When a deputy CIO of the Dept. of Labor and than Homeland Security Department has bogus degrees and has never been officially questioned about her educational experience (or lack thereof) for years, its not hard to see how gov't IT could be atrociously run.
From other articles about her, she was notorious in promoting her cronies, many of whom were also incompetent while passing over for promotion and bonuses those who knew what they were doing. Apparently Laura Callahan had a reputation for going ballistic when the occasional techie caught on to her and questioned some of her decisions. In hindsight, its rather obvious why she was so insecure.
Interestingly, she was also an IT supervisor at the White House during the Clinton years and she actually threatened people under her with jail time if they said anything about that coding error that resulted in those 100K emails subpoenaed for the Lewinski fiasco. It's amazing how such fools can not only fail to execute their job duties properly, but also actually achieve higher positions at the same time! Ah, the wonders of large, inscrutable government bureaucracy.
Judging by some of the PhD's I've met, though, it very well COULD be difficult to tell the difference between "pompous jackass covering for a lack of education" and "pompous jackass who thinks they know everything, despite the narrow focus of their PhD".
But what ever happened to ATC? Are they still using battleship CRT monitors driven by creaking mainframes? Did they come up with something that works using newer technology?
As I recall, they threw that $3B loser of a system out the window and shifted to a more modular approach. Now, instead of trying to develop a huge monster system that will be all things to all people, they're upgrading the bits and pieces one by one. One I remember hearing about was a modern controller terminal that could emulate the old mainframe-driven vector scanned terminal, but was also designed to accept input from a newer traffic control server when it became available.
OK, I just noticed THIS sentence, which I missed before:
Did ya hear when Bill Gates recently named BellSouth as one of the companies lined up with MS in a strategic partnership for delivering content to MS based media centers?
Didya also hear that Verizon, SBC, and Comcast are ALSO part of the same strategic partnership? Honestly, I don't understand your rabid cheerleading for (at best) a third-rank telecom.
Ha! It's been Ma BellSouth for years. BellSouth just bought up AT&T's wireless services, and most everything of value left in AT&T, SBC is getting their land lines and that's it. SBC has bought all of that old fangled technology, and BellSouth bought all of AT&T's investments in the future.
WTF are you talking about? Cingular bought AT&T Wireless. BellSouth has a 40% share in Cingular, while SBC has 60%. Cingular is a joint venture between the two, with SBC holding a controlling interest. What is happening now is that SBC is buying what's left of AT&T for itself.
SBC is the second of the baby bells. BellSouth is number 1.
SBC's market cap is $78.31B, while BellSouth's is $49.29B. I'm not sure by what twisted metric you consider BellSouth to be "number 1".
The idea was that the satellite could come to you.
The shuttle doesn't have a single orbital profile. They'd need a large number of capsules, each with a fairly large amount of reserve fuel in order to guarantee that one of them would be able to match orbits. "In orbit" isn't a single place like "at Disneyworld"-- it's simply a state of free fall around a mass wherein speed, altitude, and direction of travel can vary greatly.
Fucking wankers on 9/11 used boxcutters (no evidence to that actually but that's a different rant). Now whenever I go to the airport, even my fingernail clippers are suspect. WHAT IS TSA THINKING?
I think this one analogy is out of place here. The only reason something as stupid as a box cutter was effective on 9/11 was that, for all 30-odd years of hijacking history, hijackings were without excecption committed by people intent on using the living passengers as bargaining chips. People knew that the odds were that they'd survive, as at worst hijackers killed perhaps two or three passengers, tops, and then usually only when they're off-duty US marines or something. 9/11 has now forever altered that now the precedent has been set that everyone dies, hijackers included. Now, faced with six men armed with tiny razor blades, what rational person isn't going to jump up and attempt to beat the living crap out of them, rather than sit down and wait to die? Heck just take a look at flight 93. Mere minutes after the passengers heard about the other planes hitting buildings, they managed to grasp the new paradigm and start fighting back.
The TSA confiscating such marginal weapons as nail clippers, keychain pocketknives, and yes, even box cutters really is asinine: there is no way such weapons will ever be adequate to hijack a plane again.
Keeping with the aviation parallels, Lindbergh would probably not have been allowed to take off today - single engine, no radio, no forward visibility and so on - and yet he is (rightly) credited with pulling off an amazing feat*, rather than "doing something foolhardy and dangerous"
* being picky, the amazing part was landing at his chosen destination (Paris), rather than flying non-stop across the Atlantic, as that had already been done
Actually, to be completely accurate, Lindbergh is famous for winning the Orteig Prize, which was specifically:
In 1919 Raymond Orteig offered a prize of $25,000 for the first nonstop aircraft flight between New York and Paris.
People often mischaracterize Lindbergh's flight as merely being "non-stop across the atlantic". NY to Paris is actually nearly twice as far (3609 miles) as Alcock & Brown's Newfoundland to Ireland flight (1890 miles). Though from the sound of it, Alcock & Brown had a MUCH harder time of it in that old open Vickers bomber!
I would agree completely. Blackjack was the first game I ever wrote. I did it on the TI-82 graphing calculator during my HS Chemistry class. It sucked, but I was learned the basics about programming and how difficult it really can be. Especially putting in the cheat codes so my lab partner would always be at a statistical disadvantage.:)
You know, I think blackjack must be the most common "first game" there is. The first game I ever wrote was a text-based blackjack in BASIC on some weird NCSS mainframe (accessed using a 15" dot-matrix print-terminal via 300baud acoustic coupler). My father's first game was blackjack written in binary "toggled in" via switches on the front of his home-built Heathkit(?) Z80(?) machine. Even the piece of software at issue in the saga of Mel, a Real Programmer was a blackjack program. Makes sense, though. The game really does lend itself to computer implementation with its simple hard rules for the dealer/AI.
umm.. it's 2005 now. 2005-1997 = 8 years, which is indeed the better part of a decade.
No shit, dumbass, but the OP claimed the OS supported right click, not context menus, for the better part of a decade. Native OS context menus (ctrl-click), 1997. Native OS support for right-click (not 3rd party mouse drivers configurable to send ctrl-click events), 2001. 2001-2005 = 4 years-- not the better part of a decade by ANY definition. Sure, maybe he meant "context menus", but that's not what he said. His statement was in error, and I corrected it.
Have you ever seen the pointer code a three year old child writes? There's some things that they're just not responsible enough to use until they're older.
You said it. My idiot 3 year old nephew keeps re-implementing vectors no matter how many times I tell him to just use the template from the STL.
I see, so then how do you explain all of those adults that cant seem to figure out right and left clicking?
Personally, I think much of the neophyte confusion between left and right clicking comes from the fact that they do both with their right hand. People are accustomed to dealing with left and right in terms of their bodies and their brains totally misfire trying to properly interpret "right click" when "left click" means "press the button of the device under your RIGHT hand". It might have been more logical to use the names of the fingers that press the buttons-- but that would have rendered the RIGHT button the MIDDLE button, thus creating an even bigger confusion. I think they should have named them "one" and "two", or A and B, or even "select" and "whatever"; anything other than Left and Right.
Never seen a font license that was any less than per machine since, with the exception of home machines (the users of which seldom BUY fonts), nearly every single machine out there has one user. You relly think any font seller is going to create a new license level that costs less and encompasses 99% of their current paying clientelle?
Except for one little thing: third party software houses already take 2 button mice as a given. Even Apple's own software does. There's some stuff in OS X that makes it oh so much easier to right click (oh wait, ctrl click). And Final Cut Pro is just a nightmare with one button.
Heh. OK, so we have two possible scenarios: 1) Apple is too stubborn to admit they made a mistake with the 1-button mouse; or 2) apple is too stubborn to stray from their definition of "standard", despite the fact that it generally goes unheeded. I must admit that your thery sounds more likely, as it fits with the Apple marketting notion that the Mac is a computer "for the rest of [them]"*.
* You know, the kind of people smugly say they bought a Mac because they "don't like computers", as if that's some sort of badge of prestige.
How is this Apple's fault, when the OS has natively supported two button mice for the better part of a decade?
Ehhhh....I think "the better part of a decade" is a bit of a stretch. ctrl-click context menus came out on the Mac with OS8, as I recall, (mid-'97?), but they didn't get around to native OS support for multi-button mice till OS X in 2001. Prior to OS X, you essentially had to set your mouse driver to generate a ctrl-click on a right-click event to get the OS to pop the menu.
How many major Photoshop releases have there been in this time?
Not really relevant. So long as Apple continues to ship Macs with a single-button mouse, all third party apps have to treat that as "standard". Though I do have to lay a lot of blame at the feet of Adobe for not being more attentive now to ctrl-click functionality, they do deserve a small slap upside the head for "over-dumbing" the interface in the early days. I knew many professional computer artists ten-plus years ago who constantly cursed Apple for not adopting some of the functionality found on SGI machines of the day.
And, heaven forbid I have to deal with a southpaw idiot who has a 5 button mouse... We are pretty good about who gets the 5 button mice, but somethimes an idiots mouse breaks, and the 5 buttons are all we have to replace them with!
When I say "right click" I mean the button that is left of center, but not the far left on the side, okay?
Heh. That's when it's time to whip that black Sharpie out of your pocket protector and (just like you do with 4-year-old's shoes) put a big 'R' on the Right-Click button, and a big 'L' on the Left-Click button. I've never seen anyone using such a mouse, but I found one marked R and L in the garbage at work once.
Note that they don't even 'market' their innovative one-button mouse anymore. They know it's stupid. They know people hate it. They're just too stubborn to go back and say "oops, we made a mistake".
I suspect they have an even WORSE reason for shipping a 1-button mouse as standard. In an effort to enforce some odd ideal of "simplicity", the maintain 1-button as "standard" so third party software houses don't start taking 2 buttons as given, thus confounding "The Rest of Us"* who have all they can handle with the stock 1-button mouse already.
* you know, the kind that say "I don't like computers so I bought a Mac"
Yes! And what about all those function keys on the keyboard? F1? Do I press F and then 1? And Alt? What the heck does that do? Two Alt buttons!?!? And why do we need both backspace and delete; they just confuse everyone!! I think Apple should be shipping a one-button keyboard!!
This reminds me of the Dilbert cartoon where a salesman is trying to sell him the most user-friendly computer ever:
Vendor: It only has one button, and we press it before it leaves the factory
Dilbert: What does that button do?
Vendor: Whoa! I'm in way over my head! Let me give you our tech support number.
I'm probably going to get modded into oblivion for saying this.... But why don't people just not read dupes? I mean, it's not really hurting you that it's there...and some of us didn't see the first one, but see the second one. It just doesn't seem worth complaining over.
Part of outrage is that it makes it clear that the editors don't bother to read the very "new accumulator" the work on. I sometimes miss a day or two worth of articles, but it's not my job-- they're paid to be editors. They're the only ones who absolutely should be reading slashdot at work every day, and apparently they're not even doing that.
I think that one is a generalization: oh you can buy some LSD near the tracks...at night. but providing a dealer's name, address, and cell phone would be different.
I'm curious under what statute you think someone can be prosecuted under for announcing the name, address, and phone of a drug dealer. Even if such a statute were to exist, it would rely heavily upon demonstrated intent. It would not, for example, immediately render someone an "accomplice", or make them guilty of some byzantine interpretation of "aiding and abetting", if they walked into a public place and said "Joe Smith at 123 Main is a filthy drug pusher! call him at 555-1212 and tell him what we good people think of that!" Because there are so many possible intentions behind the passing of such information, there cannot be a law declaring all such utterances illegal. As I've stated elsewhere, feel free to debate how this might show intent, but quit trying to argue the ridiculous notion that there is some level of detail beyond which such speech is always a violation of law.
That's true: but first are you a newspaper reporter?
Not relevant, unless you're trying to show intent
Second, providing a generalization (in this neighborhood or "almost any building on this block" )would be okay, but if you provide the exact name and address with cell phone number of a gun runner or pimp or even music/dvd pirate then I think that would prove your intent to aid in the criminal activity
Actually, that would prove no such thing. All it would prove is that I knew where it was happening.
We can surmise intent with your actions, words, intended audience, and the degree of accuracy or self-censorship offered.
Oh, I see, so this all goes towards intent, which is what really matters. Please read my post again, paying particular attention to the end where I say
"Now, if you want to argue that
intent determines culpability, go right ahead; but having to prove intent is a far cry from the automatic guilt from merely presenting information you claim."
In other words, you are not supporting the original assertion that "statement of where to get [guns|drugs|etc]" == Automatic Guilt; rather you are inexplicably countering with the very argument I stated was perfectly reasonable. Honestly, I thought I made it fairly clear.
But Lucas has been using very stupid names since before Star Wars (episode 4, whatever). His original pitch described the film as:
"the story of Mace Windu, a revered Jedi-bendu of Ophuchi who was related to Usby C.J. Thape, a padawaan leader to the famed Jedi"...
My god, all that's missing is for Nanki-Poo to show up and sing with Pish-Tush and Pooh-Bah.
I assume you meant "kernel," but no: my intent was to provide the homophone "colonel" since it is a military rank and the accepted pronunciations of the two words are pretty much identical.
Just as telling someone where to buy drugs, illigal firewarms, slaves etc will get you in trouble
If I were a writer for a great metropolitan newspaper, I might write an article about lax law enforcement in downtown Metropolis. "Yes", I'd say, "it is indeed possible to walk into just about any basement on 53rd street between Ave F and Ave J, and purchase crack, stolen guns, and even the occasional child prostitute." Would this "get [me] in trouble", as you claim? Not a chance. The premise upon which your entire argument is based is false. Now, if you want to argue that intent determines culpability, go right ahead; but having to prove intent is a far cry from the automatic guilt from merely presenting information you claim.
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Interestingly, she was also an IT supervisor at the White House during the Clinton years and she actually threatened people under her with jail time if they said anything about that coding error that resulted in those 100K emails subpoenaed for the Lewinski fiasco. It's amazing how such fools can not only fail to execute their job duties properly, but also actually achieve higher positions at the same time! Ah, the wonders of large, inscrutable government bureaucracy.
Judging by some of the PhD's I've met, though, it very well COULD be difficult to tell the difference between "pompous jackass covering for a lack of education" and "pompous jackass who thinks they know everything, despite the narrow focus of their PhD".
As I recall, they threw that $3B loser of a system out the window and shifted to a more modular approach. Now, instead of trying to develop a huge monster system that will be all things to all people, they're upgrading the bits and pieces one by one. One I remember hearing about was a modern controller terminal that could emulate the old mainframe-driven vector scanned terminal, but was also designed to accept input from a newer traffic control server when it became available.
Did ya hear when Bill Gates recently named BellSouth as one of the companies lined up with MS in a strategic partnership for delivering content to MS based media centers?
Didya also hear that Verizon, SBC, and Comcast are ALSO part of the same strategic partnership? Honestly, I don't understand your rabid cheerleading for (at best) a third-rank telecom.
WTF are you talking about? Cingular bought AT&T Wireless. BellSouth has a 40% share in Cingular, while SBC has 60%. Cingular is a joint venture between the two, with SBC holding a controlling interest. What is happening now is that SBC is buying what's left of AT&T for itself.
SBC is the second of the baby bells. BellSouth is number 1.
SBC's market cap is $78.31B, while BellSouth's is $49.29B. I'm not sure by what twisted metric you consider BellSouth to be "number 1".
The shuttle doesn't have a single orbital profile. They'd need a large number of capsules, each with a fairly large amount of reserve fuel in order to guarantee that one of them would be able to match orbits. "In orbit" isn't a single place like "at Disneyworld"-- it's simply a state of free fall around a mass wherein speed, altitude, and direction of travel can vary greatly.
I think this one analogy is out of place here. The only reason something as stupid as a box cutter was effective on 9/11 was that, for all 30-odd years of hijacking history, hijackings were without excecption committed by people intent on using the living passengers as bargaining chips. People knew that the odds were that they'd survive, as at worst hijackers killed perhaps two or three passengers, tops, and then usually only when they're off-duty US marines or something. 9/11 has now forever altered that now the precedent has been set that everyone dies, hijackers included. Now, faced with six men armed with tiny razor blades, what rational person isn't going to jump up and attempt to beat the living crap out of them, rather than sit down and wait to die? Heck just take a look at flight 93. Mere minutes after the passengers heard about the other planes hitting buildings, they managed to grasp the new paradigm and start fighting back.
The TSA confiscating such marginal weapons as nail clippers, keychain pocketknives, and yes, even box cutters really is asinine: there is no way such weapons will ever be adequate to hijack a plane again.
Totally with you on all the others, though.
* being picky, the amazing part was landing at his chosen destination (Paris), rather than flying non-stop across the Atlantic, as that had already been done
Actually, to be completely accurate, Lindbergh is famous for winning the Orteig Prize, which was specifically:
People often mischaracterize Lindbergh's flight as merely being "non-stop across the atlantic". NY to Paris is actually nearly twice as far (3609 miles) as Alcock & Brown's Newfoundland to Ireland flight (1890 miles). Though from the sound of it, Alcock & Brown had a MUCH harder time of it in that old open Vickers bomber!Like most kids nowadays, he probably thinks he knows better!
You know, I think blackjack must be the most common "first game" there is. The first game I ever wrote was a text-based blackjack in BASIC on some weird NCSS mainframe (accessed using a 15" dot-matrix print-terminal via 300baud acoustic coupler). My father's first game was blackjack written in binary "toggled in" via switches on the front of his home-built Heathkit(?) Z80(?) machine. Even the piece of software at issue in the saga of Mel, a Real Programmer was a blackjack program. Makes sense, though. The game really does lend itself to computer implementation with its simple hard rules for the dealer/AI.
No shit, dumbass, but the OP claimed the OS supported right click, not context menus, for the better part of a decade. Native OS context menus (ctrl-click), 1997. Native OS support for right-click (not 3rd party mouse drivers configurable to send ctrl-click events), 2001. 2001-2005 = 4 years-- not the better part of a decade by ANY definition. Sure, maybe he meant "context menus", but that's not what he said. His statement was in error, and I corrected it.
That's not a link, that's a URL. this is a link.
You said it. My idiot 3 year old nephew keeps re-implementing vectors no matter how many times I tell him to just use the template from the STL.
Personally, I think much of the neophyte confusion between left and right clicking comes from the fact that they do both with their right hand. People are accustomed to dealing with left and right in terms of their bodies and their brains totally misfire trying to properly interpret "right click" when "left click" means "press the button of the device under your RIGHT hand". It might have been more logical to use the names of the fingers that press the buttons-- but that would have rendered the RIGHT button the MIDDLE button, thus creating an even bigger confusion. I think they should have named them "one" and "two", or A and B, or even "select" and "whatever"; anything other than Left and Right.
Never seen a font license that was any less than per machine since, with the exception of home machines (the users of which seldom BUY fonts), nearly every single machine out there has one user. You relly think any font seller is going to create a new license level that costs less and encompasses 99% of their current paying clientelle?
Heh. OK, so we have two possible scenarios: 1) Apple is too stubborn to admit they made a mistake with the 1-button mouse; or 2) apple is too stubborn to stray from their definition of "standard", despite the fact that it generally goes unheeded. I must admit that your thery sounds more likely, as it fits with the Apple marketting notion that the Mac is a computer "for the rest of [them]"*.
* You know, the kind of people smugly say they bought a Mac because they "don't like computers", as if that's some sort of badge of prestige.
Ehhhh....I think "the better part of a decade" is a bit of a stretch. ctrl-click context menus came out on the Mac with OS8, as I recall, (mid-'97?), but they didn't get around to native OS support for multi-button mice till OS X in 2001. Prior to OS X, you essentially had to set your mouse driver to generate a ctrl-click on a right-click event to get the OS to pop the menu.
How many major Photoshop releases have there been in this time?
Not really relevant. So long as Apple continues to ship Macs with a single-button mouse, all third party apps have to treat that as "standard". Though I do have to lay a lot of blame at the feet of Adobe for not being more attentive now to ctrl-click functionality, they do deserve a small slap upside the head for "over-dumbing" the interface in the early days. I knew many professional computer artists ten-plus years ago who constantly cursed Apple for not adopting some of the functionality found on SGI machines of the day.
Heh. That's when it's time to whip that black Sharpie out of your pocket protector and (just like you do with 4-year-old's shoes) put a big 'R' on the Right-Click button, and a big 'L' on the Left-Click button. I've never seen anyone using such a mouse, but I found one marked R and L in the garbage at work once.
I suspect they have an even WORSE reason for shipping a 1-button mouse as standard. In an effort to enforce some odd ideal of "simplicity", the maintain 1-button as "standard" so third party software houses don't start taking 2 buttons as given, thus confounding "The Rest of Us"* who have all they can handle with the stock 1-button mouse already.
* you know, the kind that say "I don't like computers so I bought a Mac"
This reminds me of the Dilbert cartoon where a salesman is trying to sell him the most user-friendly computer ever:
Vendor: It only has one button, and we press it before it leaves the factory
Dilbert: What does that button do?
Vendor: Whoa! I'm in way over my head! Let me give you our tech support number.
Part of outrage is that it makes it clear that the editors don't bother to read the very "new accumulator" the work on. I sometimes miss a day or two worth of articles, but it's not my job-- they're paid to be editors. They're the only ones who absolutely should be reading slashdot at work every day, and apparently they're not even doing that.
I'm curious under what statute you think someone can be prosecuted under for announcing the name, address, and phone of a drug dealer. Even if such a statute were to exist, it would rely heavily upon demonstrated intent. It would not, for example, immediately render someone an "accomplice", or make them guilty of some byzantine interpretation of "aiding and abetting", if they walked into a public place and said "Joe Smith at 123 Main is a filthy drug pusher! call him at 555-1212 and tell him what we good people think of that!" Because there are so many possible intentions behind the passing of such information, there cannot be a law declaring all such utterances illegal. As I've stated elsewhere, feel free to debate how this might show intent, but quit trying to argue the ridiculous notion that there is some level of detail beyond which such speech is always a violation of law.
Not relevant, unless you're trying to show intent
Second, providing a generalization (in this neighborhood or "almost any building on this block" )would be okay, but if you provide the exact name and address with cell phone number of a gun runner or pimp or even music/dvd pirate then I think that would prove your intent to aid in the criminal activity
Actually, that would prove no such thing. All it would prove is that I knew where it was happening.
We can surmise intent with your actions, words, intended audience, and the degree of accuracy or self-censorship offered.
Oh, I see, so this all goes towards intent, which is what really matters. Please read my post again, paying particular attention to the end where I say
In other words, you are not supporting the original assertion that "statement of where to get [guns|drugs|etc]" == Automatic Guilt; rather you are inexplicably countering with the very argument I stated was perfectly reasonable. Honestly, I thought I made it fairly clear.
My god, all that's missing is for Nanki-Poo to show up and sing with Pish-Tush and Pooh-Bah.
Thank you, Captain Obvious!
If I were a writer for a great metropolitan newspaper, I might write an article about lax law enforcement in downtown Metropolis. "Yes", I'd say, "it is indeed possible to walk into just about any basement on 53rd street between Ave F and Ave J, and purchase crack, stolen guns, and even the occasional child prostitute." Would this "get [me] in trouble", as you claim? Not a chance. The premise upon which your entire argument is based is false. Now, if you want to argue that intent determines culpability, go right ahead; but having to prove intent is a far cry from the automatic guilt from merely presenting information you claim.