Clue: The US Defense Department is the latest agency to give up on auditing or setting up GAAP accounting - several agencies have tried to set up real corporate accounting systems and failed.
If any publicly-held company's accounting were as bad as the US government's, the principals would be headed to jail. By some estimates 10% of the money just wanders off into the bushes, never to be seen again. It is not necessarily taken, or stolen, it's just lost track of like the Ark of the Covenant stored in an army warehouse in that movie, never to be seen again. The US government (and probably most other governments) has a large number of sofas, with change amounting to $billions lost in the cushions.
A big chunk of it wanders through various internal accounts and ends up at CIA, NSA and Lockheed's Skunkworks.
Fixing those systems would require a huge refactoring of all government operations. There are probably 100,000 workers in US government that are essentially 'lost' - they do something, they get paid, but they're not accounted for anywhere. IMHO, of course, this is yet another reason why all governmental activities should be done at the lowest, most local level possible. Centralizing management works about as well as centralizing the economy - badly. A system comprised of many small entities making small decisions based on good information is much more robust and adaptive than a single large entity. Such a system will have proportionately more errors, but their impact will be proportionately smaller, and the cost and speed of correction will be much better. (IOW it's hard for a centipede to trip and fall down.)
Hate HP for making us individual taxpayers pick up the slack
So you are arguing that taxes should be paid on total gross revenue, regardless of costs? That's gonna make your grocery bill go up by about 30% (grocery stores typically run on 2% to 5% margins, so taxing on gross revenues instead of profits means they will pay taxes of 35% of the total bill rather than on the 2% profit.)
I'll just add that according to many economists, as a class corporations essentially don't pay taxes - they only pass those taxes on to customers (whether corporate or individual) as increased prices.
And if you think the money just goes to management, that's rarely true (though widely publicized). When competition is working as it should, corporations that keep the money that would have gone to taxes will be forced to reduce their prices to match their competitors. And if board management is working (which it often isn't), even if they can keep the prices and profits up, the money will be passed to the investors as dividends and/or stock price increases. Since the vast, vast majority of stock is held by institutions such as 401-K funds, pension funds and the like, most of the money still ends up eventually in the hands of individuals like you and me.
Recent studies have shown that there are many similarities in the personality traits of psychopaths and successful leaders. The problem is where the fine line lies - or where it is put for a given company/nation.
Good luck with that. There are numerous cases in recent history where large companies have managed to hide their problems prior to a merger, or prior to going completely bust. It can be very, very difficult to figure out the details of how big complex companies are put together - even for the company's own accountants. It can be analogized to the halting problem, or the shortest route problem. A big company's internal transactions constitute a huge dependency graph with an almost unlimited opportunity for cycles within the graph, and then there are all the external transactions - which ones are truly 'external'?
For example, a company like Best Buy may have over one thousand subsidiaries, nested three to four levels deep, in over 100 countries. None of those countries require the level of accounting rigor of the US, especially since Sarbanes-Oxley (the so-called 'Enron law' - case in point). Now try to analyze millions of transactions large and small between the various subsidiaries and to/from outside entities, and determine which of those transactions is part of a complex money laundering process, and which ones are part of some accountant's method for skimming money off the top. In fact, with a company that big and complex, the odds are that several of the accountants or executives in smaller subsidiaries are, in fact, skimming - perhaps by 'selling' goods to a dummy company that never happens to pay its bills. Now separate those actions from some larger process that the parent company has set up to avoid visibility of losses.
It can happen by accident as well, without any intent to do evil. I know of a at least one IPO that was cancelled when a company doing the required due diligence before going public discovered to their dismay that while they thought they were going gangbusters, they were in fact insolvent (hint: growth is expensive). So instead of IPO, bankruptcy followed.
There are zillions of other ways to use 'creative' accounting methods to hide problems - companies often don't know until it's too late. It's a mistake to consider a large corporation as a monolithic entity. One group of large companies that I work with literally don't know who their customers are - they are the product of dozens of mergers over decades, and have never integrated the accounting systems together - I won't go into why that is but there are good reasons, which are related to risk, cost and disruption.
tl;dr: the complexity of companies can be arbitrarily large; finding problems may be impossible with the limited data available prior to merger.
I visited a Chevron facility back in 1998. At that time they had their own custom version of Windows (did they have source?). Putting your own data or program on the machine would get you fired. The IT staff could, and would, push a new version of the OS overnight whenever they felt the need, writing over everything on the machine, including all your work if you hadn't pushed it up to the file server. Their desktops had no floppy, no CD, and this was before USB. Opening the case would get you fired. The guy I was visiting, an oilfield engineer but a former sysadmin at another company, had a network problem a few weeks before. If he were allowed, he could have opened the box up, fixed the problem and been back at work in 1/2 hour. As it was it took two weeks before the networking guy finally made it over to fix it, so the engineer was dead in the water for two weeks.
No need to beat - threats and bribery, or just cuteness and heavy breathing, will generally work fine. In red team tests back in 1999 (IIRC) a Navy group found that the average cost to bribe a sys admin to let 'bad guys' into the data center and provide passwords to get in was about $7000. With inflation, maybe that's $10,000 now. I'm sure that 90% of workers would give up the password with merely a threat of pain, although I like to think that most would resist bribing.
Actually the Perq workstation used paging back in 1978. Brian Rosen, the original designer, had a falling out with the folks at Xerox PARQ over paging vs. . And VM was originally used in mainframes in the 1960s. The same is true of preemptive multitasking, and a lot of other stuff - the real guts of OS. If software had been patentable back then, a lot of important stuff would have been kept proprietary for two decades and we'd still be using an abacus to do arithmetic. Which is why software patents, whether pragmatic or not, are ultimately unfair - stuff I did back in the late 1970s and early 1980s were a lot more interesting and difficult than one-click ordering and rounded corners. So for that reason alone, the change in 1986 to allow software patents was a violation of all that's good, right and holy. Imagine if Tim Berners-Lee had patented the World Wide Web? (which was inspired in large part by the NeXT computer's user environment and NeXTMail - much of which could also have been patented under present rules.)
The present situation is akin to the inventor of the internal combustion engine not being granted patents, but painting the side of the car blue being patentable. But I know, I rant off-topic.
the Doctrine of First Sale which allows that the owner of an item, whatever it is, has no further obligation to the person who sold it to him once the Contract of Sale is fulfilled.
IANAL but I think you are stretching this too far. For example, I may buy a book, and I may give it to someone else (in fact I think it's OK to sell it to someone else) - this is covered by first sale. But I may not then make copies of the book and sell them without permission from the rights holder. And I think that is the case that applies to GPL.
Yes, I wired the doorbell for a million volts, replaced the welcome mat with a grounded copper plate, and then invited him over for tea, but he's the one who touched the doorbell button! It was suicide!
Ah, I am reminded of the joys of youth! Of course, in my case was only a 13KV neon sign transformer, and I was the one invited in by my brother, to his bedroom door across the hall. The plate was aluminum foil, under the door mat. It arced between my foot and the mat, and between my hand and the doorknob. The muscle contractions tossed me across the hall, through the door, over my bed and I landed against the window. Big fun!:P He wanted to make sure it wasn't dangerous before he tried it on his friend...
I'll just step in here - where I live is 6 miles from the nearest store, along skinny New England country roads where the power poles AND trees come right up to the edge of the pavement. It's not that the wind takes out the power lines, it's that the wind takes out the trees, and they fall across the power lines - and in a good storm there can be trees down every hundred feet for the whole six miles. Since these roads are not main roads and the population served is relatively small per square mile, they come last in the priorities.
Before you laugh about the road engineering, and as a recent arrival in NE, I will say that the roads were designed by cows in the 1600s and 1700s, and the property lines were defined at the same time. There's no money and little inclination to widen the roads to accommodate such things as bike lanes or shoulder to walk on - it would often require major surgery to people's houses and other property. And, I think, the towns have the view that narrow winding roads with trees hanging over them tend to keep traffic speeds down - for them it's a win-win.
So last year an unusual early snow storm hit while the leaves were still on the trees. One tree about two miles from my house fell across the lines. The lines didn't break but were pulled down to within a few feet of the ground (two poles were bent or broken, don't know which) - I think the connection was broken, or automatically shut off (we didn't have cable either). With all the other problems in the region this one didn't get fixed for a week. For most of that time we had to drive on the opposite shoulder to get around the tree, which was down enough to block one lane.
I can't resist adding another, salient example: TV and monitor size. Most people buy the 27 inch screen vs. the 22 inch screen, without reading whether the bigger screen is 720P or 1080P, or some other resolution - much less the other criteria. Our own company's purchasing guy got stung this way recently, buying several big new monitors without realizing that they were 720P. Fortunately we were able to send them back and exchange them.
No, because it is much better to tell *engineers* what resolution they get, and what size screen, or such instead of a useless name that means absolutely nothing.
FTFY.
For confirmation, I recall a dog food commercial a while back, where the 'customer' asks, "But how did you get all that meat into the bag?" The voiceover responds, "We *bang, flash of light* PUT THE MEAT INTO THE BAG!". O golly, now I understand completely. Thanks for the highly technical explanation!:P
The fact is, that most of the time even highly technical customers don't really want to know the details, although they might want to hear some details to satisfy their belief in their own technical prowess they don't actually use them as a primary consideration to evaluate the product. Car X might get 10 more horsepower and use 2% less gas than car Y, but car Y has a better color scheme, or the steering wheel feels better, so the technical customer buys car Y. A lot of product marketing is purely designed to provide a perceived difference from commodity. 'Retina display' is one example. So is 'turbo' when applied to computers. Remember when everything from graphics cards to CPUs to, finally, software, was marked 'Turbo' for the more expensive option?
No argument there, though I would argue that the media can not rightly assert that they are neutral when their own demographic is so highly skewed from the population. Rather than a highly skewed reporting entity 'trying to be unbiased', I would prefer if their institutions weren't essentially echo chambers for their own biases - I would like to see two news reporters who actually disagree once in a while - in private, not to mention in public.
Of course, that's about as likely as a reporter who actually knows anything about the topic they are reporting on - history, technology, science, math, all those things they didn't take in school while they were learning to be 'journalists'.
IMHO only 'true believers' are in agreement with everything espoused by any party - we all have a self-contradictory mishmash of beliefs. We'd like to see X, but feel badly for those who will suffer as a result of X, and also feel badly for those who are suffering without X.
Note re counter-biasing - I had a boss like that once. At every review, he always had to come up with 'three good things, three bad things' about every employee. A triumph of algorithm over sense.
Funny thing - last year a professor (UCLA?) used standard statistical measures on various news outlets to measure overall bias. I don't recall the details of the methodology, but it is one that has been used for a long time for this sort of thing. He found that most of the mainstream news media were far to the left (over 70%), and Fox News was only slightly to the left (IIRC 52%, within experimental error).
It's also worth noting that in DC something over 90% of all news professionals are registered to left or extreme left parties - IIRC last survey showed over 12/13. Among the reporters and editors the ratio is more extreme. I just read a quote from the editor or publisher or something at NY Times, who said (as I recall) that everyone in the news room and editorial staff is so far left that they don't even know how to cover a story from any other angle.
If you are a college grad, realize that at most colleges over 95% of instructors are left or far left - so your education started out from a very left perspective. Chances are, based on the available inputs to most of us, your idea of 'center' is probably somewhere to the left of where it really is. Of course I don't know you, I'm generalizing.
IMHO any news organization that presumes to be nonpartisan should have approximately equal numbers of personnel of all common persuasions. AFAIK the only 'mainstream' news TV outlet with _any_ regular non-leftist onscreen personalities is Fox - I don't have cable and rarely see TV, so I could be mistaken on that by now. (plus also maybe Bloomberg and some other financial channels?) I think the experience of Juan Williams (is he still on Fox?) is a useful example.
Yes, no true nerd *under the age of 30* would admit to not being obsessed with WoW.
There, FTFY.
Young whippersnappers. I used to play Adventure when it was one great huge FORTRAN loop with gotos between rooms. And Startrek when it involved printing out the short range and long range scans on the paper in your DECwriter - at 300 BPS. I got bored with games (prefer writing to playing) long before WoW. Last game I wrote (actually modified) was converting Asteroids to four dimensions on with planets and gravity. I recently found the printout I saved of the original source (in Tek 4052 BASIC). I'm thinking of rewriting it in PHP, just to see if I can.;) Then maybe Erlang...
Funny thing, what you describe (along with the original article) are perfectly metaphorical of the present situation. Security theater such as you describe - removing weapons etc., of course, are affecting tools-within-the-game, and so will have zero effect on the problem but will inconvenience everyone to the point where some will quit the game. Meanwhile the true cause is not identified, leaving the whole game susceptible. I'm not a WoW player (never been there) but I would hope that the powers that be in WoW are working hard to figure out how they got hacked. I also hope that the WoW servers can revert to a backup.
(I know, that's just what you said more amusingly, but I had to put my 2c in)
So the real value would seem to be found in upping the time, hardware, and interest requirements.
That's pretty much the same as a description of bank vault locks (from the late 1800s?) - all any lock does is increase the cost, time and complexity to break into a safe. "The more things change, the more they remain the same.":)
From some of my earlier reading, one of the big advantages is the elimination of a huge, expensive and unreliable supply chain to provide explosive ammunition and missiles to the ships, and elimination of the biggest threat to military ships, the penetration and explosion of the ammunition in the ship. With rail guns you have only to supply electrical power (typically from nuclear reactors that are already big enough to supply the juice), and inert metal projecticles. The projectiles are much cheaper than cannon rounds and much, much cheaper than Tomahawks ($600,000 each). There are various other advantages and disadvantages for each weapon, but manufacturing, assembling the explosives and other components of 1000 1/2 ton cannon shells, and delivering them to a carrier or destroyer at a top secret location in the middle of an ocean in unpredictable weather can't be easy. With railguns and nuclear power a surface ship is good to go as long as the food and the tungsten pellets (inert, safe-until-fired ammunition) last.
If you send a ton of pointy object at those speeds, the 1/2 mv^2 of that object is large relative to air resistance. Also, they presently do have bullets for large caliber weapons that can change direction during flight. Not as much as a missile, but significantly.
From the vids I've seen, they're not silent and not invisible. There's quite a bit of smoke and even flame (I'm guessing oxidation of the molten top layer of the railgun?), and a loud bang - that may be the sonic boom. See Youtube.
Someone else on here noted that railguns work better for large projectiles, and less well for small (handheld-size) weapons. I don't know, I only lurk here.
Slashdot Mirror
Clue: The US Defense Department is the latest agency to give up on auditing or setting up GAAP accounting - several agencies have tried to set up real corporate accounting systems and failed.
If any publicly-held company's accounting were as bad as the US government's, the principals would be headed to jail. By some estimates 10% of the money just wanders off into the bushes, never to be seen again. It is not necessarily taken, or stolen, it's just lost track of like the Ark of the Covenant stored in an army warehouse in that movie, never to be seen again. The US government (and probably most other governments) has a large number of sofas, with change amounting to $billions lost in the cushions.
A big chunk of it wanders through various internal accounts and ends up at CIA, NSA and Lockheed's Skunkworks.
Fixing those systems would require a huge refactoring of all government operations. There are probably 100,000 workers in US government that are essentially 'lost' - they do something, they get paid, but they're not accounted for anywhere. IMHO, of course, this is yet another reason why all governmental activities should be done at the lowest, most local level possible. Centralizing management works about as well as centralizing the economy - badly. A system comprised of many small entities making small decisions based on good information is much more robust and adaptive than a single large entity. Such a system will have proportionately more errors, but their impact will be proportionately smaller, and the cost and speed of correction will be much better. (IOW it's hard for a centipede to trip and fall down.)
Hate HP for making us individual taxpayers pick up the slack
So you are arguing that taxes should be paid on total gross revenue, regardless of costs? That's gonna make your grocery bill go up by about 30% (grocery stores typically run on 2% to 5% margins, so taxing on gross revenues instead of profits means they will pay taxes of 35% of the total bill rather than on the 2% profit.)
I'll just add that according to many economists, as a class corporations essentially don't pay taxes - they only pass those taxes on to customers (whether corporate or individual) as increased prices.
And if you think the money just goes to management, that's rarely true (though widely publicized). When competition is working as it should, corporations that keep the money that would have gone to taxes will be forced to reduce their prices to match their competitors. And if board management is working (which it often isn't), even if they can keep the prices and profits up, the money will be passed to the investors as dividends and/or stock price increases. Since the vast, vast majority of stock is held by institutions such as 401-K funds, pension funds and the like, most of the money still ends up eventually in the hands of individuals like you and me.
Recent studies have shown that there are many similarities in the personality traits of psychopaths and successful leaders. The problem is where the fine line lies - or where it is put for a given company/nation.
I don't know Bill Veghte - were you being serious, or ironic?
Good luck with that. There are numerous cases in recent history where large companies have managed to hide their problems prior to a merger, or prior to going completely bust. It can be very, very difficult to figure out the details of how big complex companies are put together - even for the company's own accountants. It can be analogized to the halting problem, or the shortest route problem. A big company's internal transactions constitute a huge dependency graph with an almost unlimited opportunity for cycles within the graph, and then there are all the external transactions - which ones are truly 'external'?
For example, a company like Best Buy may have over one thousand subsidiaries, nested three to four levels deep, in over 100 countries. None of those countries require the level of accounting rigor of the US, especially since Sarbanes-Oxley (the so-called 'Enron law' - case in point). Now try to analyze millions of transactions large and small between the various subsidiaries and to/from outside entities, and determine which of those transactions is part of a complex money laundering process, and which ones are part of some accountant's method for skimming money off the top. In fact, with a company that big and complex, the odds are that several of the accountants or executives in smaller subsidiaries are, in fact, skimming - perhaps by 'selling' goods to a dummy company that never happens to pay its bills. Now separate those actions from some larger process that the parent company has set up to avoid visibility of losses.
It can happen by accident as well, without any intent to do evil. I know of a at least one IPO that was cancelled when a company doing the required due diligence before going public discovered to their dismay that while they thought they were going gangbusters, they were in fact insolvent (hint: growth is expensive). So instead of IPO, bankruptcy followed.
There are zillions of other ways to use 'creative' accounting methods to hide problems - companies often don't know until it's too late. It's a mistake to consider a large corporation as a monolithic entity. One group of large companies that I work with literally don't know who their customers are - they are the product of dozens of mergers over decades, and have never integrated the accounting systems together - I won't go into why that is but there are good reasons, which are related to risk, cost and disruption.
tl;dr: the complexity of companies can be arbitrarily large; finding problems may be impossible with the limited data available prior to merger.
I visited a Chevron facility back in 1998. At that time they had their own custom version of Windows (did they have source?). Putting your own data or program on the machine would get you fired. The IT staff could, and would, push a new version of the OS overnight whenever they felt the need, writing over everything on the machine, including all your work if you hadn't pushed it up to the file server. Their desktops had no floppy, no CD, and this was before USB. Opening the case would get you fired. The guy I was visiting, an oilfield engineer but a former sysadmin at another company, had a network problem a few weeks before. If he were allowed, he could have opened the box up, fixed the problem and been back at work in 1/2 hour. As it was it took two weeks before the networking guy finally made it over to fix it, so the engineer was dead in the water for two weeks.
No need to beat - threats and bribery, or just cuteness and heavy breathing, will generally work fine. In red team tests back in 1999 (IIRC) a Navy group found that the average cost to bribe a sys admin to let 'bad guys' into the data center and provide passwords to get in was about $7000. With inflation, maybe that's $10,000 now.
I'm sure that 90% of workers would give up the password with merely a threat of pain, although I like to think that most would resist bribing.
Actually the Perq workstation used paging back in 1978. Brian Rosen, the original designer, had a falling out with the folks at Xerox PARQ over paging vs. . And VM was originally used in mainframes in the 1960s. The same is true of preemptive multitasking, and a lot of other stuff - the real guts of OS. If software had been patentable back then, a lot of important stuff would have been kept proprietary for two decades and we'd still be using an abacus to do arithmetic. Which is why software patents, whether pragmatic or not, are ultimately unfair - stuff I did back in the late 1970s and early 1980s were a lot more interesting and difficult than one-click ordering and rounded corners. So for that reason alone, the change in 1986 to allow software patents was a violation of all that's good, right and holy. Imagine if Tim Berners-Lee had patented the World Wide Web? (which was inspired in large part by the NeXT computer's user environment and NeXTMail - much of which could also have been patented under present rules.)
The present situation is akin to the inventor of the internal combustion engine not being granted patents, but painting the side of the car blue being patentable. But I know, I rant off-topic.
the Doctrine of First Sale which allows that the owner of an item, whatever it is, has no further obligation to the person who sold it to him once the Contract of Sale is fulfilled.
IANAL but I think you are stretching this too far. For example, I may buy a book, and I may give it to someone else (in fact I think it's OK to sell it to someone else) - this is covered by first sale. But I may not then make copies of the book and sell them without permission from the rights holder. And I think that is the case that applies to GPL.
Dad didn't think it was all that funny.
Hahaha! I can just see Dad's face (any dad)!! :D
Yes, I wired the doorbell for a million volts, replaced the welcome mat with a grounded copper plate, and then invited him over for tea, but he's the one who touched the doorbell button! It was suicide!
Ah, I am reminded of the joys of youth! Of course, in my case was only a 13KV neon sign transformer, and I was the one invited in by my brother, to his bedroom door across the hall. The plate was aluminum foil, under the door mat. It arced between my foot and the mat, and between my hand and the doorknob. The muscle contractions tossed me across the hall, through the door, over my bed and I landed against the window. Big fun! :P He wanted to make sure it wasn't dangerous before he tried it on his friend...
I'll just step in here - where I live is 6 miles from the nearest store, along skinny New England country roads where the power poles AND trees come right up to the edge of the pavement. It's not that the wind takes out the power lines, it's that the wind takes out the trees, and they fall across the power lines - and in a good storm there can be trees down every hundred feet for the whole six miles. Since these roads are not main roads and the population served is relatively small per square mile, they come last in the priorities.
Before you laugh about the road engineering, and as a recent arrival in NE, I will say that the roads were designed by cows in the 1600s and 1700s, and the property lines were defined at the same time. There's no money and little inclination to widen the roads to accommodate such things as bike lanes or shoulder to walk on - it would often require major surgery to people's houses and other property. And, I think, the towns have the view that narrow winding roads with trees hanging over them tend to keep traffic speeds down - for them it's a win-win.
So last year an unusual early snow storm hit while the leaves were still on the trees. One tree about two miles from my house fell across the lines. The lines didn't break but were pulled down to within a few feet of the ground (two poles were bent or broken, don't know which) - I think the connection was broken, or automatically shut off (we didn't have cable either). With all the other problems in the region this one didn't get fixed for a week. For most of that time we had to drive on the opposite shoulder to get around the tree, which was down enough to block one lane.
I can't resist adding another, salient example: TV and monitor size. Most people buy the 27 inch screen vs. the 22 inch screen, without reading whether the bigger screen is 720P or 1080P, or some other resolution - much less the other criteria. Our own company's purchasing guy got stung this way recently, buying several big new monitors without realizing that they were 720P. Fortunately we were able to send them back and exchange them.
No, because it is much better to tell *engineers* what resolution they get, and what size screen, or such instead of a useless name that means absolutely nothing.
FTFY.
For confirmation, I recall a dog food commercial a while back, where the 'customer' asks, "But how did you get all that meat into the bag?" The voiceover responds, "We *bang, flash of light* PUT THE MEAT INTO THE BAG!". O golly, now I understand completely. Thanks for the highly technical explanation! :P
The fact is, that most of the time even highly technical customers don't really want to know the details, although they might want to hear some details to satisfy their belief in their own technical prowess they don't actually use them as a primary consideration to evaluate the product. Car X might get 10 more horsepower and use 2% less gas than car Y, but car Y has a better color scheme, or the steering wheel feels better, so the technical customer buys car Y. A lot of product marketing is purely designed to provide a perceived difference from commodity. 'Retina display' is one example. So is 'turbo' when applied to computers. Remember when everything from graphics cards to CPUs to, finally, software, was marked 'Turbo' for the more expensive option?
No argument there, though I would argue that the media can not rightly assert that they are neutral when their own demographic is so highly skewed from the population. Rather than a highly skewed reporting entity 'trying to be unbiased', I would prefer if their institutions weren't essentially echo chambers for their own biases - I would like to see two news reporters who actually disagree once in a while - in private, not to mention in public.
Of course, that's about as likely as a reporter who actually knows anything about the topic they are reporting on - history, technology, science, math, all those things they didn't take in school while they were learning to be 'journalists'.
IMHO only 'true believers' are in agreement with everything espoused by any party - we all have a self-contradictory mishmash of beliefs. We'd like to see X, but feel badly for those who will suffer as a result of X, and also feel badly for those who are suffering without X.
Note re counter-biasing - I had a boss like that once. At every review, he always had to come up with 'three good things, three bad things' about every employee. A triumph of algorithm over sense.
Funny thing - last year a professor (UCLA?) used standard statistical measures on various news outlets to measure overall bias. I don't recall the details of the methodology, but it is one that has been used for a long time for this sort of thing. He found that most of the mainstream news media were far to the left (over 70%), and Fox News was only slightly to the left (IIRC 52%, within experimental error).
It's also worth noting that in DC something over 90% of all news professionals are registered to left or extreme left parties - IIRC last survey showed over 12/13. Among the reporters and editors the ratio is more extreme. I just read a quote from the editor or publisher or something at NY Times, who said (as I recall) that everyone in the news room and editorial staff is so far left that they don't even know how to cover a story from any other angle.
If you are a college grad, realize that at most colleges over 95% of instructors are left or far left - so your education started out from a very left perspective. Chances are, based on the available inputs to most of us, your idea of 'center' is probably somewhere to the left of where it really is. Of course I don't know you, I'm generalizing.
IMHO any news organization that presumes to be nonpartisan should have approximately equal numbers of personnel of all common persuasions. AFAIK the only 'mainstream' news TV outlet with _any_ regular non-leftist onscreen personalities is Fox - I don't have cable and rarely see TV, so I could be mistaken on that by now. (plus also maybe Bloomberg and some other financial channels?) I think the experience of Juan Williams (is he still on Fox?) is a useful example.
NPC means it's a character which doesn't take up any room in the basement, and is more productive.
+1 Funny! :D
Yes, no true nerd *under the age of 30* would admit to not being obsessed with WoW.
There, FTFY.
Young whippersnappers. I used to play Adventure when it was one great huge FORTRAN loop with gotos between rooms. And Startrek when it involved printing out the short range and long range scans on the paper in your DECwriter - at 300 BPS. I got bored with games (prefer writing to playing) long before WoW. Last game I wrote (actually modified) was converting Asteroids to four dimensions on with planets and gravity. I recently found the printout I saved of the original source (in Tek 4052 BASIC). I'm thinking of rewriting it in PHP, just to see if I can. ;) Then maybe Erlang ...
... would have figured that much out from the context of the article
Someone on /. read TFA? You must be joking.
Funny thing, what you describe (along with the original article) are perfectly metaphorical of the present situation. Security theater such as you describe - removing weapons etc., of course, are affecting tools-within-the-game, and so will have zero effect on the problem but will inconvenience everyone to the point where some will quit the game. Meanwhile the true cause is not identified, leaving the whole game susceptible. I'm not a WoW player (never been there) but I would hope that the powers that be in WoW are working hard to figure out how they got hacked. I also hope that the WoW servers can revert to a backup.
(I know, that's just what you said more amusingly, but I had to put my 2c in)
... Yeah! Six digits FTW!! ... uh, where's my coffee? I left it around here somewhere.
So the real value would seem to be found in upping the time, hardware, and interest requirements.
That's pretty much the same as a description of bank vault locks (from the late 1800s?) - all any lock does is increase the cost, time and complexity to break into a safe. "The more things change, the more they remain the same." :)
From some of my earlier reading, one of the big advantages is the elimination of a huge, expensive and unreliable supply chain to provide explosive ammunition and missiles to the ships, and elimination of the biggest threat to military ships, the penetration and explosion of the ammunition in the ship. With rail guns you have only to supply electrical power (typically from nuclear reactors that are already big enough to supply the juice), and inert metal projecticles. The projectiles are much cheaper than cannon rounds and much, much cheaper than Tomahawks ($600,000 each). There are various other advantages and disadvantages for each weapon, but manufacturing, assembling the explosives and other components of 1000 1/2 ton cannon shells, and delivering them to a carrier or destroyer at a top secret location in the middle of an ocean in unpredictable weather can't be easy. With railguns and nuclear power a surface ship is good to go as long as the food and the tungsten pellets (inert, safe-until-fired ammunition) last.
If you send a ton of pointy object at those speeds, the 1/2 mv^2 of that object is large relative to air resistance. Also, they presently do have bullets for large caliber weapons that can change direction during flight. Not as much as a missile, but significantly.
From the vids I've seen, they're not silent and not invisible. There's quite a bit of smoke and even flame (I'm guessing oxidation of the molten top layer of the railgun?), and a loud bang - that may be the sonic boom. See Youtube.
Someone else on here noted that railguns work better for large projectiles, and less well for small (handheld-size) weapons. I don't know, I only lurk here.