The President's records fall under "Executive Privilege", and cannot be subpoenaed or FOIA'd. Rationale: the Pres needs to be able to make independent decisions without being second-guessed or legally harassed.
Federal agencies with authority independent from the President do not have this privilege, and must comply with FOIA. Rationale: the people should know what their government is up to.
Legal question: Is the White House's internal bureaucracy part of "the President" or is it an "independent agency" from the president? Judge's answer: it's part of the President, and therefore privileged.
Can't say I like what the White House is doing, but the judge's decision looks pretty clear-cut as I see it.
Didn't pretty much every college and university with internet access do exactly this in the early/mid-'90s? All this wailing and gnashing of teeth and huffy posts about Internet Freedoms and stuff sounds really familiar, I think I myself wrote a long and pompous forum post on the subject while procrastinating my problem sets.
Only difference now is we've got a slightly larger private entity controlling its content delivery, and an exciting new buzzword "common carrier" to justify our outrage.
The cost of the raw materials is negligible for almost all chemical synthesis. When you pay $X for a bottle of benzene or whatever, you're paying for energy, labor, and equipment. Sure, the energy costs will go up as oil gets more expensive, but that's the same problem every industry faces, and it can be solved with renewables. You *can't* easily replace feedstocks with renewable alternatives, but the cost of the feedstock is a tiny fraction of the selling price of the product.
It certainly dosn't help using only part of the plant, the seeds, to feed to the yeast.
The problem is that yeast only eats sugar. The seeds themselves produce a handy enzyme that converts their starch into sugar for yeast to eat (beermaking 101), but enzymes to break down cellulose are hard to come by, and harder to use effectively.
Believe me, if you could just feed hay to yeast to make beer, humans would have been doing it for millenia.
Yes, but they spend their own energy to feed thei symbiotic bacteria that do it, so they don't grow nearly as fast as grass. You don't get something for nothing.
Ammonia for nitrogen fertilizer is made from natural gas; not oil.
For our purposes, it doesn't matter much. An energy source is an energy source: switchgrass ethanol can replace either natural gas or oil for most applications. The only exception is when natural gas is used to do chemistry (synthesis of fertilizer or plastics) rather than just burning it, but that's small potatoes compared to combustion.
So the GP post, which said, fertilizer is... completely independent of petroleum... is categorically wrong. Fertilizer production requires vast amounts of energy. Not petroleum specifically, but fossil fuels are fungible.
The problem is that a complicated, multilayered trust system makes it impossible to integrate and correlate information from various sources. If the sources mistrust each other, you'll never put two and two together.
How high should you make internal barriers to free exchange of information? It comes down to a trade-off: are you more worried about missing an imminent threat, or are you more worried about the bad guys stealing your intel?
Like many things in intel/military, I think this trade-off has shifted a lot since the cold war. When dealing with the Russkies, you definitely have to worry about internal security. But the odds that Al Qaeda has a mole inside Langley are pretty damned small.
Maybe Intelliwiki is a sign that the U.S. intel community recognizes that change.
There's no question that Scott McClellan was a little short on conscience when he was at the White House, but it's not clear whether his change of heart inspired him to write a book or the other way around.
He could be cashing in, he could be a truly repentant whistleblower. Personally, I think his memoirs would have sold very well *without* accusing the administration of criminal acts, so greed isn't enough of a motivation on its own.
Wow are you wrong. Hans Blix and his inspections team were in Iraq with what they described as unfettered access for 11 weeks in late 2002/early 2003. Inspectors had been denied access earlier in 2002, but the claim that the UN was never allowed to do inspections is false.
please note that, to the best of my knowledge, no one in the Bush administration claimed Saddam was an imminent threat. that allegation started with Democrats.
9/18/2002: Donald Rumsfeld tells Congress, "Some have argued that the nuclear threat from Iraq is not imminent, that Saddam Hussein is at least five to seven years away from having nuclear weapons. I would not be so certainÂ--we should be just as concerned about the immediate threat from biological weapons. Iraq has these weapons."
But, what's this?! Juliet sees that Romeo has a high propensity for Down Syndrome (or any other "disease" - take your pick). Well, this isn't good.
That's a tragedy for Romeo, but I much prefer it to the tragedy of bringing a kid with, say, cystic fibrosis or Tay-Sachs disease into the world. Or Down syndrome, though that's more closely tied to the age of the mother than to genetics.
The thing about the major genetic diseases I've mentioned is that in most cases, they're recessive, which means that a variety of simple solutions (ranging from divorce to sperm donation) can result in happy families and no risk of disease.
Your tragic tale isn't so tragic: genetic diseases are examples of where good medical information can be a good, not an evil.
Err, I take *that* back. Without an out-of-band communication, you can't be sure you've been given the website's public key, and not a fake key provided by your ISP.
1) write a checksum to a page; if it doesn't match (or another hashing method doesn't match) warn the user that the page has been intercepted and corrupted; the code might not be too tough
ISP adds its own ads, recomputes the checksum, and changes the checksum value.
D'oh!
Checksums and signatures are only useful if the sender and receiver have shared information inaccessible to the man-in-the-middle. For public web pages, this isn't true.
To hell with "common carrier": a network that deliberately mangles transmissions isn't a "carrier" of any sort.
It's as if I called my grandma on the phone, and ten seconds into the conversation the phone company started playing a recorded ad for computer equipment on my end, and an AARP membership ad on her end.
You can bet Grandma would be on the phone to complain to her congressman about that... oh, wait.
If you're paying for metered bandwidth, why are you accepting ads in the first place? AdBlock+ solves that problem very quickly.
Yes, and in the parent post's analogy, I could switch off my electricity and put a padlock on the breaker panel before I leave the house to thwart the electrical company's ninjas....
I've got no problem with heavy users paying more, light users paying less. But $1/gigabyte is so far in excess of the "going rate" for bandwidth that it's not even funny.
For instance, my current web hosting provider offers me 5 TERAbytes of transfer for six bucks a month. Now, it's possible they'd try to change the terms of the deal if I actually approached that level of usage, but still, it shows the cable company in TFA is charging more by roughly a factor of 1000.
I'm guessing that Dreamhost probably serves up roughly as many bytes as a cable company does in a large town or small city. Now, I totally agree that providing internet access to a bunch of houses spread out over square miles is going to cost more than providing it to a couple rows of rackmounted servers. But that's a *fixed* cost to provide access, regardless of bandwidth usage.
I'm okay with charging more for using more, but this is so out of proportion it's simply highway robbery.
If you've ever seen an "open-ended" MMO with players in charge of creation (say, Second Life), you've probably seen little sparks of creativity in a sea of boring copies of trendy junk. 90% of everything is crap. And the little sparks of creativity don't tie together: one person's perfect recreation of the rebel base on Hoth is right next to another person's gothic revival castle, and they clash horribly.
The same is true of TV shows with a large pool of authors (say, your average sitcom). Some episodes are good, some bad, but none of them mesh up together, and you're left with a mess.
For both MMOs and TV shows, a dictatorial author is the only route to success. The best MMOs (say, World of Warcraft or EVE) allow roleplaying only within the tight rules of the game world. The best TV shows (say, Lost, Battlestar Galactica, or Firefly) have just one or two guys who call the shots for the layout of the whole show, and set firm boundaries for the writers.
An open-ended MMO inspired by a TV show, and an authorless TV show inspired by the MMO? It's the blind leading the blind, a ship without a rudder, drifting off into banality.
And if the show *does* get a visionary author to conduct the show, then the whole MMO / TV connection is pretty much irrelevant, it becomes, first and foremost, the author's story to tell.
Why is this story relevant to Slashdot? Because here at Slashdot, we like technology, and cloning is a fascinating cyberpunk-to-reality technology. The banana is a great low-tech example of what happens when your food crops are clones.
This isn't the end of the world, I mean, there are other varieties which we can eventually breed into mass-commerce viable crops. Maybe we have no bananas for a few years while they plant new varieties... it could nuke the banana companies, but we can live without bananas for a few years, right?
Yeah. But now imagine the same thing happens to cloned cattle, corn, rice, and wheat. The world can do without corn for a few years, right?
Can we have a new topic specifically for OOXML/ODF wars? We're up to two of these a day, and as I find them totally boring, I'd like to be able to filter them out.
Desktop computers and laptops currently rely on the keyboard and mouse input paradigm, while it may be possible to learn another skill (touching your screen) this will be even more time consuming than moving between the keyboard and the mouse.
You sound just like I did, twenty years ago when I first saw an ad for a Macintosh. "Mouse?" I said. "What do I need one of those for."
Don't worry about training and skillsets, everyone knows how to use touchscreens already from ATM machines. And this is actually *less* abstract than the mouse idea, which everyone understands too.
IMO, it's not a user-relations problem, it's a "devil in the details" problem. You can't just tack a touch interface onto an existing system: you have to rethink every detail of the OS, just like Apple and others did for the first mouse OSes. Just two examples: How do you right-click with a touch OS? Should you even have a right-click gesture? You can't "hover" over stuff with a touch interface. How do you do tooltips and other mouseover stuff?
And finally, there's one big issue which, as a long-term iPhone user, I can speak to with some authority: fingers are low-resolution input devices. The iPhone tries really hard to make this less of a problem, but any way you slice it, you can't touch only one of two things spaced 1/8 inch apart.
Slashdot Mirror
So, have I got this right? (IANAL):
The President's records fall under "Executive Privilege", and cannot be subpoenaed or FOIA'd. Rationale: the Pres needs to be able to make independent decisions without being second-guessed or legally harassed.
Federal agencies with authority independent from the President do not have this privilege, and must comply with FOIA. Rationale: the people should know what their government is up to.
Legal question: Is the White House's internal bureaucracy part of "the President" or is it an "independent agency" from the president? Judge's answer: it's part of the President, and therefore privileged.
Can't say I like what the White House is doing, but the judge's decision looks pretty clear-cut as I see it.
Didn't pretty much every college and university with internet access do exactly this in the early/mid-'90s? All this wailing and gnashing of teeth and huffy posts about Internet Freedoms and stuff sounds really familiar, I think I myself wrote a long and pompous forum post on the subject while procrastinating my problem sets.
Only difference now is we've got a slightly larger private entity controlling its content delivery, and an exciting new buzzword "common carrier" to justify our outrage.
Yawn.
I was under the impression that geothermal was gravity based not fission.
Lord Kelvin was under that impression 120 years ago, too. He was wrong then as you are now.
The cost of the raw materials is negligible for almost all chemical synthesis. When you pay $X for a bottle of benzene or whatever, you're paying for energy, labor, and equipment. Sure, the energy costs will go up as oil gets more expensive, but that's the same problem every industry faces, and it can be solved with renewables. You *can't* easily replace feedstocks with renewable alternatives, but the cost of the feedstock is a tiny fraction of the selling price of the product.
It certainly dosn't help using only part of the plant, the seeds, to feed to the yeast.
The problem is that yeast only eats sugar. The seeds themselves produce a handy enzyme that converts their starch into sugar for yeast to eat (beermaking 101), but enzymes to break down cellulose are hard to come by, and harder to use effectively.
Believe me, if you could just feed hay to yeast to make beer, humans would have been doing it for millenia.
I don't know if switchgrass is a legume or not.
... completely independent of petroleum...
It's not.
Legumes make their own nitrogen fertilizer;
Yes, but they spend their own energy to feed thei symbiotic bacteria that do it, so they don't grow nearly as fast as grass. You don't get something for nothing.
Ammonia for nitrogen fertilizer is made from natural gas; not oil.
For our purposes, it doesn't matter much. An energy source is an energy source: switchgrass ethanol can replace either natural gas or oil for most applications. The only exception is when natural gas is used to do chemistry (synthesis of fertilizer or plastics) rather than just burning it, but that's small potatoes compared to combustion.
So the GP post, which said,
fertilizer is
is categorically wrong. Fertilizer production requires vast amounts of energy. Not petroleum specifically, but fossil fuels are fungible.
The problem is that a complicated, multilayered trust system makes it impossible to integrate and correlate information from various sources. If the sources mistrust each other, you'll never put two and two together.
How high should you make internal barriers to free exchange of information? It comes down to a trade-off: are you more worried about missing an imminent threat, or are you more worried about the bad guys stealing your intel?
Like many things in intel/military, I think this trade-off has shifted a lot since the cold war. When dealing with the Russkies, you definitely have to worry about internal security. But the odds that Al Qaeda has a mole inside Langley are pretty damned small.
Maybe Intelliwiki is a sign that the U.S. intel community recognizes that change.
From TFA:
"We still call spies collaborators," he noted. "We're trying to encourage collaboration, but there is still a negative connotation with that word."
This quote floored me. My god, does it explain a lot about 9/11 intelligence failures.
Simple: because his remarks were made out of session, they carry as much weight as if he'd made them on a talk show. Which he has, frequently.
Had he called for impeachment *in* session, it'd be front page news.
There's no question that Scott McClellan was a little short on conscience when he was at the White House, but it's not clear whether his change of heart inspired him to write a book or the other way around.
He could be cashing in, he could be a truly repentant whistleblower. Personally, I think his memoirs would have sold very well *without* accusing the administration of criminal acts, so greed isn't enough of a motivation on its own.
Wow are you wrong. Hans Blix and his inspections team were in Iraq with what they described as unfettered access for 11 weeks in late 2002/early 2003. Inspectors had been denied access earlier in 2002, but the claim that the UN was never allowed to do inspections is false.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2003/feb/14/iraq.unitednations1
please note that, to the best of my knowledge, no one in the Bush administration claimed Saddam was an imminent threat. that allegation started with Democrats.
9/18/2002: Donald Rumsfeld tells Congress, "Some have argued that the nuclear threat from Iraq is not imminent, that Saddam Hussein is at least five to seven years away from having nuclear weapons. I would not be so certainÂ--we should be just as concerned about the immediate threat from biological weapons. Iraq has these weapons."
http://www.motherjones.com/bush_war_timeline/ (warning: source is biased, but comprehensive)
So what? So there's no little black spots on the sun today. It's the same old thing as yesterday...
*Sigh*. If you're going to use Slashdot to pimp your pointless tech blog, please at least make sure your information is up-to-date.
Latest news: dirt seems to be stuck, possibly too cakey to enter test chamber. Engineers are working on a solution.
Now where's *my* ten million site visits?
CHA
But, what's this?! Juliet sees that Romeo has a high propensity for Down Syndrome (or any other "disease" - take your pick). Well, this isn't good.
That's a tragedy for Romeo, but I much prefer it to the tragedy of bringing a kid with, say, cystic fibrosis or Tay-Sachs disease into the world. Or Down syndrome, though that's more closely tied to the age of the mother than to genetics.
The thing about the major genetic diseases I've mentioned is that in most cases, they're recessive, which means that a variety of simple solutions (ranging from divorce to sperm donation) can result in happy families and no risk of disease.
Your tragic tale isn't so tragic: genetic diseases are examples of where good medical information can be a good, not an evil.
Err, I take *that* back. Without an out-of-band communication, you can't be sure you've been given the website's public key, and not a fake key provided by your ISP.
Err, I take it back. A public key signature system would work, a simple checksum would not.
1) write a checksum to a page; if it doesn't match (or another hashing method doesn't match) warn the user that the page has been intercepted and corrupted; the code might not be too tough
ISP adds its own ads, recomputes the checksum, and changes the checksum value.
D'oh!
Checksums and signatures are only useful if the sender and receiver have shared information inaccessible to the man-in-the-middle. For public web pages, this isn't true.
To hell with "common carrier": a network that deliberately mangles transmissions isn't a "carrier" of any sort.
... oh, wait.
It's as if I called my grandma on the phone, and ten seconds into the conversation the phone company started playing a recorded ad for computer equipment on my end, and an AARP membership ad on her end.
You can bet Grandma would be on the phone to complain to her congressman about that
If you're paying for metered bandwidth, why are you accepting ads in the first place? AdBlock+ solves that problem very quickly.
Yes, and in the parent post's analogy, I could switch off my electricity and put a padlock on the breaker panel before I leave the house to thwart the electrical company's ninjas....
But should I have to?
I've got no problem with heavy users paying more, light users paying less. But $1/gigabyte is so far in excess of the "going rate" for bandwidth that it's not even funny.
For instance, my current web hosting provider offers me 5 TERAbytes of transfer for six bucks a month. Now, it's possible they'd try to change the terms of the deal if I actually approached that level of usage, but still, it shows the cable company in TFA is charging more by roughly a factor of 1000.
I'm guessing that Dreamhost probably serves up roughly as many bytes as a cable company does in a large town or small city. Now, I totally agree that providing internet access to a bunch of houses spread out over square miles is going to cost more than providing it to a couple rows of rackmounted servers. But that's a *fixed* cost to provide access, regardless of bandwidth usage.
I'm okay with charging more for using more, but this is so out of proportion it's simply highway robbery.
If you've ever seen an "open-ended" MMO with players in charge of creation (say, Second Life), you've probably seen little sparks of creativity in a sea of boring copies of trendy junk. 90% of everything is crap. And the little sparks of creativity don't tie together: one person's perfect recreation of the rebel base on Hoth is right next to another person's gothic revival castle, and they clash horribly.
The same is true of TV shows with a large pool of authors (say, your average sitcom). Some episodes are good, some bad, but none of them mesh up together, and you're left with a mess.
For both MMOs and TV shows, a dictatorial author is the only route to success. The best MMOs (say, World of Warcraft or EVE) allow roleplaying only within the tight rules of the game world. The best TV shows (say, Lost, Battlestar Galactica, or Firefly) have just one or two guys who call the shots for the layout of the whole show, and set firm boundaries for the writers.
An open-ended MMO inspired by a TV show, and an authorless TV show inspired by the MMO? It's the blind leading the blind, a ship without a rudder, drifting off into banality.
And if the show *does* get a visionary author to conduct the show, then the whole MMO / TV connection is pretty much irrelevant, it becomes, first and foremost, the author's story to tell.
Why is this story relevant to Slashdot? Because here at Slashdot, we like technology, and cloning is a fascinating cyberpunk-to-reality technology. The banana is a great low-tech example of what happens when your food crops are clones.
This isn't the end of the world, I mean, there are other varieties which we can eventually breed into mass-commerce viable crops. Maybe we have no bananas for a few years while they plant new varieties... it could nuke the banana companies, but we can live without bananas for a few years, right?
Yeah. But now imagine the same thing happens to cloned cattle, corn, rice, and wheat. The world can do without corn for a few years, right?
Oh crap...
Can we have a new topic specifically for OOXML/ODF wars? We're up to two of these a day, and as I find them totally boring, I'd like to be able to filter them out.
Desktop computers and laptops currently rely on the keyboard and mouse input paradigm, while it may be possible to learn another skill (touching your screen) this will be even more time consuming than moving between the keyboard and the mouse.
You sound just like I did, twenty years ago when I first saw an ad for a Macintosh. "Mouse?" I said. "What do I need one of those for."
Don't worry about training and skillsets, everyone knows how to use touchscreens already from ATM machines. And this is actually *less* abstract than the mouse idea, which everyone understands too.
IMO, it's not a user-relations problem, it's a "devil in the details" problem. You can't just tack a touch interface onto an existing system: you have to rethink every detail of the OS, just like Apple and others did for the first mouse OSes. Just two examples: How do you right-click with a touch OS? Should you even have a right-click gesture? You can't "hover" over stuff with a touch interface. How do you do tooltips and other mouseover stuff?
And finally, there's one big issue which, as a long-term iPhone user, I can speak to with some authority: fingers are low-resolution input devices. The iPhone tries really hard to make this less of a problem, but any way you slice it, you can't touch only one of two things spaced 1/8 inch apart.