I've been thinking that we should check out these valleys and make sure that a small defensible area is clear. Then, you drop troops and supplies in that area to establish a "valley-head".
The technical term for this strategy is the "Dien Bien Phu Waltz." Really, it is more of a funeral dirge, for the guys in the valley. Never cede the high ground.
What this guy Paul McMaster's forgets, is, WE ARE AT WAR! We didn't start it, but we intend to finish it (which will involve 'finishing' lots of arabs--hell yeah!).
Actually, a very strong case can be made that we did start it, with our foreign policy decisions.
America has never lost a war, and I see no reason to let our record be sullied now.
Besides the glaring inaccuracy of this statement, you seem to be willing to sully our nation with the furthering of racist hatred. And frankly, I don't see how we can win by "finishing lots of arabs" I'd rather end this war with a little more justice in the world, and that may mean a willingness to forego violence.
If winning the fight against evil means restricting our civil liberties, then so be it. The last thing we need right now is people criticizing the government, and that includes people whining about restrictions on their "civil liberties". Come on, people! It's only by the grace of the US Government that you have those "rights" to begin with. And if, in order to sustain itself and protect the American people, the government needs to take back some of those privileges we've grown used to, you have nothing to complain about. You should be THANKING the government for letting you have freedom of speech for all those years.
You've been practicing your Orwell. Somehow I missed the transition showing that giving up civil liberties would somehow win the war. The evil that we should be fighting, is any action, anywhere, that trashes justice. I don't see any caveats in the rights enumerated in the Constitution about "times of war," and I've read enough to know that the folks who wrote it omitted those caveats intentionally.
Thank the government for freedom of speech? No... but I do thank the men and women in and out of uniform who dedicated their lives to protecting and ensuring my freedom of expression.
[SNIP]
"Critical" information? Well, if it's "critical" to the public, then it must be even more critical to terrorists, who will use it against us. The last thing we need right now is for information to be available to everyone. If you don't absolutely NEED a piece of information, you have no business knowing it, or attempting to get your hands on it. Anyone who has a problem with this is aiding terrorist and is exactly the type of person we need to fight.
As a soldier, I was made aware that if the press knew about it, then the opposition forces knew. Stopping the press from disseminating the information only kept it from our own citizens.
The Flag Desecration Act, which would for the first time in the history of our nation amend the First Amendment to prohibit burning the flag as a form of political dissent.
How could anyone have a problem with this? If you are in favor of desecrating Old Glory, you have no business being in this country. Go to Afgahanistan, and join your ideological bedmates.
I still have a Military ID card in my wallet, and have had one for over 15 years. I was raised by a career soldier. I have a problem with with the Flag Desecration Act. The flag is just a symbol of a set of values. Protecting the symbol and foregoing the values, such as a commitment to unrestricted expression, is just plain stupid. It seems to me that you are the idealogical bedmate of the rulers in Afghanistan, they seem to have an intolerance of dissent and are as willing to forego the rights of their citizens as you.
In a previous lifestyle, I flew helicopters for the Army. As a newbie admin, other admins have seemed impressed by how paranoid I am that some box I am responsible for is going to get cracked. This has always been my explanation:
The thing is, helicopters are different from planes. An airplane by it's nature wants to fly, and if not interfered with too strongly by unusual events or by a deliberately incompetent pilot, it will fly. A helicopter does not want to fly. It is maintained in the air by a variety of forces and controls working in opposition to each other, and if there is any disturbance in this delicate balance the helicopter stops flying; immediately and disastrously. There is no such thing as a gliding helicopter.
This is why being a helicopter pilot is so different from being an airplane pilot, and why in generality, airplane pilots are open, clear-eyed, buoyant extroverts and helicopter pilots are brooding introspective anticipators of trouble. They know if something bad has not happened it is about to.
-Harry Reasoner, February 16, 1971
I just wonder what is different about the training of *nix admins that makes them recognize that vigilance must be eternal, while the admins of other OSes seem to assume everything will go right when that is clearly not the case.
the remark about our 'unelected president' makes your peice look stupid anyways...
Personally, I appreciated him pointing this out. I don't think it can be pointed out too often.
What I find patently offensive is someone explicitly telling someone else "please don't voice any other political opinions." If his observation is so off-base, rebut it.
We have conquered dozens of nations, installed rational govenments and come home against far more organized opponents than this.
Somoza and Pinochet come to mind immediately. I'm sure the people governed by those installed governments agree with your view that they were rational. Although, I have heard rumblings that there are some who are bothered by U.S. arrogance and intervention, I'm sure they are just a radicalized minority fringe that shouldn't concern us...
I agree that we have to stop these people, but the only way we are going to stop more from springing up in their place is by removing the causes, not creating corpses.
Having spent the last week cleaning up in a similar university environment, one of the ways it happened was installing other MS software that automatically installed IIS without any indication to the end user. Project Central Server was the primary culprit. They only needed Project or just the client, but they had all heard that with Central Server they could share info on their projects, and there it was on their install CDs...
The other apparent source of the problem was several people not knowing what IIS was, but seeing the option to install it when they put their Win2K Pro CD for other reasons. There would be a warning if it was risky, right?
Dave
Re:Stupidity is Self Curing
on
Eco-Terrorism
·
· Score: 1
For example, in some countries, many people have vitamin deficiencies that can lead to blindness (I think this is vitamin K but I can't remember). Some researchers are working on (or may have finished) corn that grows with the vitamin in it.
You are thinking of "Golden Rice", which has been modified to produce beta-carotene which the body can use to make Vitamin A. Of course, it takes literally 27 bowls a day of this rice to provide the minimum daily allowance to offset blindness, but don't let that affect the publicity value.
A similar bit of propoganda demonstrating the safety GMO products did involve corn. For years, Monsanto bragged about their study showing the no detectable level of pollen was found more than five feet from the perimeter of the GMO field of corn. Sounded pretty good until one of the researchers rolled over and admitted that no measurements were taken beyond five feet.
This is a dangerous genie. I am not opposed to GMO on principal, I am however opposed to making a stupid mistake by rushing to make a profit.
You were convinced of the safety of genetically modifying food crops and putting them into the environment by someone you care about who has good reason to be blind to the potential dangers. I do not mean that she is being purposefully dishonest, but I do mean that most of us have an innate ability to ignore those things that make us uncomfortable.
Try reading some of the literature from other geneticists, who are screaming at the top of their lungs that companies are acting dangerously. I really am not meaning to be personal, but consider if someone came into this forum and said that their girlfriend was a core developer at Microsoft and she was certain that Microsoft was acting in all of our best interest.
Unless you have paranoia about the police, most people wouldn't see a problem with this and in fact, think more police is a GOOD thing.
I live in Texas, land of the "law and order" politician. In the past few months, in my town of Austin, we have had
1. Police riots (Mardi Gras on Sixth St. There are surveillance tapes of this, but they are not being released to the public "because of the liekelihood of lawsuit."
2. A rapist Austin Police Officer convicted of "Official Oppression", while being defended and kept on the job by the Austin Police Association.
3. A closed doors gutting of the agreements between the Police Oversight Focus Group and the APA, resulting in the appearance of oversight where none really exists, with a 22% pay raise for officers for good measure.
4. A Federal investigation of Austin Police for running their own drug operation, resulting in a few dozen indictments. (San Antonio just had a dozen officers busted in a similar operation).
This is without going back a couple of years to include police shootings (at least one hitting a fleeing suspect in the back) and other civic behavior.
It's not the software intrinsically, it's the design decision to reduce control surface feedback.
My initial training at Mother Rucker was in the TH-55, a completely mechanical linkage aircraft. I performed well above average, according to the daily grades and the final checkride grades. Next came the Contact phase of training in the Huey, with hydraulics. On the day when my despondent instructor was ready to finally throw in the towel, convinced that I had never seen an aircraft before, he looks at me and says "You don't seem to have the faintest idea what the aircraft is doing at any moment, you are just chasing it around...".
Determined to try and keep me on syllabus, in case I ever got a clue before I washed out, on the next idiot lap around the stagefield, he started the training for a hydraulics failure. We went through the procedure, including turning the hyrdraulics off... and wow... all of a sudden I could feel the blades again... I started making little circles with the cyclic...adjusting the cyclic... just to prove to myself that I knew what the aircraft was doing.
I made my best approach and landing to that point. The IP looks over at me with this look of "Eureka!" and says "Pick it up to a hover...".
Forty-five minutes of glorious hydraulics off training later, I'm soaked in sweat, with a grin that is only exceeded by the one on my instructor's face. It took a while to feel what hydraulics was dampening, but I made it through.
The Blackhawk (known in the 80s to most Army Aviators as the Crashhawk) hides it even more. I've never flown the V-22, but I do have some time in Bell's simulator, which I am told is very accurate. Couldn't feel a thing about the blades, I'm glad it was the simulator. That aside, I'd go back to Active Duty if they'd promise me the Osprey.
as I see it is the awareness that most Mac users, especially educators have of the product and the fanatical loyalty of HyperCard developers. That fanatical loyalty stems from what Hypercard originally provided, which was an entry level development environment that allowed absolute novices to feel like they could write an application.
I don't understand why Apple doesn't come out with a new product, that they call Hypercard, that fills the same niche as Hypercard. Legacy Hypercard can run under 9.1, new Hypercard under OS X. The two sides don't have to have a thing to do with one another, besides namespace.
I think it is incredibly fantastic that Apple is distributing developer tools with the OS, but my soon-to-be-five-year-old son has a long way to go before he is ready for C++ or Java. His nine year old brother is going great with Hypercard, though.
Now let's see a show of hands of those that have contributed the maximum allowed by law, along with an additional gratuity in soft money (or other form). (Probable answer:.000001%)
The problem with this is that they are suspect to all the usual forces that affect humans in normal society. In a company, programmers have to follow the dictacts of those above, and 'those above' have to follow the dictacts of the shareholder and the consumer. This forces them to do be innovative.
Even if one accepts your premises, the conclusion is invalid. This sort of market worship uncritically assumes way to many factors. They are forced to do nothing. They have incentives to do things that strengthen their own position relative to their competitors. That could take the form of innovation, but it can also take the form of "better" marketing of an inferior product or slipping $50 into the pockets of some legislator to "act in the American way."
Innovation is a welcome buzzword in most corporations, but only as a buzzword, not as a practice.
However, I am terrified of telling our administration about this because of a kill-the-messenger syndrome.
I found the staff e-mail index at your school's web site and sent them a link to the article. I explained that it wasn't really you that was afraid to let them know about this, but really it was someone who had stolen your password and wanted to make you look bad.
The NASA scientists I was working for at the time, explained to me that the real issue in planetary status was not size or location, but how and when Pluto was formed. Which was why they were very excited about the Pluto/Kuiper Express mission, which has now been put on hold.
One of the issues that has to be considered is the exchange rate, specifically if it fluctuates dramatically. A friend of mine was working in Tokyo, doing quite nicely by American or Japanese standards. Then the bottom dropped out of the yen, and suddenly, despite his ability to feed and house himself quite nicely in Tokyo, his student loans and mortgage for a home back in the U.S., which had to be paid in U.S. dollars, became oppressive. A clause in the contract linking his pay to exchange rates would have been nice. As it was, he had to make a lot of people mad and quit, to remain financially solvent.
If Bush is really going to carry out his mandates,...
Mandates? I wasn't aware that he had even one, much less several. He didn't win the election, much less win it by any amount to justify the word "mandate."
I missed the part where I had anything to do with this (I'm a Texan). I must have been distracted while paying my Austin power bill, 40% of which goes to the South Texas Nuclear Power Plant, although Austin does not get any power from that boondoggle. "Too cheap to meter" my ass.
The producer and art director for Cosmos collaborated a few ago on a multimedia CD-ROM project called "Exploring the Planets". It was completed and they shopped around for a distributor, a process that took dramatically longer than anyone anticipated. Cinegram Media just picked it up a few months ago, and I was amazed to get my own personal courtesy copy in the box last month!
Caveat is that it only runs on Win95/98/NT (except for the beginnings of a port I did for my kids to Macintosh while waiting on a distributor).
This would be a shameless plug if I was getting any royalties from it, but I am not... so it is just a plain old plug... it is available at Exploring the Planets. It was an exceptionally cool project to work on. My first day on the job, as we were getting the office set up, I answered the phone and tried to take a message for Gentry (Chief Engineer of Viking I & II and Galileo). The guy just said to let him know that "Buzz called". It just got better from there.
If a document is published from a government entity, it should be available in some sort of downloadable format, before it ever goes to the printer. This is especially true for documents in high enough demand that they are for sale through the GPO.
Yeah, but we get Rick Perry as governor. We get doubly screwed!
Not doubly screwed. The Texas governor is so weak as to be worthless. Bush did as little harm as he did good as our governor. Perry, however, is competent evil. The power resides in the Lt Governor, at worst we break even by moving Perry out of a position to continue the harm he has been doing.
Slashdot Mirror
AvGas != JetA
AvGas is essentially leaded gasoline from days of old, JetA (the fuel used in most commercial aircraft) is closer to a really high grade kerosene.
Dave
I've been thinking that we should check out these valleys and make sure that a small defensible area is clear. Then, you drop troops and supplies in that area to establish a "valley-head".
The technical term for this strategy is the "Dien Bien Phu Waltz." Really, it is more of a funeral dirge, for the guys in the valley. Never cede the high ground.
Dave
Actually, a very strong case can be made that we did start it, with our foreign policy decisions.
Besides the glaring inaccuracy of this statement, you seem to be willing to sully our nation with the furthering of racist hatred. And frankly, I don't see how we can win by "finishing lots of arabs" I'd rather end this war with a little more justice in the world, and that may mean a willingness to forego violence.
You've been practicing your Orwell. Somehow I missed the transition showing that giving up civil liberties would somehow win the war. The evil that we should be fighting, is any action, anywhere, that trashes justice. I don't see any caveats in the rights enumerated in the Constitution about "times of war," and I've read enough to know that the folks who wrote it omitted those caveats intentionally.
Thank the government for freedom of speech? No... but I do thank the men and women in and out of uniform who dedicated their lives to protecting and ensuring my freedom of expression.
As a soldier, I was made aware that if the press knew about it, then the opposition forces knew. Stopping the press from disseminating the information only kept it from our own citizens.
I still have a Military ID card in my wallet, and have had one for over 15 years. I was raised by a career soldier. I have a problem with with the Flag Desecration Act. The flag is just a symbol of a set of values. Protecting the symbol and foregoing the values, such as a commitment to unrestricted expression, is just plain stupid. It seems to me that you are the idealogical bedmate of the rulers in Afghanistan, they seem to have an intolerance of dissent and are as willing to forego the rights of their citizens as you.
Dave
I just wonder what is different about the training of *nix admins that makes them recognize that vigilance must be eternal, while the admins of other OSes seem to assume everything will go right when that is clearly not the case.
Dave
Personally, I appreciated him pointing this out. I don't think it can be pointed out too often.
What I find patently offensive is someone explicitly telling someone else "please don't voice any other political opinions." If his observation is so off-base, rebut it.
Dave
Somoza and Pinochet come to mind immediately. I'm sure the people governed by those installed governments agree with your view that they were rational. Although, I have heard rumblings that there are some who are bothered by U.S. arrogance and intervention, I'm sure they are just a radicalized minority fringe that shouldn't concern us...
I agree that we have to stop these people, but the only way we are going to stop more from springing up in their place is by removing the causes, not creating corpses.
Dave
Having spent the last week cleaning up in a similar university environment, one of the ways it happened was installing other MS software that automatically installed IIS without any indication to the end user. Project Central Server was the primary culprit. They only needed Project or just the client, but they had all heard that with Central Server they could share info on their projects, and there it was on their install CDs...
The other apparent source of the problem was several people not knowing what IIS was, but seeing the option to install it when they put their Win2K Pro CD for other reasons. There would be a warning if it was risky, right?
Dave
You are thinking of "Golden Rice", which has been modified to produce beta-carotene which the body can use to make Vitamin A. Of course, it takes literally 27 bowls a day of this rice to provide the minimum daily allowance to offset blindness, but don't let that affect the publicity value.
A similar bit of propoganda demonstrating the safety GMO products did involve corn. For years, Monsanto bragged about their study showing the no detectable level of pollen was found more than five feet from the perimeter of the GMO field of corn. Sounded pretty good until one of the researchers rolled over and admitted that no measurements were taken beyond five feet.
This is a dangerous genie. I am not opposed to GMO on principal, I am however opposed to making a stupid mistake by rushing to make a profit.
You were convinced of the safety of genetically modifying food crops and putting them into the environment by someone you care about who has good reason to be blind to the potential dangers. I do not mean that she is being purposefully dishonest, but I do mean that most of us have an innate ability to ignore those things that make us uncomfortable.
Try reading some of the literature from other geneticists, who are screaming at the top of their lungs that companies are acting dangerously. I really am not meaning to be personal, but consider if someone came into this forum and said that their girlfriend was a core developer at Microsoft and she was certain that Microsoft was acting in all of our best interest.
Dave
Unless:
[SNIP]
Am I forgetting something?
That there is no God...
Dave
It's great to be young again! An industry shift every couple of decades seems to be working nicely...
Dave
And that book would be....?
Dave
I live in Texas, land of the "law and order" politician. In the past few months, in my town of Austin, we have had
1. Police riots (Mardi Gras on Sixth St. There are surveillance tapes of this, but they are not being released to the public "because of the liekelihood of lawsuit."
2. A rapist Austin Police Officer convicted of "Official Oppression", while being defended and kept on the job by the Austin Police Association.
3. A closed doors gutting of the agreements between the Police Oversight Focus Group and the APA, resulting in the appearance of oversight where none really exists, with a 22% pay raise for officers for good measure.
4. A Federal investigation of Austin Police for running their own drug operation, resulting in a few dozen indictments. (San Antonio just had a dozen officers busted in a similar operation).
This is without going back a couple of years to include police shootings (at least one hitting a fleeing suspect in the back) and other civic behavior.
Why would I be paranoid?
Dave
My initial training at Mother Rucker was in the TH-55, a completely mechanical linkage aircraft. I performed well above average, according to the daily grades and the final checkride grades. Next came the Contact phase of training in the Huey, with hydraulics. On the day when my despondent instructor was ready to finally throw in the towel, convinced that I had never seen an aircraft before, he looks at me and says "You don't seem to have the faintest idea what the aircraft is doing at any moment, you are just chasing it around...".
Determined to try and keep me on syllabus, in case I ever got a clue before I washed out, on the next idiot lap around the stagefield, he started the training for a hydraulics failure. We went through the procedure, including turning the hyrdraulics off... and wow... all of a sudden I could feel the blades again... I started making little circles with the cyclic...adjusting the cyclic... just to prove to myself that I knew what the aircraft was doing.
I made my best approach and landing to that point. The IP looks over at me with this look of "Eureka!" and says "Pick it up to a hover...".
Forty-five minutes of glorious hydraulics off training later, I'm soaked in sweat, with a grin that is only exceeded by the one on my instructor's face. It took a while to feel what hydraulics was dampening, but I made it through.
The Blackhawk (known in the 80s to most Army Aviators as the Crashhawk) hides it even more. I've never flown the V-22, but I do have some time in Bell's simulator, which I am told is very accurate. Couldn't feel a thing about the blades, I'm glad it was the simulator. That aside, I'd go back to Active Duty if they'd promise me the Osprey.
Dave
I don't understand why Apple doesn't come out with a new product, that they call Hypercard, that fills the same niche as Hypercard. Legacy Hypercard can run under 9.1, new Hypercard under OS X. The two sides don't have to have a thing to do with one another, besides namespace.
I think it is incredibly fantastic that Apple is distributing developer tools with the OS, but my soon-to-be-five-year-old son has a long way to go before he is ready for C++ or Java. His nine year old brother is going great with Hypercard, though.
Dave
Now let's see a show of hands of those that have contributed the maximum allowed by law, along with an additional gratuity in soft money (or other form). (Probable answer:.000001%)
-Dave
Even if one accepts your premises, the conclusion is invalid. This sort of market worship uncritically assumes way to many factors. They are forced to do nothing. They have incentives to do things that strengthen their own position relative to their competitors. That could take the form of innovation, but it can also take the form of "better" marketing of an inferior product or slipping $50 into the pockets of some legislator to "act in the American way."
Innovation is a welcome buzzword in most corporations, but only as a buzzword, not as a practice.
Dave
I found the staff e-mail index at your school's web site and sent them a link to the article. I explained that it wasn't really you that was afraid to let them know about this, but really it was someone who had stolen your password and wanted to make you look bad.
Dave
Close, it is from the immense tidal (gravitational) forces imposed by Jupiter and the other moons.
Dave
"And in the year 2003 you're going to see the NASA Pluto Express fly by and take pictures of your way cool surface to send to this web page address: h t t p colon slash slash d o s x x dot colorado dot edu slash plutohome dot h t m l You've got your own web page! For a little guy, you've made quite a splash!"
The NASA scientists I was working for at the time, explained to me that the real issue in planetary status was not size or location, but how and when Pluto was formed. Which was why they were very excited about the Pluto/Kuiper Express mission, which has now been put on hold.
Dave
Dave
Mandates? I wasn't aware that he had even one, much less several. He didn't win the election, much less win it by any amount to justify the word "mandate."
Dave
Dave
Caveat is that it only runs on Win95/98/NT (except for the beginnings of a port I did for my kids to Macintosh while waiting on a distributor).
This would be a shameless plug if I was getting any royalties from it, but I am not... so it is just a plain old plug... it is available at Exploring the Planets. It was an exceptionally cool project to work on. My first day on the job, as we were getting the office set up, I answered the phone and tried to take a message for Gentry (Chief Engineer of Viking I & II and Galileo). The guy just said to let him know that "Buzz called". It just got better from there.
Dave
Dave
Not doubly screwed. The Texas governor is so weak as to be worthless. Bush did as little harm as he did good as our governor. Perry, however, is competent evil. The power resides in the Lt Governor, at worst we break even by moving Perry out of a position to continue the harm he has been doing.
Dave