One point the person in the article seems to miss is that he clearly was into chasing the latest distributions whenever they came out
Yeah I noticed that too. He jumped around from distribution to distribution, finding each one ultimately unacceptable but not really describing why. It seemed like he was looking for an (unmentioned) something but could never find it.
His other points are still valid, however. Metaphorically speaking Linux is still the OS for people that enjoy working on and tweaking their cars. If you just want to get in and drive your car someplace without having to know much about the internals, there are probably better choices.
There was a study of flying accidents done in the UK recently (unfortunately I can't find a link at the moment). After adjusting for number of flying hours, they found that men and women pilots had about the same accident rate. However, accidents among the men tended to be due to risky or agressive flying while the accidents among women were mostly due to more fundamental errors (e.g. landing at too steep an angle, running out of gas, etc.). It's not p.c. to say so, but there does appear to be a (slight) difference between the sexes in spatial coordination skills.
Of course the million years of selective adaption that have enabled me to catch and throw so well have also left me unable to remember birthdays or discern the color 'teal'.
Yeah, Fry's is notorious for rewrapping returned items. Sometimes they put a sticker on the rewrapped items but not always.
Once I bought a new scanner from Fry's but I could never get it to work properly. After trying it on several systems and spending 45 minutes with a tech on the phone, I finally decided that it was just defective. I returned it, but knowing that they were just going to stick it back on the shelves, I left a note describing what was wrong with it under the lid. At least the next customer will know what they're getting and won't waste any time on it. It makes you wonder if their defective products ever get returned to the manufacturer or do they just pass through multiple customers until one of them waits too long to return it and gets stuck with it.
after a while people get sick of learning a new way of doing something every time they have to trade in their newly obsolete product for the next product that will be obsolete in two years. i guess this means any unstable or inconsistent interface is what's truely non user-friendly.
Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit fame has coined a term for this - version fatigue. I used to customize software I use a lot more, but now after a few upgrades I pretty much stick with the defaults unless they're very annoying.
Would you trust a company whose CEO is a professional gambler [guardian.co.uk]:
While gambling has a stigma in many people's minds, to be a successful professional gambler is actually quite demanding. Typically professional gamblers have to be very good at mathematics as well as data and strategy analysis. They also must also be able to evaluate situations logically and dispassionately (especially true in sports wagering) and not be swayed by emotions and hype. Furthermore they will also need good money management skills if they want to be around for long. Not to mention perseverance and the discipline to takes to be successful in the long run. Read any books by Ken Uston or Bob McCune and you'll come to appreciate the amount of work and analysis it takes to be a professional gambler. Any fool can gamble, but only a select few people can gamble successfully over the long haul.
So yes, I would trust a company whose CEO was a professional gambler. It's a better background than many other CEOs have had.
Professor Marc Herold's results have been pretty thoroughly debunked here, here, and here. Other studies based on reputable sources put the number of civilian casualties at no more than 1500.
Even if the number of civilian casualties in Afghanistan were greater than the number in the 9/11 attack (or 10 times as many), there is a distinct difference between deliberately targeting civilians and civilians being killed unintentionally during attacks on military targets. So long as armies insist on fighting in populated areas, there will unfortunately always be civilian causualties.
Back in 1979 right before the Iranians overran the U.S. embassy and took the staff the hostage, most of the important documents were shredded. A few years ago I saw a news report where several teams of Iranian women had spent years pieceing the slices back together, and had actually managed to rebuild quite a few documents. Of course, by that time most of the information gained was out of date anyway.
2. PCAnywhere. Good, but expensive (as opposed to vnc, which is free). Also, it is a pain in the ass to upgrade this along with windows, if that is your os of choosing.
We use PCAnywhere here in house and it does a good job of allowing remote access and debugging. It seems slicker and more data transfer optimized than VNC, though I'll admit that I haven't used VNC much recently. We also use VNC, but mainly as a backup. I have to agree with the other comments about the necessity of being on a fast LAN. You can use remote access software over the Internet, but it's just tedious enough that you'd never want to make it your fulltime environment.
I'm not sure what problems you encountered, but I've upgraded PCAnywhere several times and haven't found it difficult at all.
It's interesting that you mention that DIVX was never hacked. The nearest experience I've had with a similar system is with digital satellite systems, and these have been thoroughly hacked. In fact it's likely that the hackers understand the system nearly as well as it's designers. For those of who don't have one, they work like this: there is a plastic card in inserted in your receiver that has an custom embedded microprocessor that keeps track of what tiers of channels you're allowed to watch and also decrypts the data stream using keys tied to your receiver as well as continually changing ones in the stream. Hackers quickly learned how to glitch these cards and rewrite the data on them. The satellite companies, however, can reprogram the cards as well as the receiver's eeproms through the data stream, potentially destroying them. It's a constant arms race between the hackers and the companies, with the hackers countering the security updates and in turn being countered by new ones within a few months.
Yet despite the fact that the system has been utterly hacked, I would guess that no more than 5% of the viewers are using hacked cards. Why? Mostly because the effort and knowledge required to keep a hacked system going is sufficient that only the dedicated hobbyists will make the effort.
I guess the moral here is that while any secure system can be cracked, it's really only necessary to make the process difficult enough that the average person won't tolerate it to make the system effectively secure.
From your description it sounds as if it happens completely within the DVD player's bios - the DVD has its region encoded, the player knows what regions it can play and will either play the DVD or not.
You and many others apparently dont understand the real difference here. There is a significant change in policy, now the US may be ready to use nukes as just another weapon. This is a _huge_ change.
I think this is less of a change than you think. It's always been part of the U.S. doctrine that nuclear weapons could be used in a tactical (vs. strategic) manner. In the 80's if the Soviets has been pouring through the Fulda Gap and overrunning Nato forces, tactical nukes were a definite (and likely) option. 'Neutron' bombs have been around since the 70's. Certainly there were plans that called for their use on the battlefield. I don't think that adding small-yield tactical nukes designed to penetrate hardened targets or deep bunkers is really that different.
Remember, having a plan for X does not necessarily imply an intent to do X. I suspect that this report was deliberately leaked for an intended audience of 7 people with a strong focus on 3 in particular.
I too dont want to be harsh but you need to read between the lines a little more. (try a non US news source for example, see what i mean)
supernova87a in his comments seemed genuinely shocked that the U.S. is *ever* prepared to use nuclear weapons on the battlefield, and acted as if this fact had just beeen uncovered. Hardly. It's been well known for decades.
I don't see any indication that he was actually referring to recent changes in the U.S.'s nuclear policy that might signal a change in willingness to use nuclear weapons, as I think you're alluding to. That would be a different point.
(and yes I do read a lot of non-US news. There's some good analysis, but also a lot of breathless misinterpretation.)
Sorry supernova87a, but you're showing your naiveté and undereducation.
The threat to retaliate with nuclear weapons has been part of U.S. policy for decades and is no secret. It's been true my entire life and almost my parents' entire lives. There have been hundreds of books and thousands of newspaper and magazine articles written about it. I would bet that every political science department in the country still has at least one course on nuclear policy that covers this. Watch any presidential debate from the last 30 years and you're likely to see our nuclear defense policy being discussed. Many movies have been made dealing with it. This policy is not a surprise.
Furthermore the policy has not changed that much over the decades that it's been in effect. I would bet that the last report prepared for President Clinton in 1994 was substantially similar to the one that has just been released.
I hate to be so harsh on you, but you need to learn a little a history. Really.
Thermobarics? Three months ago? Uh.. only this particular use of a Vietnam era weapon: The Fuel-Air Explosive. FAE's are old, this use of them may be new but the tech is ancient (and easy!).
FAEs have been around for years, but the modifications to make them effective on tunnels and bunkers is very recent.
If we were to become enemies with Saudi Arabia, our stronghold in the region would disappear and your gas prices will rise by about $1 or $2
I think the administration is already working on this by establishing alternate bases in the region in Turkey and some of the small gulf states. As for a gas price increase, I believe most people would accept it if it were viewed as an effect of the war. After all we've already gone through the 1973 oil embargo.
Saudi Arabia is the thread that runs through much of Islamic terrorism today. It's no coincidence that the leader and top lieutenants of Al Quaeda and 15 of the 19 hijacks were Saudi. I think it's time to start considering a Hashemite restoration to the throne.
Right, nobody is arguing you on that point. The thing is, a good majority of the names on that list do not currently have nuclear weapons are have the capability to create them.
Of the 7 countries listed (China, Russia, Iraq, Iran, North Korea, Libya and Syria), two are recognized nuclear powers. Two others (Iraq and North Korea) already are or are expected to become nuclear powers very soon. That would make a majority.
Furthermore it's very likely that the remaining three countries (Iran, Libya, and Syria) have ongoing chemical and biological weapon programs. It's U.S. policy to respond to these kind of attacks with nuclear weapons as well.
Remember part of the military's job is to prepare for worse case scenarios. No doubt that in some file cabinet somewhere, Mexico's military has a plan on how to run a campaign against the U.S. or Guatemala. They'd be incompetent and unprofessional if they didn't.
The fact that you have a contingency plan for an event doesn't imply that you going to do it, have intentions to do it, or would ever want to do it. But unless you can rule it out, you still have to plan for it.
Take a look at Visual Tcl. It allows you to build gui-based applications based around Tcl/Tk scripts. The best part is that it's free and it's platform independent.
Another solution is to look for a previous version of Visual Studio or Borland on Ebay. Also check on Yahoo, as sometimes Microsoft shuts down auctions of it's software on Ebay.
Truthfully, if your company is too cheap to buy you the tools you need, you have to wonder how serious they are about succeeding.
A lot of the comments so far are just reactions to where it appeared - not what it says.
Whatever you think of FoxNews, try to read the article without projecting on it what you think it's going to say. Note that it's really an opinion piece, apparently part of Fox's Straight Talk feature - corbettw mislabelled it in his summary.
The article in my view is really just analyzing the political risks and possibilities for both parties here. The reality is that both the Democrats and Republicans support constituencies at times that are at odds with the philosphies they publicly profess. In this case it's the support that several heavyweight Democrats have been giving to the recording and movie industries for the SSSCA. Glenn Reynolds (the author) really would like to see the SSSCA buried and all he's really doing here is pointing out is that the Republicans could help kill it AND potentially score political points for doing so.
Glenn Reynolds also produces music in his spare time when he's not teaching law. He also runs a 'blogger' website with nearly hourly comments. He's also a Slashdot reader and poster (which is how I first heard about his web site InstaPundit). I've been reading his site since just before 9/11 and he's been consistent in criticizing the record industry for its corruptness and sneaky ploys to take advantage of the consumer. He's hardly a ideological Republican. Mostly he's libertarian and anti-Idiotarian in his viewpoints. In this, I don't think he's that far off from most Slashdot readers. That is, if they can overlook their media outlet biases.
Yahoo.fr is a subsiduary of Yahoo, therefore Yahoo has a physical presence (servers and employees) within France.
So where is the difference ?
Being a subsidiary of a larger company has legal consequences, in particular it partitions legal liablility away from the parent company. So technically Yahoo does not have a physical presence in France, Yahoo.fr does.
Yahoo.fr has complied with the French court's ruling, yahoo.com has not. The problem here is that French nationals can view (and potentially purchase) Nazi-related items on Yahoo auctions over the internet. Since none of yahoo.com's assets are in France, I don't see how French law could have any jurisdiction over yahoo. Even the person who mails said item to a buyer in France should be safe, since what he is doing is entirely legal in the U.S..
Technology has consequences, and sometimes those consequences are awful. Take, for example, recent engineering advances in weapons design. It used to be that because of how much a gun weighed and how much kick it gave when you fired it, you probably had to be at least a teenager to use it.
Not true. Submachine guns have been around since the 20's and have low enough weight and recoil to be operated by a child. Assault rifles using less powerful cartridges have been around since WWII.
U.S. gun manufacturers saw a market opportunity, so they told their engineers to design guns that were simpler to maintain, less mass, and less kick.
Actually these requirements were requested by the militaries in the West after seeing German and Russian assault rifles in action during WWII.
Engineers succeeded, through their earnest ingenuity and resourcefulness. And now the streets of Sierra Leone are full of 8-year-old children who have been pulled away from their families and forcefully recruited into fighting a civil war. Hooray for science!
The reality is that in most parts of the world including Africa, children have always been involved in warfare, either as combatants or as support. Lighter weapons may allow children to be deadlier, but they certainly did not create the phenomenon of child soldiers. Furthermore, the vast majority of small arms in Africa are AK47s - a 50+ year old design that U.S. engineers and gun manufacturers had nothing to do with.
These methods are clearly aimed at protesters. Which means that the government is using our taxpayer money to research new ways to silence its critics.
And that is very troubling.
Actually, given its characteristics, this gel is more likely to be used defensively i.e. you spray it down in front of police lines or an off-limits area. It's really designed to keep people from getting into an area rather than to break up crowds. I don't see how this would prevent peaceful demonstrators from getting their message out.
Imagine if this had been available years before:
You're the head of the Marine detachment responsible for the security of the American embassy in Tehran. A large crowd is gathering and about to attack the embassy, so you spray down the walls and the streets around it. For several hours the embassy is surrounded by an angry (and slippery) mob but no one is able get into the gates. The next day the staff are evacuated. No one has been killed, and an international crisis has been averted.
Whatever you may think of the anti-WTO protesters for whom this invention is clearly made, i hope you will agree that people like them have the right to criticize the government, and make their voices heard.
Absolutely. But they don't have the right to violently rampage through the streets setting cars on fire, smashing store windows, and attacking police. That's a riot, not a protest.
People who do things that result in harm to other people are blameworthy.
Blameworthy in what sense and by whom? Is this always true? What about a surgeon cutting open a patient to treat them? Surely they are causing harm to the patient in the short term, but I don't believe anyone would blame them for doing so. What about a policeman who shoots a man in the act of killing children? Normally shooting a person is very bad thing. Should the policeman be blamed in this case? Just as much as the killer?
Note that in both these cases the surgeon and the policeman are causing harm to someone, but arguably for the 'greater good'. Who's going to blame them for what they did - their family, their ancestors, society, a big man in the sky?
What about people who don't do anything, and their inaction causes harm to others? Are they blameworthy too? What if the sugeon had found a malignant tumor and decided not to remove it, or the policeman decided to stand back while the killer finishes killing the children? Inaction is an action too, and can cause harm to others. So according to your assertion, you're also blameworthy for the things you don't do if they cause harm to others. Pity the poor policeman in this example - no matter what he does, he is blameworthy. Now imagine the case of a soldier in Mogadishu watching as warlords steal food intended for starving people. Is there any non-blameworthy action he can take?
In some cases--war crimes, crimes against humanity, etc.--the harm is so great and so evident that soldiers should be made to pay for their actions, even if they acted on orders from above.
Ah yes, but you were discussing international politics - not war crimes which are something different. Was it right for the U.S. to get involved in Somalia? I don't think you'd get a consistent answer from reporters, pundits, or even politicians involved in the original decision. Why would an 18 year old soldier be more likely to have the correct answer to this question even if he had the right 'tools', whatever those are?
Even if a soldier personally felt that intervening there was wrong, there's little he could do about it. Part of joining the military is giving some forms of personal choice. Agreeing to obey 'lawful orders' without question is part of that (at least in the U.S. forces). Here 'lawful order' means an order given by an authorized superior which does not violate 'the Rules of War' as laid out in the various Geneva Conventions. It's a soldier's duty to not obey an 'unlawful order' otherwise he loses his protection against prosecution under the Geneva Convention and can be individually tried for his actions. It seems reasonable for a soldier to be able to judge whether a particular order is lawful or not, and the Army spends a bit of time instructing about this. However to judge whether a policy is right or wrong seems difficult for even astute policymakers.
When the harm doesn't go that far there are no legal recourse. However, the lack of legal remedy does not exculpate. [snip] In some cases the effect of these circumstances is so great that the only justified demand is to go on and live with a guilty conscience.
So you're supposing there's a morality system beyond the legal system. Sure. Ok. But remember there can be more than one such system, and the requirement that someone be exculpated and have a guilty conscience is only binding to the extent that they accept the same system. Case in point: killing someone in self-defense is legal almost all areas. It's also moral in many ethical systems to have done so, but apparently not in yours. I hate to be so relativistic here, but you're assuming that there's one morality that everyone must accept, and that's not the case.
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One point the person in the article seems to miss is that he clearly was into chasing the latest distributions whenever they came out
Yeah I noticed that too. He jumped around from distribution to distribution, finding each one ultimately unacceptable but not really describing why. It seemed like he was looking for an (unmentioned) something but could never find it.
His other points are still valid, however. Metaphorically speaking Linux is still the OS for people that enjoy working on and tweaking their cars. If you just want to get in and drive your car someplace without having to know much about the internals, there are probably better choices.
There was a study of flying accidents done in the UK recently (unfortunately I can't find a link at the moment). After adjusting for number of flying hours, they found that men and women pilots had about the same accident rate. However, accidents among the men tended to be due to risky or agressive flying while the accidents among women were mostly due to more fundamental errors (e.g. landing at too steep an angle, running out of gas, etc.). It's not p.c. to say so, but there does appear to be a (slight) difference between the sexes in spatial coordination skills.
Of course the million years of selective adaption that have enabled me to catch and throw so well have also left me unable to remember birthdays or discern the color 'teal'.
Yeah, Fry's is notorious for rewrapping returned items. Sometimes they put a sticker on the rewrapped items but not always.
Once I bought a new scanner from Fry's but I could never get it to work properly. After trying it on several systems and spending 45 minutes with a tech on the phone, I finally decided that it was just defective. I returned it, but knowing that they were just going to stick it back on the shelves, I left a note describing what was wrong with it under the lid. At least the next customer will know what they're getting and won't waste any time on it. It makes you wonder if their defective products ever get returned to the manufacturer or do they just pass through multiple customers until one of them waits too long to return it and gets stuck with it.
after a while people get sick of learning a new way of doing something every time they have to trade in their newly obsolete product for the next product that will be obsolete in two years. i guess this means any unstable or inconsistent interface is what's truely non user-friendly.
Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit fame has coined a term for this - version fatigue. I used to customize software I use a lot more, but now after a few upgrades I pretty much stick with the defaults unless they're very annoying.
Would you trust a company whose CEO is a professional gambler [guardian.co.uk]:
While gambling has a stigma in many people's minds, to be a successful professional gambler is actually quite demanding. Typically professional gamblers have to be very good at mathematics as well as data and strategy analysis. They also must also be able to evaluate situations logically and dispassionately (especially true in sports wagering) and not be swayed by emotions and hype. Furthermore they will also need good money management skills if they want to be around for long. Not to mention perseverance and the discipline to takes to be successful in the long run. Read any books by Ken Uston or Bob McCune and you'll come to appreciate the amount of work and analysis it takes to be a professional gambler. Any fool can gamble, but only a select few people can gamble successfully over the long haul.
So yes, I would trust a company whose CEO was a professional gambler. It's a better background than many other CEOs have had.
Professor Marc Herold's results have been pretty thoroughly debunked here, here, and here. Other studies based on reputable sources put the number of civilian casualties at no more than 1500.
Even if the number of civilian casualties in Afghanistan were greater than the number in the 9/11 attack (or 10 times as many), there is a distinct difference between deliberately targeting civilians and civilians being killed unintentionally during attacks on military targets. So long as armies insist on fighting in populated areas, there will unfortunately always be civilian causualties.
This is the LA Times' review of AOTC. At least he gives the proper atribution to Kenneth Turan.
Funny, he now lists Star Wars on his list of Great Movies.
Back in 1979 right before the Iranians overran the U.S. embassy and took the staff the hostage, most of the important documents were shredded. A few years ago I saw a news report where several teams of Iranian women had spent years pieceing the slices back together, and had actually managed to rebuild quite a few documents. Of course, by that time most of the information gained was out of date anyway.
2. PCAnywhere. Good, but expensive (as opposed to vnc, which is free). Also, it is a pain in the ass to upgrade this along with windows, if that is your os of choosing.
We use PCAnywhere here in house and it does a good job of allowing remote access and debugging. It seems slicker and more data transfer optimized than VNC, though I'll admit that I haven't used VNC much recently. We also use VNC, but mainly as a backup. I have to agree with the other comments about the necessity of being on a fast LAN. You can use remote access software over the Internet, but it's just tedious enough that you'd never want to make it your fulltime environment.
I'm not sure what problems you encountered, but I've upgraded PCAnywhere several times and haven't found it difficult at all.
It's interesting that you mention that DIVX was never hacked. The nearest experience I've had with a similar system is with digital satellite systems, and these have been thoroughly hacked. In fact it's likely that the hackers understand the system nearly as well as it's designers. For those of who don't have one, they work like this: there is a plastic card in inserted in your receiver that has an custom embedded microprocessor that keeps track of what tiers of channels you're allowed to watch and also decrypts the data stream using keys tied to your receiver as well as continually changing ones in the stream. Hackers quickly learned how to glitch these cards and rewrite the data on them. The satellite companies, however, can reprogram the cards as well as the receiver's eeproms through the data stream, potentially destroying them. It's a constant arms race between the hackers and the companies, with the hackers countering the security updates and in turn being countered by new ones within a few months.
Yet despite the fact that the system has been utterly hacked, I would guess that no more than 5% of the viewers are using hacked cards. Why? Mostly because the effort and knowledge required to keep a hacked system going is sufficient that only the dedicated hobbyists will make the effort.
I guess the moral here is that while any secure system can be cracked, it's really only necessary to make the process difficult enough that the average person won't tolerate it to make the system effectively secure.
Is this really a Windows issue?
From your description it sounds as if it happens completely within the DVD player's bios - the DVD has its region encoded, the player knows what regions it can play and will either play the DVD or not.
You and many others apparently dont understand the real difference here. There is a significant change in policy, now the US may be ready to use nukes as just another weapon. This is a _huge_ change.
I think this is less of a change than you think. It's always been part of the U.S. doctrine that nuclear weapons could be used in a tactical (vs. strategic) manner. In the 80's if the Soviets has been pouring through the Fulda Gap and overrunning Nato forces, tactical nukes were a definite (and likely) option. 'Neutron' bombs have been around since the 70's. Certainly there were plans that called for their use on the battlefield. I don't think that adding small-yield tactical nukes designed to penetrate hardened targets or deep bunkers is really that different.
Remember, having a plan for X does not necessarily imply an intent to do X. I suspect that this report was deliberately leaked for an intended audience of 7 people with a strong focus on 3 in particular.
I too dont want to be harsh but you need to read between the lines a little more. (try a non US news source for example, see what i mean)
supernova87a in his comments seemed genuinely shocked that the U.S. is *ever* prepared to use nuclear weapons on the battlefield, and acted as if this fact had just beeen uncovered. Hardly. It's been well known for decades.
I don't see any indication that he was actually referring to recent changes in the U.S.'s nuclear policy that might signal a change in willingness to use nuclear weapons, as I think you're alluding to. That would be a different point.
(and yes I do read a lot of non-US news. There's some good analysis, but also a lot of breathless misinterpretation.)
Sorry supernova87a, but you're showing your naiveté and undereducation.
The threat to retaliate with nuclear weapons has been part of U.S. policy for decades and is no secret. It's been true my entire life and almost my parents' entire lives. There have been hundreds of books and thousands of newspaper and magazine articles written about it. I would bet that every political science department in the country still has at least one course on nuclear policy that covers this. Watch any presidential debate from the last 30 years and you're likely to see our nuclear defense policy being discussed. Many movies have been made dealing with it. This policy is not a surprise.
Furthermore the policy has not changed that much over the decades that it's been in effect. I would bet that the last report prepared for President Clinton in 1994 was substantially similar to the one that has just been released.
I hate to be so harsh on you, but you need to learn a little a history. Really.
Can't we all just get along?
Historically we haven't. Currently we're not. And given that human nature is unchanging, I'm not betting on the future either.
Thermobarics? Three months ago? Uh.. only this particular use of a Vietnam era weapon: The Fuel-Air Explosive. FAE's are old, this use of them may be new but the tech is ancient (and easy!).
FAEs have been around for years, but the modifications to make them effective on tunnels and bunkers is very recent.
If we were to become enemies with Saudi Arabia, our stronghold in the region would disappear and your gas prices will rise by about $1 or $2
I think the administration is already working on this by establishing alternate bases in the region in Turkey and some of the small gulf states. As for a gas price increase, I believe most people would accept it if it were viewed as an effect of the war. After all we've already gone through the 1973 oil embargo.
Saudi Arabia is the thread that runs through much of Islamic terrorism today. It's no coincidence that the leader and top lieutenants of Al Quaeda and 15 of the 19 hijacks were Saudi. I think it's time to start considering a Hashemite restoration to the throne.
Saudi delinda est.
Right, nobody is arguing you on that point. The thing is, a good majority of the names on that list do not currently have nuclear weapons are have the capability to create them.
Of the 7 countries listed (China, Russia, Iraq, Iran, North Korea, Libya and Syria), two are recognized nuclear powers. Two others (Iraq and North Korea) already are or are expected to become nuclear powers very soon. That would make a majority.
Furthermore it's very likely that the remaining three countries (Iran, Libya, and Syria) have ongoing chemical and biological weapon programs. It's U.S. policy to respond to these kind of attacks with nuclear weapons as well.
Contingency nuke plans for Canada?!?
Remember part of the military's job is to prepare for worse case scenarios. No doubt that in some file cabinet somewhere, Mexico's military has a plan on how to run a campaign against the U.S. or Guatemala. They'd be incompetent and unprofessional if they didn't.
The fact that you have a contingency plan for an event doesn't imply that you going to do it, have intentions to do it, or would ever want to do it. But unless you can rule it out, you still have to plan for it.
Take a look at Visual Tcl. It allows you to build gui-based applications based around Tcl/Tk scripts. The best part is that it's free and it's platform independent.
Another solution is to look for a previous version of Visual Studio or Borland on Ebay. Also check on Yahoo, as sometimes Microsoft shuts down auctions of it's software on Ebay.
Truthfully, if your company is too cheap to buy you the tools you need, you have to wonder how serious they are about succeeding.
I'm disappointed in Slashdot's readership.
A lot of the comments so far are just reactions to where it appeared - not what it says.
Whatever you think of FoxNews, try to read the article without projecting on it what you think it's going to say. Note that it's really an opinion piece, apparently part of Fox's Straight Talk feature - corbettw mislabelled it in his summary.
The article in my view is really just analyzing the political risks and possibilities for both parties here. The reality is that both the Democrats and Republicans support constituencies at times that are at odds with the philosphies they publicly profess. In this case it's the support that several heavyweight Democrats have been giving to the recording and movie industries for the SSSCA. Glenn Reynolds (the author) really would like to see the SSSCA buried and all he's really doing here is pointing out is that the Republicans could help kill it AND potentially score political points for doing so.
Glenn Reynolds also produces music in his spare time when he's not teaching law. He also runs a 'blogger' website with nearly hourly comments. He's also a Slashdot reader and poster (which is how I first heard about his web site InstaPundit). I've been reading his site since just before 9/11 and he's been consistent in criticizing the record industry for its corruptness and sneaky ploys to take advantage of the consumer. He's hardly a ideological Republican. Mostly he's libertarian and anti-Idiotarian in his viewpoints. In this, I don't think he's that far off from most Slashdot readers. That is, if they can overlook their media outlet biases.
Yahoo.fr is a subsiduary of Yahoo, therefore Yahoo has a physical presence (servers and employees) within France.
So where is the difference ?
Being a subsidiary of a larger company has legal consequences, in particular it partitions legal liablility away from the parent company. So technically Yahoo does not have a physical presence in France, Yahoo.fr does.
Yahoo.fr has complied with the French court's ruling, yahoo.com has not. The problem here is that French nationals can view (and potentially purchase) Nazi-related items on Yahoo auctions over the internet. Since none of yahoo.com's assets are in France, I don't see how French law could have any jurisdiction over yahoo. Even the person who mails said item to a buyer in France should be safe, since what he is doing is entirely legal in the U.S..
Technology has consequences, and sometimes those consequences are awful. Take, for example, recent engineering advances in weapons design. It used to be that because of how much a gun weighed and how much kick it gave when you fired it, you probably had to be at least a teenager to use it.
Not true. Submachine guns have been around since the 20's and have low enough weight and recoil to be operated by a child. Assault rifles using less powerful cartridges have been around since WWII.
U.S. gun manufacturers saw a market opportunity, so they told their engineers to design guns that were simpler to maintain, less mass, and less kick.
Actually these requirements were requested by the militaries in the West after seeing German and Russian assault rifles in action during WWII.
Engineers succeeded, through their earnest ingenuity and resourcefulness. And now the streets of Sierra Leone are full of 8-year-old children who have been pulled away from their families and forcefully recruited into fighting a civil war. Hooray for science!
The reality is that in most parts of the world including Africa, children have always been involved in warfare, either as combatants or as support. Lighter weapons may allow children to be deadlier, but they certainly did not create the phenomenon of child soldiers. Furthermore, the vast majority of small arms in Africa are AK47s - a 50+ year old design that U.S. engineers and gun manufacturers had nothing to do with.
These methods are clearly aimed at protesters. Which means that the government is using our taxpayer money to research new ways to silence its critics.
And that is very troubling.
Actually, given its characteristics, this gel is more likely to be used defensively i.e. you spray it down in front of police lines or an off-limits area. It's really designed to keep people from getting into an area rather than to break up crowds. I don't see how this would prevent peaceful demonstrators from getting their message out.
Imagine if this had been available years before:
You're the head of the Marine detachment responsible for the security of the American embassy in Tehran. A large crowd is gathering and about to attack the embassy, so you spray down the walls and the streets around it. For several hours the embassy is surrounded by an angry (and slippery) mob but no one is able get into the gates. The next day the staff are evacuated. No one has been killed, and an international crisis has been averted.
Whatever you may think of the anti-WTO protesters for whom this invention is clearly made, i hope you will agree that people like them have the right to criticize the government, and make their voices heard.
Absolutely. But they don't have the right to violently rampage through the streets setting cars on fire, smashing store windows, and attacking police. That's a riot, not a protest.
People who do things that result in harm to other people are blameworthy.
Blameworthy in what sense and by whom? Is this always true? What about a surgeon cutting open a patient to treat them? Surely they are causing harm to the patient in the short term, but I don't believe anyone would blame them for doing so. What about a policeman who shoots a man in the act of killing children? Normally shooting a person is very bad thing. Should the policeman be blamed in this case? Just as much as the killer?
Note that in both these cases the surgeon and the policeman are causing harm to someone, but arguably for the 'greater good'. Who's going to blame them for what they did - their family, their ancestors, society, a big man in the sky?
What about people who don't do anything, and their inaction causes harm to others? Are they blameworthy too? What if the sugeon had found a malignant tumor and decided not to remove it, or the policeman decided to stand back while the killer finishes killing the children? Inaction is an action too, and can cause harm to others. So according to your assertion, you're also blameworthy for the things you don't do if they cause harm to others. Pity the poor policeman in this example - no matter what he does, he is blameworthy. Now imagine the case of a soldier in Mogadishu watching as warlords steal food intended for starving people. Is there any non-blameworthy action he can take?
In some cases--war crimes, crimes against humanity, etc.--the harm is so great and so evident that soldiers should be made to pay for their actions, even if they acted on orders from above.
Ah yes, but you were discussing international politics - not war crimes which are something different. Was it right for the U.S. to get involved in Somalia? I don't think you'd get a consistent answer from reporters, pundits, or even politicians involved in the original decision. Why would an 18 year old soldier be more likely to have the correct answer to this question even if he had the right 'tools', whatever those are?
Even if a soldier personally felt that intervening there was wrong, there's little he could do about it. Part of joining the military is giving some forms of personal choice. Agreeing to obey 'lawful orders' without question is part of that (at least in the U.S. forces). Here 'lawful order' means an order given by an authorized superior which does not violate 'the Rules of War' as laid out in the various Geneva Conventions. It's a soldier's duty to not obey an 'unlawful order' otherwise he loses his protection against prosecution under the Geneva Convention and can be individually tried for his actions. It seems reasonable for a soldier to be able to judge whether a particular order is lawful or not, and the Army spends a bit of time instructing about this. However to judge whether a policy is right or wrong seems difficult for even astute policymakers.
When the harm doesn't go that far there are no legal recourse. However, the lack of legal remedy does not exculpate. [snip] In some cases the effect of these circumstances is so great that the only justified demand is to go on and live with a guilty conscience.
So you're supposing there's a morality system beyond the legal system. Sure. Ok. But remember there can be more than one such system, and the requirement that someone be exculpated and have a guilty conscience is only binding to the extent that they accept the same system. Case in point: killing someone in self-defense is legal almost all areas. It's also moral in many ethical systems to have done so, but apparently not in yours. I hate to be so relativistic here, but you're assuming that there's one morality that everyone must accept, and that's not the case.
But the blame is still there.
Again by whom, for what, on what basis?