Do you know if the contract was in the original text of the 1997 bill?
What 1997 bill? If you mean the funding for Iraq operations, the Pentagon/DoD just says "we need $x" and Congress funds it. Part of that $x the DoD then hands over to Halliburton and says "go do x,y, and z and here's some cash to do it".
Are you aware that Halliburton is allowed a profit markup of exactly 2.5% on all the Iraq operations? Their normal private sector profit margin nears 20% so pulling employees off those other jobs to go to Iraq is a seriously crappy business decision. So let's see: 1. Make 1/8 of normal profit, and 2. Send employees to risk their lives in a war zone. Which part of this needs to be investigated for corruption, exactly? Oh, I see: the shareholders should be investigating the executive management as to why the heck the company is doing it in the first place instead of much, much safer and much, much, more profitable activities.
Is there precedent for entering contracts for "unspecified services to the military at an unspecified place and time in the future"?
No, there wasn't. That's why Al Gore's (D - Tennessee) idea was hailed as a wonderfully inventive way to save the Pentagon not only some serious cash but also a lot of hassle by getting a private sector contractor lined up ahead of time.
If elections can be decided by a court, I'm not very free.
So you'd be more free if other courts made ex post facto changes to election law to suit your position? Great for you; not for everyone on the other side.
If big businesses can invest their money wisely enough to buy off a Congress, I'm not very free. (See the energy, telecommunications, defense, highway bills.)
See every budgeting bill since 1776 regardless of the party in the majority. What's your point, or is this just a cheap shot?
If oil companies formerly run by our Vice President get no-bid contracts and take over Iraqi oil fields, I'm not very free.
Give it a rest. This Liberal talking point is one of the most insidious and a fine example of outright lies. It's so convienent to ignore that Halliburton signed a contract in '97 to provide unspecified services to the military at an unspecified place and time in the future as part of Al Gore's military spending reform. Remember Al Gore? He was the Democrat vice President during the Clinton Presidency, who was also a Democrat. So these two Democrats oversaw this contract. Just because the contract didn't say "Iraq, 2004" you claim there's no contract or bids. What a crock of crap.
I was thinking of laptop owners when I saw this article. Most laptops are Intel Integrated graphics with shared memory so how are those going to work with these new requirements? Can you even select 256MB as the amount of memory reserved for graphics???
While I'm glad I'm an Alpha, I clearly see the need for Gammas and Deltas. And for them to be in greater numbers than the Alphas and Betas. That reminds me; trash truck comes tomorrow AM...
If you liked Losing Lois Lane, check out it's opposite: "Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex" by Niven. Which is an analytical essay about what would happen if Lois and Superman actually hooked up.
Cloak and Dagger was exceptionally dark. I hope the movie version does well; I have the complete original mini-series and about a dozen issues of the first year. A very C&D-like series was done in animation called Princess Miyu. It's pretty good.
Software has miniscule barriers to entry compared to anything larger than a roadside farmer's market. All you need is: developers and their PCs. Any developer who can be called one already has a PC so there's half the assets already gathered. Now imagine instead trying to make a new factory to make the chips that go in said PCs.
First of all, I'm intrigued by this 80% of old communist institutions
I pulled this number out of the air to simply stand for "a high percentage", not expecting an actual Russian to call me on it. I have a university degree in economic policy and was speaking from a reasonably informed point of view as a western educated ecomonist. If your local point of view is different, I'd love to hear it.
In Russia economic contraction was more pronounced. Slow and inconsistent macroeconomic stabilization and liberalization hampered the structural and institutional changes that were necessary to stop and reverse the decline in output. Populist policies slowed the adaptation process and made it more severe. Russia's negative growth through most of 1990s can be traced to the slow pace and poor sequencing of economic reforms.
Than communism collapses and you starve to death on the streets
More like you starve to death on the streets because communism continues to flop about instead of dying completely. Look at Poland vs Russia. In one country they bit the bullet and did away with practically all the old communist institutions, had two years of extremely high inflation and a lot of anxiety, made it past and now all is reasonably well. In the other country they kept 80% of the communist institutions and tendencies and are STILL struggling.
After about 2000 "removals" you typically lose your drive from interface wear of one kind or another
That's a consumer grade memory module which has a thin layer of cheap, weak metal for connectors. I'll bet it has occurred to Mazda already and they're making the car key things a little tougher. I imagine they use stainless steel for the connectors or somesuch tough metal.
"We think the wind somehow got into the vents and got between the roof's (waterproof) membrane and the aluminum ceiling tiles," said Doug Thornton, regional manager of the company that manages the huge arena.
"Tiles" and "shingles" are reasonably interchangeable to mean "roofing peices" which should be obviously what I meant. WTF do you get a concrete roof that wide??? Concrete does not hold up well over wide unsupported expanses.
Because after three days everyone has had time to decide whether they're going to have regular services restored to their area fairly soon or their area is an utter disaster and they should relocate for a few months.
the effects of a Cat 5 hurricane was also shelved... Seems like it wasn't needed after all. Now we know!
No, we don't. Katrina hit shore as a category 4 and the East side of the eye wall missed New Orleans proper by a relatively wide margin. Although it's safe to speculate that the entire roof would have ripped off the Superdome since it lost a lot of shingles and leaked pretty bad in just the West side of a Cat 4. Then the casualty rates would be in the high thousands if not over 10 thousand instead of just the hundreds. But that's still speculation on my part.
This new material is harder than diamonds but there's nothing to indicate its toughness. Which is important. Diamonds are easy to chip on something tougher because they aren't themselves very tough; they're just hard. To illustrade: Imagine a picture window and a bar of iron. Throw the bar of iron at the window. The window breaks because it is not as tough as the iron bar. But take a peice of the resulting broken glass and you can scrape the iron bar because the glass is harder than the iron.
This is why a jewelry salesperson will panic if you try to scrape a diamond ring on the display glass; it's not the glass they're worried about. The diamond can break doing that if you hit someone else's prior scrape because the glass is tougher than the diamond.
I would think 26 miles of track underground wouldn't speed up the process
As a Denver resident and occasional traveller, I can tell you that when the new airport first opened and they used the automated system the bags were riding around the carousel before you could get from the plane to the pickup. My biggest worry was that someone would snatch my bag(s) before I could get there. Without the automated system, you wait at the carousel at least 10 minutes after dawdling to get off the plane. And there are plenty more places where sticky fingers in the back rooms can steal luggage away.
Disable it? Don't bother! Disabling it in BIOS implies preventing someone from sitting there next to it from using it. Guess what: There's NO SUCH THING as security when sitting in front of the main computer part of a system. Turn your back long enough to get a drink at the water fountain and any technically sophisticated attacker can have the HDD out of the case and into their pocket. Put the computer locked in a room with cables leading out for the monitor, KB, and mouse. If the user needs to input via a CDROM then just get external SCSI, non-hotswappable. That prevents the problem with USB and access to the floppy disk. Further, use only PS/2 KB and mouse. A determined attacker could cut the cable to a USB KB and splice in a USB disk. Then thanks to Windows GUI simply mouse click and paste all the data out to the newly attached USB disk.
Sure, it sounds paranoid...bit is it paranoid enough?
No, but my scheme gets a little closer to the paranoid ideal.
Output is the trick. The original questioner wants to use the computer in question to design things. I assume the plans need to come out of the computer and go somewhere to be built into things. How to have a safe method for extraction is the question but we don't know if it needs to be printed to a plotter or what.
The term fascism has come to mean any system of government resembling Mussolini's, that in various combinations:
* exalts the nation, (and in some cases the race, culture, or religion) above the individual, with the state apparatus being supreme.
* stresses loyalty to a single leader.
* uses violence and modern techniques of propaganda and censorship to forcibly suppress political opposition.
* engages in severe economic and social regimentation.
* engages in syndicalist corporatism.
* implements totalitarian systems.
The islamofascists fit every one of these definitions from the wiki you linked. As for fundamentalism, the problem is people who use islam (see: misc ayatollas in Iran, OBL, etc) for their fascist political ends, not people who want to strictly observe. That's why I specifically use the term islamofascist and not islamic fundamentalists.
At first thought it doesn't seem like it is somehow going to be able to detect and prevent terrorists?
You seem unaware that London did not have any IRA bombings after their downtown surveillance camera system went in place. And the recent islamofacist bombers were tracked down and caught impressively quickly after the tapes were perused. As for detecting and preventing ahead of time, nothing can do that outside of an oppressive police state that prevents free movement of people. And no, surveillance cameras used to track down criminals after the fact do not an oppressive police state make. Ask any Londoner how oppressed they feel.
airspeed is inversely proportional to the amount of fuel you burn
Um, no, it's a curve. At slow speeds the fuel use per distance is less than at the optimum speed and then it decreases again from there. It's like this:/\ Anyway, my point is that the designers are stuck in a mindset of using only turbofan engines. Pulsejet engines in particular promises to be much more fuel efficient at high speeds per mile travelled and passenger carried. Technology has gone from props to jets in a quick amount of time and then from turbojets to... turbofans (a relatively minor inprovement) in a long amount of time.
So the XF-103 was a Mach-3 project in 1956-7, a dozen years after the invention of the jet engine. It's now 2005 and there's just one country even trying to make a supersonic passenger aircraft. Sad, sad, sad.
The speed of light is becoming a factor in motherboard layouts
"Becoming"? Where have you been? The Cray-2, vintage 1985, was a big circular computer because that minimized the lengths of the wiring for exactly that reason.
Slashdot Mirror
Do you know if the contract was in the original text of the 1997 bill?
What 1997 bill? If you mean the funding for Iraq operations, the Pentagon/DoD just says "we need $x" and Congress funds it. Part of that $x the DoD then hands over to Halliburton and says "go do x,y, and z and here's some cash to do it".
Are you aware that Halliburton is allowed a profit markup of exactly 2.5% on all the Iraq operations? Their normal private sector profit margin nears 20% so pulling employees off those other jobs to go to Iraq is a seriously crappy business decision. So let's see: 1. Make 1/8 of normal profit, and 2. Send employees to risk their lives in a war zone. Which part of this needs to be investigated for corruption, exactly? Oh, I see: the shareholders should be investigating the executive management as to why the heck the company is doing it in the first place instead of much, much safer and much, much, more profitable activities.
Is there precedent for entering contracts for "unspecified services to the military at an unspecified place and time in the future"?
No, there wasn't. That's why Al Gore's (D - Tennessee) idea was hailed as a wonderfully inventive way to save the Pentagon not only some serious cash but also a lot of hassle by getting a private sector contractor lined up ahead of time.
If elections can be decided by a court, I'm not very free.
So you'd be more free if other courts made ex post facto changes to election law to suit your position? Great for you; not for everyone on the other side.
If big businesses can invest their money wisely enough to buy off a Congress, I'm not very free. (See the energy, telecommunications, defense, highway bills.)
See every budgeting bill since 1776 regardless of the party in the majority. What's your point, or is this just a cheap shot?
If oil companies formerly run by our Vice President get no-bid contracts and take over Iraqi oil fields, I'm not very free.
Give it a rest. This Liberal talking point is one of the most insidious and a fine example of outright lies. It's so convienent to ignore that Halliburton signed a contract in '97 to provide unspecified services to the military at an unspecified place and time in the future as part of Al Gore's military spending reform. Remember Al Gore? He was the Democrat vice President during the Clinton Presidency, who was also a Democrat. So these two Democrats oversaw this contract. Just because the contract didn't say "Iraq, 2004" you claim there's no contract or bids. What a crock of crap.
I just bought a laptop,
I was thinking of laptop owners when I saw this article. Most laptops are Intel Integrated graphics with shared memory so how are those going to work with these new requirements? Can you even select 256MB as the amount of memory reserved for graphics???
there ought to be some standard for parenthood
While I'm glad I'm an Alpha, I clearly see the need for Gammas and Deltas. And for them to be in greater numbers than the Alphas and Betas. That reminds me; trash truck comes tomorrow AM...
If you liked Losing Lois Lane, check out it's opposite: "Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex" by Niven. Which is an analytical essay about what would happen if Lois and Superman actually hooked up.
Cloak and Dagger was exceptionally dark. I hope the movie version does well; I have the complete original mini-series and about a dozen issues of the first year. A very C&D-like series was done in animation called Princess Miyu. It's pretty good.
Antz and Bug's Live didn't try forcing an unknown comic book hero to the screen
Is there really any practical difference between a character who is unknown versus one that is completely new?
Software has miniscule barriers to entry compared to anything larger than a roadside farmer's market. All you need is: developers and their PCs. Any developer who can be called one already has a PC so there's half the assets already gathered. Now imagine instead trying to make a new factory to make the chips that go in said PCs.
First of all, I'm intrigued by this 80% of old communist institutions
/ newpdfs/case-summ-Poland-CountryCase.pdf
I pulled this number out of the air to simply stand for "a high percentage", not expecting an actual Russian to call me on it. I have a university degree in economic policy and was speaking from a reasonably informed point of view as a western educated ecomonist. If your local point of view is different, I'd love to hear it.
I found this article on the World Bank's website: http://www.worldbank.org/wbi/reducingpoverty/docs
And here is a highlight illustrating the point I was making in my original post:
In Russia economic contraction was more pronounced. Slow and inconsistent
macroeconomic stabilization and liberalization hampered the structural and institutional changes
that were necessary to stop and reverse the decline in output. Populist policies slowed the adaptation
process and made it more severe. Russia's negative growth through most of 1990s can be traced to
the slow pace and poor sequencing of economic reforms.
Than communism collapses and you starve to death on the streets
More like you starve to death on the streets because communism continues to flop about instead of dying completely. Look at Poland vs Russia. In one country they bit the bullet and did away with practically all the old communist institutions, had two years of extremely high inflation and a lot of anxiety, made it past and now all is reasonably well. In the other country they kept 80% of the communist institutions and tendencies and are STILL struggling.
After about 2000 "removals" you typically lose your drive from interface wear of one kind or another
That's a consumer grade memory module which has a thin layer of cheap, weak metal for connectors. I'll bet it has occurred to Mazda already and they're making the car key things a little tougher. I imagine they use stainless steel for the connectors or somesuch tough metal.
Say that you drive up to your house and walk across your cement driveway to the front door, shivering and hurried due to the extreme cold
Sounds like you need to look into this amazing new invention called the "attached garage".
Did they also teach you that concrete can be made watertight with no need for a weather cover? See: material used to make major dams.
"We think the wind somehow got into the vents and got between the roof's (waterproof) membrane and the aluminum ceiling tiles," said Doug Thornton, regional manager of the company that manages the huge arena.
"Tiles" and "shingles" are reasonably interchangeable to mean "roofing peices" which should be obviously what I meant. WTF do you get a concrete roof that wide??? Concrete does not hold up well over wide unsupported expanses.
Why would you only do it for 3 days
Because after three days everyone has had time to decide whether they're going to have regular services restored to their area fairly soon or their area is an utter disaster and they should relocate for a few months.
the effects of a Cat 5 hurricane was also shelved ... Seems like it wasn't needed after all. Now we know!
No, we don't. Katrina hit shore as a category 4 and the East side of the eye wall missed New Orleans proper by a relatively wide margin. Although it's safe to speculate that the entire roof would have ripped off the Superdome since it lost a lot of shingles and leaked pretty bad in just the West side of a Cat 4. Then the casualty rates would be in the high thousands if not over 10 thousand instead of just the hundreds. But that's still speculation on my part.
This new material is harder than diamonds but there's nothing to indicate its toughness. Which is important. Diamonds are easy to chip on something tougher because they aren't themselves very tough; they're just hard. To illustrade: Imagine a picture window and a bar of iron. Throw the bar of iron at the window. The window breaks because it is not as tough as the iron bar. But take a peice of the resulting broken glass and you can scrape the iron bar because the glass is harder than the iron.
This is why a jewelry salesperson will panic if you try to scrape a diamond ring on the display glass; it's not the glass they're worried about. The diamond can break doing that if you hit someone else's prior scrape because the glass is tougher than the diamond.
And what do you end up with? A job that could still always be outsourced
Yeah, but on 7 acres the guy can at least sustinence-farm until things pick up. Do that in a SF condo.
I would think 26 miles of track underground wouldn't speed up the process
As a Denver resident and occasional traveller, I can tell you that when the new airport first opened and they used the automated system the bags were riding around the carousel before you could get from the plane to the pickup. My biggest worry was that someone would snatch my bag(s) before I could get there. Without the automated system, you wait at the carousel at least 10 minutes after dawdling to get off the plane. And there are plenty more places where sticky fingers in the back rooms can steal luggage away.
disable floppy
Disable it? Don't bother! Disabling it in BIOS implies preventing someone from sitting there next to it from using it. Guess what: There's NO SUCH THING as security when sitting in front of the main computer part of a system. Turn your back long enough to get a drink at the water fountain and any technically sophisticated attacker can have the HDD out of the case and into their pocket. Put the computer locked in a room with cables leading out for the monitor, KB, and mouse. If the user needs to input via a CDROM then just get external SCSI, non-hotswappable. That prevents the problem with USB and access to the floppy disk. Further, use only PS/2 KB and mouse. A determined attacker could cut the cable to a USB KB and splice in a USB disk. Then thanks to Windows GUI simply mouse click and paste all the data out to the newly attached USB disk.
Sure, it sounds paranoid...bit is it paranoid enough?
No, but my scheme gets a little closer to the paranoid ideal.
Output is the trick. The original questioner wants to use the computer in question to design things. I assume the plans need to come out of the computer and go somewhere to be built into things. How to have a safe method for extraction is the question but we don't know if it needs to be printed to a plotter or what.
Definition
The term fascism has come to mean any system of government resembling Mussolini's, that in various combinations:
* exalts the nation, (and in some cases the race, culture, or religion) above the individual, with the state apparatus being supreme.
* stresses loyalty to a single leader.
* uses violence and modern techniques of propaganda and censorship to forcibly suppress political opposition.
* engages in severe economic and social regimentation.
* engages in syndicalist corporatism.
* implements totalitarian systems.
The islamofascists fit every one of these definitions from the wiki you linked. As for fundamentalism, the problem is people who use islam (see: misc ayatollas in Iran, OBL, etc) for their fascist political ends, not people who want to strictly observe. That's why I specifically use the term islamofascist and not islamic fundamentalists.
At first thought it doesn't seem like it is somehow going to be able to detect and prevent terrorists?
You seem unaware that London did not have any IRA bombings after their downtown surveillance camera system went in place. And the recent islamofacist bombers were tracked down and caught impressively quickly after the tapes were perused. As for detecting and preventing ahead of time, nothing can do that outside of an oppressive police state that prevents free movement of people. And no, surveillance cameras used to track down criminals after the fact do not an oppressive police state make. Ask any Londoner how oppressed they feel.
airspeed is inversely proportional to the amount of fuel you burn
/\
Um, no, it's a curve. At slow speeds the fuel use per distance is less than at the optimum speed and then it decreases again from there. It's like this:
Anyway, my point is that the designers are stuck in a mindset of using only turbofan engines. Pulsejet engines in particular promises to be much more fuel efficient at high speeds per mile travelled and passenger carried. Technology has gone from props to jets in a quick amount of time and then from turbojets to... turbofans (a relatively minor inprovement) in a long amount of time.
So the XF-103 was a Mach-3 project in 1956-7, a dozen years after the invention of the jet engine. It's now 2005 and there's just one country even trying to make a supersonic passenger aircraft. Sad, sad, sad.
The speed of light is becoming a factor in motherboard layouts
"Becoming"? Where have you been? The Cray-2, vintage 1985, was a big circular computer because that minimized the lengths of the wiring for exactly that reason.