You're comparing a federal district without statehood to a state. Of course the numbers aren't comparable.
The Feds run DC, so that's the budget for public buildings, cops, fire deparments, dogcatchers, public employee retirement, the whole schmear. Alaska, being a state, has its own sources of revenue and pays for those services out of its own pocket. They top it up with federal block grants.
Alaska gets more money from the Feds than they put in, unlike California, which gets about 84 cents for every dollar we pay. We subsidize scroungers like Palin who compete on how much they can squeeze from the Federal money-tit, then take credit for their fiscal prudence.
Contacts are also of limited value when one party is several orders of magnitude more powerful than another. They only serve as instruments of oppression.
I'd like to see the law say that it's not a valid contract unless either party is demonstrably able to negotiate a change in its terms. In the case of telco customers, that is plainly not the case. You take what they offer or you do without. And they will unilaterally change the terms after you sign.
When I hear someone advocate this kind of slimy, manipulative, dishonest behavior and resort to such contorted bullshit to defend an unconscionable contract, I suspect that they secretly believe that the only way they will ever thrive in a capitalist system is by being a chiseler and a scam artist themselves. I sure as hell wouldn't knowingly do business with anyone with such an attitude. I'd also count my fingers after shaking hands with them.
The title and text of the parent post are inconsistent. The article is about the failures and obsolescence of the flight-plan system, but the discussion of radars, etc, in the text of the post is about other parts of the air-traffic control system. The flight-plan system interfaces to the part of the system that synthesizes radar data and allows communication from controllers to aircraft, but it is not that system. The reason for the interface is so you can do correlation of observed aircraft ID data, positions and position history with flight plans that have been filed. Then, if a plane goes off its flight path, the controllers can warn them and start emergency measures, which includes handing off to the air force.
The amount of data in a flight plan is pretty small, and the volume of messaging is on the order of a few million per year. Conceptually, NADIN is little more than a guaranteed-delivery email system. Next time they build the system they should consider routing over the Internet (of course using encryption) as a backup communication path. And there's also a huge amount that's been learned about system redundancy and scalability in the past few decades. The 99.9% uptime mentioned in the article is piss-poor for such a critical system. That's 8.76 hours per year of downtime. I delivered military systems in the 80's that had far better uptime. It wasn't even good in its own time.
I worked on both military and civilian air traffic control systems. The FAA and their consultants I met had that dangerous combination of arrogance and pig-ignorance that makes failure inevitable. They knew next to nothing about user interfaces, and had worse understanding of engineering tradeoffs than the average private sector middle manager (and that's pretty bad). By contrast, a good percentage of US Air Force officers involved in ATC actually knew what they were talking about. The FAA controllers I met were also shockingly ignorant of the capabilities and limitations of their systems, and some of their processes were there for historic reasons that no longer made sense. It was like dealing with overpaid DMV counter staff. It scares the hell out of me that people's lives depend on decisions that these knuckleheads make.
For USians it is wise to keep in mind that the Mail is little better than the National Enquirer. So crass, patronizing comments and appalling idiocy are to be expected.
Let's prioritize. Start with dealing with those who are "breaking the fucking law" forbidding wars of aggression and torture. Then let's go after the ones swindling people out of billions. Then smaller-scale violent crime. Once we're done with those problems, maybe we can go after a few granola-munchers growing pot in their backyards, unless by that time the US gets its collective head unwedged and repeals the inane and repressive laws against cannabis.
Incidentally I'm not a cannabis user or grower. I don't like the high and make my money in other ways. I'm for legalization because it's the right thing to do, not because there's anything in it for me personally.
Gov. Ryan commuted the sentences of all Illinois death row inmates after DNA testing exonerated ten percent of them.
It's worse than that. The minimum error rate is 10%. It is actually likely to be a higher rate, since DNA evidence that can overturn every false conviction is not necessarily available, and the appeals process may have blocked other legitimate attempts to overturn unsound convictions.
They went out of their way and expended extra effort to prevent Linux from working on their system.
Far be it from me to defend these bozos, but there are a couple nuances to keep in mind. First, they probably didn't write the BIOS. Second, it's quite possible that the BIOS code started out being wrong for all systems and was later fixed only for Vista since that's where the problem was detected and some moron didn't feel like fully testing the fix. In that case the poor quality was due to incompetence, not solely malice.
Not an excuse for shoddy products in any way. But I find it hard to believe that they would actively expend effort to sabotage Linux. Hardware makers are all about razor-thin margins, and I just don't see them spending money on something like that. Far more likely someone's just doing half-assed maintenance of the BIOS code.
Yeah, it's just like standardized testing. It's irrelevant because the conditions imposed by the testing scenario are more important to the tester than the real demands of the job. So what ends up happening is an obnoxious rehash of a CompSci course. Anyone who does that to you is a head-wedged bureaucrat. Interviewing's hard. More than anything this is a sign of laziness or incompetence on the part of the interviewer. Probably means that they're also an inept manager.
I refuse to comply with interview bullshit. I push back when asked to do things that I think are ridiculous, and have on occasion walked out. It's harsh, but the only way that they'll learn... or at least the only way to keep your self-respect.
Hasn't cost me anything either. I was voluntarily unemployed once for a two-week period. Other than that, 28 years fully employed. So don't assume you have to put up with that crap in order to get a job.
I've used it on my laptops (Dells and Thinkpads) for about 3 or 4 years after getting impatient with Red Hat's slowness in releasing packages and lagging hardware support. MDV tends to be months ahead in this regard. Always seems to have some kind of installer bug or other but so far nothing that can't be overcome with my quite shamefully minimal Linux juju. Ubuntu's really nice but I find Mandriva more convenient. Perhaps that's just a case of the devil you know. They're a good bunch and I pay for Silver just to help them keep on keepin' on.
Whether it is a lack of viable employment, stable food/water supply, sanitary living conditions, or just a dictator who generally opresses them, their problems are much greater than just general health.
Which is why I don't believe that private charity can make a lasting difference. Eliminating that dictator is a policial act, not the act of a charity. Until that happens, the other goals will be obstructed. Charities will work with the powers that be. Those powers that be are a big part of the problem.
Free software can't fix that either. But Stallman deserves credit for understanding and promoting the view that free software cannot remain viable without reference to the political context. The same can be said for any initiatives intended to help poor people: to the extent that poverty relief disempowers local parasitic rulers, it causes politcal disruption. Real change will be resisted by feudal landlords and the loan sharks, not to mention the uniformed smugglers and extortionists that call themselves the police and the military.
Even if you make the huge assumption that organizations like the Gates Foundation have 100% pure intentions, "apolitical" charity is bound to fail because it cannot resolve the root causes of much poverty: oppression and corruption. In fact, by funneling money to the ruling elites, it may strengthen and perpetuate those institutions and groups, when the goal should be to remove them from power.
Unless all those software developers who would have been writing software now switch over to doing the medical research, which some of which are certainly not cut out for, then society
STILL has to support those developers in some way, like preventing them from starving.
This argument could be used to support the preservation of any status quo-- "have to keep feeding those buggy-whip makers or they'd all be starving in the streets." "Can't lower the price of medication because less money will go into the pockets of medical researchers." And so forth. The fact that money circulates does not imply that it has to circulate into the stagnant pools it now flows into. And let's not even get started on middlemen.
For most countries, and for most companies within those countries, money spent on software licenses is nothing but a cost. Same goes for software maintenance and support.
The whole "argument from economics" is based on a grotesque distortion of human nature. People are not just rational optimizers: we also cooperate and collaborate. Systems of political economy that fail to take that into account are defective. In the US we are living in one such failed experiment in social engineering now. The so-called free-marketeers have been forcing an anti-human utopia on us every bit as broken and corrupt as that of the old Soviet Union.
If I, as an ISP user, can determine the QoS algorithm, that's a different story. But when the providers of the service have a financial incentive to favor categories of content that they sell, QoS is not being done in my interest. It's just a way of further degrading and limiting a service that I paid for. That's manipulative and slimy. Please look at how cellular providers operate for a nice preview of that dystopia.
Most ISPs already advertise packages on the basis of bandwidth but penalize customers who actually use it, so there's plenty of reason to distrust them in making any decisions on which content should be favored. Hint: if they're making a buck on it, it will have higher priority. If it's costing them money, lower. Nothing to do with what you want or need. Big ISPs don't give a shit about your interests.
As long as I know, so that I won't ever employ one of them, elect them, or use their services for anything that matters (OK, cleaning the leaves out of my rain gutters, maybe, if closely supervised). Belief in creationism is symptomatic of nothing but ignorance, superstition and an inclination to stick their magic-believing noses up other people's asscracks. A branch of my family are fundies and, while they make excellent corn-bread and aren't stupid, they are also not richly endowed with intellectual curiosity, and most are also afflicted with the Evangelical-Taliban syndrome: wanting to inflict their narrow and bizarre tribal customs on others by pretending that they are immutable religious beliefs or scientific principles.
Sorry to be blunt, but for our society to survive, such people need to be kept as far from the levers of power as possible.
First off, about half the army will likely defect. Civilian targets? Marshall law? Blow up towns?
The National Guard, composed of people a lot like ushas fired on unarmed US civilians on several occasions. Same goes for the police. Why should we assume the military would be any different? It would be miraculous if there were a 5% desertion rate, let alone 50%.
Look, they're killing hundreds of thousands of unarmed civilians now in Iraq-- they'd kill you and me too if someone pointed them in our direction.
Americans are just like the Germans when the Nazis took over, only more docile. Consider your coworkers and neighbors. They talk a lot about individuality but are more like a breed of unusually loud-mouthed sheep.
I use a 20M run of the cheapest of the cheap cable on our home network. I've never seen anything but 0&% packet loss from it. Ping time over wireless, through the wireless router/switch, down the 20M of cable to the DSL modem and back is 0.2 ms. That's UDP over very cheap equipment. A constant latency of this much is irrelevant for any audio purpose, though a phase difference between channels of this much would matter. But that's a whole 'nother kettle of fish. Anyway, it's trivial to set up and test, but if you're still fearful of packet loss, you can always buffer the audio stream.
A more relevant calculation is derived from the well-understood principle that the conditional probability of a person being an abject wanker given that they are an audiophile is very near one.
When a sock puppet like Enderle says something about Microsoft's intentions, it probably came from Microsoft. Whether it's true or not is a separate question.
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You're comparing a federal district without statehood to a state. Of course the numbers aren't comparable.
The Feds run DC, so that's the budget for public buildings, cops, fire deparments, dogcatchers, public employee retirement, the whole schmear. Alaska, being a state, has its own sources of revenue and pays for those services out of its own pocket. They top it up with federal block grants.
Alaska gets more money from the Feds than they put in, unlike California, which gets about 84 cents for every dollar we pay. We subsidize scroungers like Palin who compete on how much they can squeeze from the Federal money-tit, then take credit for their fiscal prudence.
s/contacts/contracts
Contacts are also of limited value when one party is several orders of magnitude more powerful than another. They only serve as instruments of oppression.
I'd like to see the law say that it's not a valid contract unless either party is demonstrably able to negotiate a change in its terms. In the case of telco customers, that is plainly not the case. You take what they offer or you do without. And they will unilaterally change the terms after you sign.
When I hear someone advocate this kind of slimy, manipulative, dishonest behavior and resort to such contorted bullshit to defend an unconscionable contract, I suspect that they secretly believe that the only way they will ever thrive in a capitalist system is by being a chiseler and a scam artist themselves. I sure as hell wouldn't knowingly do business with anyone with such an attitude. I'd also count my fingers after shaking hands with them.
Look, it's not easy being AT&T. They need the money to pay for all that warrantless-wiretapping equipment.
I used to design air-traffic control systems.
The title and text of the parent post are inconsistent. The article is about the failures and obsolescence of the flight-plan system, but the discussion of radars, etc, in the text of the post is about other parts of the air-traffic control system. The flight-plan system interfaces to the part of the system that synthesizes radar data and allows communication from controllers to aircraft, but it is not that system. The reason for the interface is so you can do correlation of observed aircraft ID data, positions and position history with flight plans that have been filed. Then, if a plane goes off its flight path, the controllers can warn them and start emergency measures, which includes handing off to the air force.
The amount of data in a flight plan is pretty small, and the volume of messaging is on the order of a few million per year. Conceptually, NADIN is little more than a guaranteed-delivery email system. Next time they build the system they should consider routing over the Internet (of course using encryption) as a backup communication path. And there's also a huge amount that's been learned about system redundancy and scalability in the past few decades. The 99.9% uptime mentioned in the article is piss-poor for such a critical system. That's 8.76 hours per year of downtime. I delivered military systems in the 80's that had far better uptime. It wasn't even good in its own time.
I worked on both military and civilian air traffic control systems. The FAA and their consultants I met had that dangerous combination of arrogance and pig-ignorance that makes failure inevitable. They knew next to nothing about user interfaces, and had worse understanding of engineering tradeoffs than the average private sector middle manager (and that's pretty bad). By contrast, a good percentage of US Air Force officers involved in ATC actually knew what they were talking about. The FAA controllers I met were also shockingly ignorant of the capabilities and limitations of their systems, and some of their processes were there for historic reasons that no longer made sense. It was like dealing with overpaid DMV counter staff. It scares the hell out of me that people's lives depend on decisions that these knuckleheads make.
Say, Witchfinder Pursuivant.
For USians it is wise to keep in mind that the Mail is little better than the National Enquirer. So crass, patronizing comments and appalling idiocy are to be expected.
Let's prioritize. Start with dealing with those who are "breaking the fucking law" forbidding wars of aggression and torture. Then let's go after the ones swindling people out of billions. Then smaller-scale violent crime. Once we're done with those problems, maybe we can go after a few granola-munchers growing pot in their backyards, unless by that time the US gets its collective head unwedged and repeals the inane and repressive laws against cannabis.
Incidentally I'm not a cannabis user or grower. I don't like the high and make my money in other ways. I'm for legalization because it's the right thing to do, not because there's anything in it for me personally.
It's worse than that. The minimum error rate is 10%. It is actually likely to be a higher rate, since DNA evidence that can overturn every false conviction is not necessarily available, and the appeals process may have blocked other legitimate attempts to overturn unsound convictions.
Far be it from me to defend these bozos, but there are a couple nuances to keep in mind. First, they probably didn't write the BIOS. Second, it's quite possible that the BIOS code started out being wrong for all systems and was later fixed only for Vista since that's where the problem was detected and some moron didn't feel like fully testing the fix. In that case the poor quality was due to incompetence, not solely malice.
Not an excuse for shoddy products in any way. But I find it hard to believe that they would actively expend effort to sabotage Linux. Hardware makers are all about razor-thin margins, and I just don't see them spending money on something like that. Far more likely someone's just doing half-assed maintenance of the BIOS code.
Yeah, it's just like standardized testing. It's irrelevant because the conditions imposed by the testing scenario are more important to the tester than the real demands of the job. So what ends up happening is an obnoxious rehash of a CompSci course. Anyone who does that to you is a head-wedged bureaucrat. Interviewing's hard. More than anything this is a sign of laziness or incompetence on the part of the interviewer. Probably means that they're also an inept manager.
I refuse to comply with interview bullshit. I push back when asked to do things that I think are ridiculous, and have on occasion walked out. It's harsh, but the only way that they'll learn... or at least the only way to keep your self-respect.
Hasn't cost me anything either. I was voluntarily unemployed once for a two-week period. Other than that, 28 years fully employed. So don't assume you have to put up with that crap in order to get a job.
I've used it on my laptops (Dells and Thinkpads) for about 3 or 4 years after getting impatient with Red Hat's slowness in releasing packages and lagging hardware support. MDV tends to be months ahead in this regard. Always seems to have some kind of installer bug or other but so far nothing that can't be overcome with my quite shamefully minimal Linux juju. Ubuntu's really nice but I find Mandriva more convenient. Perhaps that's just a case of the devil you know. They're a good bunch and I pay for Silver just to help them keep on keepin' on.
Are they publicly traded? If so I want to short their stock, thanks.
Which is why I don't believe that private charity can make a lasting difference. Eliminating that dictator is a policial act, not the act of a charity. Until that happens, the other goals will be obstructed. Charities will work with the powers that be. Those powers that be are a big part of the problem.
Free software can't fix that either. But Stallman deserves credit for understanding and promoting the view that free software cannot remain viable without reference to the political context. The same can be said for any initiatives intended to help poor people: to the extent that poverty relief disempowers local parasitic rulers, it causes politcal disruption. Real change will be resisted by feudal landlords and the loan sharks, not to mention the uniformed smugglers and extortionists that call themselves the police and the military.
Even if you make the huge assumption that organizations like the Gates Foundation have 100% pure intentions, "apolitical" charity is bound to fail because it cannot resolve the root causes of much poverty: oppression and corruption. In fact, by funneling money to the ruling elites, it may strengthen and perpetuate those institutions and groups, when the goal should be to remove them from power.
This argument could be used to support the preservation of any status quo-- "have to keep feeding those buggy-whip makers or they'd all be starving in the streets." "Can't lower the price of medication because less money will go into the pockets of medical researchers." And so forth. The fact that money circulates does not imply that it has to circulate into the stagnant pools it now flows into. And let's not even get started on middlemen.
For most countries, and for most companies within those countries, money spent on software licenses is nothing but a cost. Same goes for software maintenance and support.
The whole "argument from economics" is based on a grotesque distortion of human nature. People are not just rational optimizers: we also cooperate and collaborate. Systems of political economy that fail to take that into account are defective. In the US we are living in one such failed experiment in social engineering now. The so-called free-marketeers have been forcing an anti-human utopia on us every bit as broken and corrupt as that of the old Soviet Union.
Lots of laptops disappear when they get their hands on them.
If I, as an ISP user, can determine the QoS algorithm, that's a different story. But when the providers of the service have a financial incentive to favor categories of content that they sell, QoS is not being done in my interest. It's just a way of further degrading and limiting a service that I paid for. That's manipulative and slimy. Please look at how cellular providers operate for a nice preview of that dystopia.
Most ISPs already advertise packages on the basis of bandwidth but penalize customers who actually use it, so there's plenty of reason to distrust them in making any decisions on which content should be favored. Hint: if they're making a buck on it, it will have higher priority. If it's costing them money, lower. Nothing to do with what you want or need. Big ISPs don't give a shit about your interests.
As long as I know, so that I won't ever employ one of them, elect them, or use their services for anything that matters (OK, cleaning the leaves out of my rain gutters, maybe, if closely supervised). Belief in creationism is symptomatic of nothing but ignorance, superstition and an inclination to stick their magic-believing noses up other people's asscracks. A branch of my family are fundies and, while they make excellent corn-bread and aren't stupid, they are also not richly endowed with intellectual curiosity, and most are also afflicted with the Evangelical-Taliban syndrome: wanting to inflict their narrow and bizarre tribal customs on others by pretending that they are immutable religious beliefs or scientific principles.
Sorry to be blunt, but for our society to survive, such people need to be kept as far from the levers of power as possible.
Look, the Bible is true. It says so in the Bible. OK???
The National Guard, composed of people a lot like ushas fired on unarmed US civilians on several occasions. Same goes for the police. Why should we assume the military would be any different? It would be miraculous if there were a 5% desertion rate, let alone 50%.
Look, they're killing hundreds of thousands of unarmed civilians now in Iraq-- they'd kill you and me too if someone pointed them in our direction.
Americans are just like the Germans when the Nazis took over, only more docile. Consider your coworkers and neighbors. They talk a lot about individuality but are more like a breed of unusually loud-mouthed sheep.
In other words they're parasites free-riding on the efforts of the community and are looking for excuses.
I use a 20M run of the cheapest of the cheap cable on our home network. I've never seen anything but 0&% packet loss from it. Ping time over wireless, through the wireless router/switch, down the 20M of cable to the DSL modem and back is 0.2 ms. That's UDP over very cheap equipment. A constant latency of this much is irrelevant for any audio purpose, though a phase difference between channels of this much would matter. But that's a whole 'nother kettle of fish. Anyway, it's trivial to set up and test, but if you're still fearful of packet loss, you can always buffer the audio stream.
A more relevant calculation is derived from the well-understood principle that the conditional probability of a person being an abject wanker given that they are an audiophile is very near one.
Scam.
When a sock puppet like Enderle says something about Microsoft's intentions, it probably came from Microsoft. Whether it's true or not is a separate question.