I just wanted to say thank you for providing one of the very few non-idiotic comments in this thread, and the only one to suggest that somebody actually bothered to give a little bit of thought to the original post.
Agreed. I did not mean to imply that I have a magical stupidity-free highway near me. To be more precise, I don't find myself having to take any real evasive action on the highways. Sure, every cage might change lanes into me, but if I minimize the amount of time I spend alongside any other vehicles, then I minimize the chances for that to happen. Things like that. I find slower roads with intersections and stoplights to be full of much less predictable threats.
I would have never gotten the motorcycle license if I had not, as a car driver, already been convinced that everybody out there is either stupid or psychotic and it is my job to act accordingly.:-)
That's exactly when it helps you. Turn on Speedvision and watch some motorcycle racing. Somebody will take a full speed asphalt body slide and get up afterwards, precisely because he (1) didn't break any major bones thanks to the armor under his leathers, (2) didn't have his foot ground off at the ankle because of good leather boots, (3) did not lose his hand to the wrist when the monkey-boy panic reaction made him stick his gauntleted hand out to stop the fall, and (4) did not lose a sizable portion of his epidermis to road rash thanks to the anti-abrasive effects of the leather.
And I have never even come close to getting bumped, nicked, or anything else at 60mph. On highways, most people are driving in relatively straight lines in fixed lanes. Evan the lane surfers are relatively predicatble. You are a lot more likely to get clipped at 25mph by the grandma turning left across your vector because she has a mental blind spot for motorcycles. Granted, this is just a personal observation, but for me a highway is relatively safe. Highways are dangerous for the motorcyclists who are going to end up in single vehicle accidents...
That's why there are also things like armored jackets, armored pants, armored gloves, motorcycle boots...
Of course, the downside to wearing all of that is that there is no such thing as hopping and the bike and just roaring off. I ride mine much less than I thought I would partly because of this. Running a little late for work? Hopping in the car makes more sense than taking fifteen minutes to get all the gear on, strip the cover and locks off the bike (no garage), warm up the engine, and so forth.
But wearing all the gear is a heck of a lot better than wearing just a helmet. And wearing a full-face helmet is better than a simple brain bucket. Man, I look at the crap on my faceshield after I ride and I wonder how people can wear anything else...
There is a company called DAT that is developing a technology that does (1) non-GPS based location awareness and (2) strong non-algorithmic random numbers. There technology is accopanied by a security framework that allows for all sorts of configurations, particurly dynamic access level based on verifiable location.
Anyone who is interested in this thread should go check out their site. Very interesting stuff!
Not to be picky, but what do you mean by a wheat lager? Every wheat beer I have ever had (Belgians, German weizens, and so forth) is an ale, i.e. top-fermented. American piss-water beers are all bastardizations of Pilsners, a light hoppy lager (bottom-fermented and stored--laagered---cold).
Well, then you'd be writing a run-on sentence, and you'd be wrong. If the full stop really annoyed you that much though, it is obvious that the proper solution would be an em-dash: "It's official---I'm the last...":-)
That's why we are not a democracy. Check out the functions of the Electoral College, and the relevant sections of the Federalist Papers. The United States is a Republic, not a democracy (nitwit populists be damned), and the founding fathers worried an awful lot about the tyranny of the majority.
As somebody already pointed out, the ABL weapon is a COIL laser, and the C stands for chemical. Each shot uses up a noticeable chunk of the on-board chemicals. The 747-400F version of the laser will be good for, oh, something like a dozen shots. I don't remember the exact number they are throwing around, but it is on that order. Since there are no satellites anywhere near the size of a 747, a satellite version of this would be good for only a couple shots, tops. Spending the money it takes to launch a satellite that will be good for precisely one (1) operational use is not a very good idea...
Also, if you note the earlier post quoting from the ABL website, it is a theater missile defense asset, not a National Missile Defense (NMD) tool. The targeting suite that will go on ABL depends upon the relatively slow speeds, and relatively large target, of a ballistic missile during boost phase. Hitting an exoatmospheric re-entry vehicle of an ICBM is a whole different shooting match (so to speak...).
The ABL as envisioned is something that would be perfect for the current North Korea aituation. You have a potential belligerent with a couple of nukes to put on short- and intermediate-range ballistic missiles. You park an ABL at 40k feet a hundred+ miles off the peninsula and look for thermal blooms. See a missile go up, lase it to target, then whack it with the megawatt class main weapon, which, by the way, is turret mounted so the limited maneuverability of a trash-hauler like the 747 turns out not to be such a limitation.
For those who are interested in this, Northrop Grumman has already delivered BILL, the kilowatt class Beacon Illumination Laser which will be used for ranging and targeting on the ABL.
Random sampling is a sound statistical method if you can do some work to show that your sample population meets some necessary criteria. The greater the nonuniformities in the ground truth distribution, the less likely a uniform sampling method is to represent that distribution. There are any number of ways the results could get skewed by the Nielsens.
As for, ``If the Nielsen ratings weren't accurate...,'' well, how would one know? The point is that there is no alternative against which to compare the Nielsen results. The Nielsen system more-or-less props up the current economic model for television income and advertising, so nobody is going to gripe too loudy. If it turns out that low viewership shows, like Farscape, are underrepresented by the current sampling method, well that's just an extra argument to can them. However, since the comments that the SciFi channel folks have made on the subject make it sound like a declining viewer share has only just crossed the threshhold of profitability, then it could be a serious matter if that viewer share is, indeed, underrepresented.
The accuracy of Nielsen ratings is important to almost nobody. The acceptability of those ratings as the standard metric for advertising dollars...now that is essential to the survivability of the Nielsen Media company.
I, too, have worked in environments which mixed software development and classification. The first argument that pointy-haired managers raise about open source is the fear that they are required to disseminate open source product. This is, of course, nonsense, and must be explained carefully in small words.
The trickier question is scope of distribution. If your code runs a workstation out in the field operated by some E2, does something like the GPL insist he must have access to the source code? I have argued that it does not. As others in this thread have pointed out, the organization has access to the source. If the DoD contracts out classified software and the contractor uses open source stuff, then the DoD gets back its finished product of source code and executable.
Remember that in the case of the GPL, you are not required to physically distribute source with binaries; you must simply make that source available. Within the DoD, that source is available, sitting on a machine in a secure facility thousands of miles away.
I take it, then, that the Emacs keyboard users in the test were unaware of the <M-z>. command... Text editing has to be the worst possible choice of test for this sort of thing. If your hands are already on the keyboard typing in the text, leaving them there to edit that text seems pretty intuitive. Granted, the command learning curve on vi(m) and (X)Emacs are pretty high and steep, but users who are over that hump can fly around a document without a mouse.
(Especially those of us who run XEmacs in terminal mode because we like to avoid GUI startup bloat.:-)
I haven't implemented this on any sort of scale, but for my own sanity at work, I have pulled the Win32 version of Vim (Vi, Improved) from www.vim.org.
As a regular user, you can add a Windows `Send To...' option to your menus which make it available as an editor. Also, when you open the File Types menu, if you choose the Advanced options for a TXT text document and change the program used by the `open' action to gvim, you can make it the default text editor.
If you are really lucky and have registry access, you can make it into the default source-code viewer for IE.
Not having to look at Notepad has made me a much happier (albeit still reluctant:) Windows user.
How do you think Mr.Gates would react to this statement?
Microsoft patents make it impossible for a free individual to use any of Microsoft's work or build on any of that work.
So since MS patents stifle the creative and innovative process by restrivting their products solely to themselves, patents must be wrong. I never realized how smart Gates was.:-)
If I remember my UNIX history (which I may not---this is all pretty much before I was born:), the first UNIX was created as a stripped-down Multics. Multics had a very thorough file and hardware security control.
So Multics was stripped down to UNIX, and people have been fighting an uphill battle ever since to reintroduce a lot of the security features lost in that translation. I've been wondering for years whether it would be possible for someone to resurrect the relevant features from Multics... Since it hasn't happened, I guess it isn't possible.
Would that the IOC recognized any legitimate uses of their Holy Words. This is just a new incarnation of a trend that IOC has been pursuing for 20 years, in which they have been hounding business users of the words Olympic, Olympiad, etc.
In my hometown, a greek diner called the Olympic Diner was sued by IOC for their name. Anybody out their who knows what OM, or Odyssey of the Mind, competitions are might remember that they used to be called Olympics of the Mind before IOC sent their pack of trained watch-lawyers after 'em.
It is things like this that make me realize I don't have the foggiest idea how the court system in this country is supposed to work.
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I just wanted to say thank you for providing one of the very few non-idiotic comments in this thread, and the only one to suggest that somebody actually bothered to give a little bit of thought to the original post.
Kudos to you.
Agreed. I did not mean to imply that I have a magical stupidity-free highway near me. To be more precise, I don't find myself having to take any real evasive action on the highways. Sure, every cage might change lanes into me, but if I minimize the amount of time I spend alongside any other vehicles, then I minimize the chances for that to happen. Things like that. I find slower roads with intersections and stoplights to be full of much less predictable threats.
I would have never gotten the motorcycle license if I had not, as a car driver, already been convinced that everybody out there is either stupid or psychotic and it is my job to act accordingly. :-)
CJW
That's exactly when it helps you. Turn on Speedvision and watch some motorcycle racing. Somebody will take a full speed asphalt body slide and get up afterwards, precisely because he (1) didn't break any major bones thanks to the armor under his leathers, (2) didn't have his foot ground off at the ankle because of good leather boots, (3) did not lose his hand to the wrist when the monkey-boy panic reaction made him stick his gauntleted hand out to stop the fall, and (4) did not lose a sizable portion of his epidermis to road rash thanks to the anti-abrasive effects of the leather.
And I have never even come close to getting bumped, nicked, or anything else at 60mph. On highways, most people are driving in relatively straight lines in fixed lanes. Evan the lane surfers are relatively predicatble. You are a lot more likely to get clipped at 25mph by the grandma turning left across your vector because she has a mental blind spot for motorcycles. Granted, this is just a personal observation, but for me a highway is relatively safe. Highways are dangerous for the motorcyclists who are going to end up in single vehicle accidents...
CJW
That's why there are also things like armored jackets, armored pants, armored gloves, motorcycle boots...
Of course, the downside to wearing all of that is that there is no such thing as hopping and the bike and just roaring off. I ride mine much less than I thought I would partly because of this. Running a little late for work? Hopping in the car makes more sense than taking fifteen minutes to get all the gear on, strip the cover and locks off the bike (no garage), warm up the engine, and so forth.
But wearing all the gear is a heck of a lot better than wearing just a helmet. And wearing a full-face helmet is better than a simple brain bucket. Man, I look at the crap on my faceshield after I ride and I wonder how people can wear anything else...
CJW
There is a company called DAT that is developing a technology that does (1) non-GPS based location awareness and (2) strong non-algorithmic random numbers. There technology is accopanied by a security framework that allows for all sorts of configurations, particurly dynamic access level based on verifiable location.
Anyone who is interested in this thread should go check out their site. Very interesting stuff!
K.
Not to be picky, but what do you mean by a wheat lager? Every wheat beer I have ever had (Belgians, German weizens, and so forth) is an ale, i.e. top-fermented. American piss-water beers are all bastardizations of Pilsners, a light hoppy lager (bottom-fermented and stored--laagered---cold).
CJW
Well, then you'd be writing a run-on sentence, and you'd be wrong. If the full stop really annoyed you that much though, it is obvious that the proper solution would be an em-dash: "It's official---I'm the last..." :-)
That's why we are not a democracy. Check out the functions of the Electoral College, and the relevant sections of the Federalist Papers. The United States is a Republic, not a democracy (nitwit populists be damned), and the founding fathers worried an awful lot about the tyranny of the majority.
K.
As somebody already pointed out, the ABL weapon is a COIL laser, and the C stands for chemical. Each shot uses up a noticeable chunk of the on-board chemicals. The 747-400F version of the laser will be good for, oh, something like a dozen shots. I don't remember the exact number they are throwing around, but it is on that order. Since there are no satellites anywhere near the size of a 747, a satellite version of this would be good for only a couple shots, tops. Spending the money it takes to launch a satellite that will be good for precisely one (1) operational use is not a very good idea...
Also, if you note the earlier post quoting from the ABL website, it is a theater missile defense asset, not a National Missile Defense (NMD) tool. The targeting suite that will go on ABL depends upon the relatively slow speeds, and relatively large target, of a ballistic missile during boost phase. Hitting an exoatmospheric re-entry vehicle of an ICBM is a whole different shooting match (so to speak...).
The ABL as envisioned is something that would be perfect for the current North Korea aituation. You have a potential belligerent with a couple of nukes to put on short- and intermediate-range ballistic missiles. You park an ABL at 40k feet a hundred+ miles off the peninsula and look for thermal blooms. See a missile go up, lase it to target, then whack it with the megawatt class main weapon, which, by the way, is turret mounted so the limited maneuverability of a trash-hauler like the 747 turns out not to be such a limitation.
For those who are interested in this, Northrop Grumman has already delivered BILL, the kilowatt class Beacon Illumination Laser which will be used for ranging and targeting on the ABL.
CJW
As for, ``If the Nielsen ratings weren't accurate...,'' well, how would one know? The point is that there is no alternative against which to compare the Nielsen results. The Nielsen system more-or-less props up the current economic model for television income and advertising, so nobody is going to gripe too loudy. If it turns out that low viewership shows, like Farscape, are underrepresented by the current sampling method, well that's just an extra argument to can them. However, since the comments that the SciFi channel folks have made on the subject make it sound like a declining viewer share has only just crossed the threshhold of profitability, then it could be a serious matter if that viewer share is, indeed, underrepresented.
The accuracy of Nielsen ratings is important to almost nobody. The acceptability of those ratings as the standard metric for advertising dollars...now that is essential to the survivability of the Nielsen Media company.
The trickier question is scope of distribution. If your code runs a workstation out in the field operated by some E2, does something like the GPL insist he must have access to the source code? I have argued that it does not. As others in this thread have pointed out, the organization has access to the source. If the DoD contracts out classified software and the contractor uses open source stuff, then the DoD gets back its finished product of source code and executable.
Remember that in the case of the GPL, you are not required to physically distribute source with binaries; you must simply make that source available. Within the DoD, that source is available, sitting on a machine in a secure facility thousands of miles away.
CJW
(Especially those of us who run XEmacs in terminal mode because we like to avoid GUI startup bloat. :-)
CJW
CJW
As a regular user, you can add a Windows `Send To...' option to your menus which make it available as an editor. Also, when you open the File Types menu, if you choose the Advanced options for a TXT text document and change the program used by the `open' action to gvim, you can make it the default text editor.
If you are really lucky and have registry access, you can make it into the default source-code viewer for IE.
Not having to look at Notepad has made me a much happier (albeit still reluctant :) Windows user.
CJW
How do you think Mr.Gates would react to this statement?
So since MS patents stifle the creative and innovative process by restrivting their products solely to themselves, patents must be wrong. I never realized how smart Gates was. :-)
CJW
If I remember my UNIX history (which I may not---this is all pretty much before I was born :), the first UNIX was created as a stripped-down Multics. Multics had a very thorough file and hardware security control.
So Multics was stripped down to UNIX, and people have been fighting an uphill battle ever since to reintroduce a lot of the security features lost in that translation. I've been wondering for years whether it would be possible for someone to resurrect the relevant features from Multics... Since it hasn't happened, I guess it isn't possible.
Oh, well...
In my hometown, a greek diner called the Olympic Diner was sued by IOC for their name. Anybody out their who knows what OM, or Odyssey of the Mind, competitions are might remember that they used to be called Olympics of the Mind before IOC sent their pack of trained watch-lawyers after 'em.
It is things like this that make me realize I don't have the foggiest idea how the court system in this country is supposed to work.
CJW