Second, the Libyan President went on TV 1 week after the attack and said it was a terrorist attack. With the enormous intelligence budget we give to all the various Three-Letter Agencies, the U.S. should have known before a fledgling country with no intelligence agencies.
Oh yeah. Just like they did on September 10, 2001.
There's a country full of milling militias, any one (or more) which might seize an opportunity in a condition of general unrest. There's the possibility that one single militia had one single pre-prepared plan that they could roll out. There's the possibility that Al-Qaeda had a plan already set up and scheduled. Then again, there's a load of politically-based sensationalism a certain so-called "News" network wants to promote, which is basically trying to convince us that Osama, er, "Usama" bin Ladin personally led a wave of jihadis in a grand, pre-planned anniversary wave of jihadis - but only in one of the several unsettled countries making noise at that time.
Since when do we blindly believe what politicians say? Especially other people's politicians?
OK, I'm keeping an open mind. It's possible that this really was all an al-Qaeda plot. But I'd rather wait until the evidence was all collected, sifted and cross-checked. There's no ticking bomb here, and I'd really rather not have another pants-wetting rush to find ways to curtail our freedom just because some gang broke in and committed atrocities again.
Like a lot of "too good to be true" things, I suspect that the REAL time involved was more than just the 3 days.
If someone called me up, said "we're going to be writing a book this weekend, can you do X"? then yes, I could probably slam out a chapter in 3 days. but that's not counting the in-between time where I'd be getting my thoughts together and digging out the notes I'd want to use.
Nor would it be counting the time spent getting people selected to sign up or determining who's doing what.
Isn't one of open source's strong points is that things only get better over time with more people checking for errors and polishing the product?
Absolutely.
And I don't object to having a three-day sprint to do the work that they did. But almost the entire announcement is about its being written in 3 days, and I do object to the announcement being written that way.
Next time, I think there should be more thought about what they're trying to sell to their country, what their opponents will say and how to deal with that, and how they can promote that this is a continuing effort.
I would agree that this sort of thing could be used to legitimize the idea of "9 women having a baby in 1 month". And, alas, probably will be.
However, it's a false analogy in that what's being produced is not really a linear work or a work where there's tight coupling between the components. so it's not unreasonable that small teams could produce independent chapters in parallel (especially if they're working from existing notes), ship them out for review, then spend a day or so making sure that the book hangs together a whole.
So I applaud the effort, but dread the ways that clueless people will use it to justify things that don't work that way. Babies, for example.
One thing that is good about it is that it is in LaTeX. That means that it could, for instance, be put on Github, and changes made and committed. This is different from so many other books that are written in,. say MS Word, that are less easily revisioned.
I can fault MS Word for a lot of things, but it was Word's built-in version tracking that helped bring down the author of the "Love" malware.
It's not an independent VCS - and one person in the chain can wipe the history - but it's still good enough for informal collaboration, it's automatic, doesn't require all participants to have accounts in a VCS, supports out-of-line commentary, and easy to use.
Still, for something more format, a real VCS is preferable. Many modern-day VCS systems can do binary diffs to the extent that even stuff like MS-Word documents don't necessarily mean discrete full copies of each generation.
More importantly, though. MS tinkers with file formats too freely. If you must use a Word-style format, ODF is more stable. And, of course, LaTeX is plain-text without all the XML clutter.
The letters seem to be somewhere between a true serif and a sans serif font and the typesetter took it easy on the kerning too. I also find it amazingly easy to read, especially because it takes the "straightness" (I don't really know how to describe this) away from most of the letters, especially noticeable in the lowercase "i" and the "l". I have the feeling I can use less brain cycles on deciphering the lettering and I can focus more on the meaning. It looks ugly, and I wouldn't use it for a billboard or anything, but text passages are written to bring a message through and this font seems to be very good at that.
That has got to bee the ugliest, worst-kerned rendition of the letter "I", I have ever seen. It actually makes the other text less readable because it unduly distracts on account being so ill-fitting.
It takes a lot of time to write a good textbook. Why would I, as an expert who's time is in demand, do it for free?
One would think that an expert would know the difference between who's and whose.
Bring on the non-experts, I say.
Obviously AC1 is not an academic expert. "Free" is what TA's and grad students are for.
A lot of professors accumulate a collection of teaching notes over their careers. Heck, I had a High School Physics teacher who did that. Handed them out with copyright notices on them.
Getting a collection of loose notes assembled into an actual usable textbook is not trivial, but one place you should expect to be able to find people with that kind of talent is an institution of higher learning. In some ways, it's better than a publishing house, when esoteric subject matter is involved.
Orwellian dystopia here we come, welcome to the New World Order.
New World Order my $$$. The Old World Order is handling the job quite well, thank-you-very-much. Good loyal American legislators and executives who are going to make us all "safe" and "protect" our (corporate) rights wrote and passed this legislation. And we let them. Republicans and Democrats both.
There are other fluids than water that can sustain a semicolloidal solution or carry sediments. I assume that scientists now have to figure out what fluid flowed, rather than simply assuming that it had to be water.
Zap it with a laser and conduct at spectrum analysis on it and see what elements pop up.
Without proclaiming any expertise, I'd say that the erosion and eddy patterns left behind would be informative, since they would be indicative of the viscosity of the liquid. The pattern of sediment would drop hints towards its density. Water, CO2 and other highly-vaporous substances would not leave much, if any discernible residue or precipitate compared many other fluids. Some fluids would react with certain payload elements, other with different payload elements (in the structural meaning of the term "element", not the chemical one).
There's a lot you can learn just ogling the pictures.
B&N Store is empty. If Nook HD suffer the same store and restrictions, nothing can be done. Sure, rooting the devices helps, but for Joe Blow, when angry birds is $5.99 from B&N store or $0.99 from Amazon or Google Play (or even an ad supported free version is available), why would you select B&N?
Why buy expensive domestic pet food when you can get it cheaper from China^W Wal-Mart and watch Kitty and Fido keel over from liver failure?
I like low prices, too, but 6 bucks isn't going to kill me. The stuff they peddle that I REALLY don't like the price of, I simply don't buy. Like eBooks at hardbound prices.
I don't know why BN doesn't use a straight up Android OS. I have several nooks and I like them but it's frustrating that they limit the apps that will run on them by not having android support. App stores see it as android but then won't install the app.
I wish they would support that as an option - at least to the point of making it more easily rootable. However, DRM apparently is a part of it, as is B&N's stated purpose that the Nook is intended primarily as a reader/media player. So I guess if you want a real table, you have to buy a "real" tablet.
Shame, though. The Nook devices have been pretty solid, one and all.
Sounds like some kind of warped attempt to discredit FOSS to me. It just doesn't sound like the sort of thing that "the community" would do. It's rather counter-productive if someone thinks it will make people start to take FOSS more seriously.
I can't help thinking that this is only part of the story.
Is he a Republican? We ALL know that Linux is Communism. Damned Socialist Penguins. Always plotting to undermine our Defenders of Free Enterprise and the American Way!
It's true though. The R'lyeh Plus Dread font on my Wal-Mart Lower Prices import car drips green goo through impossible angles. VERY distracting while driving!
Maybe, but I'm doubtful. Go to any nice leather store and look around; when was the last time you saw barbed-wire scars on a leather jacket? I don't think I've ever seen such a thing, and I've been wearing leather jackets for a very long time. Surely they separate pieces of the leather by grade (i.e., any scarred parts get lower grades), and sell the higher-grade stuff for more money, so RR would just have to pay the premium price for the top-grade leather, right?
Dang it, I hate it when I have to actually look stuff up!
Apparently, prior to purchase by BMW, Rolls-Royce got all their leather from an Irish bespoke leather company named Connolly. It looks like newer models get their leather from Bavaria:
And:
Each Phantom has 400 pieces of leather in it for the upholstery and trim using 17 to 18 hides per car. The leather comes from German Bavarian bulls, as they are larger, or sometimes from other bulls reared in Argentina or South Africa. A little known fact is that Rolls-Royce leather craftsmen only use bull hide, hide from cows they consider is of no use because it contains stretch marks!
Off-the-rack leather is obviously not good enough for our Masters.
Exactly. There are precisely zero cows killed for their skin; they're killed for their meat. The only way lab-grown leather would make any sense is if they simultaneously introduce lab-grown beef. As long as cows are killed for their meat, there's going to be piles of left-over cow skin. If you don't use it for leather, it's just going to go to waste.
I wouldn't count on that.
What I heard was that the leather for Rolls-Royce automobiles came from cows who were farmed in pastures surrounded by electric fences (barbed wire would scar the leather).
It would obviously be wasteful to discard the meat, but the primary objective was high-grade blemish-free leather, and therefore the primary reason for killing them would be so that some 1-percenter could park his/her butt on it.
I guess you didn't realize this amazingly advanced logic but as a christian, compared to muslims, one of us is correct and one is not. There is no "tolerance" when both religions demand that there be no other fake religions. The only person who can truly promote "tolerance" is one who thinks we're both wrong and that's atheists, which is around 18% of the US and the US is not rules by an 18% majority system. So we disagree, deal with it.
Zeus tells me that BOTH religions are fake. And the Pink Unicorn tells me that making Religion into Law is blasphemous and shall be punished in eternal fire.
Anyway, it's a feeble God who needs armed men to defend himself.
It's a feeble mind who doesn't realize that if God or Satan could do absolutely anything they wanted with no rules and affect humans via any method and remove all free will and veto and human action, that wouldn't work so well. Learn about something before you talk about something.
So you're telling me that God is running a Wrath franchise, is that it?
If you have faith in an all-powerful, all-knowing God, you understand that the petty noises that infidels make are less than nothing, like waves breaking on the rocks of truth. The make a splash, then they are gone. Another splash, it too is gone. But the rocks are the rocks and remain. But ordinary rocks erode, whereas the rocks of Truth abide forever.
On the other hand, if your faith is weak, you will attempt to take matters into your own hands, because you do not believe that the truth defends itself, while lies break into a thousand pieces. This, too is free will. However, it is the free will of attempting to take away the free will of others.
So I repeat. A feeble God is an untruth, and cannot survive without external help. A True God endures regardless.
It is a great tactic you used by mentioning a dead religion to further your point. I admire that. I'd have to admit mentioning other dead religions during discussions on modern religious myth. I generally go with Ra, of ancient Egypt.
What do you mean "Dead Religion"? You can look right up in the sky and see His planet! What more proof do you need? Some book a bunch of con artists cooked up?
Ra, on the other hand is dead. The nuke that got ringed up into his ascending pyramid did it.
And yes, while I am sure most developers see such simple e-mails, I've always found it best to start "script" before I install anything, that way I can show them the exact error message.
Bless you, my child!
Full conversation (this actually happened!)
User: It doesn't work Us: What doesn't work? User: The program! Us: What's wrong with it? User: It's broken! Us: What do you mean, it's broken? User: It doesn't work! Fix it!
As a systems administrator, nothing frustrates me more than when a developer sends me an e-mail that says "install this".
First, they do not always say what the software is supposed to do, so I cannot prepare for any security requirements. I am rarely told if it needs a port opened, I have to check the security logs to see if the software is trying to communicate through the network.
Second, while I may have the ability to fix their software, I prefer not to mess with their code or configuration. Since I may not know what their software is supposed to do, I may get it running I do not know if it is operating properly.
Third, if you are asking me to install alpha or beta versions on a live system, it's usually a bad idea. I have no problem installing it on a test server or a VM, but I hate putting it on a production box.
Sounds like a developer's reaction from users who send emails saying "it doesn't work."
I hope you're a fairly small, informal shop, because places where I work require at a minimum, managerial approval before installing anything.
A first-class installer will include the mods to the firewall and system config files (and, ideally, been vetted by someone capable of spotting unauthorized mods). One of the things I like about RPM is that it allows all that, plus the ability to list what was done and validate that it wasn't tampered with.
While I hate putting Beta code on production servers, sometimes emergencies require it. However, since all my builds produce installable packages and the packages are designed to be binary-identical whether installed on a production machines or test ones, the run environment is relatively safe, even if the code isn't the best quality.
Slashdot Mirror
First off, CSI Miami is 42 minutes long.
Second, the Libyan President went on TV 1 week after the attack and said it was a terrorist attack. With the enormous intelligence budget we give to all the various Three-Letter Agencies, the U.S. should have known before a fledgling country with no intelligence agencies.
Oh yeah. Just like they did on September 10, 2001.
There's a country full of milling militias, any one (or more) which might seize an opportunity in a condition of general unrest. There's the possibility that one single militia had one single pre-prepared plan that they could roll out. There's the possibility that Al-Qaeda had a plan already set up and scheduled. Then again, there's a load of politically-based sensationalism a certain so-called "News" network wants to promote, which is basically trying to convince us that Osama, er, "Usama" bin Ladin personally led a wave of jihadis in a grand, pre-planned anniversary wave of jihadis - but only in one of the several unsettled countries making noise at that time.
Since when do we blindly believe what politicians say? Especially other people's politicians?
OK, I'm keeping an open mind. It's possible that this really was all an al-Qaeda plot. But I'd rather wait until the evidence was all collected, sifted and cross-checked. There's no ticking bomb here, and I'd really rather not have another pants-wetting rush to find ways to curtail our freedom just because some gang broke in and committed atrocities again.
Like a lot of "too good to be true" things, I suspect that the REAL time involved was more than just the 3 days.
If someone called me up, said "we're going to be writing a book this weekend, can you do X"? then yes, I could probably slam out a chapter in 3 days. but that's not counting the in-between time where I'd be getting my thoughts together and digging out the notes I'd want to use.
Nor would it be counting the time spent getting people selected to sign up or determining who's doing what.
Absolutely.
And I don't object to having a three-day sprint to do the work that they did. But almost the entire announcement is about its being written in 3 days, and I do object to the announcement being written that way.
Next time, I think there should be more thought about what they're trying to sell to their country, what their opponents will say and how to deal with that, and how they can promote that this is a continuing effort.
I would agree that this sort of thing could be used to legitimize the idea of "9 women having a baby in 1 month". And, alas, probably will be.
However, it's a false analogy in that what's being produced is not really a linear work or a work where there's tight coupling between the components. so it's not unreasonable that small teams could produce independent chapters in parallel (especially if they're working from existing notes), ship them out for review, then spend a day or so making sure that the book hangs together a whole.
So I applaud the effort, but dread the ways that clueless people will use it to justify things that don't work that way. Babies, for example.
One thing that is good about it is that it is in LaTeX. That means that it could, for instance, be put on Github, and changes made and committed. This is different from so many other books that are written in,. say MS Word, that are less easily revisioned.
I can fault MS Word for a lot of things, but it was Word's built-in version tracking that helped bring down the author of the "Love" malware.
It's not an independent VCS - and one person in the chain can wipe the history - but it's still good enough for informal collaboration, it's automatic, doesn't require all participants to have accounts in a VCS, supports out-of-line commentary, and easy to use.
Still, for something more format, a real VCS is preferable. Many modern-day VCS systems can do binary diffs to the extent that even stuff like MS-Word documents don't necessarily mean discrete full copies of each generation.
More importantly, though. MS tinkers with file formats too freely. If you must use a Word-style format, ODF is more stable. And, of course, LaTeX is plain-text without all the XML clutter.
The letters seem to be somewhere between a true serif and a sans serif font and the typesetter took it easy on the kerning too. I also find it amazingly easy to read, especially because it takes the "straightness" (I don't really know how to describe this) away from most of the letters, especially noticeable in the lowercase "i" and the "l". I have the feeling I can use less brain cycles on deciphering the lettering and I can focus more on the meaning. It looks ugly, and I wouldn't use it for a billboard or anything, but text passages are written to bring a message through and this font seems to be very good at that.
That has got to bee the ugliest, worst-kerned rendition of the letter "I", I have ever seen. It actually makes the other text less readable because it unduly distracts on account being so ill-fitting.
It takes a lot of time to write a good textbook. Why would I, as an expert who's time is in demand, do it for free?
One would think that an expert would know the difference between who's and whose.
Bring on the non-experts, I say.
Obviously AC1 is not an academic expert. "Free" is what TA's and grad students are for.
A lot of professors accumulate a collection of teaching notes over their careers. Heck, I had a High School Physics teacher who did that. Handed them out with copyright notices on them.
Getting a collection of loose notes assembled into an actual usable textbook is not trivial, but one place you should expect to be able to find people with that kind of talent is an institution of higher learning. In some ways, it's better than a publishing house, when esoteric subject matter is involved.
Use too many for too long and you'd end up with diabatteries
Better yet, there's the battery casing that you pump the sugar into - small children. Yikes! Too much energy!
Why do you hate our freedoms?
who watches the watchers?
Orwellian dystopia here we come, welcome to the New World Order.
New World Order my $$$. The Old World Order is handling the job quite well, thank-you-very-much. Good loyal American legislators and executives who are going to make us all "safe" and "protect" our (corporate) rights wrote and passed this legislation. And we let them. Republicans and Democrats both.
There are other fluids than water that can sustain a semicolloidal solution or carry sediments. I assume that scientists now have to figure out what fluid flowed, rather than simply assuming that it had to be water.
Zap it with a laser and conduct at spectrum analysis on it and see what elements pop up.
Without proclaiming any expertise, I'd say that the erosion and eddy patterns left behind would be informative, since they would be indicative of the viscosity of the liquid. The pattern of sediment would drop hints towards its density. Water, CO2 and other highly-vaporous substances would not leave much, if any discernible residue or precipitate compared many other fluids. Some fluids would react with certain payload elements, other with different payload elements (in the structural meaning of the term "element", not the chemical one).
There's a lot you can learn just ogling the pictures.
THEN zap it with a laser!
In later news, it was announced that Bain Capital was opening a window-screen factory for aircraft in China.
bats**t crazy comes standard with religions. Why should Romney's be any different?
B&N Store is empty. If Nook HD suffer the same store and restrictions, nothing can be done. Sure, rooting the devices helps, but for Joe Blow, when angry birds is $5.99 from B&N store or $0.99 from Amazon or Google Play (or even an ad supported free version is available), why would you select B&N?
Why buy expensive domestic pet food when you can get it cheaper from China^W Wal-Mart and watch Kitty and Fido keel over from liver failure?
I like low prices, too, but 6 bucks isn't going to kill me. The stuff they peddle that I REALLY don't like the price of, I simply don't buy. Like eBooks at hardbound prices.
Microsoft just plowed a lot of money into BN. The law of money hats virtually guarantees us a Windows 8 Nook.
I fear you are right. But not yet, fortunately.
I don't know why BN doesn't use a straight up Android OS. I have several nooks and I like them but it's frustrating that they limit the apps that will run on them by not having android support. App stores see it as android but then won't install the app.
I wish they would support that as an option - at least to the point of making it more easily rootable. However, DRM apparently is a part of it, as is B&N's stated purpose that the Nook is intended primarily as a reader/media player. So I guess if you want a real table, you have to buy a "real" tablet.
Shame, though. The Nook devices have been pretty solid, one and all.
Sounds like some kind of warped attempt to discredit FOSS to me. It just doesn't sound like the sort of thing that "the community" would do. It's rather counter-productive if someone thinks it will make people start to take FOSS more seriously.
I can't help thinking that this is only part of the story.
Is he a Republican? We ALL know that Linux is Communism. Damned Socialist Penguins. Always plotting to undermine our Defenders of Free Enterprise and the American Way!
Do the have the wisdom of all fonts?
It's true though. The R'lyeh Plus Dread font on my Wal-Mart Lower Prices import car drips green goo through impossible angles. VERY distracting while driving!
Maybe, but I'm doubtful. Go to any nice leather store and look around; when was the last time you saw barbed-wire scars on a leather jacket? I don't think I've ever seen such a thing, and I've been wearing leather jackets for a very long time. Surely they separate pieces of the leather by grade (i.e., any scarred parts get lower grades), and sell the higher-grade stuff for more money, so RR would just have to pay the premium price for the top-grade leather, right?
Dang it, I hate it when I have to actually look stuff up!
Apparently, prior to purchase by BMW, Rolls-Royce got all their leather from an Irish bespoke leather company named Connolly. It looks like newer models get their leather from Bavaria:
And:
Each Phantom has 400 pieces of leather in it for the upholstery and trim using 17 to 18 hides per car. The leather comes from German Bavarian bulls, as they are larger, or sometimes from other bulls reared in Argentina or South Africa. A little known fact is that Rolls-Royce leather craftsmen only use bull hide, hide from cows they consider is of no use because it contains stretch marks!
Off-the-rack leather is obviously not good enough for our Masters.
Exactly. There are precisely zero cows killed for their skin; they're killed for their meat. The only way lab-grown leather would make any sense is if they simultaneously introduce lab-grown beef. As long as cows are killed for their meat, there's going to be piles of left-over cow skin. If you don't use it for leather, it's just going to go to waste.
I wouldn't count on that.
What I heard was that the leather for Rolls-Royce automobiles came from cows who were farmed in pastures surrounded by electric fences (barbed wire would scar the leather).
It would obviously be wasteful to discard the meat, but the primary objective was high-grade blemish-free leather, and therefore the primary reason for killing them would be so that some 1-percenter could park his/her butt on it.
I guess you didn't realize this amazingly advanced logic but as a christian, compared to muslims, one of us is correct and one is not. There is no "tolerance" when both religions demand that there be no other fake religions. The only person who can truly promote "tolerance" is one who thinks we're both wrong and that's atheists, which is around 18% of the US and the US is not rules by an 18% majority system. So we disagree, deal with it.
Zeus tells me that BOTH religions are fake. And the Pink Unicorn tells me that making Religion into Law is blasphemous and shall be punished in eternal fire.
Anyway, it's a feeble God who needs armed men to defend himself.
It's a feeble mind who doesn't realize that if God or Satan could do absolutely anything they wanted with no rules and affect humans via any method and remove all free will and veto and human action, that wouldn't work so well. Learn about something before you talk about something.
So you're telling me that God is running a Wrath franchise, is that it?
If you have faith in an all-powerful, all-knowing God, you understand that the petty noises that infidels make are less than nothing, like waves breaking on the rocks of truth. The make a splash, then they are gone. Another splash, it too is gone. But the rocks are the rocks and remain. But ordinary rocks erode, whereas the rocks of Truth abide forever.
On the other hand, if your faith is weak, you will attempt to take matters into your own hands, because you do not believe that the truth defends itself, while lies break into a thousand pieces. This, too is free will. However, it is the free will of attempting to take away the free will of others.
So I repeat. A feeble God is an untruth, and cannot survive without external help. A True God endures regardless.
it's a feeble God who needs armed men to defend himself.
This is brilliant, mind if I pass it around?
Fine with me. Of course, if you get struck by lightning...
Zeus..
It is a great tactic you used by mentioning a dead religion to further your point. I admire that. I'd have to admit mentioning other dead religions during discussions on modern religious myth. I generally go with Ra, of ancient Egypt.
What do you mean "Dead Religion"? You can look right up in the sky and see His planet! What more proof do you need? Some book a bunch of con artists cooked up?
Ra, on the other hand is dead. The nuke that got ringed up into his ascending pyramid did it.
all production code had to be compiled and installed from source handed over to the Operations staff.
Which would mean that the Operations staff would also need licenses for the compiler if it is licensed per seat.
I can tell what OS you're running, if that's an issue.
And yes, while I am sure most developers see such simple e-mails, I've always found it best to start "script" before I install anything, that way I can show them the exact error message.
Bless you, my child!
Full conversation (this actually happened!)
User: It doesn't work
Us: What doesn't work?
User: The program!
Us: What's wrong with it?
User: It's broken!
Us: What do you mean, it's broken?
User: It doesn't work! Fix it!
... if they develop an UNhelpful support robot, they can make a killing staffing call centers with it.
As a systems administrator, nothing frustrates me more than when a developer sends me an e-mail that says "install this".
First, they do not always say what the software is supposed to do, so I cannot prepare for any security requirements. I am rarely told if it needs a port opened, I have to check the security logs to see if the software is trying to communicate through the network.
Second, while I may have the ability to fix their software, I prefer not to mess with their code or configuration. Since I may not know what their software is supposed to do, I may get it running I do not know if it is operating properly.
Third, if you are asking me to install alpha or beta versions on a live system, it's usually a bad idea. I have no problem installing it on a test server or a VM, but I hate putting it on a production box.
Sounds like a developer's reaction from users who send emails saying "it doesn't work."
I hope you're a fairly small, informal shop, because places where I work require at a minimum, managerial approval before installing anything.
A first-class installer will include the mods to the firewall and system config files (and, ideally, been vetted by someone capable of spotting unauthorized mods). One of the things I like about RPM is that it allows all that, plus the ability to list what was done and validate that it wasn't tampered with.
While I hate putting Beta code on production servers, sometimes emergencies require it. However, since all my builds produce installable packages and the packages are designed to be binary-identical whether installed on a production machines or test ones, the run environment is relatively safe, even if the code isn't the best quality.