yeah...just look at the thousands of body bags being pulled off the planes...
By order of George W Bush, all photography of coffins returning from Iraq is prohibited. They don't want pictures showing the cost of the Iraq adventure to go spoiling their election plans.
What they were keen to show pictures of was Bush playing dress up on an aircraft carrier, at least until Democrats said that playing soldier made the issue of his being AWOL during his national guard service fair game. After that story finaly made the mainstream media the footage looked more like 'Dukakis in tank' than 'Top Gun'.
Another picture we were allowed to see was Bush presenting a fake turkey to adoring troops. The fact that the photo-op meant that most of the troops on the base were required to have 'meals ready to eat' for their christmas dinner must have gone down really well. Visiting the troops might have appeared more sincere if Bush had taken the time to attend just one funeral of one of the soldiers killed in his war.
I hope that the GOP keeps on hammering Dick Clarke for several more weeks. The troops in Iraq must love hearing why they are stuck there rather than finishing the job they wanted to finish in Afghanistan.
Oh and I am sure that every member of the US armed services just loves the way that Halliburton has been granted multi-billion dollar no-bid contracts by Halliburton ex-CEO Cheney.
This shows the naivety of some people who are not nuclear scientists or reactor operators regrarding nuclear power. Let me give you a quick lesson.
Yeah, yeah, I have a doctorate from Oxford Univ. Nuclear Physics Lab. Where is yours from? I have also worked as a control engineer.
From your tone you sound like an ex-nuclear power employee who just has to spend their time writing self-justifications on the Internet. Sorry, you have no more credibility with me than the rentacops who used to do airport security here in Boston before 9/11. You guys screwed up real bad, you lost the public trust, that is because you deserved to.
You might be correct in claiming that it would be possible to design a safe PWR. I don't care, if anything that looks like a PWR is built it will be run and staffed by the same discredited establishment that gave us Three Mile Island and Chernobyl.
I think the public has it wrong, nuclear power deserves a second chance. But no, the nuclear power industry does not.
It's a shame that incidents such as this have contributed to the overall bad image of nuclear power.
It is a shame that sloppy and incompetent management by the nuclear power industry has created an entirely justified bad image.
The big lie told about three mile island was that the design is 'failsafe'. As a matter of definition it is not, no light water reactor design is. Failsafe means that if something breaks it breaks in a safe way. Three mile island had redundant safety systems, that is not the same thing.
The truth is that modern techniques could probably make nuclear power an extremely safe alternative.
The truth is that the better designs of forty years ago could have made safe nuclear power. The CANDU heavy water system is genuinely fail-safe. The coolant doubles as the moderator. That means if you loose one you loose the other and the reaction is halted.
Today there are vastly better designs, like the pebble bed reactor that MIT and others have been looking at.
The real problem is not technical, it is political. The concerns about nuclear power are completely justified. The nuclear industry has lied and deceived in the past. In the UK there was a long history of accidents, coverups and blatant deception. The true economics of nuclear power only became apparent after the Thatcher government tried to privatise nuclear power. When the books were opened it turned out that nuclear power had been vastly more expensive than claimed - and there are still the costs of decommissioning the plants.
Research into new types of nuclear reactor are required for many reasons. Even the idiots who ignore global warming see that energy reserves are running low. If we do not start looking at better nuclear options now we may end up being forced into repeating the light water mistake.
Under UK law it is considered prostitution but prostitution is not and never has been illegal in the UK. Soliciting an act of prostitution is illegal however. It is far from clear that this was technically soliciting in the meaning of the act.
Prostitution and internet soliciting have actually been widely tollerated by the police in the UK for about ten years. The police would rather be in the business of regulating brothels than dealling with street walkers.
There is another police angle that I have a personal connection with. I used to work in a computer shop at the weekends. It was not in a very good location and it closed down sometime after I left. After a while the shop became a 'massage parlor'. This operated without complaints for a year until a girl was murdered by one of the clients. As the law stood (still stands in fact) a single girl working on her own is not a brothel, but two are. As a result the city council and the local police decided to tell the local establishements that from now on they would not enforce the brothel-keeping law. They also tolerate Web sites which give little doubt as to their true purpose. Oh and the shop is now a very expensive financial services advice place catering to 'high net worth' individuals.
The other reason that the virginity auction is unlikely to be prosecuted is that the event was a staged protest at the cost of school fees. The government does not want this to become a saga, particularly as they have proposed complete legalization.
I want to say that I found this story quite interesting, as I do make software decisions - and while to commentary surrounding the 'story' (as usual) had anti-Microsoft info, you should probably get over it.
Actually that was pretty much the advice I was trying to give to you guys. After five years of non-stop complaining about Microsoft nothing of substance has changed. You still face the same basic choice: pay for something that is consistent and does the job pretty well or get something for free that combines flashes of genius with features of distinctly 'variable' quality.
Actually I was scanning the Slashdot RSS feed because I had had enough watching the results of hamfisted attempts at spin control by the Whitehouse on the blogs that discuss stuff that does matter. At the point when you start to send emails to your GOP contacts with advice like 'if (in(hole), stop (hole, digging))'.
The connection between the two is that in both cases you have the tyranny of a totalitarian mindset that simply cannot accept any other point of view has the right to exist. The points made by Microsoft in relation to open office look pretty reasonable and defensible to me. If Open Office was really everything the zealots claim it would be soundly beating Microsoft Office. The problem with the Zealot approach is that nobody is going to try to beat Microsoft if they are so sure that they already have.
Like the attacks on Clarke I think the continuous attack dog mode against Microsoft is counterproductive. After a while the ritual denunciations are tuned out. At least the GOP, Fox News, Drudge, make no prestense about being even handed or open minded, you know going in that you are not seeing news, you are seeing propaganda-tainment, a 24 hour non stop party political infomercial. It would be nice if VA Linux would observe usual journalistic ethics and tell readers when they choose stories that affect the business interests of their parent company - as the Microsoft owned Slate always has.
As far as your sample stories, honestly - I think the Boeing one quite qualifies as something I am very interested in (and though it's off topic for THIS article), thanks for posting it. The other two have no personal interest for me (I'm happily married).
Well the first is of most immediate interest to me, and yes like you I happen to be married. However I also have a child, so yes I do have a somewhat different perspective. Technology is having effects that are considerably wider than those the mainstream US media report.
and my MS Office-using (on a Mac even) advisor is sixpence none the wiser. Total FUD.
The points are aimed at people who actually buy software. The fact that you can write a thesis without using word is not a great surprise. I wrote mine using LaTeX.
The marketting points look reasonable enough to me, OpenOffice does not do everything that Word or Office does, it does provide a clone of the core functionality. But what happened to open source being innovation and Microsoft being only able to copy? Is there anything that OpenOffice does that is new?
When the VA Linux puts these stories up on slashdot they do so with all the objectivity of a Congressional hit squad. When it comes to Microsoft the editorial line at VA Linux is even less objective than Matt Drudge. At least Slate tells us that it is owned by Microsoft before they comment on stories that affect their employer, heck Slate even bites the hand that feeds it. But not Slashdot, there they stay on message even more comically than a Whitehouse press spokesperson.
Is this the most important tech story going on in the world? I don't think so. The editorial diet today has been pretty thin, recycled stories published a week ago on the BBC, the fascinating news that Mozilla Foxtrot is going to allow the users to choose the name for themselves. Well whoop-de-do, Internet Explorer went through that phase roung about release 3.0, you could download a tool that would let you brand it any way you chose, stupid icon and everything. I used to annoy my Netscape friends by running a version that announced itself as Netscape Navigator complete with N icon. The sometimes took quarter of an hour or more before they realized they were having their chain yanked.
Sure the latest discovery of some perfidious Microsoft marketting litterature was desperately more important and interesting. Does it tell us anything new we did not know before?
There were much more interesting stories in the BBC, like the stident who auctioned her virginity on Ebay and went through with the deal. Or the new British craze of 'Toothing' - using bluetooth cell phones to hook up for casual sex. Or if the only sex stories you find interesting involve pr0n, not real sex the news that Boeing has installed Internet access via WiFi in a number of planes seems pretty interesting to me - like its the story most likely to affect me directly in the next few months.
Instead we get a week old story about a not very original casino fraud. Oh and that fascinating story about mozilla Foxbat changing its name to Motzarellea Fuxbat.
The Internet is like any other human advance. First the disaffected early-adopt it to destabilize the status quo and effect some change, then the status quo masters it, sometimes absorbing some of the disaffected into itself in the process, and uses it to perpetuate itself and then exploits it to enhance its control.
The guy who wrote the article does not seem to understand what drives change. I was visitng Germany on a monthly basis during the period when the wall fell, the guy does not have a clue why that happened.
Sure dissidents and activists play a critical part in a revolution. But their role is secondary, try talking to some. I have met many of the 'leaders' of the year of miracles, what they were trying to do was to share information and ideas, that was what threatened the dictators.
The Web opens up the communication channels in ways that it is almost impossible to control. The corrupt government of Singapore will get its due sooner as a result of the Web. I know rather a lot about the surveilance they use there having discussed it with some of the Mossad consultants who advised them. The whole state has been designed for surveillance. Every telephone call is logged and they perform network analysis to discover who is talking to whom. The houses are deliberatly designed to actively discourage private entertaining. Restaurants are heavily subsidized in order to encourage people to eat where they can be watched. The result is that any attempt to meet in private is sufficiently unusual to be very noticable.
This all falls apart if the information does not need a dissident movement to make it through. Look at how hard it is to stop trolls on slashdot. Now imagine that you are a blogger in a 'police friendly' state like Singapore. You have to take some care to cover your tracks but it is not impossible. If the government is not corrupt, why do they need to threaten their critics. Police states suffer from obvious internal contradictions.
And don't get me started about the idiocy of the great firewall of china. About the only use it serves is to reduce spam and virus outbreaks somewhat. The criticism that threatens the communist party cadres comes from inside the country.
another problem is "what is the definition of a terrorist?", and the related issue of "who gets to decide?"
will, say, greenpeace be classified as a terrorist organisation because they "cause economic harm" to US interests?
No it is not such a bad question because some groups such as Earth First, some of the anti-abortion activists and some anti-vivisectionists crossed the line long ago. Earth First does things which are very likely to kill people, like spike trees.
There certainly are radical terrorists who champion those causes, the problem is that the line is usually abused. The current UK foreign secretary was under MI5 surveillance when he was a student. So Blair's number one man in the war on terra was once on a blacklist.
I have seen this happen personally in the UK. A group associated with the UK conservative party called the Economic League maintained a blacklist of 'left wing sympathizers' that they sold to an undisclosed list of employers. I got listed for saying that there was no way I was going to have anything to do with any group that used those tactics. In case people are wondering how privately educated sons of the establishment like myself turn on the tory party like I did, well that was the Damascus moment for me.
You can easily verify this claim further with a small amount of Googling. The list itself collapsed in irrelevance after Bob Maxwell bought a copy and set up a stand at the Labour party conference. There were more Tories on it than left wing radicals. They used to list each other when they got into faction fights.
Given the treatment meeted out to Richard Clarke in the past few days, there is no way that John Ashcroft or George Bush can be trusted with such a power. They are now talking of selectively declassifying intelligence for the sole purpose of being able to punish Clarke with a specious perjury prosecution. They went after Wilson by illegally uncovering the fact that his wife was a covert CIA operative. The continued to threaten O'Niel with prosecutions even after it was admitted that the Whitehouse had cleared all his documents for release.
And you know what? At this point I'm not really sure that Ashcroft's excuse for holding Padilla without indictment or trial is going to turn out to be valid when we find out what it is.
In the past few days Bush has shown more energy and passion in his efforts to crush Clarke than he ever has in his pro-forma attempts to track down and eliminate al Qaeda. I simply cannot believe that any other major party candidate in that race on either side would not have invaded Afghanistan to destroy al Qaeda and stayed there focused on that single task until it was complete. Forbes, Keyes, Gore, Bradley, I can't believe a single one would not have invaded (they would have been impeached anyway so it would not matter) and I can't believe any other candidate would have finished the job.
And you can forget about knowing the difference between waterfall vs. incremental development.
Please do not forget that. Back in the dotcom heyday I spoke to somebody who had bought a company that had spent oodles developing a new piece of core technology.
Unfortunately they had gone to one of the big six consulting bandits who ran out their development methodology which you would call waterfall and I call 'emperors new clothes'.
The consulting firm bled their victim for millions before getting the boot at which point there was not a single line of code written.
Another similar exercise I was consulting on as a sub-contractor. There was a problem that needed a bit of code writing to address it. "Oh thats easy says I, we just write an ISAPI filter in C and drop it in, problem solved".
The consultant 'programmer' did not know C.
"I will see if Visual Basic could be used"
Guess what? he did not know Visual Basic either, in fact the only language he did know was some oracle scripting language. and this guy was being billed out at $1.5K per day as a programmer.
Clients can do wierd things as well. I once flew in to brief a client only to find that their entire team had left for an off-site. I charged less then than I would today, but it was still a premium rate.
Don't get me wrong: I'm not dismissing algorithm development at all. I'm saying that one has to be both a strong computer scientist and a strong software engineer to compete in today's job market. And frankly, I just don't see a lot of that in our schools.
The academics like it because it is nice, mathematical and you can get mpu's out of it. But they also need to teach the skills the students are going to really need.
Its very sad you feel that way. I graduated with a Masters in Computer Science and the most valuable thing I took away from there was Algorithm Design.
Great for you, I have a doctorate from Oxford on applications of formal methods to massively parallel systems. Watching Tony Hoare prove Quicksort correct using Z is kinda useful and interesting but not because you are likely to invent an algorithm. I don't think I have ever worked on a project where algorithm performance was a major problem. Sure there are stupid choices (like the database package I once tested that used bubblesort).
You say - get them out of a book.
Lemme ask you, how do they get into the book in the first place ?
Well probably Knuth or Hoare thought it up. Offhand I can't think of a really interesting algorithm since quicksort.
Its like the difference between arithmetic and problem sets. The ability to manipulate abstract algebra is an interesting and somewhat useful skill. I can hire people with that skill by the boatload (sic). What I want is people who can map from the concrete to the abstract and back again. About one comp sci student in ten that I interview is capable of that.
See, that's what Computer "Science" is really about. Ask Dr. Knuth - the father of Computer Science, whether algorithms are important or software engineering is ? He's written 3 tomes on algorithms, none on software building.
Actually that was the point of the extended books on the TeX documentation - which I have read and discussed with Knuth when I was working on adding math markup to HTML. It is not an algorithmic problem, its a representational one.
Making large projects work should technically not even be in Computer Science. Its mostly a management skill
Again you miss the point, I am not looking for robots who I have to spoon-feed problems to. I am looking for people who can take a set of requirements and an outline architecture and make it work with existing code. I don't want someone who can't use the code manager, or writes code that only he can understand.
It is not surprising given the current oversupply. Nobody goes into comp-sci for the money any more, like they did in the dotcom craze. That is a good thing, good IT professionals are well paid because they are valuable. If you don't have the apptitude and interest do something else.
The other problem is that most of what is taught in comp-sci these days is not so great. There is a tendency to focus on algorithms (get them out of a book) rather than how to contribute to building large projects that work.
Simply put, if ICANN adopts a TLD that duplicates a TLD that "unofficially" is being registered by another registration system, then we'll have a fracturing in the standards just like in the way that it's almost impossible to tell who the heavyweight boxing champion is.
Only if a significant number of people decide that they are going to stick with the new.net root. Otherwise it is kind of like the philosopher's strike in Hitch-Hiker's guide to the Galaxy.
The laughable counter on their web site asside, I don't think that there is much demand for TLDs that are only visible to part of the net. The only thing that gives them value is the expectation that someday the new.net roots would be made official.
Sure there will be a problem when a new TLD is inserted that has a new.net copy. But that will only affect a small number of web users, mainly those whose ISPs were paid to support the new.net domains with stock, and that only if they are obliged to. Yes there will be the six members of the tinfoil hat brigade who scream on/. but the expression 'get a life' comes to mind
There are circumstances where there could be a root operator revolt, like the US deciding to exclude cuba from the Internet by blocking.cu. But these complaints do not rise to that level. The people making the complaint were told this would happen in advance. There is no way imaginable that anyone could claim detrimental reliance or such.
Slashdot seems to run these stories to show how it is the at the center of fringe net society. They would have done better to have run the stories I suggested if they wanted to do that, like toothing or virginity auctions. Seems that these are a bit too strong for their puritan editorial tastes.
And just exactly how do you know this ? Please lay out the details for the rest of us.
Take a look at the current costs of running the ISS, the cost of merely maintaining the shuttle. Then adjust for today's dollars (the shuttle program is a quarter century old).
The current plan is to build a shuttle type replacement, build a moon base and then go on to Mars. None of those programs are likely to come in under a trillion on their own.
Yeah, right, we can trust numbers from the crew who told us that medicare prescription benefit would cost less than $400 billion when their own figures said $550 billion +.
The cost is irrelevant since the mars shot was not even mentioned in the state of the union speech only six days later.
Plenty. There are lots of subjects that do not fit into nice neat, hierarchical and mutualy exclusive categories. This was one of Stephen Jay Gould's frequent points, the tree of life metaphor is a deeply flawed one. It does not even work for genealogy (hint, we each have two parents).
That sentence is meaningless. Why did the scientists get to write the taxonomy?
The sentence has a very clear semantics, go read it. That fact you disagree or can't compute does not make it meaningless. The function of science is to build models of the world through empirical processes. Taxonomy is only a science when there is a theory behind the choices. The periodic table is an example of a scientific taxonomy. The organization can be science, but the choice of names is not.
Take a look at attempts to impose a taxonomy on data that does not fit. Yahoo is a great example, they started out with a single axis, then it became two, three and finaly they just gave up. The web does not package itself up into neat little folders.
No, IIRC Seldane is an anti-dandruff shampoo.
You missed the sarcasm, it really makes no difference what you call the planet, planetoid, Sedna, Seldane, we are not discussing a question of importance or even a question of science.
I think he was talking about their biological classification dude, and not their use in the english language. In other words, kingdom, genus, species, etc. The two groups in biology are exclusive.
My point was that the biological classification is valid, but that does not make any other classification invalid. The fundamental error here is the idea that there is only one true taxonomy and that science is in the business of discovering it. Both ideas are broken but even so there are plenty of folk who try to insist they are true - as this thread shows.
The point is not whether the tomato is or is not a fruit. The point is that the issue is not so simple that it is beyond dispute or that someone is somehow wrong for using a perfectly good classification that has worked for several centuries. So people can lay off calling people idiots because they disagree with you, if you really understand the question you know that there is no single right answer.
Stephen Jay Gould wrote an essay on the Brontesaurus issue and he found the reasons for the name change unconvincing, that is why he called one of his books 'bully for brontesaurus'. The point is that the fact that the animal had been known by one name for close to a century did not stop a desicated committee from deciding it knew better.
And thats why the argument over whether pluto is or is not a planet is irrelevant. There is no king so mighty that their decision alone is truth. Like the 'continent' of Europe the fact Pluto is a planet is so well entrenched in our shared culture that it is futile to try to reclasify it. If you think about it, the difference between the inner planets such as earth and mars and the gas giants Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune is much, much bigger than the difference between Mercury and Pluto.
Whether you call the thing a planet or a rock you will not learn anything about it as a result. This is not science, it it stamp collecting
I cite Cecil Adams of The Straight Dope, font of all knowledge, to say with authority:
The guy seems to have a very absolutist view of the world.
The point I am making here is that there is a very big difference between saying 'according to the current scientific consensus it makes sense to call a tomato a fruit, rename Brontosuarus Apatosaurus and demote Pluto from Cabinet rank" and saying "the tomato is a fruit, there never was a Brontosaurus and Pluto is not a planet".
The point is that there are some subjects where you can have right and wrong, 'the earth is flat' being one of them. But when it comes down to definitions there may not be an ultimate 'truth'.
What the FUCK have you been smoking in your pipe?
Fruit (froot) [n]--the ripened reproductive body of a seed plant
Try reading a dictionary that was written in 1800 or earlier. And try looking up the definition of tomato rather than the definition of fruit. You are reading a definition that is the result of the taxonomists having won and in the process completely missing the fact that there was ever a legitimate dispute. The farmers classified the tomato as a vegetable because it has a thin skin and is perishable. That is why the supreme court rulled the way it did, the tax law in question was written when the previous description was in force.
The OED definitions of 'vegetable' go from the incredibly broad (any plant) to the more specific (any plant that is eaten for food). Curiously I did not actually find the scientific definition cited in my copy (2nd ed). But that might be because the entry is two pages long and I overlooked.
The point I was making is that the whole idea of rigid taxonomy is a Victorian invention. The idea of fixed immutable categories that are determined by rigid application of science is very much a late 19th century view.
That is the point at which the Oxford English Dictionary, the Encyclopaedia Britanica, Principia Mathematica are all being written. Then by 1930 it has all slammed to an abrupt halt as relativity, Goedel's incompleteness theorem and quantum mechanics have all become mainstream. Suddenly the logical positivist view of the universe is no longer universal.
There is some logic to a taxonomy of fruits and veg based on genetics, there is equal logic to a taxonomy based on how well it keeps. The farmers lost out to the scientists here because the scientists got to write the taxonomy.
When it comes to the definition of 'planet' there is no real scientific basis for the taxonomy. Planets have simply been defined to be obejects orbiting a star that are not orbiting anything else (another planet) and are large enough to form a sphere under their own gravity. This gets subjective when the term 'sphere' is debated. Clearly the earth and the other planets are only roughly spherical, how much tolerance is there?
It is a silly dispute as are most taxonomic disputes, Pluto and Seldane are planets if people chose to call them such. Witgenstein was right.
This dispute is like the stupid 'is a tomato a vegetable' dispute.
According to plenty of legal definitions tomatos are in fact vegetables and not fruit. The tomato=fruit idea was introduced long after the classification as a vegetable as well established.
The reason for the reclassification of tomatos by the biologists was that they started to buy into the evolutionary classification schemes. So the taxonomy was redefined to fit the new theory.
Same thing happened with the Dinosaur formerly known as Brontosaurous. A bunch of jumped up greybeards with nothing to do decided that Brontosaurous and Apatasaurous were the same beast and that their idiotic rules were more important than common sense.
In this case there does not seem to be any particularly important theoretical issues. A planet and a planetoid behave in exactly the same way. The distinction between the two will inevitably be arbitrary at some point. Its like getting hung up on the definition of continent. Exactly why is Europe a continent but India is merely a 'sub continent' despite being much larger and a much more distinct geographical area? There is no real justification, except that Europe has to be a continent by the original definition, The fact that it is contiguous with Asia is conveniently ignored. India would have been considered a continent if they had not already reached the magic number of seven.
what can a human do on Mars that a robot cannot do - cheaper and faster?
Get votes.
I doubt that there will be any follow through on the Mars shot. It was not even mentioned six days later in the state of the union address. It has not been mentioned since. The press corps were uniformly skeptical, as are the public.
Not long after they knifed Hubble. The fact that the Christian fundies were complaining about spending money on questioning creation is probably pure coincidence.
I think that regardless of what happens in November the most likely thing will be the cancellation of the shuttle and ISS shortly afterwards. If it is unsafe to fly to Hubble just the once the 50-100 odd shuttle launches required to complete and maintain the ISS are a complete non-starter. At present reliability rates we would see a couple more disasters en-route. And no, I don't think for a second that NASA has been fixed.
A Mars shot would cost one heck of a lot more than a trillion dolars. There is no way that Congress or the seniors are going to stand for it unless they are confident their social security and medicare benefits are completely safe. The drugs benefit for seniors was priced at $400 bn because the Congress would not pay any more. So given the demand for senior's drug coverage what is the probability that a program that costs at least twice as much being passed?
BTW, are you (Zeinfeld) claiming to be the guy who put "Referer" in the HTTP spec, or did you just feel like jumping in with a non-sequitur?
No, I proposed the referer field.
I don't know whether I 'mis-spelt' it or Tim did.
Regardless, that is now the spelling and the dictionaries are the ones who are wrong. My spelling comfortably outnumbers the old one by a few billion uses per day.
MS Windows is a perfect pure example of this paradigm. Bill Gates wanted every feature developed only if it could be profitable. It was not profitable to make a good OS because that would cost more money.
You would think from this statement that UNIX had been a model of O/S design rather than a poorly documented hack job. Back in the day we used to have a unix haters list at MIT. nobody could believe that something so pathetic was winning.
MS Windows did not have true multitasking at the start because Intel botched the 286 design. Unlike the Motorola 68K which supported multitasking and protected memory but for some reason Apple decided not to use them.
What I think we are seeing here is projection from a bunch of people who fear their skills may loose value. It was the same with the Cobol coders, MVS jockeys etc. Whatever they know they call 'good design'.
OK so Microsoft is accused of 'copying', well what the heck has open source done that is so amazingly original? First you write a copy of a twenty year operating system, then you write a copy of a ten year old user interface to run on top of it.
Fact is that there are not all that many new ideas in the computer industry and once an idea gets hold in one form the execution almost never gets improved. Spreadsheets are an example of this, all of them show the same limited base concepts that were in Visicalc twenty five years ago.
The most glaring example are databases. SQL is a horrible language. It is completely incompatible with modern programming languages. But we end up having to use it because its the only scalable persistence model you can buy support for. So you write your applications three times, once in Java, a second time in SQL and then get the SQL part to talk to the Java part.
Rather than spending time praising ourselves about how wonderful the stuff is lets just admit that it is all a steaming pile, it all stinks.
Nice try, but dyslexia causes you to mix up the order of the letters, it doesn't cause you to miss double consonants. It also doesn't cause you to confuse the contraction of "it is" with possessive "it":-P. Some things are just bad spelling.
So you would be some kind of expert on it? Like know more about the effects than someone with dyslexia?
It should be noted that RFC 2616 (HTTP/1.1) backs up my concern about the "Referer" (great, like if programmers needed help spelling badly):
Hey, its not my fault I have dyslexia.
The idea of referer was to allow back links to sites to be discovered. The blogging world uses this extensively. Remember that in 1992 there was no Google and we had less than 1000 users.
I think you overstate the privacy issues. It has always been possible to create session identifiers. I had a hack that did that running in '93. If someon wants to restrict access they can.
One thing is sure, we can't pretend that taking cocaine does not atrophy the intellect. Question is what Rummie, Wolfie and Perle were taking.
It is now two years since the hunt for Bin Laden was wound down to concentrate resources on settling scores with Saddam.
The Spanish have every reason to be pissed with the US. If Bin Laden and al Zawahiri had been eliminated 3/11 might have been prevented. Spain put itself in the line of fire by rounding up Al Qaeda operatives. Instead of holding up its end of the deal and hitting Al Qaeda hard the campaign was wound up as soon as the Taleban were displaced from power.
After 9/11 The Bushies were bitterly critical of 'how little' Clinton had done against Al Qaeda. Fact is that much more was done to suppress Al Qaeda during 1999 and 2000 than the Bushies have done in the past two years.
Slashdot Mirror
By order of George W Bush, all photography of coffins returning from Iraq is prohibited. They don't want pictures showing the cost of the Iraq adventure to go spoiling their election plans.
What they were keen to show pictures of was Bush playing dress up on an aircraft carrier, at least until Democrats said that playing soldier made the issue of his being AWOL during his national guard service fair game. After that story finaly made the mainstream media the footage looked more like 'Dukakis in tank' than 'Top Gun'.
Another picture we were allowed to see was Bush presenting a fake turkey to adoring troops. The fact that the photo-op meant that most of the troops on the base were required to have 'meals ready to eat' for their christmas dinner must have gone down really well. Visiting the troops might have appeared more sincere if Bush had taken the time to attend just one funeral of one of the soldiers killed in his war.
I hope that the GOP keeps on hammering Dick Clarke for several more weeks. The troops in Iraq must love hearing why they are stuck there rather than finishing the job they wanted to finish in Afghanistan.
Oh and I am sure that every member of the US armed services just loves the way that Halliburton has been granted multi-billion dollar no-bid contracts by Halliburton ex-CEO Cheney.
Yeah, yeah, I have a doctorate from Oxford Univ. Nuclear Physics Lab. Where is yours from? I have also worked as a control engineer.
From your tone you sound like an ex-nuclear power employee who just has to spend their time writing self-justifications on the Internet. Sorry, you have no more credibility with me than the rentacops who used to do airport security here in Boston before 9/11. You guys screwed up real bad, you lost the public trust, that is because you deserved to.
You might be correct in claiming that it would be possible to design a safe PWR. I don't care, if anything that looks like a PWR is built it will be run and staffed by the same discredited establishment that gave us Three Mile Island and Chernobyl.
I think the public has it wrong, nuclear power deserves a second chance. But no, the nuclear power industry does not.
It is a shame that sloppy and incompetent management by the nuclear power industry has created an entirely justified bad image.
The big lie told about three mile island was that the design is 'failsafe'. As a matter of definition it is not, no light water reactor design is. Failsafe means that if something breaks it breaks in a safe way. Three mile island had redundant safety systems, that is not the same thing.
The truth is that modern techniques could probably make nuclear power an extremely safe alternative.
The truth is that the better designs of forty years ago could have made safe nuclear power. The CANDU heavy water system is genuinely fail-safe. The coolant doubles as the moderator. That means if you loose one you loose the other and the reaction is halted.
Today there are vastly better designs, like the pebble bed reactor that MIT and others have been looking at.
The real problem is not technical, it is political. The concerns about nuclear power are completely justified. The nuclear industry has lied and deceived in the past. In the UK there was a long history of accidents, coverups and blatant deception. The true economics of nuclear power only became apparent after the Thatcher government tried to privatise nuclear power. When the books were opened it turned out that nuclear power had been vastly more expensive than claimed - and there are still the costs of decommissioning the plants.
Research into new types of nuclear reactor are required for many reasons. Even the idiots who ignore global warming see that energy reserves are running low. If we do not start looking at better nuclear options now we may end up being forced into repeating the light water mistake.
BBC News last year, Australian last week. I sent the story in, I thought they would be too prudish to publish. I was right.
Under UK law it is considered prostitution but prostitution is not and never has been illegal in the UK. Soliciting an act of prostitution is illegal however. It is far from clear that this was technically soliciting in the meaning of the act.
Prostitution and internet soliciting have actually been widely tollerated by the police in the UK for about ten years. The police would rather be in the business of regulating brothels than dealling with street walkers.
There is another police angle that I have a personal connection with. I used to work in a computer shop at the weekends. It was not in a very good location and it closed down sometime after I left. After a while the shop became a 'massage parlor'. This operated without complaints for a year until a girl was murdered by one of the clients. As the law stood (still stands in fact) a single girl working on her own is not a brothel, but two are. As a result the city council and the local police decided to tell the local establishements that from now on they would not enforce the brothel-keeping law. They also tolerate Web sites which give little doubt as to their true purpose. Oh and the shop is now a very expensive financial services advice place catering to 'high net worth' individuals.
The other reason that the virginity auction is unlikely to be prosecuted is that the event was a staged protest at the cost of school fees. The government does not want this to become a saga, particularly as they have proposed complete legalization.
Actually that was pretty much the advice I was trying to give to you guys. After five years of non-stop complaining about Microsoft nothing of substance has changed. You still face the same basic choice: pay for something that is consistent and does the job pretty well or get something for free that combines flashes of genius with features of distinctly 'variable' quality.
Actually I was scanning the Slashdot RSS feed because I had had enough watching the results of hamfisted attempts at spin control by the Whitehouse on the blogs that discuss stuff that does matter. At the point when you start to send emails to your GOP contacts with advice like 'if (in(hole), stop (hole, digging))'.
The connection between the two is that in both cases you have the tyranny of a totalitarian mindset that simply cannot accept any other point of view has the right to exist. The points made by Microsoft in relation to open office look pretty reasonable and defensible to me. If Open Office was really everything the zealots claim it would be soundly beating Microsoft Office. The problem with the Zealot approach is that nobody is going to try to beat Microsoft if they are so sure that they already have.
Like the attacks on Clarke I think the continuous attack dog mode against Microsoft is counterproductive. After a while the ritual denunciations are tuned out. At least the GOP, Fox News, Drudge, make no prestense about being even handed or open minded, you know going in that you are not seeing news, you are seeing propaganda-tainment, a 24 hour non stop party political infomercial. It would be nice if VA Linux would observe usual journalistic ethics and tell readers when they choose stories that affect the business interests of their parent company - as the Microsoft owned Slate always has.
As far as your sample stories, honestly - I think the Boeing one quite qualifies as something I am very interested in (and though it's off topic for THIS article), thanks for posting it. The other two have no personal interest for me (I'm happily married).
Well the first is of most immediate interest to me, and yes like you I happen to be married. However I also have a child, so yes I do have a somewhat different perspective. Technology is having effects that are considerably wider than those the mainstream US media report.
The points are aimed at people who actually buy software. The fact that you can write a thesis without using word is not a great surprise. I wrote mine using LaTeX.
The marketting points look reasonable enough to me, OpenOffice does not do everything that Word or Office does, it does provide a clone of the core functionality. But what happened to open source being innovation and Microsoft being only able to copy? Is there anything that OpenOffice does that is new?
When the VA Linux puts these stories up on slashdot they do so with all the objectivity of a Congressional hit squad. When it comes to Microsoft the editorial line at VA Linux is even less objective than Matt Drudge. At least Slate tells us that it is owned by Microsoft before they comment on stories that affect their employer, heck Slate even bites the hand that feeds it. But not Slashdot, there they stay on message even more comically than a Whitehouse press spokesperson.
Is this the most important tech story going on in the world? I don't think so. The editorial diet today has been pretty thin, recycled stories published a week ago on the BBC, the fascinating news that Mozilla Foxtrot is going to allow the users to choose the name for themselves. Well whoop-de-do, Internet Explorer went through that phase roung about release 3.0, you could download a tool that would let you brand it any way you chose, stupid icon and everything. I used to annoy my Netscape friends by running a version that announced itself as Netscape Navigator complete with N icon. The sometimes took quarter of an hour or more before they realized they were having their chain yanked.
I still think the Wired story on how to get casual sex via bluetooth was more interesting. Oh and that virginity auction in the UK. Or how about Boeing being about to launch high speed internet service via WiFi on planes next month?
Sure the latest discovery of some perfidious Microsoft marketting litterature was desperately more important and interesting. Does it tell us anything new we did not know before?
There were much more interesting stories in the BBC, like the stident who auctioned her virginity on Ebay and went through with the deal. Or the new British craze of 'Toothing' - using bluetooth cell phones to hook up for casual sex. Or if the only sex stories you find interesting involve pr0n, not real sex the news that Boeing has installed Internet access via WiFi in a number of planes seems pretty interesting to me - like its the story most likely to affect me directly in the next few months.
Instead we get a week old story about a not very original casino fraud. Oh and that fascinating story about mozilla Foxbat changing its name to Motzarellea Fuxbat.
The guy who wrote the article does not seem to understand what drives change. I was visitng Germany on a monthly basis during the period when the wall fell, the guy does not have a clue why that happened.
Sure dissidents and activists play a critical part in a revolution. But their role is secondary, try talking to some. I have met many of the 'leaders' of the year of miracles, what they were trying to do was to share information and ideas, that was what threatened the dictators.
The Web opens up the communication channels in ways that it is almost impossible to control. The corrupt government of Singapore will get its due sooner as a result of the Web. I know rather a lot about the surveilance they use there having discussed it with some of the Mossad consultants who advised them. The whole state has been designed for surveillance. Every telephone call is logged and they perform network analysis to discover who is talking to whom. The houses are deliberatly designed to actively discourage private entertaining. Restaurants are heavily subsidized in order to encourage people to eat where they can be watched. The result is that any attempt to meet in private is sufficiently unusual to be very noticable.
This all falls apart if the information does not need a dissident movement to make it through. Look at how hard it is to stop trolls on slashdot. Now imagine that you are a blogger in a 'police friendly' state like Singapore. You have to take some care to cover your tracks but it is not impossible. If the government is not corrupt, why do they need to threaten their critics. Police states suffer from obvious internal contradictions.
And don't get me started about the idiocy of the great firewall of china. About the only use it serves is to reduce spam and virus outbreaks somewhat. The criticism that threatens the communist party cadres comes from inside the country.
No it is not such a bad question because some groups such as Earth First, some of the anti-abortion activists and some anti-vivisectionists crossed the line long ago. Earth First does things which are very likely to kill people, like spike trees.
There certainly are radical terrorists who champion those causes, the problem is that the line is usually abused. The current UK foreign secretary was under MI5 surveillance when he was a student. So Blair's number one man in the war on terra was once on a blacklist.
I have seen this happen personally in the UK. A group associated with the UK conservative party called the Economic League maintained a blacklist of 'left wing sympathizers' that they sold to an undisclosed list of employers. I got listed for saying that there was no way I was going to have anything to do with any group that used those tactics. In case people are wondering how privately educated sons of the establishment like myself turn on the tory party like I did, well that was the Damascus moment for me.
You can easily verify this claim further with a small amount of Googling. The list itself collapsed in irrelevance after Bob Maxwell bought a copy and set up a stand at the Labour party conference. There were more Tories on it than left wing radicals. They used to list each other when they got into faction fights.
Given the treatment meeted out to Richard Clarke in the past few days, there is no way that John Ashcroft or George Bush can be trusted with such a power. They are now talking of selectively declassifying intelligence for the sole purpose of being able to punish Clarke with a specious perjury prosecution. They went after Wilson by illegally uncovering the fact that his wife was a covert CIA operative. The continued to threaten O'Niel with prosecutions even after it was admitted that the Whitehouse had cleared all his documents for release.
And you know what? At this point I'm not really sure that Ashcroft's excuse for holding Padilla without indictment or trial is going to turn out to be valid when we find out what it is.
In the past few days Bush has shown more energy and passion in his efforts to crush Clarke than he ever has in his pro-forma attempts to track down and eliminate al Qaeda. I simply cannot believe that any other major party candidate in that race on either side would not have invaded Afghanistan to destroy al Qaeda and stayed there focused on that single task until it was complete. Forbes, Keyes, Gore, Bradley, I can't believe a single one would not have invaded (they would have been impeached anyway so it would not matter) and I can't believe any other candidate would have finished the job.
Please do not forget that. Back in the dotcom heyday I spoke to somebody who had bought a company that had spent oodles developing a new piece of core technology.
Unfortunately they had gone to one of the big six consulting bandits who ran out their development methodology which you would call waterfall and I call 'emperors new clothes'.
The consulting firm bled their victim for millions before getting the boot at which point there was not a single line of code written.
Another similar exercise I was consulting on as a sub-contractor. There was a problem that needed a bit of code writing to address it. "Oh thats easy says I, we just write an ISAPI filter in C and drop it in, problem solved".
The consultant 'programmer' did not know C.
"I will see if Visual Basic could be used"
Guess what? he did not know Visual Basic either, in fact the only language he did know was some oracle scripting language. and this guy was being billed out at $1.5K per day as a programmer.
Clients can do wierd things as well. I once flew in to brief a client only to find that their entire team had left for an off-site. I charged less then than I would today, but it was still a premium rate.
Don't get me wrong: I'm not dismissing algorithm development at all. I'm saying that one has to be both a strong computer scientist and a strong software engineer to compete in today's job market. And frankly, I just don't see a lot of that in our schools.
The academics like it because it is nice, mathematical and you can get mpu's out of it. But they also need to teach the skills the students are going to really need.
Great for you, I have a doctorate from Oxford on applications of formal methods to massively parallel systems. Watching Tony Hoare prove Quicksort correct using Z is kinda useful and interesting but not because you are likely to invent an algorithm. I don't think I have ever worked on a project where algorithm performance was a major problem. Sure there are stupid choices (like the database package I once tested that used bubblesort).
You say - get them out of a book. Lemme ask you, how do they get into the book in the first place ?
Well probably Knuth or Hoare thought it up. Offhand I can't think of a really interesting algorithm since quicksort.
Its like the difference between arithmetic and problem sets. The ability to manipulate abstract algebra is an interesting and somewhat useful skill. I can hire people with that skill by the boatload (sic). What I want is people who can map from the concrete to the abstract and back again. About one comp sci student in ten that I interview is capable of that.
See, that's what Computer "Science" is really about. Ask Dr. Knuth - the father of Computer Science, whether algorithms are important or software engineering is ? He's written 3 tomes on algorithms, none on software building.
Actually that was the point of the extended books on the TeX documentation - which I have read and discussed with Knuth when I was working on adding math markup to HTML. It is not an algorithmic problem, its a representational one.
Making large projects work should technically not even be in Computer Science. Its mostly a management skill
Again you miss the point, I am not looking for robots who I have to spoon-feed problems to. I am looking for people who can take a set of requirements and an outline architecture and make it work with existing code. I don't want someone who can't use the code manager, or writes code that only he can understand.
The other problem is that most of what is taught in comp-sci these days is not so great. There is a tendency to focus on algorithms (get them out of a book) rather than how to contribute to building large projects that work.
Only if a significant number of people decide that they are going to stick with the new.net root. Otherwise it is kind of like the philosopher's strike in Hitch-Hiker's guide to the Galaxy.
The laughable counter on their web site asside, I don't think that there is much demand for TLDs that are only visible to part of the net. The only thing that gives them value is the expectation that someday the new.net roots would be made official.
Sure there will be a problem when a new TLD is inserted that has a new.net copy. But that will only affect a small number of web users, mainly those whose ISPs were paid to support the new.net domains with stock, and that only if they are obliged to. Yes there will be the six members of the tinfoil hat brigade who scream on /. but the expression 'get a life' comes to mind
There are circumstances where there could be a root operator revolt, like the US deciding to exclude cuba from the Internet by blocking .cu. But these complaints do not rise to that level. The people making the complaint were told this would happen in advance. There is no way imaginable that anyone could claim detrimental reliance or such.
Slashdot seems to run these stories to show how it is the at the center of fringe net society. They would have done better to have run the stories I suggested if they wanted to do that, like toothing or virginity auctions. Seems that these are a bit too strong for their puritan editorial tastes.
Take a look at the current costs of running the ISS, the cost of merely maintaining the shuttle. Then adjust for today's dollars (the shuttle program is a quarter century old).
The current plan is to build a shuttle type replacement, build a moon base and then go on to Mars. None of those programs are likely to come in under a trillion on their own.
Yeah, right, we can trust numbers from the crew who told us that medicare prescription benefit would cost less than $400 billion when their own figures said $550 billion +.
The cost is irrelevant since the mars shot was not even mentioned in the state of the union speech only six days later.
Plenty. There are lots of subjects that do not fit into nice neat, hierarchical and mutualy exclusive categories. This was one of Stephen Jay Gould's frequent points, the tree of life metaphor is a deeply flawed one. It does not even work for genealogy (hint, we each have two parents).
That sentence is meaningless. Why did the scientists get to write the taxonomy?
The sentence has a very clear semantics, go read it. That fact you disagree or can't compute does not make it meaningless. The function of science is to build models of the world through empirical processes. Taxonomy is only a science when there is a theory behind the choices. The periodic table is an example of a scientific taxonomy. The organization can be science, but the choice of names is not.
Take a look at attempts to impose a taxonomy on data that does not fit. Yahoo is a great example, they started out with a single axis, then it became two, three and finaly they just gave up. The web does not package itself up into neat little folders.
No, IIRC Seldane is an anti-dandruff shampoo.
You missed the sarcasm, it really makes no difference what you call the planet, planetoid, Sedna, Seldane, we are not discussing a question of importance or even a question of science.
My point was that the biological classification is valid, but that does not make any other classification invalid. The fundamental error here is the idea that there is only one true taxonomy and that science is in the business of discovering it. Both ideas are broken but even so there are plenty of folk who try to insist they are true - as this thread shows.
The point is not whether the tomato is or is not a fruit. The point is that the issue is not so simple that it is beyond dispute or that someone is somehow wrong for using a perfectly good classification that has worked for several centuries. So people can lay off calling people idiots because they disagree with you, if you really understand the question you know that there is no single right answer.
Stephen Jay Gould wrote an essay on the Brontesaurus issue and he found the reasons for the name change unconvincing, that is why he called one of his books 'bully for brontesaurus'. The point is that the fact that the animal had been known by one name for close to a century did not stop a desicated committee from deciding it knew better.
And thats why the argument over whether pluto is or is not a planet is irrelevant. There is no king so mighty that their decision alone is truth. Like the 'continent' of Europe the fact Pluto is a planet is so well entrenched in our shared culture that it is futile to try to reclasify it. If you think about it, the difference between the inner planets such as earth and mars and the gas giants Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune is much, much bigger than the difference between Mercury and Pluto.
Whether you call the thing a planet or a rock you will not learn anything about it as a result. This is not science, it it stamp collecting
The guy seems to have a very absolutist view of the world.
The point I am making here is that there is a very big difference between saying 'according to the current scientific consensus it makes sense to call a tomato a fruit, rename Brontosuarus Apatosaurus and demote Pluto from Cabinet rank" and saying "the tomato is a fruit, there never was a Brontosaurus and Pluto is not a planet".
The point is that there are some subjects where you can have right and wrong, 'the earth is flat' being one of them. But when it comes down to definitions there may not be an ultimate 'truth'.
Fruit (froot) [n]--the ripened reproductive body of a seed plant
Try reading a dictionary that was written in 1800 or earlier. And try looking up the definition of tomato rather than the definition of fruit. You are reading a definition that is the result of the taxonomists having won and in the process completely missing the fact that there was ever a legitimate dispute. The farmers classified the tomato as a vegetable because it has a thin skin and is perishable. That is why the supreme court rulled the way it did, the tax law in question was written when the previous description was in force.
The OED definitions of 'vegetable' go from the incredibly broad (any plant) to the more specific (any plant that is eaten for food). Curiously I did not actually find the scientific definition cited in my copy (2nd ed). But that might be because the entry is two pages long and I overlooked.
The point I was making is that the whole idea of rigid taxonomy is a Victorian invention. The idea of fixed immutable categories that are determined by rigid application of science is very much a late 19th century view.
That is the point at which the Oxford English Dictionary, the Encyclopaedia Britanica, Principia Mathematica are all being written. Then by 1930 it has all slammed to an abrupt halt as relativity, Goedel's incompleteness theorem and quantum mechanics have all become mainstream. Suddenly the logical positivist view of the universe is no longer universal.
There is some logic to a taxonomy of fruits and veg based on genetics, there is equal logic to a taxonomy based on how well it keeps. The farmers lost out to the scientists here because the scientists got to write the taxonomy.
When it comes to the definition of 'planet' there is no real scientific basis for the taxonomy. Planets have simply been defined to be obejects orbiting a star that are not orbiting anything else (another planet) and are large enough to form a sphere under their own gravity. This gets subjective when the term 'sphere' is debated. Clearly the earth and the other planets are only roughly spherical, how much tolerance is there?
It is a silly dispute as are most taxonomic disputes, Pluto and Seldane are planets if people chose to call them such. Witgenstein was right.
According to plenty of legal definitions tomatos are in fact vegetables and not fruit. The tomato=fruit idea was introduced long after the classification as a vegetable as well established.
The reason for the reclassification of tomatos by the biologists was that they started to buy into the evolutionary classification schemes. So the taxonomy was redefined to fit the new theory.
Same thing happened with the Dinosaur formerly known as Brontosaurous. A bunch of jumped up greybeards with nothing to do decided that Brontosaurous and Apatasaurous were the same beast and that their idiotic rules were more important than common sense.
In this case there does not seem to be any particularly important theoretical issues. A planet and a planetoid behave in exactly the same way. The distinction between the two will inevitably be arbitrary at some point. Its like getting hung up on the definition of continent. Exactly why is Europe a continent but India is merely a 'sub continent' despite being much larger and a much more distinct geographical area? There is no real justification, except that Europe has to be a continent by the original definition, The fact that it is contiguous with Asia is conveniently ignored. India would have been considered a continent if they had not already reached the magic number of seven.
Get votes.
I doubt that there will be any follow through on the Mars shot. It was not even mentioned six days later in the state of the union address. It has not been mentioned since. The press corps were uniformly skeptical, as are the public.
Not long after they knifed Hubble. The fact that the Christian fundies were complaining about spending money on questioning creation is probably pure coincidence.
I think that regardless of what happens in November the most likely thing will be the cancellation of the shuttle and ISS shortly afterwards. If it is unsafe to fly to Hubble just the once the 50-100 odd shuttle launches required to complete and maintain the ISS are a complete non-starter. At present reliability rates we would see a couple more disasters en-route. And no, I don't think for a second that NASA has been fixed.
A Mars shot would cost one heck of a lot more than a trillion dolars. There is no way that Congress or the seniors are going to stand for it unless they are confident their social security and medicare benefits are completely safe. The drugs benefit for seniors was priced at $400 bn because the Congress would not pay any more. So given the demand for senior's drug coverage what is the probability that a program that costs at least twice as much being passed?
No, I proposed the referer field.
I don't know whether I 'mis-spelt' it or Tim did.
Regardless, that is now the spelling and the dictionaries are the ones who are wrong. My spelling comfortably outnumbers the old one by a few billion uses per day.
You would think from this statement that UNIX had been a model of O/S design rather than a poorly documented hack job. Back in the day we used to have a unix haters list at MIT. nobody could believe that something so pathetic was winning.
MS Windows did not have true multitasking at the start because Intel botched the 286 design. Unlike the Motorola 68K which supported multitasking and protected memory but for some reason Apple decided not to use them.
What I think we are seeing here is projection from a bunch of people who fear their skills may loose value. It was the same with the Cobol coders, MVS jockeys etc. Whatever they know they call 'good design'.
OK so Microsoft is accused of 'copying', well what the heck has open source done that is so amazingly original? First you write a copy of a twenty year operating system, then you write a copy of a ten year old user interface to run on top of it.
Fact is that there are not all that many new ideas in the computer industry and once an idea gets hold in one form the execution almost never gets improved. Spreadsheets are an example of this, all of them show the same limited base concepts that were in Visicalc twenty five years ago.
The most glaring example are databases. SQL is a horrible language. It is completely incompatible with modern programming languages. But we end up having to use it because its the only scalable persistence model you can buy support for. So you write your applications three times, once in Java, a second time in SQL and then get the SQL part to talk to the Java part.
Rather than spending time praising ourselves about how wonderful the stuff is lets just admit that it is all a steaming pile, it all stinks.
So you would be some kind of expert on it? Like know more about the effects than someone with dyslexia?
Hey, its not my fault I have dyslexia.
The idea of referer was to allow back links to sites to be discovered. The blogging world uses this extensively. Remember that in 1992 there was no Google and we had less than 1000 users.
I think you overstate the privacy issues. It has always been possible to create session identifiers. I had a hack that did that running in '93. If someon wants to restrict access they can.
What a great description of the Iraq fiasco.
One thing is sure, we can't pretend that taking cocaine does not atrophy the intellect. Question is what Rummie, Wolfie and Perle were taking.
It is now two years since the hunt for Bin Laden was wound down to concentrate resources on settling scores with Saddam.
The Spanish have every reason to be pissed with the US. If Bin Laden and al Zawahiri had been eliminated 3/11 might have been prevented. Spain put itself in the line of fire by rounding up Al Qaeda operatives. Instead of holding up its end of the deal and hitting Al Qaeda hard the campaign was wound up as soon as the Taleban were displaced from power.
After 9/11 The Bushies were bitterly critical of 'how little' Clinton had done against Al Qaeda. Fact is that much more was done to suppress Al Qaeda during 1999 and 2000 than the Bushies have done in the past two years.