I'm going to assume that you think everything posted is truth.
Trade shows, gun shows, people paying cash for handguns, without having to wait five days.
Not illegal. First off, gun manufactureres get no money off this (no more than used CD sales give money to the riaa). There is no five day waiting period - there is a thing called instant check, though private individuals do not have to go through the system (and the gun manufactuars do not get money from them, and it is perfectly legal). There is no special provisions for gun shows - gun dealers still have to follow the same rules and so do private individuals (hint - look up "the yellow sheet" to find the minimum needed for sale).
The problem is that, even though they *know* that a large amount of money is coming from illegal sales, they do nothing to stop it.
Even given that what you imply is actually true - that 60% of thier profits come from known illegal arms sells - what would you have them do. In order for them to sell to a person you must have a FFL (Federal Firearms Liscense - that is the Federal Govt has declared that you are capable of selling legal firarms), at what point are they liable. If the *FEDERAL* govt says you are trusted to resell firarms what shoudl the manufacturers do? It seems that the federal govt is liable for telling the manufacturers that those people are trustworthy when they are not, assuming that what you imply is true.
Great point - look at the Clinton appointee's - they ended up being the most conservative of the group though at the time they were expected to be very leftist, much to the chargin of many who approved them.
It is the single most important piece to our judicial system - they do what they think is correct, regardless of the political fallout and money changing hands in the parties (or, though this is sometimes bad, even if the majority of people disagree with them), at least for the most part.
It is good that the balance of power can tell those they balance to screw off.
I use vidomi (It actually uses both of my processors - which is a good thing) and you can seperate out the audio track into any codec supported on your computer (though this is with winders).
I've used to remix the Queen song "princes of the universe" to include Sean Connery's speech at the beginning of "The Highlander" (much cooler with it in there).
Unfortunately, Europe is entirely capable of creating its own gaffes, as well as grafting them on top of US-originating ideas.
[rant]Why is that nearly every good law the US has that is replaced by a crappy one is passed "because europe does it" and nearly every good law europe has that is replaced by a crappy one is because "the US does it"
Everybody seems plagued by this. They seem to want to take all the crappy laws from each country, the most restrictive from each country, and create a homogenized structure based on that. Why can't they take the good stuff from everyone.
Well, it would still be rare. Males with no girlfriends, strait females wouldn't have girlfriends, homosexuals will be the female coutner parts of the males and hence no girlfriends.
Those numbers have been important in arguing with xbox religious people. I hear constantly that the xbox is number 2 and is make HUGE gains on the playstation, thier sales have gone up X percent while sony's has only gone up Y percent (where x is much greater than y).
Yea, so - sony has over *5 times* the number of consoles sold - microsoft can grow 60 percent while sony only grows 25 percent all year long and sony will still be widening the gap with the xbox.
Seeing the raw numbers puts things in a much different light than most of the big pro-xbox sites around and what microsoft wants people to think.
Not that sony is an angel in the field, just that micrsoft isn't doing quite as well as they would like you to think.
Then the system is *still* worthless because the information will not be acted upon in a timely manner. The future attack will occur despite the enhanced surveillance because the conclusions developed from the intelligence may sound insane to the analyst. In short, all conclusions leading to something outrageous will be ignored. So the reasons for gathering the information cannot be justified based on the prospect that it *might* catch the bad guys.
If you are waiting for an all or nothing perfect system then it will never happen. Most are incremental and a learning process. Even if it only foils many small terrorist attacks and a few large ones it is still a good system with repect to catching terrorists - much better than what we are doing now. Once more that irrespective of personal freedoms - just that arguing that it will not catch all criminals (or even just a few of them) will fall on deaf ears for most people. And if it is enough of a personal violation to be bad then it is regardless of the amount of criminals or terrorist it would catch.
Right. Just like the FBI started dragging in all Arab males just after the Murrah Building was destroyed. The FBI later claimed they had reasonable certainty that the attackers fit the profile.
And they did have reason. Profiles are statistical models and as such are not infallable. If over 90% of those crimes are commited by a certain group (be it religious, ethnic, or such) then it is fairly reasonable to seek out those people - the people they gathered up were not just simply random Arabs. Innocent people get detained and interviewed all the time.
But, then again, thier methods also *did* end up with catching the correct person.
I assumed something along those lines - unless I am using the term wrong (I am by no means a die hard MMORPG player) that would still be farming items, just for PC reselling instead of NPC selling.
Project Entropia seems to do most of this already. I only played during the economic model beta - interesting concept. Free client, free to play if you want. You put real money in for game money, get real money out from the same game money. So, theoretically, if you spent enough time farming then you could make some money, though I doubt very much.
Typically "start up" funds are about 10 bucks or so - at least when I played.
1) If this statement is indeed true, then my first question is "Were the links apparent before, or after the terrorist attacks".
a) If the answer is "before", then why didn't these paragons of virtue say something and save ~3000 lives?
Because there were many many different plots that appeared to be going on - flying a plane into the world trade center sounded quite a bit tin-foil hat theory - would you have supported military and police action because "it appeared, within the intelligence commite, that the taliban was going to fly an airplane into the world trade centers"? Probably not.
b) If the answer is "after", then the system is worthless as an intelligence tool. The bits and pieces of any conspiracy are always out in the public before an incident occurs. The value of intelligence analysis is the ability to merge these apparently unrelated pieces of information to reach a conclusion. If their system is only capable of making a link after an event, then Florida residents better keep an eye on their wallets.
Not true - it is generall a good idea to figure out who did it with a reasonable amount of certainty for some form of prosecution. I for one like that.
Here, I'll do the same thing without their database: 'The Japanese were responsible for bombing Pearl Harbor.'
Pretty neat, huh?
Yes, pretty neat. Especially considering that was a pretty simple trail to follow. Maybe some of the other recent bombings are not so simple?
There are much better reasons to hate/fear this system than those. They are actually pretty good reasons to have it if the privacy concerns could be met (which they really can not).
Yes, but would you really trust your life to a model? At some point they moved from a model - there is no "in between" in that system. You go from a model to the real world (nature of the problem, you either have x number of trains moving through the itnersection or you do not). You can not get a prototype interchange system that mimics the real world with one or two volunteers well enough to be usefull - you have to use the real world.
Would you trust any driver/model you wrote to not kill some people? I know I would not and I do not consider myself to be a bad programmer.
Sorta OT but a company came to our school when I was there and offered jobs. It started by telling us they had professional massages every thursday, anytime there was a space something or other at nasa they took time off to watch it. Friday, saturday and sundays off. Free day care, free unlimited dry cleaning. Pay was quite good (I don't remember) and some other nice perks I didn't remember.
So I was thinking "Ok, whats the catch, are they lieing?". Turns out the wrote control systems for trains (some form of intelligent scheduling system) that should they fail the trains collided with each other. Because of the way the things work most testing was "live" - it had to be carried out on a real train moving in the real world - if your software failed people died. Sometimes the first real test of the software was on *real live trains* - I mean just the trains you see running around with chemicals and such. The software was very complex on top of that.
The average job span there was only a few years because of the stress. No way would I ever take a job with that much risk involved, even should thier testing of been easier I don't know that I could handle having my software fail and 200 people die.
Re:What does reboot even mean in this context?
on
In-Flight Reboot?
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· Score: 1
In this type of system that is actually kinda dangerous thinking. Others have mentioned many ways, that even if the code is perfect, the system may fail.
In fact you assume failure - both hardware and software - it will happen. Control systems get large anough that there WILL be bugs, you just deseign the system so that it doesn't matter. The money goes towards minimising these bugs, Where you really can get no better then the limit as bugs approach zero - you can not reach zero regardless of the amount of money or expertise - and for testing/redundancy. Most likely each redundent part of the system was deseigned and implemented seperatly so that they do not have the same bugs. That is VERY expensive to do (think about training three groups, since they can not communicate three seperate facilities, implementing all three, testing all three, then testing them together and causing all the faults you can possibly think of BEFORE the system even goes into beta and a live test flight. Then the exhastive regression testing in a working, real system).
Oak ridge has tought us very many things, of those nuclear power is unclean is not one of them.
First, the ecology of the area is quite robust. A lot of wildlife - on the road into the lab deer are populated enough that nearly two are killed every week crossing the road, turkey's have become so overpopulated that they are opening the preservation up for hunting (previously only animals large enough to damage property were allowed to hunt), and Melton Hill lake is swimable and the fish are edible (above a certain point - though that point is for bacterial not nuclear).
Also Oak ridges issue, as stated in the article, is from the 40's and 50's when they thought that putting the waste in barrels at the bottom of a pond was good enough, or pouring stuff on the ground was good. As far as I know that is not standard practice today. This has to do with nuclear bomb production back in the early days, it's not even relevent to current weapons research (which is produces much worse waste than a power plant).
Oak Risge still produces some of the most radioactive stuff in the world (at the HFIR http://www.ornl.gov/hfir/hfirhome.html ) and does so qutie safely - I've looked in the holding tank at stuff glowing quite brightly (medical isotopes being produced) so it is definatly on going production.
Modern plants are quite efficient and do not produce near the waste that they used to - in fact, a large portion of thier material is recyclable back into the plant or into other useful materials. Coal is MUCH worse for the environment than nuclear power. Total impact - with materials cost, waste, and output - nuclear plants are one of, if not the best, solutions for power in all geographical areas.
"Luther came along and destroyed their control by doing what Ester had done long before. He gave the Bible back to the people so THEY could determine what was the truth and what wasn't without having to rely on a priest."
OT (but I find quite funny), one of my friends and his Wife are Catholic , and thus were married in a Catholic church. I had a very strong urge to end the wedding with an 80's punk rock type of outburst "Martin Luther RUUUUULES!" while shaking my fist. Since this would have meant he was no longer my friend (not because of protestant, but not really approriate for a wedding) I refrained:)
I went to montreal a few years back. I went to a few restaurants and was treated well. That is true - though the fact that I was paying them probably had something to do with it.
Out in the streets was another story - I know about three french words - none of them nice polite words. Simply saying "Excuse me, could you please direct me to ?" got one of the few words I recognise quite often. Of course they could have been double hatred for me as I am American also. As the question I asked wasn't exactly what you would call rude I don't think it was what I said. While they was a minority, it was a large enough minority that I encountered it several times a day. Most were indifferent (read ignored me)though that could just be city life. The portion of people that were nice was about the same as the rude (outside of restaurants and the conference).
Having never payed any attention to language squabbles before I can't say I predisposed to experience this. I could care less what people speak.
Outside of the conference/university and resaurants the reception was horrid - the worst I have ever had on travel.
If your car had a 30% chance of bursting into flames while you were driving it, would you rather know about it now or wait for the recall?
This would be more like "If your car was touched in a certain way it will automatically explode, but normal everyday operations work fine, would you want everyone to know about it until a fix is made?" probably not - as long as they are activly working on the patch. I, for one, would not like to have "code red" worms working around the internet for all windows boxes (not just IIS) simply because of the bandwidth used. This seems to be dealt with correctly.
This would be true of any software system I have - I would rather the programmers be contacted directly - if possible - to fix the vulnerability before going public. Now if they sat on it I'm all for full disclosure to force thier hand.
Then again, is this yet another example of the Internet and the rest of the world becoming more and more centered on the continental USA?
No, that is most companies trying to sell a product in thier country on the web.
For example, I race radio controll cars. Japan has the newest and more "professional" kits (carbon fibre, titanium, etc). Many not available in the US because of tarriffs - companies just don't have enough demand for them at the price. I make enough and want one. Unfortunatly it is VERY difficult to find someone that will ship what you want, replacement parts, and other misc items needed to run the car to the US.
One of my friends like "foreign" films (not made in the US). He has players for the regions he wants. It is difficult to get many of the DVD's shipped to the US.
There has never been the implication of everything on world accessable servers to sell to the world, wasn't using gopher, usenet, or the web - all of which had parts that were world visisble. In fact, it is not horribly uncommon to find web sites that will not sale outside of thier states as they do not want to deal with fraud issues and legalities between states, let alone international.
Because we can is a valid excuse. Think of it this way:
"Why overclock a processor to the point it needs liquid nitrogen": because we can
"Why try and break the record for the fastest mile ran": because we can
"Why climb mount everest": because we can
That is basically a way of saying that we can push the limits in a way that we can actually achieve. We can't, at this point, colonise another starsytem, but we can send people into space.
I can walk down the street to the market but that's not too interesting (well, I'm fat and out of shape so it may be), OTOH a new world record mile ran is interesting.
Much of our technology is pushed by someone thinking "I can do that" and proving it by doing the action. If we only stayed within what we knew for sure we could do both society and science would never evolve. "Because we can" Is very important.
Well, I guess that depends on your current political leaning - ORNL is Oak Ridge National Lab (the one from the manhattan project where the fissionable materials were produced) - the US govt.
Another one I forgot was also with P4's. On several of our applications, that because they were once again compiled with no particular architecture in mind had nothing more than the minimum optimisations run, ran faster on P3's 1/2 the speed of the P4's. Once optimised for the processor the P4's more than triple the speed of the P3's. That is important to know - do I have to have code optomised for my processor. Unoptomised (or at the very least no processor specific stuff) is usefull indication of this.
I've also done compiler work - I do understand the differences and what you said before.
If I have a mix of compiled code and I don't know what it is optimised for because it is closed source and I have a binary (or I do know but can't run it on specific hardware). I want to know what worse case scanario is. Hard-to-optimise code will generall not do much worse than unoptimised code (unless you go out and write something specifically to kill the machine).
For something more concrete: I have a 16 processor p3 zeon cluster, 18 processor p4 cluster, and a 16 processor athlon cluster. I know I have some closed source code optimised for a P4 and athlons (as they are our "main" cluster). I need to run the code and can't recompile to optimise. Which should I run them on as the code needs to be ran on a single cluster (firewall issues and such that I can't control).
It is important to know which one of the will perform good with code that is NOT optimised for it. No, unoptimised code is not exact, but it is a hell of a lot better than looking at optimised code. In fact it gives a pretty good estimation of which cluster to run on. The above is not a horribly rare occurence. It DOES factor into which machines we buy for a cluster, so does optimised performance. If you do not then you can get VERY bad performance from some expensive and fast hardware. And that I do know from experience (our high dollar P4 clusters had absolutly shitty performance because of this on several projects).
It generally doesn't take much to get the idea across if you know different (I do know technical jargon)
Heck, I'm not an Apple fan (in fact I tend to really dislike the UI in the mac os) but yellow dog linux has had some good clustering solutions for smaller clusters, both for high availibility and computation. They had some pretty nifty software (though last time I saw it it had some severe scalability problems with thier UI - but then again they were not selling multi thousand node clusters and it has been a couple of years since I last checked that closely).
Slashdot Mirror
Too late, even France and Germany can see this is a bad thing worthy of destruction, plus it need to be pre-emptive also.
I know - lets bomb ICANN then!
I'm going to assume that you think everything posted is truth.
Trade shows, gun shows, people paying cash for handguns, without having to wait five days.
Not illegal. First off, gun manufactureres get no money off this (no more than used CD sales give money to the riaa). There is no five day waiting period - there is a thing called instant check, though private individuals do not have to go through the system (and the gun manufactuars do not get money from them, and it is perfectly legal). There is no special provisions for gun shows - gun dealers still have to follow the same rules and so do private individuals (hint - look up "the yellow sheet" to find the minimum needed for sale).
The problem is that, even though they *know* that a large amount of money is coming from illegal sales, they do nothing to stop it.
Even given that what you imply is actually true - that 60% of thier profits come from known illegal arms sells - what would you have them do. In order for them to sell to a person you must have a FFL (Federal Firearms Liscense - that is the Federal Govt has declared that you are capable of selling legal firarms), at what point are they liable. If the *FEDERAL* govt says you are trusted to resell firarms what shoudl the manufacturers do? It seems that the federal govt is liable for telling the manufacturers that those people are trustworthy when they are not, assuming that what you imply is true.
Great point - look at the Clinton appointee's - they ended up being the most conservative of the group though at the time they were expected to be very leftist, much to the chargin of many who approved them.
It is the single most important piece to our judicial system - they do what they think is correct, regardless of the political fallout and money changing hands in the parties (or, though this is sometimes bad, even if the majority of people disagree with them), at least for the most part.
It is good that the balance of power can tell those they balance to screw off.
I use vidomi (It actually uses both of my processors - which is a good thing) and you can seperate out the audio track into any codec supported on your computer (though this is with winders).
I've used to remix the Queen song "princes of the universe" to include Sean Connery's speech at the beginning of "The Highlander" (much cooler with it in there).
Unfortunately, Europe is entirely capable of creating its own gaffes, as well as grafting them on top of US-originating ideas.
[rant]Why is that nearly every good law the US has that is replaced by a crappy one is passed "because europe does it" and nearly every good law europe has that is replaced by a crappy one is because "the US does it"
Everybody seems plagued by this. They seem to want to take all the crappy laws from each country, the most restrictive from each country, and create a homogenized structure based on that. Why can't they take the good stuff from everyone.
Bah, politicians the world over suck.[/rant]
Ok, I feel a little better.
Well, it would still be rare. Males with no girlfriends, strait females wouldn't have girlfriends, homosexuals will be the female coutner parts of the males and hence no girlfriends.
Thus it is gender inspecific and correct.
Those numbers have been important in arguing with xbox religious people. I hear constantly that the xbox is number 2 and is make HUGE gains on the playstation, thier sales have gone up X percent while sony's has only gone up Y percent (where x is much greater than y).
Yea, so - sony has over *5 times* the number of consoles sold - microsoft can grow 60 percent while sony only grows 25 percent all year long and sony will still be widening the gap with the xbox.
Seeing the raw numbers puts things in a much different light than most of the big pro-xbox sites around and what microsoft wants people to think.
Not that sony is an angel in the field, just that micrsoft isn't doing quite as well as they would like you to think.
Then the system is *still* worthless because the information will not be acted upon in a timely manner. The future attack will occur despite the enhanced surveillance because the conclusions developed from the intelligence may sound insane to the analyst. In short, all conclusions leading to something outrageous will be ignored. So the reasons for gathering the information cannot be justified based on the prospect that it *might* catch the bad guys.
If you are waiting for an all or nothing perfect system then it will never happen. Most are incremental and a learning process. Even if it only foils many small terrorist attacks and a few large ones it is still a good system with repect to catching terrorists - much better than what we are doing now. Once more that irrespective of personal freedoms - just that arguing that it will not catch all criminals (or even just a few of them) will fall on deaf ears for most people. And if it is enough of a personal violation to be bad then it is regardless of the amount of criminals or terrorist it would catch.
Right. Just like the FBI started dragging in all Arab males just after the Murrah Building was destroyed. The FBI later claimed they had reasonable certainty that the attackers fit the profile.
And they did have reason. Profiles are statistical models and as such are not infallable. If over 90% of those crimes are commited by a certain group (be it religious, ethnic, or such) then it is fairly reasonable to seek out those people - the people they gathered up were not just simply random Arabs. Innocent people get detained and interviewed all the time.
But, then again, thier methods also *did* end up with catching the correct person.
I assumed something along those lines - unless I am using the term wrong (I am by no means a die hard MMORPG player) that would still be farming items, just for PC reselling instead of NPC selling.
Project Entropia seems to do most of this already. I only played during the economic model beta - interesting concept. Free client, free to play if you want. You put real money in for game money, get real money out from the same game money. So, theoretically, if you spent enough time farming then you could make some money, though I doubt very much.
Typically "start up" funds are about 10 bucks or so - at least when I played.
1) If this statement is indeed true, then my first question is "Were the links apparent before, or after the terrorist attacks".
a) If the answer is "before", then why didn't these paragons of virtue say something and save ~3000 lives?
Because there were many many different plots that appeared to be going on - flying a plane into the world trade center sounded quite a bit tin-foil hat theory - would you have supported military and police action because "it appeared, within the intelligence commite, that the taliban was going to fly an airplane into the world trade centers"? Probably not.
b) If the answer is "after", then the system is worthless as an intelligence tool. The bits and pieces of any conspiracy are always out in the public before an incident occurs. The value of intelligence analysis is the ability to merge these apparently unrelated pieces of information to reach a conclusion. If their system is only capable of making a link after an event, then Florida residents better keep an eye on their wallets.
Not true - it is generall a good idea to figure out who did it with a reasonable amount of certainty for some form of prosecution. I for one like that.
Here, I'll do the same thing without their database: 'The Japanese were responsible for
bombing Pearl Harbor.'
Pretty neat, huh?
Yes, pretty neat. Especially considering that was a pretty simple trail to follow. Maybe some of the other recent bombings are not so simple?
There are much better reasons to hate/fear this system than those. They are actually pretty good reasons to have it if the privacy concerns could be met (which they really can not).
Yes, but would you really trust your life to a model? At some point they moved from a model - there is no "in between" in that system. You go from a model to the real world (nature of the problem, you either have x number of trains moving through the itnersection or you do not). You can not get a prototype interchange system that mimics the real world with one or two volunteers well enough to be usefull - you have to use the real world.
Would you trust any driver/model you wrote to not kill some people? I know I would not and I do not consider myself to be a bad programmer.
Sorta OT but a company came to our school when I was there and offered jobs. It started by telling us they had professional massages every thursday, anytime there was a space something or other at nasa they took time off to watch it. Friday, saturday and sundays off. Free day care, free unlimited dry cleaning. Pay was quite good (I don't remember) and some other nice perks I didn't remember.
So I was thinking "Ok, whats the catch, are they lieing?". Turns out the wrote control systems for trains (some form of intelligent scheduling system) that should they fail the trains collided with each other. Because of the way the things work most testing was "live" - it had to be carried out on a real train moving in the real world - if your software failed people died. Sometimes the first real test of the software was on *real live trains* - I mean just the trains you see running around with chemicals and such. The software was very complex on top of that.
The average job span there was only a few years because of the stress. No way would I ever take a job with that much risk involved, even should thier testing of been easier I don't know that I could handle having my software fail and 200 people die.
In this type of system that is actually kinda dangerous thinking. Others have mentioned many ways, that even if the code is perfect, the system may fail.
In fact you assume failure - both hardware and software - it will happen. Control systems get large anough that there WILL be bugs, you just deseign the system so that it doesn't matter. The money goes towards minimising these bugs, Where you really can get no better then the limit as bugs approach zero - you can not reach zero regardless of the amount of money or expertise - and for testing/redundancy. Most likely each redundent part of the system was deseigned and implemented seperatly so that they do not have the same bugs. That is VERY expensive to do (think about training three groups, since they can not communicate three seperate facilities, implementing all three, testing all three, then testing them together and causing all the faults you can possibly think of BEFORE the system even goes into beta and a live test flight. Then the exhastive regression testing in a working, real system).
Oak ridge has tought us very many things, of those nuclear power is unclean is not one of them.
First, the ecology of the area is quite robust. A lot of wildlife - on the road into the lab deer are populated enough that nearly two are killed every week crossing the road, turkey's have become so overpopulated that they are opening the preservation up for hunting (previously only animals large enough to damage property were allowed to hunt), and Melton Hill lake is swimable and the fish are edible (above a certain point - though that point is for bacterial not nuclear).
Also Oak ridges issue, as stated in the article, is from the 40's and 50's when they thought that putting the waste in barrels at the bottom of a pond was good enough, or pouring stuff on the ground was good. As far as I know that is not standard practice today. This has to do with nuclear bomb production back in the early days, it's not even relevent to current weapons research (which is produces much worse waste than a power plant).
Oak Risge still produces some of the most radioactive stuff in the world (at the HFIR http://www.ornl.gov/hfir/hfirhome.html ) and does so qutie safely - I've looked in the holding tank at stuff glowing quite brightly (medical isotopes being produced) so it is definatly on going production.
Modern plants are quite efficient and do not produce near the waste that they used to - in fact, a large portion of thier material is recyclable back into the plant or into other useful materials. Coal is MUCH worse for the environment than nuclear power. Total impact - with materials cost, waste, and output - nuclear plants are one of, if not the best, solutions for power in all geographical areas.
"Luther came along and destroyed their control by doing what Ester had done long before. He gave the Bible back to the people so THEY could determine what was the truth and what wasn't without having to rely on a priest."
:)
OT (but I find quite funny), one of my friends and his Wife are Catholic , and thus were married in a Catholic church. I had a very strong urge to end the wedding with an 80's punk rock type of outburst "Martin Luther RUUUUULES!" while shaking my fist. Since this would have meant he was no longer my friend (not because of protestant, but not really approriate for a wedding) I refrained
Bite my shiny metal ass!
--Bender
I went to montreal a few years back. I went to a few restaurants and was treated well. That is true - though the fact that I was paying them probably had something to do with it.
Out in the streets was another story - I know about three french words - none of them nice polite words. Simply saying "Excuse me, could you please direct me to ?" got one of the few words I recognise quite often. Of course they could have been double hatred for me as I am American also. As the question I asked wasn't exactly what you would call rude I don't think it was what I said. While they was a minority, it was a large enough minority that I encountered it several times a day. Most were indifferent (read ignored me)though that could just be city life. The portion of people that were nice was about the same as the rude (outside of restaurants and the conference).
Having never payed any attention to language squabbles before I can't say I predisposed to experience this. I could care less what people speak.
Outside of the conference/university and resaurants the reception was horrid - the worst I have ever had on travel.
If your car had a 30% chance of bursting into flames while you were driving it, would you rather know about it now or wait for the recall?
This would be more like "If your car was touched in a certain way it will automatically explode, but normal everyday operations work fine, would you want everyone to know about it until a fix is made?" probably not - as long as they are activly working on the patch. I, for one, would not like to have "code red" worms working around the internet for all windows boxes (not just IIS) simply because of the bandwidth used. This seems to be dealt with correctly.
This would be true of any software system I have - I would rather the programmers be contacted directly - if possible - to fix the vulnerability before going public. Now if they sat on it I'm all for full disclosure to force thier hand.
Then again, is this yet another example of the Internet and the rest of the world becoming more and more centered on the continental USA?
No, that is most companies trying to sell a product in thier country on the web.
For example, I race radio controll cars. Japan has the newest and more "professional" kits (carbon fibre, titanium, etc). Many not available in the US because of tarriffs - companies just don't have enough demand for them at the price. I make enough and want one. Unfortunatly it is VERY difficult to find someone that will ship what you want, replacement parts, and other misc items needed to run the car to the US.
One of my friends like "foreign" films (not made in the US). He has players for the regions he wants. It is difficult to get many of the DVD's shipped to the US.
There has never been the implication of everything on world accessable servers to sell to the world, wasn't using gopher, usenet, or the web - all of which had parts that were world visisble. In fact, it is not horribly uncommon to find web sites that will not sale outside of thier states as they do not want to deal with fraud issues and legalities between states, let alone international.
Because we can is a valid excuse. Think of it this way:
"Why overclock a processor to the point it needs liquid nitrogen": because we can
"Why try and break the record for the fastest mile ran": because we can
"Why climb mount everest": because we can
That is basically a way of saying that we can push the limits in a way that we can actually achieve. We can't, at this point, colonise another starsytem, but we can send people into space.
I can walk down the street to the market but that's not too interesting (well, I'm fat and out of shape so it may be), OTOH a new world record mile ran is interesting.
Much of our technology is pushed by someone thinking "I can do that" and proving it by doing the action. If we only stayed within what we knew for sure we could do both society and science would never evolve. "Because we can" Is very important.
Well, I guess that depends on your current political leaning - ORNL is Oak Ridge National Lab (the one from the manhattan project where the fissionable materials were produced) - the US govt.
Another one I forgot was also with P4's. On several of our applications, that because they were once again compiled with no particular architecture in mind had nothing more than the minimum optimisations run, ran faster on P3's 1/2 the speed of the P4's. Once optimised for the processor the P4's more than triple the speed of the P3's. That is important to know - do I have to have code optomised for my processor. Unoptomised (or at the very least no processor specific stuff) is usefull indication of this.
Sorry then, simply a differnece of opinion then.
I've also done compiler work - I do understand the differences and what you said before.
If I have a mix of compiled code and I don't know what it is optimised for because it is closed source and I have a binary (or I do know but can't run it on specific hardware). I want to know what worse case scanario is. Hard-to-optimise code will generall not do much worse than unoptimised code (unless you go out and write something specifically to kill the machine).
For something more concrete: I have a 16 processor p3 zeon cluster, 18 processor p4 cluster, and a 16 processor athlon cluster. I know I have some closed source code optimised for a P4 and athlons (as they are our "main" cluster). I need to run the code and can't recompile to optimise. Which should I run them on as the code needs to be ran on a single cluster (firewall issues and such that I can't control).
It is important to know which one of the will perform good with code that is NOT optimised for it. No, unoptimised code is not exact, but it is a hell of a lot better than looking at optimised code. In fact it gives a pretty good estimation of which cluster to run on. The above is not a horribly rare occurence. It DOES factor into which machines we buy for a cluster, so does optimised performance. If you do not then you can get VERY bad performance from some expensive and fast hardware. And that I do know from experience (our high dollar P4 clusters had absolutly shitty performance because of this on several projects).
It generally doesn't take much to get the idea across if you know different (I do know technical jargon)
Heck, I'm not an Apple fan (in fact I tend to really dislike the UI in the mac os) but yellow dog linux has had some good clustering solutions for smaller clusters, both for high availibility and computation. They had some pretty nifty software (though last time I saw it it had some severe scalability problems with thier UI - but then again they were not selling multi thousand node clusters and it has been a couple of years since I last checked that closely).
See http://www.yellowdoglinux.com/