Just like the $300 coffee pot was for a C-130 full of troops
Couldnt they have, like, used flasks ?
Actually, it was part of a $20,000 hot coffee/tea/soup dispensing system built into the planes used by the Rapid Deployment Force. When you need to send the RDF somewhere, there really isn't time for people to go find a thermos make a pot of coffee. Besides, when they wake you up in the middle of the night and say "get your gear and form up"*, you have no way of knowing if it's just a drill or if it's the real thing. Do you carry around thermos of hot coffee all day and sleep with one under your pillow all niught, just in case?
* happened to me in December 1989. Woke us up at 2am and said "get your shit ready". Four hours later we were flying to Panama.
Nothing you can physically do will stop the PIO - OTHER than just releasing the controls and letting everything stop naturally - because it's the inputs that drive the oscillation. And you can bet that's quite frightening for a control-freak pilot who's afraid he's about to lose control. Takes a LOT of training in how to recognize it for what it is; stopping it is easy (if you have time or altitude) - just let go.
I remember an Air Force F-15 pilot telling my father a couple stories about training fighter pilots in some Islamic Persian Gulf state (dunno - I was only 8 years old then). He said the students had an alarming habit of reacting to control difficulties during training flights by letting go of the stick, throwing their arms in the air and shouting "Allahu Akbar". This reaction worked when the trouble was PIO, but he frequently had to take control because the students would simply let go and trust Allah to fly the plane out of trouble for them! One time, shortly before returning to the US, the training aircraft suffered some sort of serious failure and the student pilot shouted "Allahu Akbar" repeatedly as the plane spun out of control. He (the instructor) yelled at him to eject, but he just kept saying "Allahu Akbar". So the instructor ejected and landed without serious injury, while the student rode the plane all the way into the ground.
Nextel will return some of their bandwidth to the public domain
I don't think this part of the spectrum is in the "public domain" as if anyone can use it. More accurately, it's been returned to the highly regulated, unaassigned pool of the spectrum.
Heh. Yeah, it's "public" in the sense of "we're hoarding it and selling it off to the highest bidder, but we're doing it FOR YOUR OWN GOOD!"
Six years of uptime is pretty impressive for a computer. But it's even more impressive for the facility. Seriously -- what kind of UPS and equipment redundancy would you need to get that kind of uptime?
Dunno about that particular facility, but Hughes Aircraft Company (since swallowed by the abominable Raytheon) had a facility built in the 60's that used multiple diesel generators for long term outages and a mechanically coupled flywheel electrical feed for their critical computer systems. From how my father described it, it was a large electric motor attached to a generator with a 6-foot diameter reinforced concrete flywheel between them. The kinetic energy stored in the flywheel easily maintained consistenet power during brownouts, and gave four or five minutes of power if the power went out completely-- enough time for the diesel generators to start. One of the engineers my father worked with called it "inertial backup power".
People like you are called "sociopaths" and generally end up in jail or on court mandated drugs.
"generally"? You really think that most sociopaths get "caught"? Only the extreme ones do, really. Most of them are so good at what they do that they live their entire lives without serving any jail time or being medicated into submission. They just sell cars, manage software development, defend clients in court, or hold political office...
"The country is not run on principle it is run on pragmatism, and that is the way it should be."
Oh, that's a nice line.
I'll remember that the next time I decide to rob a bank.
"It's just not efficient for all that money to be sitting around in a drawer all day when it could be out in the economy circulating around. Now fill this bag or I'll kill every damn one of you!"
Ethics, unlike laws, are not enshrined in statute books. Everyone has their own set.
But by all means, if this is actually how you feel, please leave your front door open so that I may help myself to whatever is in your fridge... Please ve sure to by some cheap beer for me.
Sure, but being unethical doesn't mean I have to tolerate unethical behavior in others. Help yourself to my poisoned cheap beer...
If you do not feel that you have to abide by "societies" ethics, go live in the hills.
I feel no ethical compulsion to separate myself from society simply because I behave unethically. If society wants me in the hills, it'll have to drag me there itself!
Disregarding the fact that, before computers, we did that very thing, and disregarding the total lack of evidentiary or other support offered with your statement, I should like to know why we cannot just manually count slips of paper.
It is by now well known that Union County, which used paper ballots, had a reasonably correct vote count by midnight. The system does in fact scale. In Volusia County, we had many times the number of votes, but also many times the number of precincts.
Union County population: 13,877 (census bureau 2002 estimate)
Volusia County population: 459,435
Los Angeles County population: 9,806,577
A system of sort, hand count, sort, hand count, etc. does not scale to very large counties, particularly in large, populous states.
Union had several choices on single ballot forms. Voters would indicate presidential, congressional, and local choices. Also, I think, there were a couple of constitutional amendments. Oh, the complexity!
Sounds like you have a very short and simple ballot there. Here in CA we frequently have a couple dozen or more votes to cast in a single November election. And 500 votes per precinct? L.A. County precincts get that in primaries.
So you have 500 votes on ten or so issues and you finish by midnight. We have 600-800 votes on 20+ issues. It doesn't scale unless you also scale the staff, which isn't going to happen.
P.S. BTW 'Hollywood' stop showing me Mountain Dew and Los Angeles Times and or whatever commercials before the movie starts
No shit, man. I swear, if I have to watch those dumbass CGI guys fail to make a realistic 3D beagle in that one LA Times commercial again, I'm gonna puke. I've even started to tell them, when their damned telemarketers call me at work (once a month, usually), that I'll subscribe to their stupid paper as soon as they stop those stupid 6-month-long runs of the same inane movie theater ad. The telemarketers generally don't have an answer to that one.
Easy. Don't vote for all of them at once. Vote for federal stuff in the federal election, provincial stuff in the provincial election and municipal stuff in the municipal election
That's essentially the same as a single combined election since it still doesn't reduce the ballots to single question each by which they can be sorted into individually counted "piles", which was the advantage to the Canadian system the original poster cited.
In Civic elections (for non-warded cities) we vote for the Mayor, one vote for each seat on council, on vote for each seat on the school board, and one vote for each seat for the regional district for our area.
The last civic election for Nanaimo, we used an electronic tallying machine, which read your vote off of a card marked with a pencil, then put the card in a box where it could be hand counted later if required.
That's essentially the same system used by most of the United States.
If the code is sufficiently short, it is possible to bypass the rolling code system by simply trying all possible codes. Also, many houses (including mine) have 80s vintage systems, which are usually designed with something like a fixed 6-bit code. Very easy to hack.
I built a device that uses a timer chip and a bunch of chained flip-flops in place of the DIP switches in one of those universal garage door openers. I can open most Linear 8 and Genie 9 switch types in under two minutes, Multi-Code 10 switch in about five minutes, and old Genie 12 switchers in fifteen or so. No good against code-hoppers or the Genie Intellicode learning openers, but those remain fairly rare in commercial applications (I work for a locksmith who does mostly commercial/industrial work). It's a fun device because it looks like something a mad scientist would build. It's in a gray metal box with a fairly large (10") whip antenna on top and when you press the "search" button a row of 12 LEDs light up in binary sequence as it scans (so you know about where the code was found).
Of course, picking a typical deadbolt lock is also very easy and takes less than a minute, so it's unlikely a thief would bother trying to open the garage door.
This is true. Those cheap locks (cough)Kwikset/USLock/etc(/cough) are a joke. Then again, people are bizarrely worried about burglars picking locks. Picking locks is something you do when you don't want anyone to know you got in. Burglars are perfectly happy to knock out a window with a brick. So unless you have a problem with CIA spies or private investigators or stalkers or ninjas, you don't need to concern yourself so much with "pickability".
After the polls close, people at each polling station manually count the collected paper slips. These small numbers are then sent to a central point, summed, and the winner is determined.
We cast votes for many things on a single ballot. We can't just manually count slips of paper.
I googled for a sample Canadian ballot, but I could not find one. How many items do you typically vote on? In the US, a ballot is frequently (but not always) several pages long with national, state, and local issues. Are Canadian ballots similar?
Sounds to me like Canadians go in and vote for one thing: their parliamentary representative. Otherwise, separating the ballots into "piles" which are then counted wouldn't really be possible. Like you say, this method is totally unsuitable for the US, where one can end up voting for (in one november election on a single multi-page ballot) President, a senator, a house representative, state governor, lieutenant governor, a state senator, state assemblyman, state treasurer, member of the county board of supervisors, county sheriff, mayor, city councilman, a bunch of judges, bond measures at state/county/city levels, and a whole raft of propositions. I'd like to see one o' them smug Canadians deal with that kind of mess by having "people at each polling station manually count the collected paper slips" (see here for explaination of canadian system)
The bank insists "that customers report to a branch with documents to prove their identities".
The article does not explain under what circumstances the bank requires this, perhaps to open an account.
Well, let's analyze it just based on the words used. People who haven't opened an account yet aren't "customers" of the bank until they've opened an account, and demanding that new account applicants provide ID is hardly something that'd qualify for a "most invasive company" award. To judge by the wording, it sounds as if Lloyds TSB sent letters to all its customers demanding that they show up in person to a bank branch and produce ID. This is pretty obnoxious behavior.
You're welcome. Few things are more annoying than seeing a perfectly rational post sunk to "-1, Troll" (while hysterical rants get modded "+5, Insightful") because of typical/. groupthink.
Michael Moore is a "documentarian" in the same sense that Leni Riefenstahl was a "documentarian", and Fahrenheit 9/11 is a documentary in the same sense that Triumph of the Will was a documentary. (Both movies also won prominent French awards... coincidence?) Fahrenheit 9/11 makes Fox News seem like a bastion of journalistic integrity by comparison.
Michael Moore's arguments lack a logical flow or any direction whatsoever. He seems to just string together a sequence of often unrelated anti-Bush/Iraq War arguments (which have the depth of talking points) hoping to rile up his already anti-Bush/Iraq War audience.
Moore builds his whole argument upon omissions, discarding any and all facts which are not in accordance with his world view. The claim that there are no factual inaccuracies in the movie is partly true; however, this is no great feat, as the movie is filled with omissions, innuendos, and logical fallacies (post hoc ergo propter hoc, etc). For example, I could very easily convince someone with no knowledge of 20th century European History that Hitler was a great guy, simply through omissions and without making one factually inaccurate statement i.e. Hitler was a great connoisseur of art; his love of art lead to him amassing a great art collection, spanning art from all over Europe. Hitler also implemented economic policies which restored Germany's shattered economy and made Germany into one of the most powerful economic powers of its time. He was much loved by his people, and took great pride in his heritage, etc, etc, etc. I'm sure my point has become evident, and I no longer need to pursue this perverted example.
Moore is well known for his editing prowess, and I have no reason to believe that he does not continue using his "skills" in Fahrenheit 9/11. There are several well known instances of Moore's editing in Bowling For Columbine i.e. Heston's tie changing colours, the clip of Heston's speech not being the one he gave right after Columbine, but rather a different one altogether (1st Google Result on Query), etc. I'm sure there are many other examples in both movies.
Moore makes several assertions in Fahrenheit 9/11 which not only make no logical sense, but also contradict with other statements he made in the movie. Moore mentions the well documented effort on Saddam's behalf to murder George H. W. Bush (probably intended as an argumentum ad hominem), then he refers to the sovereign nation of Iraq, which had never threatened or harmed a single American life. Ok, let's see, Moore himself admits that Saddam tried to kill H. W. Bush. Furthermore, Iraq invaded Kuwait, and constantly threatened Saudi Arabia and Israel. First of all, there are plenty of Americans in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Israel. Furthermore, plenty of American lives were lost in Desert Storm, which was clearly in response to a war of unilateral aggression on Saddam's behalf (then again, Moore may very well oppose Desert Storm, as well as England and France declaring war on Germany when they invaded Poland... who knows). After the end of Desert Storm, Americans remained in the region and constantly flew sorties to enforce the no-fly zones in the north and south of Iraq and make sure they minimized the number of Kurds and Shiites massacred by Saddam and his gang of (Sunni) thugs. Anyways, the Iraqis constantly attempted to shoot down the American planes that were merely enforcing the UN sanctioned No-fly Zones. (Seems like threatening American lives to me.)
Ok, moving on... Moore attempts to make it seem like there is no link between Saddam and international terrorism, where in reality Saddam offered USD $10000-20000 to the family members of Palestinian suicide bombers (what a great guy) (
So would you say the same if I listened in to your cellphone calls to your girlfriend ? Public airwaves and all...
If I listened in to conversations you had with your clients, and went on to have a little chat with them too, say...
Cellular communications aren't intended for public consumption. Troll elsewhere, please.
I filed for a patent on; "complaining about patents with reference to the respiratory system, or use of the respiratory system in the act of complaining about a patent or patents"
Yeah, and I'm going to patent the butthole so everyone has to pay me if they a) want to take a crap, or b) pull out another lame joke to post for the nth time on slashdot.
Please, can we let the stupid joke die already? It wasn't particularly funny the first time, and it doesn't get any funnier with repetition.
Slashdot Mirror
Scrolling support for Synaptics touchpads on laptops?
(this may have been addressed, but the version I downloaded last week was still broken)
Couldnt they have, like, used flasks ?
Actually, it was part of a $20,000 hot coffee/tea/soup dispensing system built into the planes used by the Rapid Deployment Force. When you need to send the RDF somewhere, there really isn't time for people to go find a thermos make a pot of coffee. Besides, when they wake you up in the middle of the night and say "get your gear and form up"*, you have no way of knowing if it's just a drill or if it's the real thing. Do you carry around thermos of hot coffee all day and sleep with one under your pillow all niught, just in case?
* happened to me in December 1989. Woke us up at 2am and said "get your shit ready". Four hours later we were flying to Panama.
I remember an Air Force F-15 pilot telling my father a couple stories about training fighter pilots in some Islamic Persian Gulf state (dunno - I was only 8 years old then). He said the students had an alarming habit of reacting to control difficulties during training flights by letting go of the stick, throwing their arms in the air and shouting "Allahu Akbar". This reaction worked when the trouble was PIO, but he frequently had to take control because the students would simply let go and trust Allah to fly the plane out of trouble for them! One time, shortly before returning to the US, the training aircraft suffered some sort of serious failure and the student pilot shouted "Allahu Akbar" repeatedly as the plane spun out of control. He (the instructor) yelled at him to eject, but he just kept saying "Allahu Akbar". So the instructor ejected and landed without serious injury, while the student rode the plane all the way into the ground.
I don't think this part of the spectrum is in the "public domain" as if anyone can use it. More accurately, it's been returned to the highly regulated, unaassigned pool of the spectrum.
Heh. Yeah, it's "public" in the sense of "we're hoarding it and selling it off to the highest bidder, but we're doing it FOR YOUR OWN GOOD!"
Dunno about that particular facility, but Hughes Aircraft Company (since swallowed by the abominable Raytheon) had a facility built in the 60's that used multiple diesel generators for long term outages and a mechanically coupled flywheel electrical feed for their critical computer systems. From how my father described it, it was a large electric motor attached to a generator with a 6-foot diameter reinforced concrete flywheel between them. The kinetic energy stored in the flywheel easily maintained consistenet power during brownouts, and gave four or five minutes of power if the power went out completely-- enough time for the diesel generators to start. One of the engineers my father worked with called it "inertial backup power".
"generally"? You really think that most sociopaths get "caught"? Only the extreme ones do, really. Most of them are so good at what they do that they live their entire lives without serving any jail time or being medicated into submission. They just sell cars, manage software development, defend clients in court, or hold political office...
Oh, that's a nice line.
I'll remember that the next time I decide to rob a bank.
"It's just not efficient for all that money to be sitting around in a drawer all day when it could be out in the economy circulating around. Now fill this bag or I'll kill every damn one of you!"
But by all means, if this is actually how you feel, please leave your front door open so that I may help myself to whatever is in your fridge... Please ve sure to by some cheap beer for me.
Sure, but being unethical doesn't mean I have to tolerate unethical behavior in others. Help yourself to my poisoned cheap beer...
I feel no ethical compulsion to separate myself from society simply because I behave unethically. If society wants me in the hills, it'll have to drag me there itself!
Incorrect. The property is the copyright itself. Duplication of a CDROM doesn't take away their copyright, nor does it diminish the original.
It is by now well known that Union County, which used paper ballots, had a reasonably correct vote count by midnight. The system does in fact scale. In Volusia County, we had many times the number of votes, but also many times the number of precincts.
Union County population: 13,877 (census bureau 2002 estimate)
Volusia County population: 459,435
Los Angeles County population: 9,806,577
A system of sort, hand count, sort, hand count, etc. does not scale to very large counties, particularly in large, populous states.
Union had several choices on single ballot forms. Voters would indicate presidential, congressional, and local choices. Also, I think, there were a couple of constitutional amendments. Oh, the complexity!
Sounds like you have a very short and simple ballot there. Here in CA we frequently have a couple dozen or more votes to cast in a single November election. And 500 votes per precinct? L.A. County precincts get that in primaries.
So you have 500 votes on ten or so issues and you finish by midnight. We have 600-800 votes on 20+ issues. It doesn't scale unless you also scale the staff, which isn't going to happen.
Also, we need to be able to sue the operator of the bus line.
No shit, man. I swear, if I have to watch those dumbass CGI guys fail to make a realistic 3D beagle in that one LA Times commercial again, I'm gonna puke. I've even started to tell them, when their damned telemarketers call me at work (once a month, usually), that I'll subscribe to their stupid paper as soon as they stop those stupid 6-month-long runs of the same inane movie theater ad. The telemarketers generally don't have an answer to that one.
That's essentially the same as a single combined election since it still doesn't reduce the ballots to single question each by which they can be sorted into individually counted "piles", which was the advantage to the Canadian system the original poster cited.
The last civic election for Nanaimo, we used an electronic tallying machine, which read your vote off of a card marked with a pencil, then put the card in a box where it could be hand counted later if required.
That's essentially the same system used by most of the United States.
I built a device that uses a timer chip and a bunch of chained flip-flops in place of the DIP switches in one of those universal garage door openers. I can open most Linear 8 and Genie 9 switch types in under two minutes, Multi-Code 10 switch in about five minutes, and old Genie 12 switchers in fifteen or so. No good against code-hoppers or the Genie Intellicode learning openers, but those remain fairly rare in commercial applications (I work for a locksmith who does mostly commercial/industrial work). It's a fun device because it looks like something a mad scientist would build. It's in a gray metal box with a fairly large (10") whip antenna on top and when you press the "search" button a row of 12 LEDs light up in binary sequence as it scans (so you know about where the code was found).
Of course, picking a typical deadbolt lock is also very easy and takes less than a minute, so it's unlikely a thief would bother trying to open the garage door.
This is true. Those cheap locks (cough)Kwikset/USLock/etc(/cough) are a joke. Then again, people are bizarrely worried about burglars picking locks. Picking locks is something you do when you don't want anyone to know you got in. Burglars are perfectly happy to knock out a window with a brick. So unless you have a problem with CIA spies or private investigators or stalkers or ninjas, you don't need to concern yourself so much with "pickability".
Heh. I doubt the US Navy transmitter was a Part 15 device.
We cast votes for many things on a single ballot. We can't just manually count slips of paper.
Sounds to me like Canadians go in and vote for one thing: their parliamentary representative. Otherwise, separating the ballots into "piles" which are then counted wouldn't really be possible. Like you say, this method is totally unsuitable for the US, where one can end up voting for (in one november election on a single multi-page ballot) President, a senator, a house representative, state governor, lieutenant governor, a state senator, state assemblyman, state treasurer, member of the county board of supervisors, county sheriff, mayor, city councilman, a bunch of judges, bond measures at state/county/city levels, and a whole raft of propositions. I'd like to see one o' them smug Canadians deal with that kind of mess by having "people at each polling station manually count the collected paper slips" (see here for explaination of canadian system)
The article does not explain under what circumstances the bank requires this, perhaps to open an account.
Well, let's analyze it just based on the words used. People who haven't opened an account yet aren't "customers" of the bank until they've opened an account, and demanding that new account applicants provide ID is hardly something that'd qualify for a "most invasive company" award. To judge by the wording, it sounds as if Lloyds TSB sent letters to all its customers demanding that they show up in person to a bank branch and produce ID. This is pretty obnoxious behavior.
You're welcome. Few things are more annoying than seeing a perfectly rational post sunk to "-1, Troll" (while hysterical rants get modded "+5, Insightful") because of typical /. groupthink.
Michael Moore is a "documentarian" in the same sense that Leni Riefenstahl was a "documentarian", and Fahrenheit 9/11 is a documentary in the same sense that Triumph of the Will was a documentary. (Both movies also won prominent French awards... coincidence?) Fahrenheit 9/11 makes Fox News seem like a bastion of journalistic integrity by comparison.
Michael Moore's arguments lack a logical flow or any direction whatsoever. He seems to just string together a sequence of often unrelated anti-Bush/Iraq War arguments (which have the depth of talking points) hoping to rile up his already anti-Bush/Iraq War audience.
Moore builds his whole argument upon omissions, discarding any and all facts which are not in accordance with his world view. The claim that there are no factual inaccuracies in the movie is partly true; however, this is no great feat, as the movie is filled with omissions, innuendos, and logical fallacies (post hoc ergo propter hoc, etc). For example, I could very easily convince someone with no knowledge of 20th century European History that Hitler was a great guy, simply through omissions and without making one factually inaccurate statement i.e. Hitler was a great connoisseur of art; his love of art lead to him amassing a great art collection, spanning art from all over Europe. Hitler also implemented economic policies which restored Germany's shattered economy and made Germany into one of the most powerful economic powers of its time. He was much loved by his people, and took great pride in his heritage, etc, etc, etc. I'm sure my point has become evident, and I no longer need to pursue this perverted example.
Moore is well known for his editing prowess, and I have no reason to believe that he does not continue using his "skills" in Fahrenheit 9/11. There are several well known instances of Moore's editing in Bowling For Columbine i.e. Heston's tie changing colours, the clip of Heston's speech not being the one he gave right after Columbine, but rather a different one altogether (1st Google Result on Query), etc. I'm sure there are many other examples in both movies.
Moore makes several assertions in Fahrenheit 9/11 which not only make no logical sense, but also contradict with other statements he made in the movie. Moore mentions the well documented effort on Saddam's behalf to murder George H. W. Bush (probably intended as an argumentum ad hominem), then he refers to the sovereign nation of Iraq, which had never threatened or harmed a single American life. Ok, let's see, Moore himself admits that Saddam tried to kill H. W. Bush. Furthermore, Iraq invaded Kuwait, and constantly threatened Saudi Arabia and Israel. First of all, there are plenty of Americans in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Israel. Furthermore, plenty of American lives were lost in Desert Storm, which was clearly in response to a war of unilateral aggression on Saddam's behalf (then again, Moore may very well oppose Desert Storm, as well as England and France declaring war on Germany when they invaded Poland... who knows). After the end of Desert Storm, Americans remained in the region and constantly flew sorties to enforce the no-fly zones in the north and south of Iraq and make sure they minimized the number of Kurds and Shiites massacred by Saddam and his gang of (Sunni) thugs. Anyways, the Iraqis constantly attempted to shoot down the American planes that were merely enforcing the UN sanctioned No-fly Zones. (Seems like threatening American lives to me.)
Ok, moving on... Moore attempts to make it seem like there is no link between Saddam and international terrorism, where in reality Saddam offered USD $10000-20000 to the family members of Palestinian suicide bombers (what a great guy) (
Yep, with the exception of the fact that they usually speak perfect english, most europeans are just like us! :)
Cellular communications aren't intended for public consumption. Troll elsewhere, please.
Yeah, and I'm going to patent the butthole so everyone has to pay me if they a) want to take a crap, or b) pull out another lame joke to post for the nth time on slashdot.
Please, can we let the stupid joke die already? It wasn't particularly funny the first time, and it doesn't get any funnier with repetition.