This is a really unimformed set of statements on high-energy particle physics which have appeared in several forms throughout this discussion. Let me clarify a couple things.
I was a CERN fellow, how well informed do you have to be to post to slashdot.
The Next Linear Collider (NLC) is not competition for the LHC.
Then why is it described as such in the report?
I'm really too young to know much about the SSC's cancellation, but I have heard older folks say that their big mistake was not putting enough money into R&D before beginning construction.
They had many problems, one was naming the thing after Ronald Reagan while he was still living which did not exactly give the Democrats a huge incentive to fund a monument to him. The fundamental problem was that the original budget was predicated on contributions from other countries, but the US made it plain it would be a 100% US lab. The Canadians offered to provide free power if it was near the border close to their hydro-electric stations... nope gotta give the pork to Texas.
Lack of preparation had nothing to do with the funding being cut. The problem was that the LHC was going to get there first and do the interesting physics. They had the tunnel already built.
The hadron approach is good because a proton is 2000 times heavier than an electron. So it's much easier to get to very high energies. On the down side, protons are not point particles, but rather "bags" of 3 quarks each.
Yeah, yeah, not knowing the distribution of the energy amongst the quarks is not a major problem if you know what you are doing. You just need to compile additional statistics to cut through the mess. At the end of the day you are going to know enough about the energy of the particles you are interested in from the calorimeter and the wire chamber. It is just a computational issue.
The big question is not whether to build the NLC--it is whether it will be here or in Europe, and how long will we have to wait.
The big question is whether there is a point to buiding another accelerator. I got out of the field because it was pretty clear that the LHC was the end of the road.
The fussion types have a much better claim on any funds that might go to physics. But I don't see why physics should have a special claim, we are talking about an experiment that will cost of the order of 3 to 6 billion. There are plenty of research projects that are likely to give bigger returns.
And don't get me started on the Web thing. If we had had anything like the funding for computer science as there was for physics we would be way ahead of where we are now. Computer science has to mostly survive on the handouts from the military program, DARPA funding has skewed the whole field towards a set of requirements that have nothing to do with reality.
I don't know why this was considered offtopic, the US constitution specifies maximum terms for the Presidency of 4 years, and no more than two terms in all. So barring a change in the consitution or a second controvertial ruling by Renquist and co there will be at least 3 and more likely 4 or 5 changes in administration in that time. And that is only the executive, the Congress holds the purse stings.
The US has already started to build one collider to compete with the LHC at CERN and abandoned it after spending a billion or so on it. This is a wish list, not a final decision.
Quite why anyone thinks the linac is worth building is beyond me, by the time the machine is finished the LHC will have done all the interesting work at this energy scale. Also note the comment about the world wide web being created by the high energy physics world, but without mentioning it was actually their competitor at cern who did that one.
The wish list is of course compiled by the people who do this type of big science so the priorities given to the projects is likely to be more indicative of the representation of the various factions on the comittee than a disinterested comparison. At the end of the day these projects will get funded according to the amount of pork they divert to certain districts.
Re:prefabs are great
on
Pre-Fab Homes?
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
From a process engineering (geek) point of view you can't beat a prefab house built in a factory.
The first ever pre-fab homes were built by Thomas Edison for his own use. He had two built next door to each other on his place in Florida. There was no way he could have got the quality of contractors localy in what was then a swamp mostly.
If you are going to build a wooden house you are almost certainly going to build it in panels and then fit the panels together. Bob Villa builds all his houses that way at any rate. So there is not much difference between building a partly finished panel onsite and a fully finished panel back at a factory. Certainly no intrinsic reason pre-fab should be worse.
I have a Victorian arts and crafts house, some parts are completely hand crafted, others are machine made. The real difference is not the type of manufacture, its the quality of the materials.
Supposedly the companies do this so they can say they could not fill the position and off-shore it.
There is no problem offshoring a job, it is only if the programmer is going to come to the US and pay taxes here that there are any restrictions.
Don't worry that much about offshore contracts, they are a fad. The US govt is currently running a 400 billion deficit and thats before the $87 billion for Iraq/hallibuton is spent. If the Bush tax cuts are made permanent the deficit will be structural and run to about $300 billion even if we have a return to the Clinton economy.
What I am getting at here is the fact that the exchange rate is not going to hold at its current rate forever with that type of deficit. The only way to fund the deficit is to borrow, that in turn will push up interest rates. In the short term the capital inflow will shore up the dollar (people buying dollars to lend) the rise in the dollar will further hurt the economy, as will the increasing interest rates that the Fed has to offer to get people to buy the debt.
Eventually things that can't go on forever don't. The currency market will get nervous about the ability of the US to repay the debt burden and we will have a good old fashioned currency crisis. At that point the dollar will rapidly plumet in value and the economic incentive to offshore jobs will be gone.
Of course they might not be wanting yout J2EE/Linux skills by that time. The market will probably have moved on
Ok if one wanted 5 years of experience with win2k, they would need to go forward in time, to say 2005. Not backwards, because win2k was not created yet.
I have five years experience with Windows 2000, just not with the release version...
Betas were circulating in 1999, alphas quite a bit before then.
Requiring SAT scores is complete bullshit. How you did on some test in high school is no indicator whatsoever of how you perform on the job at age 30.
IQ tests mean very little at any point. The bulk of the 'research' done to support the use of IQ tests has been either tainted with eugenic/racist theories or outright fraudulent. Stephen Jay Gould did the cannonical debunking of them in 'the mismeasure of man'.
When I was at high school I posted some IQ scores that were well outside the standard range - 160 to 180. That is because the school was a selective school and we had a weekly coaching session on the exam to get into the upper school. My scores went from upper decile to 2 to 3 standard deviations above the mean. All through coaching and practice.
Then when we got into the upper school we were told that research shows that the results are innate. I said the results had to be faulty since the entitre class of us had shown the same type of improvement (not necessarily as extreeme). Thats the point where I discovered that English public schools can hire some awfully stupid geography teachers. The science staff backed me up though.
Odd thing was that despite all that testing the school never picked up the fact I have a form of dyslexia.
A few years ago they were Realplayer or Quicktime. Some Sites still run 2 or 3 Different players but more and more are just playing WMP. Is it because WMP is cheaper? Is it because WMP is better? or Is it because WMP comes on 90% of PC sold in the last 3 to 4 Years?
Maybe its because Realplayer fucks up your PC completely with its numerous nagware components. There is a stupid icon in your system tray that keeps blinking away forever, the user interface is clumsy and ad laden.
Quicktime is nowhere near as offensive but it is an irritation to have to keep clicking away the offer to spend $30 on a stupid CODEC.
It would be a different issue if the competitors were genuinely open and unencumbered standards. They are not, the cost of server licenses for streaming video is ridiculous. There is no reason they should cost one penny more than Apache.
Microsoft just have a more clueful business model, if you look into the pricing of the systems you will quickly see the smart move to make.
American/. reader here! Now no offense intended, but can the ministers of the EU be bought or threatened? American Justices are up for sale, it seems.
Well the entire commission had to resign a few years back apart from Niel Kinnock (Brit) and one other guy after a corruption scandal.
Oh and the current President of the EU is a gangster who has thus far prevented the Italian courts from sending him to prison by getting parliament to pass a law giving him immunity from prosecution.
He, as a citizen, must follow the laws of this country.
As this country's constitution says treaties have full force of law, he's thus bound by it whether he signs or not.
Actually in this particular case a more concise consideration would be that the US courts are not obliged to consider any claim that is not supported by the laws of the country.
As someone once said 'Strange women lying arroud in ponds is no basis for a system of government. If I called myself an emperor just because some moistened bink lobbed a scimitar at me they'd put me away'.
This guy can shout and scream as much as he likes, but the key to property rights is not the act of making the claim, it is the recognition of the claim that is significant.
For all the hogwash this idiot spews about putting his work effort in he has done nothing that would justify a claim. He wasn't even responsible for noticing it in the first place.
NASA actually have a much better claim since traditionally landing on an island would give a territorial claim. Renouncing a personal claim does not mean that one automatically recognizes the claims of others...
Wait a second, the original assertion ran along the lines that slashdot was better five years ago when it was just leading tech.
That somehow precludes the current assertion that slashdot hasn't grown in six years. So, which is it, slashdot has changed or it hasn't?
Slashdot has grown, the editors have not. They are still peddling the same old tired stories we have seen time and again.
Um, do you have any kids? Just curious. If you don't, I don't think you know what you're talking about. If you do, you should be ashamed that you are willing to let someone else do your job (sex education) for you.
My kid is 2.5, exactly what type of sex education do you think is appropriate for that age? Just curious...
Why would I subscribe to AOL just to stop him encountering that type of information?
I do use the parental control freature on my TV, I stop my parents from tuning in to Fox news. I see no reason to have that kind of filth in my house. What do you use your parental control feature for?
I also object to poor'nography. There is far too much poor'nography and far too little good 'nography.
Don't get me wrong - the press is really hard on AOL. Yes, customers are leaving, but they still have the most customers and charge the highest price. They are still making tons of cash, they're just making less and less of it.
I see AOL as the Apple of the space. If you wind back to the days of the original Mac Apple was making its money from being the easy to use personal computer and charging a premium for doing so. AOL is in pretty much exactly the same niche and with the same limitatations.
The Mac interface was great when the problem was persuading people they could use a computer, to overcome the fear factor. But it was much less useful and started to become a major handicap once there was a large number of technically savy users who wanted to move beyond the one button mouse. [Yes I know you can buy aftermarket add ons, try adding a button to the integrated laptop mouse area, bit of a pain if you want the machine to host an X-Windows session from a linux box app that assumes three buttons)
AOL has the same problem, they can't take the training wheels off without loosing their core market.
The other problem AOL face is that their users quickly outgrow the walled garden content AOL offers. When the Whitehouse first went online AOL sold access to the Whitehouse web site as a 'premium' service at several cents a minute extra, meanwhile the same content was available for free.
At one time it looked like there was a market for 'premium' content but that model only really works if the publishers of the content have no direct distribution channel to the consumer. Once Web sites found that they could support themselves through advertising revenue the need for AOL as a distribution channel went away. Exactly why would I pay AOL to screw up my broadband connection for me?
The problem with buying a company that has a shrinking customer base in an expanding market is that the company may well go the way of buggy-whip Inc. AOL looks to me to be in a situation very similar to that described in the innovator's dilema, in this case the disruptive factor is not so much a change in technology (although broadband could be argued as such) as a change in the user base.
Companies like AOL and Kodak can probably run profitably for quite a few more years. But if they cannot find a replacement for their core product they will go the way of Polaroid. Yes Kodak will continue to sell lots of celluloid film for ten years or more, but every person who buys a digital camera represents a shrinking of their market. The 35mm format will not die, people still buy medium and large format cameras even today. But Kodak's business depends on selling through the ammusement park kiosk.
AOL has a more severe problem, their product depends on network effects. As their customer base shrinks so does the desirability of the product.
And first and foremost, Disallow the creation of packets with spoofed source's.
Hell, anyone even know a reason we're allowed to lie about who we are on the internet?
That would have to be filtered at the IP level, but the next generation of cable modems will have built in WiFi routers so it is not a big issue.
The question to ask is what is the point of sending a packet with a spoofed source address unless it is to attack another machine?
Of course one of the positive effects of NAT boxes is that you get this protection built in for free.
Oh, I don't know. In addition to the "coffin" quoted by others, the lead-in says:
Microsoft has a soft spot for Linux, but it believes that recent developments in the open-source community have killed the free software model
It is pretty difficult to know what was originally said and what part is interpretation by the journalist. I would like to see a quote here... I see a very big difference between the open source software movement and the open source software business model.
I read this part as saying that the idea that you take open source software off the shelf and build a VC funded public company arround selling it is dead. That does not sound like a shocker to me, I always thought the Linux startup concept was pretty hokey. But I never considered that anything more than a dotcom era phenomena which was always doomed to go the way of pets.com.
I don't see how the failure of Redhat etc. to build billion dollar businesses out of selling open source has anything to do with the open source software movement. They are a distraction at best.
The way to make money from open source is with professional services and very few successful professional services companies are organized as public companies. There is a reason that most professional services companies are partnerships, the entire assets of the company walk out the doors every night and go home.
The problem is that slashdot has not grown along with its audience. They are still stuck in a 1997 timewarp.
As far as agendas go, I would presume that the skew, bias and agenda you see on/. is more due to the members than the editorial crew.
The bias is in the story selection. Agenda control is one of the principal definitions of power. In the 2000 presidential election the media exercised power through agenda setting, they were the ones who decided to discuss manufactured character issues while pretending that there were no policy differences between the candidates.
As I understand it, the majority of moderation is supplied by the users, not the editors, which further tends to indicate that/. members want to discuss the ramifications of technology on their lives, outside of the narrow scope of tech for tech's sake.
My point exactly, I can pretty much get away with discussing politics in pretty much any discussion thread and the probability of being listed offtopic is small. I take some hits from people who plain disagree with my politics - you can tell those they use the cowardly 'overated' control which turns out to be the only one end users cannot override - why?
Wouldn't increasing the intelligence of routing hardware enough to limit DoS emanating from single home machines also give the ISPs a lot more insentive to block home run servers, p2p clients, check for NAT and make sure you don't visit "unsavory" locations on the net?
ISPs would be much less bothered about people running servers from home if the chance of them being compromised was lower. If an ISP wants to do any of the things you mention they can pretty much do it at the moment, it is pretty easy to block incomming server traffic, just drop incomming SYN packets at the main router. Same goes for censorship.
The proposal I am making requires the regulator to maintain state which makes it difficult to implement in a router.
One party in Israeli politics issues unreasonable statements. Hell, one party in Canadian politics believes they can fly through the power of meditation. Doesn't mean it's government policy.
Err it certainly does when it is the Prime Minister's party.
And as for the number of civilians killed, the Israeli retributions, while not the best way of dealing with anything, at least target terrorists.
Hogwash, they don't care who they kill. That is the reason that we now have Israeli fighter pilots refusing to fly. That is an absolutely unheard of situation.
An occupying force has no right under international law to commit reprisals against civilians under occupation. These are considered war crimes.
If Israel was serious about peace they would have stopped building settlements after they agreed to do so in Oslo. Instead they doubled the number. 70% of Israelis agree that the settlements should be dismantled. There are even large numbers of settlers who are willing to trade for an appartnemtn in Israel, they only moved to the occupied territories in the first place because of government subsidies.
Hamas and Sharon have the same goal here, maintain the status quo. Sharon was the champion of the settler movement and he is not going to back down. Hamas do not want a two state solution, they want to wait until the Palestinian population outnumbers the jewish and then they will start demanding equal citizenship rights in a greater Israel. in the meantime each lunatic faction will do everything in its power prevent a peace settlement.
Likud and Hamas are two sides of the same fascist coin.
Always question the person who proclaims a thing dead. Ask if they gain anything from the death. If so, assume they are full of shit.
The string 'dead' does not appear anywhere in the article. The claim is simply another fabrication from the va-linux employees who edit slashdot.
These 'Microsoft evil' stories do get somewhat tiresome. I think that it says more about the despreation of Va-linux than either Microsoft or the open-source community.
If the open source bullshit means anything then slashdot should try to be something better than the Fox News of the open source community. I am sure the editorial line pleases the Va-Linux directors, but how long the readers tolerate it is a different matter.
Slashdot is old and staid, technology is interesting but it is getting boring repeating the same old debates, particularly the RIAA vs Napster debate which has become like the abortion debate, both sides are so obnoxious you just want to scream when they start talking.
Five years ago what young people were interested was technology. Raise a political point on slashdot and you would get slapped down with offtopic. Today what people are interested in is politics, there is a war going on out there which matters a damn sight more than what Hilary Rosen or Bill Gates might have said.
Slashdot is the only part of va-linux worth having, but it won't be for long if it is not allowed to grow. Manufactured headlines claiming that Microsoft said something they did not are a poor substitute for what it could be.
The gangs can *TRY* to extort money, but in the long run, it would be cheaper to hire consultants or better administrators. This will have the effect of IMPROVING security worldwide. Thanks European gangs!
Commercial rates for security consultants start at $2,000 per day. People in the middle tier charge as much as $5,000. Big name consultants such as Bruce Schneier can name their price.
And the fact is that none of us can do diddly against a DDoS attack, except advise you on how to configure bigger pipes and how to get in touch with ISPs quickly to stop the traffic from their networks.
Occasionally there is a DDoS that has a flawed mode of attack that can be diverted. There have been a couple of attacks against the Whitehouse that were like that. They can divert the attacks because they can get top rank consulting for free in extremis.
Not paying might be cheaper in the long run, but in the long run we are all dead. The answer is not consultants, it is law enforcement and better infrastructure.
For example why exactly does anyone need to send a stream of several thousand SYN packets per second from a home computer to the same IP address for several hours at a time? There is simply no reason why a home machine should need to do that, nor should a home machine be sending millions of DNS requests per second to any machine.
There is a pretty easy fix to DDoS attacks, put intelligence into cable modems and router boxes. Even if there is an option that allows the expert user to turn the checking off the boxes should be shipped in a safe configuration by default and it should not be possible to disable the safety catch without physical access to the modem.
Congress could encourage ISPs to adopt this type of technology by merely suggesting that ISPs be made liable for attacks mounted from their machines.
"Equally evil"? The Arab governments in the area have publicly and frequently
Save it, the Likud party has publicly and frequently made those same statements. The only difference is that the Israeli government is acting on those statements, oppressing Palestinians and preventing citizens that it exiled from the country and denied citizenship to from returning.
Both sides use force, both sides target civilians.
The Israeli government on the other hand has not engaged in the mass slaughter of their foes
The Israeli courts found Sharon to be responsible for the massacres of civilians at Shabra and Chatilla. So far mass slaughter appears to be beyond the capabilities of Hamas.
The numbers of innocent civilians killed in Israeli reprisals is considerably higher than the numbers of innocent Israelis killed. So why condemn only one side and the side of the occupier rather than the occupied at that?
Sharon and Arafat are equally evil for the simple reason that they are the exact same person. This should be pretty obvious to any observer.
If Israel behaved with any logic they would have bulldozed the settlements after the settlers murdered Rabin.
Bush said just about the same thing, and no one called him anti-american for it.
"Sixty years of Western nations excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom in the Middle East did nothing to make us safe, because in the long run, stability cannot be purchased at the expense of liberty."
Bush fails to come to grips with the fact that the US has done more than passively accept dictatorships it has actively worked to destroy democracies. The US did more than passively keep the Shah of Iran and General Pinochet in power, the US instigated and executed the replacement of democratic governments with dictators.
Its fun to point out that the Middle East policy of GWB has been influence heavily by (drum roll...) Noam Chomsky.
Actually the phrase 'those who are not with us are against us' is actually due to Lenin who appears to be a far more significant influence on this administration's ideology. It is pretty amusing to see an allegedly right wing government spewing so much Marxist ideology without appearing to know where it comes from.
No longer, if Bush has his way, will the US set up dictatorships and arm them even to genocide.
US politicians have always clothed themselves in the mantle of liberty and justice even when they were arming the very dictators you refer to.
I very much doubt that we will see Bush show the slightest inclination to challenge Putin over Chetchnya, or seriously incommode the Saudi, Kewati or other gulf royal famillies. He certainly will not question anything that Sharon does in Israel. So what we are left with is the same old US foreign policy of propping up 'good' dictators and condeming the bad.
Since being exposed as a liar on the WMD issue it is difficult to accept any claim that Bush makes with anything other than skepticism. If we cannot trust Bush to make an honest factual statement about the present we can hardly be expected to believe his promises for the future.
Bush also promised to be 'a uniter not a divider', not only has he governed as the most Partisan president since the civil war he has divided the US from her traditional allies in NATO and at the UN.
Parting Shot: You can attempt to understand the present or you can make a straw man and chop it up all you want.
Let see, I read the world press every day. Bush has admitted he does not even read the US press. I have a reasonable understanding of recent history, Bush displays absolutely none. If you look back through my slashdot posts you will see that I correctly predicted a quagmire in post invasion Iraq. Bush predicted troops being wellcomed with flowers and his only post-invasion plans were for the victory parade and photo-op.
Of course having read the history of the British occupation of Iraq I knew that we only held Iraq by killing over 50,000 natives, mostly through punishment bombing of recalcitrant vilages. This despite liberating Iraq from the hated Turkish oppression. I now hear that the Gernerals who have taken charge of Iraq from Bremer are proposing much the same strategy.
We should not give one further cent to Israel or guarantee one cent in further loans until it stops building settlements in the West Bank and Gaza.
We should not fund the Palestinian authority if the international comunity determines it is not living up to its undertakings.
Neither side should be allowed to be the judge of its own cause. It is pretty easy to determine that Israel is failling to keep its commitments by looking at satelite photographs. It is much harder to determine whether there is a good faith effort to suppress terrorists.
As for the other histrionics, I see no legitimacy in any state that declares itself to be 'for' one section of the population. I do not see any difference between zionists calling for arabs to be driven into the sea or arabs calling for zionists to be driven into the sea. Currently the situation is that zionist racists drove a large number of palestinians from their homes in 1948 and continue to deny their right to return, meanwhile the state has confiscated their property and declared that it is to only be occupied by jews from now on.
What I see here is projection, the arab hysterics you complain of are in essence merely a threat to do to the jewish population what was done to the palestinians. Unless and until you recognize both threats as equally evil you will never find peace.
But those Arab dictatorships will stay in power as long as they can convince people that Israel and the US are the reasons for their problems
Absolutely, and the US has been very keen to make sure that the status quo continues for its own reasons.
The reason that there is no democracy in the Middle East is because the CIA organized a coup to depose the only elected government there in 1953. The Iranian government was understandably outraged that the Anglo-Persian oil company refused to pay a fair price for the oil they extracted or even audit the books so they could make sure they were paid the amount they were owed.
Rather than compromise Anglo-Persian refused to negotiate, this led to the democratically elected Iranian parliament nationalizing the oil industry. A bunch of spooks at the CIA led by the Dulles brothers decided that they would rather have Iran become a dictatorship under the Shah than risk seeing nationalism take hold in the region, possibly threatening a domino-effect of democratisation. This was acknowledged by the US Secretary of State during the Clinton administration.
The result was a coup which imposed a brutal regime in Iran. This was successful in the short run but in the long run led to the rise of Islamic fundamentalism and a second coup led by a popular uprising. This was then hijacked as popular uprisings often are by the theocrats who currently control much of Iran's government.
Something similar happened in Iraq, it is well established that the CIA helped Saddam remain in power for many years, providing lists of political opponents to be silenced etc.
All told the US and Israel have both done a great deal to create the mess that they now face. Israel insists that time started sometime in 1948, sometime after the Palestinians were driven from their homes by force. The US insists that any criticism of its past covert activities is unpatriotic, illegitimate.
Instead of facing the past the Israelis scream ANTI-SEMITE at anyone who raises it while the US screams ANTI-AMERICAN. And they hope that screaming and yelling and a sufficient supply of bullets will allow them to remain where they are and never have to make any compromise to anyone or to admit their cause to be anything less than entirely-richeous.
You can attempt to understand the past or you can be a prisoner of it.
Slashdot Mirror
I was a CERN fellow, how well informed do you have to be to post to slashdot.
The Next Linear Collider (NLC) is not competition for the LHC.
Then why is it described as such in the report?
I'm really too young to know much about the SSC's cancellation, but I have heard older folks say that their big mistake was not putting enough money into R&D before beginning construction.
They had many problems, one was naming the thing after Ronald Reagan while he was still living which did not exactly give the Democrats a huge incentive to fund a monument to him. The fundamental problem was that the original budget was predicated on contributions from other countries, but the US made it plain it would be a 100% US lab. The Canadians offered to provide free power if it was near the border close to their hydro-electric stations... nope gotta give the pork to Texas.
Lack of preparation had nothing to do with the funding being cut. The problem was that the LHC was going to get there first and do the interesting physics. They had the tunnel already built.
The hadron approach is good because a proton is 2000 times heavier than an electron. So it's much easier to get to very high energies. On the down side, protons are not point particles, but rather "bags" of 3 quarks each.
Yeah, yeah, not knowing the distribution of the energy amongst the quarks is not a major problem if you know what you are doing. You just need to compile additional statistics to cut through the mess. At the end of the day you are going to know enough about the energy of the particles you are interested in from the calorimeter and the wire chamber. It is just a computational issue.
The big question is not whether to build the NLC--it is whether it will be here or in Europe, and how long will we have to wait.
The big question is whether there is a point to buiding another accelerator. I got out of the field because it was pretty clear that the LHC was the end of the road.
The fussion types have a much better claim on any funds that might go to physics. But I don't see why physics should have a special claim, we are talking about an experiment that will cost of the order of 3 to 6 billion. There are plenty of research projects that are likely to give bigger returns.
And don't get me started on the Web thing. If we had had anything like the funding for computer science as there was for physics we would be way ahead of where we are now. Computer science has to mostly survive on the handouts from the military program, DARPA funding has skewed the whole field towards a set of requirements that have nothing to do with reality.
I don't know why this was considered offtopic, the US constitution specifies maximum terms for the Presidency of 4 years, and no more than two terms in all. So barring a change in the consitution or a second controvertial ruling by Renquist and co there will be at least 3 and more likely 4 or 5 changes in administration in that time. And that is only the executive, the Congress holds the purse stings.
The US has already started to build one collider to compete with the LHC at CERN and abandoned it after spending a billion or so on it. This is a wish list, not a final decision.
Quite why anyone thinks the linac is worth building is beyond me, by the time the machine is finished the LHC will have done all the interesting work at this energy scale. Also note the comment about the world wide web being created by the high energy physics world, but without mentioning it was actually their competitor at cern who did that one.
The wish list is of course compiled by the people who do this type of big science so the priorities given to the projects is likely to be more indicative of the representation of the various factions on the comittee than a disinterested comparison. At the end of the day these projects will get funded according to the amount of pork they divert to certain districts.
The first ever pre-fab homes were built by Thomas Edison for his own use. He had two built next door to each other on his place in Florida. There was no way he could have got the quality of contractors localy in what was then a swamp mostly.
If you are going to build a wooden house you are almost certainly going to build it in panels and then fit the panels together. Bob Villa builds all his houses that way at any rate. So there is not much difference between building a partly finished panel onsite and a fully finished panel back at a factory. Certainly no intrinsic reason pre-fab should be worse.
I have a Victorian arts and crafts house, some parts are completely hand crafted, others are machine made. The real difference is not the type of manufacture, its the quality of the materials.
There is no problem offshoring a job, it is only if the programmer is going to come to the US and pay taxes here that there are any restrictions.
Don't worry that much about offshore contracts, they are a fad. The US govt is currently running a 400 billion deficit and thats before the $87 billion for Iraq/hallibuton is spent. If the Bush tax cuts are made permanent the deficit will be structural and run to about $300 billion even if we have a return to the Clinton economy.
What I am getting at here is the fact that the exchange rate is not going to hold at its current rate forever with that type of deficit. The only way to fund the deficit is to borrow, that in turn will push up interest rates. In the short term the capital inflow will shore up the dollar (people buying dollars to lend) the rise in the dollar will further hurt the economy, as will the increasing interest rates that the Fed has to offer to get people to buy the debt.
Eventually things that can't go on forever don't. The currency market will get nervous about the ability of the US to repay the debt burden and we will have a good old fashioned currency crisis. At that point the dollar will rapidly plumet in value and the economic incentive to offshore jobs will be gone.
Of course they might not be wanting yout J2EE/Linux skills by that time. The market will probably have moved on
I have five years experience with Windows 2000, just not with the release version...
Betas were circulating in 1999, alphas quite a bit before then.
IQ tests mean very little at any point. The bulk of the 'research' done to support the use of IQ tests has been either tainted with eugenic/racist theories or outright fraudulent. Stephen Jay Gould did the cannonical debunking of them in 'the mismeasure of man'.
When I was at high school I posted some IQ scores that were well outside the standard range - 160 to 180. That is because the school was a selective school and we had a weekly coaching session on the exam to get into the upper school. My scores went from upper decile to 2 to 3 standard deviations above the mean. All through coaching and practice.
Then when we got into the upper school we were told that research shows that the results are innate. I said the results had to be faulty since the entitre class of us had shown the same type of improvement (not necessarily as extreeme). Thats the point where I discovered that English public schools can hire some awfully stupid geography teachers. The science staff backed me up though.
Odd thing was that despite all that testing the school never picked up the fact I have a form of dyslexia.
Does not work.
Real reinitializes itself regularly and reinserts itself into the systray. It is just another piece of scumware in my opinion.
After spending several hours trying to remove it from my last machine there is no way I am ever going to install it again.
Maybe its because Realplayer fucks up your PC completely with its numerous nagware components. There is a stupid icon in your system tray that keeps blinking away forever, the user interface is clumsy and ad laden.
Quicktime is nowhere near as offensive but it is an irritation to have to keep clicking away the offer to spend $30 on a stupid CODEC.
It would be a different issue if the competitors were genuinely open and unencumbered standards. They are not, the cost of server licenses for streaming video is ridiculous. There is no reason they should cost one penny more than Apache.
Microsoft just have a more clueful business model, if you look into the pricing of the systems you will quickly see the smart move to make.
Ogg would be better, if it was really all there.
Well the entire commission had to resign a few years back apart from Niel Kinnock (Brit) and one other guy after a corruption scandal.
Oh and the current President of the EU is a gangster who has thus far prevented the Italian courts from sending him to prison by getting parliament to pass a law giving him immunity from prosecution.
Apart from that, no problem at all.
Actually in this particular case a more concise consideration would be that the US courts are not obliged to consider any claim that is not supported by the laws of the country.
As someone once said 'Strange women lying arroud in ponds is no basis for a system of government. If I called myself an emperor just because some moistened bink lobbed a scimitar at me they'd put me away'.
This guy can shout and scream as much as he likes, but the key to property rights is not the act of making the claim, it is the recognition of the claim that is significant.
For all the hogwash this idiot spews about putting his work effort in he has done nothing that would justify a claim. He wasn't even responsible for noticing it in the first place.
NASA actually have a much better claim since traditionally landing on an island would give a territorial claim. Renouncing a personal claim does not mean that one automatically recognizes the claims of others...
Slashdot has grown, the editors have not. They are still peddling the same old tired stories we have seen time and again.
My kid is 2.5, exactly what type of sex education do you think is appropriate for that age? Just curious...
Why would I subscribe to AOL just to stop him encountering that type of information?
I do use the parental control freature on my TV, I stop my parents from tuning in to Fox news. I see no reason to have that kind of filth in my house. What do you use your parental control feature for?
I also object to poor'nography. There is far too much poor'nography and far too little good 'nography.
I see AOL as the Apple of the space. If you wind back to the days of the original Mac Apple was making its money from being the easy to use personal computer and charging a premium for doing so. AOL is in pretty much exactly the same niche and with the same limitatations.
The Mac interface was great when the problem was persuading people they could use a computer, to overcome the fear factor. But it was much less useful and started to become a major handicap once there was a large number of technically savy users who wanted to move beyond the one button mouse. [Yes I know you can buy aftermarket add ons, try adding a button to the integrated laptop mouse area, bit of a pain if you want the machine to host an X-Windows session from a linux box app that assumes three buttons)
AOL has the same problem, they can't take the training wheels off without loosing their core market.
The other problem AOL face is that their users quickly outgrow the walled garden content AOL offers. When the Whitehouse first went online AOL sold access to the Whitehouse web site as a 'premium' service at several cents a minute extra, meanwhile the same content was available for free.
At one time it looked like there was a market for 'premium' content but that model only really works if the publishers of the content have no direct distribution channel to the consumer. Once Web sites found that they could support themselves through advertising revenue the need for AOL as a distribution channel went away. Exactly why would I pay AOL to screw up my broadband connection for me?
The problem with buying a company that has a shrinking customer base in an expanding market is that the company may well go the way of buggy-whip Inc. AOL looks to me to be in a situation very similar to that described in the innovator's dilema, in this case the disruptive factor is not so much a change in technology (although broadband could be argued as such) as a change in the user base.
Companies like AOL and Kodak can probably run profitably for quite a few more years. But if they cannot find a replacement for their core product they will go the way of Polaroid. Yes Kodak will continue to sell lots of celluloid film for ten years or more, but every person who buys a digital camera represents a shrinking of their market. The 35mm format will not die, people still buy medium and large format cameras even today. But Kodak's business depends on selling through the ammusement park kiosk.
AOL has a more severe problem, their product depends on network effects. As their customer base shrinks so does the desirability of the product.
Hell, anyone even know a reason we're allowed to lie about who we are on the internet?
That would have to be filtered at the IP level, but the next generation of cable modems will have built in WiFi routers so it is not a big issue.
The question to ask is what is the point of sending a packet with a spoofed source address unless it is to attack another machine?
Of course one of the positive effects of NAT boxes is that you get this protection built in for free.
Microsoft has a soft spot for Linux, but it believes that recent developments in the open-source community have killed the free software model
It is pretty difficult to know what was originally said and what part is interpretation by the journalist. I would like to see a quote here... I see a very big difference between the open source software movement and the open source software business model.
I read this part as saying that the idea that you take open source software off the shelf and build a VC funded public company arround selling it is dead. That does not sound like a shocker to me, I always thought the Linux startup concept was pretty hokey. But I never considered that anything more than a dotcom era phenomena which was always doomed to go the way of pets.com.
I don't see how the failure of Redhat etc. to build billion dollar businesses out of selling open source has anything to do with the open source software movement. They are a distraction at best.
The way to make money from open source is with professional services and very few successful professional services companies are organized as public companies. There is a reason that most professional services companies are partnerships, the entire assets of the company walk out the doors every night and go home.
The problem is that slashdot has not grown along with its audience. They are still stuck in a 1997 timewarp.
As far as agendas go, I would presume that the skew, bias and agenda you see on /. is more due to the members than the editorial crew.
The bias is in the story selection. Agenda control is one of the principal definitions of power. In the 2000 presidential election the media exercised power through agenda setting, they were the ones who decided to discuss manufactured character issues while pretending that there were no policy differences between the candidates.
As I understand it, the majority of moderation is supplied by the users, not the editors, which further tends to indicate that /. members want to discuss the ramifications of technology on their lives, outside of the narrow scope of tech for tech's sake.
My point exactly, I can pretty much get away with discussing politics in pretty much any discussion thread and the probability of being listed offtopic is small. I take some hits from people who plain disagree with my politics - you can tell those they use the cowardly 'overated' control which turns out to be the only one end users cannot override - why?
No, I want Google to get a clue and start a politico-slashdot using the top stories listed in google-news as the editorial line.
I want something more independent than the politico equivalent of commander taco running the show.
ISPs would be much less bothered about people running servers from home if the chance of them being compromised was lower. If an ISP wants to do any of the things you mention they can pretty much do it at the moment, it is pretty easy to block incomming server traffic, just drop incomming SYN packets at the main router. Same goes for censorship.
The proposal I am making requires the regulator to maintain state which makes it difficult to implement in a router.
Err it certainly does when it is the Prime Minister's party.
And as for the number of civilians killed, the Israeli retributions, while not the best way of dealing with anything, at least target terrorists.
Hogwash, they don't care who they kill. That is the reason that we now have Israeli fighter pilots refusing to fly. That is an absolutely unheard of situation.
An occupying force has no right under international law to commit reprisals against civilians under occupation. These are considered war crimes.
If Israel was serious about peace they would have stopped building settlements after they agreed to do so in Oslo. Instead they doubled the number. 70% of Israelis agree that the settlements should be dismantled. There are even large numbers of settlers who are willing to trade for an appartnemtn in Israel, they only moved to the occupied territories in the first place because of government subsidies.
Hamas and Sharon have the same goal here, maintain the status quo. Sharon was the champion of the settler movement and he is not going to back down. Hamas do not want a two state solution, they want to wait until the Palestinian population outnumbers the jewish and then they will start demanding equal citizenship rights in a greater Israel. in the meantime each lunatic faction will do everything in its power prevent a peace settlement.
Likud and Hamas are two sides of the same fascist coin.
The string 'dead' does not appear anywhere in the article. The claim is simply another fabrication from the va-linux employees who edit slashdot.
These 'Microsoft evil' stories do get somewhat tiresome. I think that it says more about the despreation of Va-linux than either Microsoft or the open-source community.
If the open source bullshit means anything then slashdot should try to be something better than the Fox News of the open source community. I am sure the editorial line pleases the Va-Linux directors, but how long the readers tolerate it is a different matter.
Slashdot is old and staid, technology is interesting but it is getting boring repeating the same old debates, particularly the RIAA vs Napster debate which has become like the abortion debate, both sides are so obnoxious you just want to scream when they start talking.
Five years ago what young people were interested was technology. Raise a political point on slashdot and you would get slapped down with offtopic. Today what people are interested in is politics, there is a war going on out there which matters a damn sight more than what Hilary Rosen or Bill Gates might have said.
Slashdot is the only part of va-linux worth having, but it won't be for long if it is not allowed to grow. Manufactured headlines claiming that Microsoft said something they did not are a poor substitute for what it could be.
Commercial rates for security consultants start at $2,000 per day. People in the middle tier charge as much as $5,000. Big name consultants such as Bruce Schneier can name their price.
And the fact is that none of us can do diddly against a DDoS attack, except advise you on how to configure bigger pipes and how to get in touch with ISPs quickly to stop the traffic from their networks.
Occasionally there is a DDoS that has a flawed mode of attack that can be diverted. There have been a couple of attacks against the Whitehouse that were like that. They can divert the attacks because they can get top rank consulting for free in extremis.
Not paying might be cheaper in the long run, but in the long run we are all dead. The answer is not consultants, it is law enforcement and better infrastructure.
For example why exactly does anyone need to send a stream of several thousand SYN packets per second from a home computer to the same IP address for several hours at a time? There is simply no reason why a home machine should need to do that, nor should a home machine be sending millions of DNS requests per second to any machine.
There is a pretty easy fix to DDoS attacks, put intelligence into cable modems and router boxes. Even if there is an option that allows the expert user to turn the checking off the boxes should be shipped in a safe configuration by default and it should not be possible to disable the safety catch without physical access to the modem.
Congress could encourage ISPs to adopt this type of technology by merely suggesting that ISPs be made liable for attacks mounted from their machines.
Save it, the Likud party has publicly and frequently made those same statements. The only difference is that the Israeli government is acting on those statements, oppressing Palestinians and preventing citizens that it exiled from the country and denied citizenship to from returning.
Both sides use force, both sides target civilians.
The Israeli government on the other hand has not engaged in the mass slaughter of their foes
The Israeli courts found Sharon to be responsible for the massacres of civilians at Shabra and Chatilla. So far mass slaughter appears to be beyond the capabilities of Hamas.
The numbers of innocent civilians killed in Israeli reprisals is considerably higher than the numbers of innocent Israelis killed. So why condemn only one side and the side of the occupier rather than the occupied at that?
Sharon and Arafat are equally evil for the simple reason that they are the exact same person. This should be pretty obvious to any observer.
If Israel behaved with any logic they would have bulldozed the settlements after the settlers murdered Rabin.
Bush fails to come to grips with the fact that the US has done more than passively accept dictatorships it has actively worked to destroy democracies. The US did more than passively keep the Shah of Iran and General Pinochet in power, the US instigated and executed the replacement of democratic governments with dictators.
Its fun to point out that the Middle East policy of GWB has been influence heavily by (drum roll...) Noam Chomsky.
Actually the phrase 'those who are not with us are against us' is actually due to Lenin who appears to be a far more significant influence on this administration's ideology. It is pretty amusing to see an allegedly right wing government spewing so much Marxist ideology without appearing to know where it comes from.
No longer, if Bush has his way, will the US set up dictatorships and arm them even to genocide.
US politicians have always clothed themselves in the mantle of liberty and justice even when they were arming the very dictators you refer to.
I very much doubt that we will see Bush show the slightest inclination to challenge Putin over Chetchnya, or seriously incommode the Saudi, Kewati or other gulf royal famillies. He certainly will not question anything that Sharon does in Israel. So what we are left with is the same old US foreign policy of propping up 'good' dictators and condeming the bad.
Since being exposed as a liar on the WMD issue it is difficult to accept any claim that Bush makes with anything other than skepticism. If we cannot trust Bush to make an honest factual statement about the present we can hardly be expected to believe his promises for the future.
Bush also promised to be 'a uniter not a divider', not only has he governed as the most Partisan president since the civil war he has divided the US from her traditional allies in NATO and at the UN.
Parting Shot: You can attempt to understand the present or you can make a straw man and chop it up all you want.
Let see, I read the world press every day. Bush has admitted he does not even read the US press. I have a reasonable understanding of recent history, Bush displays absolutely none. If you look back through my slashdot posts you will see that I correctly predicted a quagmire in post invasion Iraq. Bush predicted troops being wellcomed with flowers and his only post-invasion plans were for the victory parade and photo-op.
Of course having read the history of the British occupation of Iraq I knew that we only held Iraq by killing over 50,000 natives, mostly through punishment bombing of recalcitrant vilages. This despite liberating Iraq from the hated Turkish oppression. I now hear that the Gernerals who have taken charge of Iraq from Bremer are proposing much the same strategy.
Neither, we should withold support from both.
We should not give one further cent to Israel or guarantee one cent in further loans until it stops building settlements in the West Bank and Gaza.
We should not fund the Palestinian authority if the international comunity determines it is not living up to its undertakings.
Neither side should be allowed to be the judge of its own cause. It is pretty easy to determine that Israel is failling to keep its commitments by looking at satelite photographs. It is much harder to determine whether there is a good faith effort to suppress terrorists.
As for the other histrionics, I see no legitimacy in any state that declares itself to be 'for' one section of the population. I do not see any difference between zionists calling for arabs to be driven into the sea or arabs calling for zionists to be driven into the sea. Currently the situation is that zionist racists drove a large number of palestinians from their homes in 1948 and continue to deny their right to return, meanwhile the state has confiscated their property and declared that it is to only be occupied by jews from now on.
What I see here is projection, the arab hysterics you complain of are in essence merely a threat to do to the jewish population what was done to the palestinians. Unless and until you recognize both threats as equally evil you will never find peace.
Absolutely, and the US has been very keen to make sure that the status quo continues for its own reasons.
The reason that there is no democracy in the Middle East is because the CIA organized a coup to depose the only elected government there in 1953. The Iranian government was understandably outraged that the Anglo-Persian oil company refused to pay a fair price for the oil they extracted or even audit the books so they could make sure they were paid the amount they were owed.
Rather than compromise Anglo-Persian refused to negotiate, this led to the democratically elected Iranian parliament nationalizing the oil industry. A bunch of spooks at the CIA led by the Dulles brothers decided that they would rather have Iran become a dictatorship under the Shah than risk seeing nationalism take hold in the region, possibly threatening a domino-effect of democratisation. This was acknowledged by the US Secretary of State during the Clinton administration.
The result was a coup which imposed a brutal regime in Iran. This was successful in the short run but in the long run led to the rise of Islamic fundamentalism and a second coup led by a popular uprising. This was then hijacked as popular uprisings often are by the theocrats who currently control much of Iran's government.
Something similar happened in Iraq, it is well established that the CIA helped Saddam remain in power for many years, providing lists of political opponents to be silenced etc.
All told the US and Israel have both done a great deal to create the mess that they now face. Israel insists that time started sometime in 1948, sometime after the Palestinians were driven from their homes by force. The US insists that any criticism of its past covert activities is unpatriotic, illegitimate.
Instead of facing the past the Israelis scream ANTI-SEMITE at anyone who raises it while the US screams ANTI-AMERICAN. And they hope that screaming and yelling and a sufficient supply of bullets will allow them to remain where they are and never have to make any compromise to anyone or to admit their cause to be anything less than entirely-richeous.
You can attempt to understand the past or you can be a prisoner of it.