I believe anyone who is pro free speech has to support the channel.
Support their right to exist (and even to have an editorial slant), certainly. Support, as in buy from their advertisers and link to their website, not any time soon.
I hear the NYSE is kicking them out, and if that's just retaliation for being anti-American (they claim not), it's probably counter-productive.
Re:Content still available...
on
4l-j4z333ra 0wn3d
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
... it's nice to have news from outside sources (ie: outside the US sphere of influence) with an opposite view-point.
Wrong in a couple of ways, I think. First, Al Jazeera, while most cerainly outside U.S. control, is far from being outside U.S. influence. It is truly said that "he who angers you controls you". Al Jazeera is run by people so opposed to the United States and its policies that they violate every tenet of journalistic professionalism in their efforts to make Americans look bad. The result is a "news" service that disdains superficialities like fact-checking and citing sources. They are worse than useless for stories involving the U.S.
Second, it is flawed to believe that one can hear reports biased FOR America on one hand and reports biased AGAINST America on the other, and somehow synthesize the two into the truth. I grant that the American media is lacking both in objectivity and in sources other than the U.S. government. Please don't think, however, that getting "information" from Al Jazeera can somehow help you see through the crap. In the end, I think you're going to have to accept that everyone involved has an interest in lying to you (or at the least, putting a spin on the facts--and you'll play hell telling which is which), and sit back and wait to see how it all plays out. If Iraqis end up running their own free country, and happy about the change (and if we don't bankrupt the U.S. Treasury in the process), then it was a net good (in my opinion). If it all goes to shit in any of the countless ways it possibly could, then it was a bad idea, and whose intentions were good and whose were bad will be pretty much irrelevent.
In the other hand, if the war ends, was "easy" and without a lot of lost lives, and Bush feels sucessful and invincible, what will be next? North Korea? the rest of the arab countries? China? France?
I believe you have just voiced the fear that underlies much of the international opposition to this war.
I am an American citizen, and I am not an imperialist. I don't know anyone who advocates American imperialism. I teach my children, as most Americans do, to mind their own damn business. So, I can tell you honestly that countries which do not threaten the U.S. need have no fear of us. Unfortunately, that still leaves three problems for the rest of the world: 1. What if I (and the U.S. government) are lying about our intentions? 2. Who decides what constitutes a threat? (apparently, we do) 3. What if our attitude becomes more imperialistic later on?
I don't know what to tell you. Direct U.S. involvement in this mess began in 1979, in Iran, and since that time there have been over 800 U.S. citizens killed in Middle East-related violence before 9/11. Many Americans think we have been patient bordering on negligent. The WTC/Pentagon attacks pushed us into action; now we all have to work to find a peace that everyone can live with. This cannot even begin until the aftermath of the current fighting, when it will be seen that (as in Afghanistan) we were as good as our word insofar as returning Iraq to the Iraqis, and helping the citizens of Iraq to rebuild their country.
After that, who knows? The U.S. seems to be attempting to execute the Paul Wolfowitz plan to remake the Middle East into a region of free societies. This is a risky course which seeks to preempt an ever-increasing spiral: terrorist attacks followed by military retribution (against people who may or may not have been involved in the terror) followed by terrorist attacks... Eventually, many of us think, this would lead to World War III, especially if terrorists succeed in using a nuclear device against a U.S. city. I support the President and his advisors in this attempt. However, I know many well-intentioned people who think it's a bad idea, for reasons that range from "fuck it, just nuke 'em all now", to "Arabs can't make a free democracy work" to "we brought it all on ourselves with misguided foreign policy".
I very much hope that our course is the correct one. Only time will tell.
Did you even RTFA? You only pay for email that people decide was an unwelcome intrusion on their time. It's their decision, made AFTER they read your email. Do you send a lot of email that makes people resentful?
Almost every time I take a deep breath and chill out before I flame somebody, they make me glad I did. I appreciate any and all appeals to reason in these high-stress times, and it would seem that's what you were trying to do.
Still, I have trouble thinking of time-critical GPS applications that couldn't be considered, if not purely military, at least dual-use (excepting rare events like saving trapped miners). For instance, I can see where the DOD might have an interest in halting the use of precision GPS for instrument approaches, even if the aircraft involved weren't always Iraqi Air Force. Do you have examples of purely civilian GPS applications that couldn't stand a few days or weeks delay, or be replaced by old-school methods?
I don't understand. How is it paranoid to think that your enemy in war may want to kill you? How is it idiotic to deprive them of a useful tool?
This article says that the DOD has better ways to achieve this end, so you can stop crying. But, if degrading the signal worldwide were the only way to degrade it for the Iraqi military, they would be correct to do so.
I'm gonna metamod everyday until I get a chance to whack the idiot who modded this "offtopic". Of course it's offtopic; it's also priceless. Thanks for the laughs, arvindn.
This is a valid question, but a look at the cash flow statement I cited before shows that cash from operations over the same 3 years exceeded US$39 billion. When earnings are questionable, cash flow is often a good indicator.
If cash flow is hard to analyze (the accepted format, i.e. starting with net income and reconciling to changes in cash on hand, is suboptimal for good analysis), comfort can sometimes be had by looking at the company's dealings with the IRS. Companies may inflate earnings when they're talking to analysts or shareholders, but they don't do so to the IRS. In Microsoft's case they are paying over 30% in taxes, which is a solid indication that their earnings are real.
I'm no lover of Microsoft, but this article is long on accusation and short on substantiation. For instance, this gem:
At the root of Microsoft's problems is its financial structure. Leveraged by stock options and other financial tricks (R7), it depends heavily on rapid revenue growth and increasing stock value. When you've saturated your market (over 90%), and that market is stagnant, rapid revenue growth becomes difficult. Should future growth look poor, holders of stock options are likely to cash out, and much of that $43 Billion evaporates.
Where does he think the money goes, exactly? A large overhang of options is bad for stockholders (including Bill Gates, et al.) but it's a non-cash charge to the company, if they even choose to take the charge at all (which apparently they haven't in the past). If you check the linked reference in the article, it takes you to some rant that specifically tells you, among other things, not to try to read the financials for yourself, just take his word that there's massive abuse going on. Yeah, right.
One of the ways a company can "make it up" to their shareholders for issuing a lot of options is to buy stock on the open market to take back those dilutive shares. According to this over the last three fiscal years, MS has spent (net) over US$11 billion repurchasing stock. Maybe Bill doesn't like having the value of his holdings beat down by options any more than any other stockholder does.
I'm not saying everything in the article is bullshit, but I don't think I would run around quoting this guy until I did a lot of homework for myself.
Hmmm. Perhaps I can help with a few misconceptions here, based on over 19 years of air traffic control experience at Atlanta Center.
First, people need to understand that some bad things might happen if enough ATC systems go offline at once. Bad things are less likely to happen, as the poster states, if the outages occur in the enroute (my) environment, because the planes are generally farther apart than in terminal airspace. (Picky notes: enroute separation is 5 miles (not 3) OR 1000 feet--not AND--but I'm sure that was just a misstatement.) But they're not THAT far apart. This post makes it sound like any time we want to we can drop back to good old non-radar control. Well, standard separation in a non-radar environment is as high as 10 minutes flying time (longitudinally, which is to say along the same route). That's a lot more than the five miles I was using when the radar was working. The transition will be a bit tricky, and if I have to do it for any length of time, traffic will slow to a virtual standstill.
What's more, it is simply not true that aircraft clearances cover eventualities like lost communications or lost radar. This is a myth, and one that new on-the-job trainees quickly get de-programmed out of their heads. It's not possible to issue clearances that are good all the way to your clearance limit--every aircraft that departs, deviates for weather, changes destination, or even changes altitude (say, for turbulence) has the potential to screw up everybody else's "perfect" clearances. We truly don't even try to come up with such clearances. As for the idea that everybody will get to their clearance limit (actually, it's the published holding pattern for the route they're on to their clearance limit--probably that was simplified for clarity) and hold, that's great until you get the part about "until their estimated time of arrival" (original poster left that part out). Now you have planes dropping out of holding (and BTW, who assigned altitudes to make sure 6 aircraft didn't hold at the same altitude when the radios went out?), not necessarily from the bottom first, and flying to their destination airport. It's a 5-times-a-day event at hubs like Atlanta for 30+ aircraft to be scheduled over one fix in an hour--what are we gonna use for sequencing? TCAS? Common Traffic Advisory freqs? Get serious.
I'm not trying to scare anybody here. There are redundant systems (and they're pretty well-seasoned at this point anyway, so they almost never break), and ways to get hold of aircraft through company radios, and it really is a big sky. But it doesn't do anybody any good to pretend that it's not dangerous to try to sort out a major arrival rush by looking in your fish-finder and chatting with the other pilots til the controller gets back.
ATC was invented many decades ago because airplanes flew into each other without it. Those were props, flying to destinations with a tenth the volume of a modern hub. Maybe someday we'll have some cool hive-mind software that will allow the airplanes to sort everything out between themselves, and there won't be anymore ground-based controllers. (I won't see it in my career, cause I retire in less than 6 years.) Until that time, controllers and reliable control equipment will continue to be necessary for safety as well as expediency.
I followed the readme file right up until the last item in Future Plans. Can someone explain this to me: - Replace length fields with two fields (length of length, and length)
to avoid attacks on stream cipher.
I like this vision for NASA. I don't think enough Americans realize the extent to which the ISS exists to keep the shuttle flying and the shuttle exists to keep ISS going.
(Those too young to remember what a painful birth the Space Shuttle had may find this 23-year-old article interesting. It spells out what was promised, and how far short the delivered product fell.)
One comment: I don't know how old you are, but I'm 43, and to me it looks like people my age are the ones who should be sent first on any one-way space trips. Forty-somethings frequently have raised their children to a state of (semi-)independence, and don't plan to have any more (and would be willing to accept sterilization to ensure it, if necessary). On the other hand, we are young enough to still be reasonably fit, and many of us are looking for a new challenge, having dumped a couple of decades into a first career. We have a bit of experience under our belts, and we're old enough to understand what "the rest of your life on Mars" really means.
BTW, are you a member of any group that advocates the views you espouse, or is this just your own (well-thought-out) opinion?
- "i can't use my hands".. you can't when you drive either
It's not a replacement for driving. It goes 12.5 mph. It's a replacement for walking. In some ways it's an improvement (faster, less work) on walking, and in other ways it's not as good (limited range, no exercise, and my feet don't crowd me in a restroom stall while I'm taking a crap).
This thing is neither fish nor fowl; it has very limited utility.
The message I'm getting is that they're unsupervised children. This is their so-called "job", while the rest of us have to do actual work for a living, but they have no more respect for their good fortune than to do stupid shit like this.
The only consolation is that they probably took a lot of their "compensation" for Slashdot in the form of VA stock.
For over twenty years I've wondered: if I knew the end was coming, and I had a willing woman handy, could I live in the present enough to perform, or would I be too distracted by my impending obliteration? (Note that she may have analogous performance issues. The first friend I had this conversation with joked, "You seem a little dry, honey.")
With luck, I'll never find out how I would do in this situation.
Yeah, that might work. Then again, maybe hiring some editors who weren't trying to do this job a. drunk, b. from poolside, and c. in-between autoerotic fantasies might help too. How fucking hard can it be to set up a system to prevent all these dupes?
Most ACs just mouth off and run, but if you're still around, please do "rebut" ever one of my sentences. I hope it won't involve more "translating" from plain English to strained analogies or pretending to misunderstand simple phrases like "both liberals and...conservatives." Also, please decide if you envision me as a federal convict, an out-of-work bureaucrat, or a parasitic teenager; I'm none of those, but it will make your arguments more coherent if you pick one strawman to attack.
I don't like the President, but I'm not sure he really understands that what he's doing isn't a game. In the same way that both liberals and (especially) conservatives in Washington seem to have forgotten that science is not a branch of ideology, I think they have lost track of the fact that the things they do "to each other" in the course of their political maneuvers have real effects in the outside world. I have seen (from the inside of a federal agency) the corrosive effects of endless rounds of budget cuts and hiring freezes--followed, of course, by much wailing about how ineffective government agencies are.
I don't believe politicians are evil. I just think the system selects for style over substance, and the people you get in office aren't very good at running a country.
Slashdot Mirror
Support their right to exist (and even to have an editorial slant), certainly. Support, as in buy from their advertisers and link to their website, not any time soon.
I hear the NYSE is kicking them out, and if that's just retaliation for being anti-American (they claim not), it's probably counter-productive.
Wrong in a couple of ways, I think. First, Al Jazeera, while most cerainly outside U.S. control, is far from being outside U.S. influence. It is truly said that "he who angers you controls you". Al Jazeera is run by people so opposed to the United States and its policies that they violate every tenet of journalistic professionalism in their efforts to make Americans look bad. The result is a "news" service that disdains superficialities like fact-checking and citing sources. They are worse than useless for stories involving the U.S.
Second, it is flawed to believe that one can hear reports biased FOR America on one hand and reports biased AGAINST America on the other, and somehow synthesize the two into the truth. I grant that the American media is lacking both in objectivity and in sources other than the U.S. government. Please don't think, however, that getting "information" from Al Jazeera can somehow help you see through the crap. In the end, I think you're going to have to accept that everyone involved has an interest in lying to you (or at the least, putting a spin on the facts--and you'll play hell telling which is which), and sit back and wait to see how it all plays out. If Iraqis end up running their own free country, and happy about the change (and if we don't bankrupt the U.S. Treasury in the process), then it was a net good (in my opinion). If it all goes to shit in any of the countless ways it possibly could, then it was a bad idea, and whose intentions were good and whose were bad will be pretty much irrelevent.
I believe you have just voiced the fear that underlies much of the international opposition to this war.
I am an American citizen, and I am not an imperialist. I don't know anyone who advocates American imperialism. I teach my children, as most Americans do, to mind their own damn business. So, I can tell you honestly that countries which do not threaten the U.S. need have no fear of us. Unfortunately, that still leaves three problems for the rest of the world:
1. What if I (and the U.S. government) are lying about our intentions?
2. Who decides what constitutes a threat? (apparently, we do)
3. What if our attitude becomes more imperialistic later on?
I don't know what to tell you. Direct U.S. involvement in this mess began in 1979, in Iran, and since that time there have been over 800 U.S. citizens killed in Middle East-related violence before 9/11. Many Americans think we have been patient bordering on negligent. The WTC/Pentagon attacks pushed us into action; now we all have to work to find a peace that everyone can live with. This cannot even begin until the aftermath of the current fighting, when it will be seen that (as in Afghanistan) we were as good as our word insofar as returning Iraq to the Iraqis, and helping the citizens of Iraq to rebuild their country.
After that, who knows? The U.S. seems to be attempting to execute the Paul Wolfowitz plan to remake the Middle East into a region of free societies. This is a risky course which seeks to preempt an ever-increasing spiral: terrorist attacks followed by military retribution (against people who may or may not have been involved in the terror) followed by terrorist attacks... Eventually, many of us think, this would lead to World War III, especially if terrorists succeed in using a nuclear device against a U.S. city. I support the President and his advisors in this attempt. However, I know many well-intentioned people who think it's a bad idea, for reasons that range from "fuck it, just nuke 'em all now", to "Arabs can't make a free democracy work" to "we brought it all on ourselves with misguided foreign policy".
I very much hope that our course is the correct one. Only time will tell.
Did you even RTFA? You only pay for email that people decide was an unwelcome intrusion on their time. It's their decision, made AFTER they read your email. Do you send a lot of email that makes people resentful?
Still, I have trouble thinking of time-critical GPS applications that couldn't be considered, if not purely military, at least dual-use (excepting rare events like saving trapped miners). For instance, I can see where the DOD might have an interest in halting the use of precision GPS for instrument approaches, even if the aircraft involved weren't always Iraqi Air Force. Do you have examples of purely civilian GPS applications that couldn't stand a few days or weeks delay, or be replaced by old-school methods?
This article says that the DOD has better ways to achieve this end, so you can stop crying. But, if degrading the signal worldwide were the only way to degrade it for the Iraqi military, they would be correct to do so.
As for leaving it on to help in the U.S., the system is not yet certified for aviation.
Here's a page that says basically the same things.
I'm gonna metamod everyday until I get a chance to whack the idiot who modded this "offtopic". Of course it's offtopic; it's also priceless. Thanks for the laughs, arvindn.
If cash flow is hard to analyze (the accepted format, i.e. starting with net income and reconciling to changes in cash on hand, is suboptimal for good analysis), comfort can sometimes be had by looking at the company's dealings with the IRS. Companies may inflate earnings when they're talking to analysts or shareholders, but they don't do so to the IRS. In Microsoft's case they are paying over 30% in taxes, which is a solid indication that their earnings are real.
At the root of Microsoft's problems is its financial structure. Leveraged by stock options and other financial tricks (R7), it depends heavily on rapid revenue growth and increasing stock value. When you've saturated your market (over 90%), and that market is stagnant, rapid revenue growth becomes difficult. Should future growth look poor, holders of stock options are likely to cash out, and much of that $43 Billion evaporates.
Where does he think the money goes, exactly? A large overhang of options is bad for stockholders (including Bill Gates, et al.) but it's a non-cash charge to the company, if they even choose to take the charge at all (which apparently they haven't in the past). If you check the linked reference in the article, it takes you to some rant that specifically tells you, among other things, not to try to read the financials for yourself, just take his word that there's massive abuse going on. Yeah, right.
One of the ways a company can "make it up" to their shareholders for issuing a lot of options is to buy stock on the open market to take back those dilutive shares. According to this over the last three fiscal years, MS has spent (net) over US$11 billion repurchasing stock. Maybe Bill doesn't like having the value of his holdings beat down by options any more than any other stockholder does.
I'm not saying everything in the article is bullshit, but I don't think I would run around quoting this guy until I did a lot of homework for myself.
First, people need to understand that some bad things might happen if enough ATC systems go offline at once. Bad things are less likely to happen, as the poster states, if the outages occur in the enroute (my) environment, because the planes are generally farther apart than in terminal airspace. (Picky notes: enroute separation is 5 miles (not 3) OR 1000 feet--not AND--but I'm sure that was just a misstatement.) But they're not THAT far apart. This post makes it sound like any time we want to we can drop back to good old non-radar control. Well, standard separation in a non-radar environment is as high as 10 minutes flying time (longitudinally, which is to say along the same route). That's a lot more than the five miles I was using when the radar was working. The transition will be a bit tricky, and if I have to do it for any length of time, traffic will slow to a virtual standstill.
What's more, it is simply not true that aircraft clearances cover eventualities like lost communications or lost radar. This is a myth, and one that new on-the-job trainees quickly get de-programmed out of their heads. It's not possible to issue clearances that are good all the way to your clearance limit--every aircraft that departs, deviates for weather, changes destination, or even changes altitude (say, for turbulence) has the potential to screw up everybody else's "perfect" clearances. We truly don't even try to come up with such clearances. As for the idea that everybody will get to their clearance limit (actually, it's the published holding pattern for the route they're on to their clearance limit--probably that was simplified for clarity) and hold, that's great until you get the part about "until their estimated time of arrival" (original poster left that part out). Now you have planes dropping out of holding (and BTW, who assigned altitudes to make sure 6 aircraft didn't hold at the same altitude when the radios went out?), not necessarily from the bottom first, and flying to their destination airport. It's a 5-times-a-day event at hubs like Atlanta for 30+ aircraft to be scheduled over one fix in an hour--what are we gonna use for sequencing? TCAS? Common Traffic Advisory freqs? Get serious.
I'm not trying to scare anybody here. There are redundant systems (and they're pretty well-seasoned at this point anyway, so they almost never break), and ways to get hold of aircraft through company radios, and it really is a big sky. But it doesn't do anybody any good to pretend that it's not dangerous to try to sort out a major arrival rush by looking in your fish-finder and chatting with the other pilots til the controller gets back.
ATC was invented many decades ago because airplanes flew into each other without it. Those were props, flying to destinations with a tenth the volume of a modern hub. Maybe someday we'll have some cool hive-mind software that will allow the airplanes to sort everything out between themselves, and there won't be anymore ground-based controllers. (I won't see it in my career, cause I retire in less than 6 years.) Until that time, controllers and reliable control equipment will continue to be necessary for safety as well as expediency.
- Replace length fields with two fields (length of length, and length) to avoid attacks on stream cipher.
Attacks on stream cipher?
Yes, it does that.
(Those too young to remember what a painful birth the Space Shuttle had may find this 23-year-old article interesting. It spells out what was promised, and how far short the delivered product fell.)
One comment: I don't know how old you are, but I'm 43, and to me it looks like people my age are the ones who should be sent first on any one-way space trips. Forty-somethings frequently have raised their children to a state of (semi-)independence, and don't plan to have any more (and would be willing to accept sterilization to ensure it, if necessary). On the other hand, we are young enough to still be reasonably fit, and many of us are looking for a new challenge, having dumped a couple of decades into a first career. We have a bit of experience under our belts, and we're old enough to understand what "the rest of your life on Mars" really means.
BTW, are you a member of any group that advocates the views you espouse, or is this just your own (well-thought-out) opinion?
I think you meant to use quotation marks instead of asterisks.
--No, author used old PowerMac until the day his iBook came in.
Author gets new iBook.
--Just so; very good!
Author can't run Palm 515 software on new iBoook.
--Correction: author can't get Palm 515 software to run properly on new iBooook. But he sees enough to know it doesn't "just work".
Author sees release of Safari. Author extrapolates that since Apple is releasing own web browser, Apple can't get decent third party software support.
--Actually, author sees that Apple can't get decent third-party support, considers Safari evidence that Apple sees same problem.
Author sees this as imminent demise of Apple.
--Right again! But it's only one man's opinion.
It's interesting that so many true believers rise to the bait yet again. Don't you people have any faith?
It's not a replacement for driving. It goes 12.5 mph. It's a replacement for walking. In some ways it's an improvement (faster, less work) on walking, and in other ways it's not as good (limited range, no exercise, and my feet don't crowd me in a restroom stall while I'm taking a crap).
This thing is neither fish nor fowl; it has very limited utility.
The only consolation is that they probably took a lot of their "compensation" for Slashdot in the form of VA stock.
Agguracy may also suyyer for a while ;)
Do you ever worry that you might not be able to perform for your favorite large-breasted toon when she needs you?
Groucho?
With luck, I'll never find out how I would do in this situation.
Yeah, that might work. Then again, maybe hiring some editors who weren't trying to do this job
a. drunk,
b. from poolside, and
c. in-between autoerotic fantasies
might help too. How fucking hard can it be to set up a system to prevent all these dupes?
Most ACs just mouth off and run, but if you're still around, please do "rebut" ever one of my sentences. I hope it won't involve more "translating" from plain English to strained analogies or pretending to misunderstand simple phrases like "both liberals and ...conservatives." Also, please decide if you envision me as a federal convict, an out-of-work bureaucrat, or a parasitic teenager; I'm none of those, but it will make your arguments more coherent if you pick one strawman to attack.
I don't believe politicians are evil. I just think the system selects for style over substance, and the people you get in office aren't very good at running a country.