> Secondly, it is true that the intelligence community cannot ever be 100% certain it is right or wrong or does, in fact, have all the data. It's never been pushed as a 100% concept that I am aware of. Intelligence is doomed to fail, but not always. Why is this concept difficult for some people to understand?
What I find alarming is that even after you factor out the Bush spin, it's clear that our intelligence services didn't have the slightest idea what was going on in Iraq.
> I have a class this semester where the teacher encourages political debate, he is a liberal and I am a neo-con (I love that), so we get into the topic of the war in Iraq, and he says "You know why we went into Iraq right? OIL!" and so I politely responded "See, I just don't see what we have to gain by overtaking Iraq, in terms of oil." to which he responded "That's right, we don't! It's not worth it!". He made my point quite cleary, and quickly realized the quandary he had gotten into so we moved on at that point. The fact that Iraq exports oil is not just a coincidence, it is not a reason for going to war but it WOULD explain why Iraq is so corrupt, that is the only correlation I, myself, can make between the Iraq war and oil.
It's a no-brainer. Iraq had been under sanctions for a decade, and Big Oil was missing out on the action. To an Oil President, that situation could not be allowed to continue.
> You see, he responded that -- until 6 months ago -- he did not know there was dissent among the intelligence community that gave him the information he relied on to make his case. You can argue that he was stupid, or anything else you like, but he relied on his staff, and the intelligence community, to let him know what was fact and what was in dispute. According to him, this was not presented. He was told the information was "rock solid.
Which is strange, because all you had to do is turn on the evening news, hear coverage of the latest pro-war propaganda from the White House, and then hear the anchor follow up with a comment along the lines of "Our contacts in the intelligence community say that that claim is not well established".
> Then on the left we have people like Murtha and Kennedy screaming that we should leave, RIGHT NOW GODDAMNIT!!! That's just insane, we can't leave the Iraqis in a worse position than we found them.
I feel that we - or at least the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld/Wolfowitz cabal - have a moral responsibility for what has been done, but realistically, staying there is only postponing the inevitable. I can't see prolonging the misery as a virtue.
At any rate, it's clear that Bush is going to declare progress and bring about 1/3 of the troops home before the elections. And he isn't asking for any more money for rebuilding. It's clear that these people have already written Iraq off as a loss, and are in political damage control mode. In 2008 they'll declare "mission accomplished" and bring the rest home.
> Oh yes, Ada is a statically, strongly, strictly typed language (e.g. the compiler won't let you assign an integer to a float variable). My opinion is that it's a Good Thing for critical programs.
Yes, it's very frustrating when you first start using it because it makes you say what you mean and mean what you say, but once you get over that you find yourself writing programs where certain kinds of bugs simply never happen.
The strong typing (no, strong, not the fluff some other languages call "strong") and run-time checks work to move error-discovery forward. That is, you find stuff a compile time that most languages leave you to find at run time, and you find stuff at run time that most languages leave you to (hopefully) notice that you're getting incorrect outputs.
> So if the source code is available for anyone to analyse, AND the software can be updated on-the-fly... what makes this effective? Why does everyone keep assuming terrorists are stupid? Attacks don't succeed through stupidity, they succeed through ingenuity. Look at the source, find a hole, "fix" the software, detonate a WMD...
Yeah, 'cause closed source always keeps the evildoers out.
> Which is a laughable parody. There is nothing 'sudden' planned about the Bush proposal.
It doesn't matter whether it's sudden or not. Pumping the money into the stock market will inflate share prices, and you'll either get one big correction or else a number of smaller ones. The social security money disappears into the savvy market players' pockets either way.
> The video of that will be played by their opponents for every election from now on. Speech writers know how each side will react when they write these things. I'm amazed that the Democrats fell for it.
If the Democrats are smart they'll be the ones playing it.
> Money invested in the stock market is money that represents capital. It's money in the economy and it keeps the economy thriving.
Of course, suddenly pumping a zillion dollars of social security money into the market is going to inflate share prices, and the immediate "correction" will pump the money right back out and into the bank accounts of the pros who know to get out while it's high, leaving Joe No Social Security royally fuxored, with an "investment" worth less than what he put in to it.
> The "Social Security" plans are designed to get amateur stock investors into the stock market, where the professionals, who back the plan, can take the amateur's money.
Even before we get to that, this explains Bush's zeal for social security reform via the stock market.
> It will be a suitcase bomb delivered by a madman.
I think Tom Clancy said during the Reagan-era Star Wars Fantasy Trip, that the workaround would be to "disguise it as drugs and fly it in via the Maimi airport".
> The major reason for this is probably to allow the Bush camp to pursue their true dream of authorizing the use of so-called "tactical nukes".
I figured the major reason was to shovel vast amounts of money at the defense contractors. Almost everything he has done has shoveled money at some big corporation.
> yet this first group were obviously brought by the Spanish.
Interestingly, Black slavery in the Americas began at the suggestion of Las Casas, whose views were modern enough for him to be outraged at the practice of bringing "Indians" down from the Mexican highlands to suffer and die working in steamy sugar cane plantations, but not modern enough to reject the idea of slavery itself: he suggested bringing in Africans to do the work instead.
> My dad was in the paratroopers (I was born at Ft Campbell). On one jump, one of his fellow paratrooper's chute didn't open, and neither did the reserve. Dad says the fellow fell 2000 feet (divide by three for meters), landed in a muddy, plowed field, and didn't break a single bone! He was in the hospital for his bruises for only 2 days (this was in 1951).
There was a story in Readers Digest many years ago, about world record fall survivors. (I mention how long ago it was, because they may not still be the record heights.)
The very highest was a stewardess who was strapped in a seat in the back of a plane when a bomb blew it up, and she survived the fall in the tail section.
The second was a WWII paratrooper who had to bail out during a bombing run, and his parachute didn't open. He hit the glass roof of a train station just as a bomb went off inside; some kind of equalization of pressure thing saved him.
The third was another military aviator whose chute didn't open. He survived because he hit deep snow on the steep embankment of a ditch or canal, and the combination of snow padding and angular deflection saved him.
Presumably the drag from the unbillowed chutes slowed the two parachutists' falling speed somewhat.
> You did read his definition didn't you? It said "function and composition". What you said is just duplicating function, but not composition.
The composition of software products is a pattern of bits in some kind of media. The choice of media almost never matters when reverse engineering software. If I were trying to reverse engineer a car battery the choice of materials would be critical, but that's not what Wine is doing.
> It's most definitely concerned with internals - reverse engineering means taking apart the product and trying to duplicate it exactly - clone it.
No, it doesn't. It means creating a product that you can use in place of the one you looked at to create yours.
It doesn't even have to look the same on the outside, unless the look is important to its function.
> Do you really think that if you compared the Wine source code and the Windows source code they'd be exactly the same?
Of course not. Get over your misconception of what reverse engineering means, and you'll quit expecting me to believe things that I don't.
> To me that sounds as if reverse engineering has more to do with cloning products than just coming up with an alternative implementation which is what Wine is.
Reverse engineering is in fact almost always used for cloning. However, that's exactly what Wine is: a clone of various Windows components.
> All that Wine does is create a blackbox that works like the Windows API from the point of view of a Windows application but using totally different internals.
Reverse engineering isn't concerned with the internals, it's concerned with the effect.
> Reverse engineering would be if they had recreated the internals more or less exactly using components replicated as far as possible from the originals in which case they would have to recreate the Windows source code from binaries somehow.
No, that's not what reverse engineering means. Reverse engineering means "I'm want to make a thingy that works just like your thingy, but I don't have your blueprints, so I'm going to poke and prod your thingy as a black box, and mimic whatever behavior I observe."
> You could also point to the AMD processors that implement the x86 instruction set, internally they are radically different from the Intel originals but to Windows they function the same. If that was reverse engineering I somehow suspect AMD would have gotten it's pants sued of by now.
Intel did in fact sue whoever first cloned their x86 chips, but lost because the reverse-engineered chips did not violate any patents or copyrights.
One of the dangers of keeping trade secrets rather than patenting them is that someone can reverse engineer your goodies and market them without paying you anything.
Slashdot Mirror
...but somebody edited it to say something else.
How are you going to fix it, when the lobbyists who run the country think it's great as it is?
> Sounds like Iran is next on the list
Perhaps I'm naive, but I like to think even our current Moron in Chief realizes that we can't take on Iran right now.
However, I fully expect him to do something stupid that will cause Iran to become overtly involved in Iraq.
> Secondly, it is true that the intelligence community cannot ever be 100% certain it is right or wrong or does, in fact, have all the data. It's never been pushed as a 100% concept that I am aware of. Intelligence is doomed to fail, but not always. Why is this concept difficult for some people to understand?
What I find alarming is that even after you factor out the Bush spin, it's clear that our intelligence services didn't have the slightest idea what was going on in Iraq.
> I have a class this semester where the teacher encourages political debate, he is a liberal and I am a neo-con (I love that), so we get into the topic of the war in Iraq, and he says "You know why we went into Iraq right? OIL!" and so I politely responded "See, I just don't see what we have to gain by overtaking Iraq, in terms of oil." to which he responded "That's right, we don't! It's not worth it!". He made my point quite cleary, and quickly realized the quandary he had gotten into so we moved on at that point. The fact that Iraq exports oil is not just a coincidence, it is not a reason for going to war but it WOULD explain why Iraq is so corrupt, that is the only correlation I, myself, can make between the Iraq war and oil.
It's a no-brainer. Iraq had been under sanctions for a decade, and Big Oil was missing out on the action. To an Oil President, that situation could not be allowed to continue.
> You see, he responded that -- until 6 months ago -- he did not know there was dissent among the intelligence community that gave him the information he relied on to make his case. You can argue that he was stupid, or anything else you like, but he relied on his staff, and the intelligence community, to let him know what was fact and what was in dispute. According to him, this was not presented. He was told the information was "rock solid.
Which is strange, because all you had to do is turn on the evening news, hear coverage of the latest pro-war propaganda from the White House, and then hear the anchor follow up with a comment along the lines of "Our contacts in the intelligence community say that that claim is not well established".
> Then on the left we have people like Murtha and Kennedy screaming that we should leave, RIGHT NOW GODDAMNIT!!! That's just insane, we can't leave the Iraqis in a worse position than we found them.
I feel that we - or at least the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld/Wolfowitz cabal - have a moral responsibility for what has been done, but realistically, staying there is only postponing the inevitable. I can't see prolonging the misery as a virtue.
At any rate, it's clear that Bush is going to declare progress and bring about 1/3 of the troops home before the elections. And he isn't asking for any more money for rebuilding. It's clear that these people have already written Iraq off as a loss, and are in political damage control mode. In 2008 they'll declare "mission accomplished" and bring the rest home.
> The Left (for lack of a better term) is fond of pointing out that the No Fly Zones were not actually UN mandated. Aren't they correct about this?
I don't know about that, but regardless, I seriously doubt that the UN has the authority to tell any nation that it can't defend its own airspace.
> I really feel bad for him.
I detest him for not having the moral fiber to resign.
a) old news
b) anyone with two neurons to rub together should have figured this out before the shooting started
c) the public at large isn't going to get outraged about this (or anything else) unless gas prices go back up to $3/gal
> How can that be when we all know that the Earth is only 6000 years old?
The higher numbers are virtual years, allowing us to determine the fake dates on all the fossils God created.
> Oh yes, Ada is a statically, strongly, strictly typed language (e.g. the compiler won't let you assign an integer to a float variable). My opinion is that it's a Good Thing for critical programs.
Yes, it's very frustrating when you first start using it because it makes you say what you mean and mean what you say, but once you get over that you find yourself writing programs where certain kinds of bugs simply never happen.
The strong typing (no, strong, not the fluff some other languages call "strong") and run-time checks work to move error-discovery forward. That is, you find stuff a compile time that most languages leave you to find at run time, and you find stuff at run time that most languages leave you to (hopefully) notice that you're getting incorrect outputs.
> So if the source code is available for anyone to analyse, AND the software can be updated on-the-fly... what makes this effective? Why does everyone keep assuming terrorists are stupid? Attacks don't succeed through stupidity, they succeed through ingenuity. Look at the source, find a hole, "fix" the software, detonate a WMD...
Yeah, 'cause closed source always keeps the evildoers out.
> Which is a laughable parody. There is nothing 'sudden' planned about the Bush proposal.
It doesn't matter whether it's sudden or not. Pumping the money into the stock market will inflate share prices, and you'll either get one big correction or else a number of smaller ones. The social security money disappears into the savvy market players' pockets either way.
> The video of that will be played by their opponents for every election from now on. Speech writers know how each side will react when they write these things. I'm amazed that the Democrats fell for it.
If the Democrats are smart they'll be the ones playing it.
> Money invested in the stock market is money that represents capital. It's money in the economy and it keeps the economy thriving.
Of course, suddenly pumping a zillion dollars of social security money into the market is going to inflate share prices, and the immediate "correction" will pump the money right back out and into the bank accounts of the pros who know to get out while it's high, leaving Joe No Social Security royally fuxored, with an "investment" worth less than what he put in to it.
> The "Social Security" plans are designed to get amateur stock investors into the stock market, where the professionals, who back the plan, can take the amateur's money.
Even before we get to that, this explains Bush's zeal for social security reform via the stock market.
> It will be a suitcase bomb delivered by a madman.
I think Tom Clancy said during the Reagan-era Star Wars Fantasy Trip, that the workaround would be to "disguise it as drugs and fly it in via the Maimi airport".
> The major reason for this is probably to allow the Bush camp to pursue their true dream of authorizing the use of so-called "tactical nukes".
I figured the major reason was to shovel vast amounts of money at the defense contractors. Almost everything he has done has shoveled money at some big corporation.
Excuse me if I don't believe this.
> yet this first group were obviously brought by the Spanish.
Interestingly, Black slavery in the Americas began at the suggestion of Las Casas, whose views were modern enough for him to be outraged at the practice of bringing "Indians" down from the Mexican highlands to suffer and die working in steamy sugar cane plantations, but not modern enough to reject the idea of slavery itself: he suggested bringing in Africans to do the work instead.
> My dad was in the paratroopers (I was born at Ft Campbell). On one jump, one of his fellow paratrooper's chute didn't open, and neither did the reserve. Dad says the fellow fell 2000 feet (divide by three for meters), landed in a muddy, plowed field, and didn't break a single bone! He was in the hospital for his bruises for only 2 days (this was in 1951).
There was a story in Readers Digest many years ago, about world record fall survivors. (I mention how long ago it was, because they may not still be the record heights.)
The very highest was a stewardess who was strapped in a seat in the back of a plane when a bomb blew it up, and she survived the fall in the tail section.
The second was a WWII paratrooper who had to bail out during a bombing run, and his parachute didn't open. He hit the glass roof of a train station just as a bomb went off inside; some kind of equalization of pressure thing saved him.
The third was another military aviator whose chute didn't open. He survived because he hit deep snow on the steep embankment of a ditch or canal, and the combination of snow padding and angular deflection saved him.
Presumably the drag from the unbillowed chutes slowed the two parachutists' falling speed somewhat.
> What's creepier -- flirting with her brother, or flirting with the guards?
How about coming out of the Ewok's pad wearing her pajamas?
> You did read his definition didn't you? It said "function and composition". What you said is just duplicating function, but not composition.
The composition of software products is a pattern of bits in some kind of media. The choice of media almost never matters when reverse engineering software. If I were trying to reverse engineer a car battery the choice of materials would be critical, but that's not what Wine is doing.
> It's most definitely concerned with internals - reverse engineering means taking apart the product and trying to duplicate it exactly - clone it.
No, it doesn't. It means creating a product that you can use in place of the one you looked at to create yours.
It doesn't even have to look the same on the outside, unless the look is important to its function.
> Do you really think that if you compared the Wine source code and the Windows source code they'd be exactly the same?
Of course not. Get over your misconception of what reverse engineering means, and you'll quit expecting me to believe things that I don't.
> To me that sounds as if reverse engineering has more to do with cloning products than just coming up with an alternative implementation which is what Wine is.
Reverse engineering is in fact almost always used for cloning. However, that's exactly what Wine is: a clone of various Windows components.
> All that Wine does is create a blackbox that works like the Windows API from the point of view of a Windows application but using totally different internals.
Reverse engineering isn't concerned with the internals, it's concerned with the effect.
> Reverse engineering would be if they had recreated the internals more or less exactly using components replicated as far as possible from the originals in which case they would have to recreate the Windows source code from binaries somehow.
No, that's not what reverse engineering means. Reverse engineering means "I'm want to make a thingy that works just like your thingy, but I don't have your blueprints, so I'm going to poke and prod your thingy as a black box, and mimic whatever behavior I observe."
> You could also point to the AMD processors that implement the x86 instruction set, internally they are radically different from the Intel originals but to Windows they function the same. If that was reverse engineering I somehow suspect AMD would have gotten it's pants sued of by now.
Intel did in fact sue whoever first cloned their x86 chips, but lost because the reverse-engineered chips did not violate any patents or copyrights.
One of the dangers of keeping trade secrets rather than patenting them is that someone can reverse engineer your goodies and market them without paying you anything.