Talk about spin! The economy and defecit problems started in Clinton's last year. Bush has been trying to undo them, but has until now been blocked by Tom Daschle's attempt to damage the economy by making Republicans look bad at the polls.
And whose campaign pledge was all about taking responsibility? Yep the empty suit in the Whitehouse who has tried to evade responsibility at every turn.
Bush can't even keep his Harken oil lies straight. One minute its the SEC lost his filing, the next it is his lawyers to blame.
Perhaps those lawyers were also to blame for the gap in his military records when he went AWOL for 14 months?
It takes a very special type of coward to manage to both dodge the draft by getting Daddy to pull strings and then actually desert to boot.
GOP smear? Actually, it was something Gore said. Exact quote: "I took the initiative in creating the Internet".
Correct but out of context, the true quote begins, 'in my time in Congress'. A congressional initiative is a funding initiative. The Internet was invented by Vint Cert, Tim Berners-Lee, myself et. al. The Internet was created through a government grant which Gore took the lead in getting funded. Gore's quote was deliberately and maliciously taken out of context by the GOP.
The very fact that you keep trying to peddle such smears shows how little confidence you have in both your arguments and the empty suit you call a President. It also shows how willing you are to deceive both yourselves and the voters.
Small wonder that so few other countries are willing to support the US in war with Iraq, the problem is that Bush simply has no credibility and that is the result of his own deceptions and evasions. In two years the failure in the Whitehouse has turned a historic budget surplus into a historic deficit, started a war but failed to finish it with the capture of either the Taleban or Al Qaeda leadership, lost a majority in the Senate through sheer incompetence and alienated every other major power with the sole exception of the UK. About the only campaign pledges he has kept are giving out huge tax 'cuts' for the hyper-rich which are not really cuts at all but transfers of the tax burden to future generations and not having any blow jobs in the oval office.
Kerry's own worst enemy is himself. Accurately reporting and presenting the facts on someone is not a "smear". Perhaps you work for his campaign? In Kerry's favor, he hasn't claimed yet to have created the Internet. Maybe he did invent ketchup instead.
Strange how Mr Anonymous defends the republican echo chamber against the smear charge by repeating yet again a notorious GOP smear. As has been repeatedly demonstrated on slashdot, Gore never claimed to have invented the Internet. It was a GOP press release that made that claim by deliberately taking a quote out of context.
As for working for a campaign, it is strange how GOP Anonymous Cowards appear to try to shout down any disident views.
FOX's marketing machine scores another idiot. I challenge you to find a significant difference in FOX's news coverage from CNN, MSNBC, or other mass market crap. They all cover the same bullshit.
It is no secret that CNN has been moving rightward to try to stem the flow to Fox. However CNN is not prepared to become a full time Republican propaganda machine, it can see why the head of news should not be sending Karl Rove political advice on dealing with the media.
CNN has also backed off its rightward drift after they started to lose viewers to MSNBC as a result.
Another element in the mix is Al Gore's 'Republican Echo Chamber' speech where he showed that its not only the GOP who are prepared to work the refs. It is notable that since Trent Lott was dispatched as a result of that speech there have been absolutely no stories making it out into the mainstream media by way of Matt Drudge, the Washington Times and the Murdoch press. This is not for lack of trying, their current project is to smear Kerry in case he gets the Democratic nomination for President.
Fox's idea of telling both sides is to tell you why the Republicans are right and then tell you why everyone else is wrong.
Whenever a left wing idea is raised on Fox the presenter immediately shouts it down or pour derision on it. Right wing loons like Ann Coulter are treated with absolute respect however.
The fact is that right wing idealogues are so intollerant of any other ideas that merely to hear a left wing view makes them get into a lather. Thats why they have to have their own parallel media where the range of views is Bill O'Riley to Rush Limbaugh and the standard of journalism is set by Matt Drudge.
Rupert understands that producing 'news' for such people is a lot cheaper that real journalism. One shouting head, no matter how well paid is a lot less expensive than a news staff.
The most likely reason for the interface card being separate is that it is likely that most customers would want to have the card fitted and installed as part of the host config. For example a company that is looking to buy a main server and a hot swap spare is going to want one RAID box and two controllers. The RAID box already has redundancy in the level 5 RAID config.
Apart from that issue, everyone knows that Apple is in the customer gouging business, always has been. Only reason why I think they will succeed here is that the Apple gear is one heck of a lot cheaper than the comparable Sun gear.
If you want to buy a commercial UNIX with lots of support and a thoroughly tested O/S base you can't do much better than Apple.
If only Apple would make their stuff available with a performance competative CPU things would be even better. One of the might of beens of history is what would have happend if Apple had chosen the DEC Alpha instead of powerPC...
A totally unexpected post in this thread, but a very interesting one. I've been very against News Corp buying DirecTV, and still am. If it has to happen, GE or SBC would be much preferable. Actually, what I think would be great is if Ted Turner made a bid for it. I think his ideas and energy would make DirecTV much less moribund, and maybe get them to go whole hog into HDTV.
Ted is currently negotiating with AOL Time Warner to buy back his sports teams and quite possibly CNN. Basically Ted realises that putting clueless Bimbos like Paula Zahn on the set is the way to make your ratings tank, not to rescue them. Every one of CNNs main advertising draws is a long timer from the Ted Turner era.
Ted also notes that the ratings for Fox's right wing pap only tell half the story. Advertising rates for Fox are less than half those of CNN. Basically the rednecks in the bible belt are not only too poor to benefit from the Bush tax cuts, they are too poor to buy enough stuff to interest advertisers.
Could be interesting if that deal takes place, Ted certainly has the passion that CNN has been lacking recently. Nobody wants to watch Connie Chung and Larry King doing week long reviews of the Jon Bennet Ramsey case, we all know who killed her and like the OJ case they ain't going to get punished for it.
It would be much more suprising if Ted bought DirectTV, that would require a heck of a lot more capital.
Now, that everybody but fools know that dotNet is somehow Java cloned... MS try to yet and again let people forget about the fact that MFC/VB/MTS/... are nothing but dead !
What is amazing is the number of fools who will say such things without actually bothering to look at dotNET, relying entirely on what they see others like them post on slashdot. Looks like the pointy haired boss has added in some exclamation points to liven up what would otherwise be a bald and uninteresting narrative.
C# does have some Java like features, but C# is not dotNET, it is merely one language that works on top of the CLI. The dotNET framework is not a straight clone of Java, it copies the stuff that works and tries to fix the stuff that does not work.
Given that Sun is going to sick lawyers on anyone who has the temerity to modify Java against its wishes nobody should be at all suprised that Microsoft won't support Java. So even if C# were simply a straight copy of Java today it is clear that it is going to have a different development path. Moreover unlike Sun which has repeatedly promised to put Java into an open development process and then broken that promise, Microsoft has submitted C# to ECMA.
rupert's political biases are trully staggering. Over here in the US everyone thinks he is a right wing nut because that is the group he supports with the New York Post, Fox News etc. with their ludicrous hard right biases.
However in other markets Rupert is pro whatever party is in power provided they are responsive to his commercial interests. Rupert backs Tony Blair in the UK despite the fact his Labour party still calls itself socialist and is well to the left of Ted Kenedy.
In China Rupert backs the communists. This is why you don't see much criticism of China in the US Murdoch press since Rupert does not want to offend his masters there.
Rupert does have some political convictions but they are all driven by his commercial interests. He is anti-union and anti any government attempts to enforce anti-trust regulations. This is why he is one of the few businessmen opposed to the Euro, he recognises Brussels as a threat to his empire.
So while Lott, Guiliani, Rove and co are trying to push DirectTV into his grasp they should be careful what they wish for. They would not be the first set of right wing ideologues Rupert has dispensed with. He dropped the British Tory party the minute it was clear they could not win the 1997 general election.
If Bush comes a cropper in Iraq with loony fundamentalists blowing stuff up left right and center in a war of attrition Rupert will have no qualms about dumping them. He would replace O'Riley and co with Noam Chomsky if he though that is the way the political winds are blowing.
Rupert is a grade one shit, he has absolutely no interest in the well being of any country other than his own which is not the UK, US or China, it is Australia, and don't believe that purchase of a US passport changes that.
What you don't get is your local TV station's programming. So you miss your local news, and things like local information on the Weather Channel, as well as independent stations in your area. That's a long way from saying you don't get the Simpsons.
I get my local networks on DishTV. The direct TV merger may have had some logic like extending local coverage without the need to put an extra bird up.
Of course we never watch local TV with the exception of PBS. And even that was better on the national feed which had no pledge breaks.
Actually the shuttle Columbia was nammed after the Columbia River, not Christopher Columbus.
And what do you think the river was named after?
According to NASA the shuttle was actually named after a ship, as were the other shuttles apart from Enterprise. Whatever the ship was named after the name originally comes from Christopher Columbus.
I'm not a freak. I was just joking about how the Bush administration is evil.
Thats not the sort of thing you should joke about. Ashcroft, Bush, Cheney and co are evil personified. They are planning to start a war that will probably kill 100,000 people simply to distract public opinion from the utter failure of their economic policy. How many Iraquis is Bush allowed to kill in order to save them from Saddam without ending up worse than Saddam?
If there was such a thing as the anti-christ he would obtain power exactly the way Bush has done and use it in exactly the way Bush has done.
Dude, Jack Welch's performance looks particularly hot
when you look at GE's earnings growth. Steady double digit growth for twenty some years, no?
What are you talking about?
That would be the share price. The earnings have also risen but not as fast. If one takes earnings per share instead of the gross earnings the picture looks much less impressive. Basically a company can pump up its earnings by simply buying companies.
The earnings growth is currently being questioned in the financial press. While nobody is alleging anything like Worldcom or Enron went on there is a heck of a lot more skepticism over GE's results during the Welch period. It appears that GE was growing in the same way AOL did, using an inflated stock price to buy up companies that were actually profitable.
While that is cute, it is hardly evidence that six sigma and the cult of Jack Welch really worked. It was a PR game rather than a model of business leadership.
Hmm. Take a look at the next story in the list about 14 minute orgasms and an alleged compound caled Retalanaline. Strange thing is that the term Retalanaline only appears twice in Google even though the
article that is linked to says it was written in 2001. One would think that such a compound would have more comment than that if it actually existed.
While one fake story does not prove the other is fake it does indicate that the journalistic standards are somewhat lax.
The parts did not fall first on Palestine, Texas. They were falling off went it went over California. Also, the main debris field in Texas is very big. There is a small town named Palestine in that area, but they also fell on other towns.
Yeah , yeah, the FIRST REPORTS came from Palestine Texas, and that is what people will remember, particularly the fruitcake faction.
The reason the conspriacy faction aren't working overtime here is that they really don't have to. The events themselves are wierd enough.
If we are going to invent conspiracy theories then how about this one? Al Qaeda operatives used a stolen crypto box to send a signal to the space shuttle that caused it to activate the explosive bolts on the wing wells, causing the undercariage to deploy on the left hand side at 200,000 feet.
Much better conspiracy theory than anyone has managed to date. It would also explain the reason the feds are looking for the box and the reason the debris fell where it did.
Of course I doubt that this is what happened as I just made it up.
Er... for those of us who are not businesspeople or even pro developers, could you please:
$man "level 5 leader"
It is a term used by Jim Collins in his book 'Good to Great'.
What Collins did was to set up a bunch of objective standards for good-to-great companies based on their share price over two 15 year periods. Then he compared them with a bunch of other companies that were comparable in the 'good' phase but never managed the 'great' phase.
He noted that the good to great companies had a bunch of qualities in common. In particular the CEOs behaved in a particular way. Instead of using 'I' all the time they used the word 'we'. They did not spend their time in self promotion for the sake of it. One of them used the comparison 'I'm a plough horse, he [the competitor's CEO] was more of a show horse'.
The basic research for the book was done prior to the recent CEO perp-walks by the Enron, Worldcom, Haliburton, Harken etc. crowd. So now almost everyone is trying to be a level-5 type leader rather than a Jack Welch who is a 'level 4' - not quite as good.
Incidentally if you apply it to politics then Thatcher comes out as a level-4 leader rather than a level-5. Anyone who follows British politics will know the reason why, she failled to plan for succession. The Tory leaders who followed her have all been failures and the party poll numbers show the results.
Unfortunately the notable standout is the failure in the Whitehouse who is a level-2 leader if that. Bush meets none of Collin's leadership criteria. It is all do as I say, not do as I do. Prime example, you go off and fight a war, I dodged service in Vietnam by getting Daddy to pull strings, then went AWOL. Secondary examples you keep your treaty commitments, I will unilaterally break the test ban treaty, ignore the security council, withdraw from Kyoto and basically ignore any treaty I consider inconvenient.
Exactly my point - the weak spot for the germans was that fact that Enigma was reversible once you found one of these things.
No, that is not security through obscurity. It is an unintended design flaw.
The Germans intended the Enigma system to be resistant to cryptanalysis even though the boxes were likely to be captured.
In our day in age why isn't the shuttle using a system that does not rely on this problem.
Basically because military ciphers are expected to keep stuff secret for a very long time. The space shuttle was first launched in the days when DES was the main commercial cipher - possibly even earlier (can't remember offhand whether DES came out before or after the shuttle).
If the NASA and NSA people had used standard commercial crypto then they would have been using a system that is compromised today.
Keeping your algorithm secret is a pretty good idea if you have that option. It certainly makes matters much harder for attackers. It is unlikely that Rivest, Goldberg, Shamir and co are going to publish a paper that is directly applicable to the security of NATO cipher systems. That limits the pool of available analysts significantly.
The reason that security through obscurity is rejected as a design principle for IETF etc. protocols is that in the commercial space we do not have that option. We cannot propose a standard, have it implemented by 200 different companies and keep it secret. Whatever we do someone is going to have hardware available and reverse engineer it.
The same does not apply to the space shuttle cipher boxes if it happens to be carrying them. For cryptanalysis to begin the attackers have to first find one of the boxes. That is hard.
Has he read the part about the antichrist. I'm thinking he fits the description.
OK this is simply too good to pass up.
Revalation: Then shall appear the denier, and he who is set apart in the darkness, who is called Antichrist. And again I said: Lord, reveal to me what he is like.... The appearance of his face is dusky; hmm, would fit Rice better, perhaps after a sun tan? the hairs of his head are sharp, like darts; his eyebrows like a wild beast's; his right eye like the star which rises in the morning, and the other like a lion's; his mouth about one cubit; Hmm does not sound too accurate his teeth span long; well that fits but Carter would seem a better fit, after all he was also the one attacked by the killer rabbit his fingers like scythes; the print of his feet of two spans; and on his face an inscription, Antichrist; he shall be exalted even to heaven, well depends on your definition of exaulted I suppose and shall be cast down even to Hades, making false displays. Yep, right about the false displays.
Hmm, that is not looking too accurate. Sounds to me like this would have to be read allegorically. Problem there being that you could read almost anything into the text.
Revelation 9:I saw a star from heaven fallen.
This would normally be interpreted as a great leader, but the fruitcakes will say it is Columbia. Of course getting back to the original omens post Columia may be interpreted as an omen that a great leader will fall.
Also folk might want to work in the two candlesticks that are destroyed in chapter 11.
The unfortunate thing about the revalation story is that a sizable proportion of Bush's followers believe it literally and believe that the rapture is imminent. So don't worry about greenhouse gases destroying the earth or SUVs or anything we can trash the environment as much as we like since the planet is only going to last another 30 years or so anyway.
If Bush is the anti-Christ he sure is good playing at being stupid. Of course the devil would know everything anyway which would explain his complete disinterest in finding anything out.
However one would think that the devil would have though up a better criminal past than a DUI conviction, stock fraud at Harken and going AWOL from the national guard. Even the unproven allegations that he took coke hardly bring him into the big league.
Why dodge Vietnam in the first place if you are the anti-christ who one would presume is imortal? Surely the anti-christ would not need to be 'exhonorated' by a sleezy SEC 'investigation' run by his father's appointees? One would expect the car carrying the person with the proof to come of the road unexpectedly or something.
Also the very fact that I can send this post to slashdot would appear to disprove the antichrist theory. Why haven't I been hit by a thund
First off, who knows if the note is even authentic.
We will soon find out. However Microsoft will certainly get the ability to subpoena etc. regardless of whether it is eventually proved to be a fraud.
Judge, Sun feels they should improve their Java product
No, that would be Sun like Microsoft recognises that Java is broken and needs fixing. Furthermore it recognises that the monolithic architecture of the JVM makes it seriously broken.
If Java was not a 30Mb lump it would not need to be deployed with the O/S. It would be possible to download the support libraries required together with the code. It would be possible to download the versions of the libraries that the code was compiled against - exactly what dotNET does.
Of course this would also mean that the distinction Sun has attempted to enforce between Sun approved modules and other modules would go away. It would be possible to develop a version of dotNET that ran J2EE programs optimised for the native processor.
Sun's legal manipulations have been aimed at forcing Microsoft to support a platform while denying Microsoft and the rest of the community any say in the development of that platform. In every other standards process the vendors always reserve the right to not support the outcome if they don't like it. So there is a compromise between the positions of the parties, usually one that is aligned to the interests of the users. In the case of Java Sun has opposed any changes by Microsoft and in fact any other party that it belives are counter to Sun's interests
I am not a Microsoft employee but I would be happy to testify for them.
Read the article. It's a communications box- for years, most of the shuttle communications have been encrypted. Occasionally they do stuff on unencrypted channels for the hams.
My personal experience kinda makes me doubt that. When a group of people suggested taking the mars lunar rover for a joy ride the proverbial excrement hit the ventilator.
I got a call from the EOP which was in panic don't trust a word that is said by the NASA management mode. The (limited) information I got (I don't have a security clearance, I am not a US national) was that they did not have any crypto protection on the control signals. They don't want extra boxes to go wrong.
It is not unlikely that the shuttle had encryption boxes on it. However I would not expect them to be used for the bulk of the signals. I certainly would not expect the shuttle to be carrying crypto boxes whose contents could compromise any NATO systems. The probability of the shuttle comming down in the wrong place was always significant. That is why the shuttle crews went on survival courses.
Also the real secure crypto boxes have explosives embedded to make sure the contents get wiped. I doubt NASA would want to carry such boxes without a really good reason.
I would however doubt anything told me in a press report. First off the journalist probably does not know the difference between a crypto box and an IFF box so the fact a distinction is not drawn in the article is not significant. There are probably a lot of components that the US govt would not want in the wrong hands.
Secondly the US media is quite happy to report any old garbage told it when it comes to this type of incident. So I prefer to check any info I receive against my own sources.
No. There's no "sizeable chance"; the shuttle is not a capsule with little/no control.i>
Events kinda disprove that assertion. And in any case astronauts have always received training in case they come down in the wrong location. I kinda thought the training was kinda wierd since the probability the craft would come down in one piece in a really out of the way place unobserved seemed unlikely. However whoever was in charge of the crypto hardware would have reconned that the probability that another shuttle came to a sticky end would be well within probabilities that lead to concern.
No. Missiles do not do friend-or-foe identification. It's done by radar systems at fixed installations or on vehicles, not munitions.
You would probably want the radars to have the ability to identify the shuttle though...
Ummm... I thought that a stinger missile uses only infrared guidence [howstuffworks.com].
The use infrared guidance to find the target. They may use IFOF to identify non-tagets.
I can't find any authoritative source like Jane's that lists this capability. However the idea of denying ordinance to the enemy has been known for years. The term 'spiking his guns' refers to the practice of carrying soft copper nails into battle to drive into the touchports of any captured weapons to stop them being used against them if the tide of battle turns again. Alternatively they might be used to prevent weapons that are about to be lost being turned against them (a less likely occurrence since the guns would usually be aimed in the wrong direction).
If you have a box and it performs encryption, then in this day and age the security of future transmissions on this box (oh say, to keep terrorist froming saying "Ok shuttle, now lets fly into the sun") should not be reliant on the security of the box itself! This is the same failed tatic that took out the Germans in World War II and DECSS; its security by obscurity.
That is pure dogma. The biggest enemy of security is dogma in place of thought.
The Germans had good reason to use security through obscurity. At the time there were NO ciphers available that were not vulnerable to analysis. It would not have taken an insane amount of additional computing power to break the allied codes. They were only slightly better by modern standards.
The enigma codes were broken in part because the Allies captured several enigma machines and code books. But the Germans knew that it was likely that this would happen. The Enigma system had been designed to be resistant to such attacks. It failed because it had one non obvious flwa - a letter never encrybecpted to itself and the operators were indisciplined.
The reason that security through obscurity is bad is it leads to complacency. But it is not the only way people can become complacent. As recently as 1992 I was arguing with UNIX sysadmins on comp.sys.computing that shaddow passowrds were necessary for UNIX since crack etc. were a real threat. Oh no came the reply you are ignorant, you don't understand, you are promoting security through obscurity.
If the government doens't know of any flaws in AES, Blowfish, RSA, etc., then why would they bother using a "top secret" crypto box instead of just the publicly available algorithms?
The box is most likely an Identify Friend Or Foe box. Any encryption of actual data would be handled by the applications sending it.
IFOF boxes are standard on all military vehicles. The shuttle is a military vehicle as defined by the relevant treaties as it has been used to launch military satelites. It would carry an IFOF box in any case as a matter of course since there is a sizable probability it might end up comming down in non-US airspace.
One of the alleged features of IFOF is the ability to identify itself to other 'friendly' airborne objects and avoid an attack. For example a passing stinger missile obtained from Uncle Sam by way of the Taleban.
It is unlikely such a box would have an amazingly complex crypto system. After all you don't want your stinger missile to be doing DH calculations before deciding whether to explode. So there could be some real importance there.
There is an article in Salon by Camile Paglia on the shuttle disaster. She interprets it as an omen, the same way that in ancient times a Roman General who tripped on the threshold as he went off to a battle would call the battle off.
After all as an omen the shuttle does look bad. It is named after the discover of America (what do you think the yacht was named after). It carries the first Israeli in space and the parts fall first on Palestine Texas - the home state of Cheney and Bush.
OK so you probably don't belive in such things. But the President does, or at least he believes in the bible which is full of such interpretations of events. More importantly the loonie fundamentalist Islamic types believe in such stuff.
Slashdot Mirror
And whose campaign pledge was all about taking responsibility? Yep the empty suit in the Whitehouse who has tried to evade responsibility at every turn.
Bush can't even keep his Harken oil lies straight. One minute its the SEC lost his filing, the next it is his lawyers to blame.
Perhaps those lawyers were also to blame for the gap in his military records when he went AWOL for 14 months?
It takes a very special type of coward to manage to both dodge the draft by getting Daddy to pull strings and then actually desert to boot.
Correct but out of context, the true quote begins, 'in my time in Congress'. A congressional initiative is a funding initiative. The Internet was invented by Vint Cert, Tim Berners-Lee, myself et. al. The Internet was created through a government grant which Gore took the lead in getting funded. Gore's quote was deliberately and maliciously taken out of context by the GOP.
The very fact that you keep trying to peddle such smears shows how little confidence you have in both your arguments and the empty suit you call a President. It also shows how willing you are to deceive both yourselves and the voters.
Small wonder that so few other countries are willing to support the US in war with Iraq, the problem is that Bush simply has no credibility and that is the result of his own deceptions and evasions. In two years the failure in the Whitehouse has turned a historic budget surplus into a historic deficit, started a war but failed to finish it with the capture of either the Taleban or Al Qaeda leadership, lost a majority in the Senate through sheer incompetence and alienated every other major power with the sole exception of the UK. About the only campaign pledges he has kept are giving out huge tax 'cuts' for the hyper-rich which are not really cuts at all but transfers of the tax burden to future generations and not having any blow jobs in the oval office.
Strange how Mr Anonymous defends the republican echo chamber against the smear charge by repeating yet again a notorious GOP smear. As has been repeatedly demonstrated on slashdot, Gore never claimed to have invented the Internet. It was a GOP press release that made that claim by deliberately taking a quote out of context.
As for working for a campaign, it is strange how GOP Anonymous Cowards appear to try to shout down any disident views.
It is no secret that CNN has been moving rightward to try to stem the flow to Fox. However CNN is not prepared to become a full time Republican propaganda machine, it can see why the head of news should not be sending Karl Rove political advice on dealing with the media.
CNN has also backed off its rightward drift after they started to lose viewers to MSNBC as a result.
Another element in the mix is Al Gore's 'Republican Echo Chamber' speech where he showed that its not only the GOP who are prepared to work the refs. It is notable that since Trent Lott was dispatched as a result of that speech there have been absolutely no stories making it out into the mainstream media by way of Matt Drudge, the Washington Times and the Murdoch press. This is not for lack of trying, their current project is to smear Kerry in case he gets the Democratic nomination for President.
Fox's idea of telling both sides is to tell you why the Republicans are right and then tell you why everyone else is wrong.
Whenever a left wing idea is raised on Fox the presenter immediately shouts it down or pour derision on it. Right wing loons like Ann Coulter are treated with absolute respect however.
The fact is that right wing idealogues are so intollerant of any other ideas that merely to hear a left wing view makes them get into a lather. Thats why they have to have their own parallel media where the range of views is Bill O'Riley to Rush Limbaugh and the standard of journalism is set by Matt Drudge.
Rupert understands that producing 'news' for such people is a lot cheaper that real journalism. One shouting head, no matter how well paid is a lot less expensive than a news staff.
Apart from that issue, everyone knows that Apple is in the customer gouging business, always has been. Only reason why I think they will succeed here is that the Apple gear is one heck of a lot cheaper than the comparable Sun gear.
If you want to buy a commercial UNIX with lots of support and a thoroughly tested O/S base you can't do much better than Apple.
If only Apple would make their stuff available with a performance competative CPU things would be even better. One of the might of beens of history is what would have happend if Apple had chosen the DEC Alpha instead of powerPC...
Ted is currently negotiating with AOL Time Warner to buy back his sports teams and quite possibly CNN. Basically Ted realises that putting clueless Bimbos like Paula Zahn on the set is the way to make your ratings tank, not to rescue them. Every one of CNNs main advertising draws is a long timer from the Ted Turner era.
Ted also notes that the ratings for Fox's right wing pap only tell half the story. Advertising rates for Fox are less than half those of CNN. Basically the rednecks in the bible belt are not only too poor to benefit from the Bush tax cuts, they are too poor to buy enough stuff to interest advertisers.
Could be interesting if that deal takes place, Ted certainly has the passion that CNN has been lacking recently. Nobody wants to watch Connie Chung and Larry King doing week long reviews of the Jon Bennet Ramsey case, we all know who killed her and like the OJ case they ain't going to get punished for it.
It would be much more suprising if Ted bought DirectTV, that would require a heck of a lot more capital.
What is amazing is the number of fools who will say such things without actually bothering to look at dotNET, relying entirely on what they see others like them post on slashdot. Looks like the pointy haired boss has added in some exclamation points to liven up what would otherwise be a bald and uninteresting narrative.
C# does have some Java like features, but C# is not dotNET, it is merely one language that works on top of the CLI. The dotNET framework is not a straight clone of Java, it copies the stuff that works and tries to fix the stuff that does not work.
Given that Sun is going to sick lawyers on anyone who has the temerity to modify Java against its wishes nobody should be at all suprised that Microsoft won't support Java. So even if C# were simply a straight copy of Java today it is clear that it is going to have a different development path. Moreover unlike Sun which has repeatedly promised to put Java into an open development process and then broken that promise, Microsoft has submitted C# to ECMA.
However in other markets Rupert is pro whatever party is in power provided they are responsive to his commercial interests. Rupert backs Tony Blair in the UK despite the fact his Labour party still calls itself socialist and is well to the left of Ted Kenedy.
In China Rupert backs the communists. This is why you don't see much criticism of China in the US Murdoch press since Rupert does not want to offend his masters there.
Rupert does have some political convictions but they are all driven by his commercial interests. He is anti-union and anti any government attempts to enforce anti-trust regulations. This is why he is one of the few businessmen opposed to the Euro, he recognises Brussels as a threat to his empire.
So while Lott, Guiliani, Rove and co are trying to push DirectTV into his grasp they should be careful what they wish for. They would not be the first set of right wing ideologues Rupert has dispensed with. He dropped the British Tory party the minute it was clear they could not win the 1997 general election.
If Bush comes a cropper in Iraq with loony fundamentalists blowing stuff up left right and center in a war of attrition Rupert will have no qualms about dumping them. He would replace O'Riley and co with Noam Chomsky if he though that is the way the political winds are blowing.
Rupert is a grade one shit, he has absolutely no interest in the well being of any country other than his own which is not the UK, US or China, it is Australia, and don't believe that purchase of a US passport changes that.
I get my local networks on DishTV. The direct TV merger may have had some logic like extending local coverage without the need to put an extra bird up.
Of course we never watch local TV with the exception of PBS. And even that was better on the national feed which had no pledge breaks.
And what do you think the river was named after?
According to NASA the shuttle was actually named after a ship, as were the other shuttles apart from Enterprise. Whatever the ship was named after the name originally comes from Christopher Columbus.
Thats not the sort of thing you should joke about. Ashcroft, Bush, Cheney and co are evil personified. They are planning to start a war that will probably kill 100,000 people simply to distract public opinion from the utter failure of their economic policy. How many Iraquis is Bush allowed to kill in order to save them from Saddam without ending up worse than Saddam?
If there was such a thing as the anti-christ he would obtain power exactly the way Bush has done and use it in exactly the way Bush has done.
That would be the share price. The earnings have also risen but not as fast. If one takes earnings per share instead of the gross earnings the picture looks much less impressive. Basically a company can pump up its earnings by simply buying companies.
The earnings growth is currently being questioned in the financial press. While nobody is alleging anything like Worldcom or Enron went on there is a heck of a lot more skepticism over GE's results during the Welch period. It appears that GE was growing in the same way AOL did, using an inflated stock price to buy up companies that were actually profitable.
While that is cute, it is hardly evidence that six sigma and the cult of Jack Welch really worked. It was a PR game rather than a model of business leadership.
While one fake story does not prove the other is fake it does indicate that the journalistic standards are somewhat lax.
Yeah , yeah, the FIRST REPORTS came from Palestine Texas, and that is what people will remember, particularly the fruitcake faction.
The reason the conspriacy faction aren't working overtime here is that they really don't have to. The events themselves are wierd enough.
If we are going to invent conspiracy theories then how about this one? Al Qaeda operatives used a stolen crypto box to send a signal to the space shuttle that caused it to activate the explosive bolts on the wing wells, causing the undercariage to deploy on the left hand side at 200,000 feet.
Much better conspiracy theory than anyone has managed to date. It would also explain the reason the feds are looking for the box and the reason the debris fell where it did.
Of course I doubt that this is what happened as I just made it up.
$man "level 5 leader"
It is a term used by Jim Collins in his book 'Good to Great'.
What Collins did was to set up a bunch of objective standards for good-to-great companies based on their share price over two 15 year periods. Then he compared them with a bunch of other companies that were comparable in the 'good' phase but never managed the 'great' phase.
He noted that the good to great companies had a bunch of qualities in common. In particular the CEOs behaved in a particular way. Instead of using 'I' all the time they used the word 'we'. They did not spend their time in self promotion for the sake of it. One of them used the comparison 'I'm a plough horse, he [the competitor's CEO] was more of a show horse'.
The basic research for the book was done prior to the recent CEO perp-walks by the Enron, Worldcom, Haliburton, Harken etc. crowd. So now almost everyone is trying to be a level-5 type leader rather than a Jack Welch who is a 'level 4' - not quite as good.
Incidentally if you apply it to politics then Thatcher comes out as a level-4 leader rather than a level-5. Anyone who follows British politics will know the reason why, she failled to plan for succession. The Tory leaders who followed her have all been failures and the party poll numbers show the results.
Unfortunately the notable standout is the failure in the Whitehouse who is a level-2 leader if that. Bush meets none of Collin's leadership criteria. It is all do as I say, not do as I do. Prime example, you go off and fight a war, I dodged service in Vietnam by getting Daddy to pull strings, then went AWOL. Secondary examples you keep your treaty commitments, I will unilaterally break the test ban treaty, ignore the security council, withdraw from Kyoto and basically ignore any treaty I consider inconvenient.
No, that is not security through obscurity. It is an unintended design flaw.
The Germans intended the Enigma system to be resistant to cryptanalysis even though the boxes were likely to be captured.
In our day in age why isn't the shuttle using a system that does not rely on this problem.
Basically because military ciphers are expected to keep stuff secret for a very long time. The space shuttle was first launched in the days when DES was the main commercial cipher - possibly even earlier (can't remember offhand whether DES came out before or after the shuttle).
If the NASA and NSA people had used standard commercial crypto then they would have been using a system that is compromised today.
Keeping your algorithm secret is a pretty good idea if you have that option. It certainly makes matters much harder for attackers. It is unlikely that Rivest, Goldberg, Shamir and co are going to publish a paper that is directly applicable to the security of NATO cipher systems. That limits the pool of available analysts significantly.
The reason that security through obscurity is rejected as a design principle for IETF etc. protocols is that in the commercial space we do not have that option. We cannot propose a standard, have it implemented by 200 different companies and keep it secret. Whatever we do someone is going to have hardware available and reverse engineer it.
The same does not apply to the space shuttle cipher boxes if it happens to be carrying them. For cryptanalysis to begin the attackers have to first find one of the boxes. That is hard.
OK this is simply too good to pass up.
Revalation: Then shall appear the denier, and he who is set apart in the darkness, who is called Antichrist. And again I said: Lord, reveal to me what he is like. ... The appearance of his face is dusky; hmm, would fit Rice better, perhaps after a sun tan? the hairs of his head are sharp, like darts; his eyebrows like a wild beast's; his right eye like the star which rises in the morning, and the other like a lion's; his mouth about one cubit; Hmm does not sound too accurate his teeth span long; well that fits but Carter would seem a better fit, after all he was also the one attacked by the killer rabbit his fingers like scythes; the print of his feet of two spans; and on his face an inscription, Antichrist; he shall be exalted even to heaven, well depends on your definition of exaulted I suppose and shall be cast down even to Hades, making false displays. Yep, right about the false displays.
Hmm, that is not looking too accurate. Sounds to me like this would have to be read allegorically. Problem there being that you could read almost anything into the text.
Revelation 9:I saw a star from heaven fallen.
This would normally be interpreted as a great leader, but the fruitcakes will say it is Columbia. Of course getting back to the original omens post Columia may be interpreted as an omen that a great leader will fall.
Also folk might want to work in the two candlesticks that are destroyed in chapter 11.
The unfortunate thing about the revalation story is that a sizable proportion of Bush's followers believe it literally and believe that the rapture is imminent. So don't worry about greenhouse gases destroying the earth or SUVs or anything we can trash the environment as much as we like since the planet is only going to last another 30 years or so anyway.
If Bush is the anti-Christ he sure is good playing at being stupid. Of course the devil would know everything anyway which would explain his complete disinterest in finding anything out.
However one would think that the devil would have though up a better criminal past than a DUI conviction, stock fraud at Harken and going AWOL from the national guard. Even the unproven allegations that he took coke hardly bring him into the big league.
Why dodge Vietnam in the first place if you are the anti-christ who one would presume is imortal? Surely the anti-christ would not need to be 'exhonorated' by a sleezy SEC 'investigation' run by his father's appointees? One would expect the car carrying the person with the proof to come of the road unexpectedly or something.
Also the very fact that I can send this post to slashdot would appear to disprove the antichrist theory. Why haven't I been hit by a thund
We will soon find out. However Microsoft will certainly get the ability to subpoena etc. regardless of whether it is eventually proved to be a fraud.
Judge, Sun feels they should improve their Java product
No, that would be Sun like Microsoft recognises that Java is broken and needs fixing. Furthermore it recognises that the monolithic architecture of the JVM makes it seriously broken.
If Java was not a 30Mb lump it would not need to be deployed with the O/S. It would be possible to download the support libraries required together with the code. It would be possible to download the versions of the libraries that the code was compiled against - exactly what dotNET does.
Of course this would also mean that the distinction Sun has attempted to enforce between Sun approved modules and other modules would go away. It would be possible to develop a version of dotNET that ran J2EE programs optimised for the native processor.
Sun's legal manipulations have been aimed at forcing Microsoft to support a platform while denying Microsoft and the rest of the community any say in the development of that platform. In every other standards process the vendors always reserve the right to not support the outcome if they don't like it. So there is a compromise between the positions of the parties, usually one that is aligned to the interests of the users. In the case of Java Sun has opposed any changes by Microsoft and in fact any other party that it belives are counter to Sun's interests
I am not a Microsoft employee but I would be happy to testify for them.
My personal experience kinda makes me doubt that. When a group of people suggested taking the mars lunar rover for a joy ride the proverbial excrement hit the ventilator.
I got a call from the EOP which was in panic don't trust a word that is said by the NASA management mode. The (limited) information I got (I don't have a security clearance, I am not a US national) was that they did not have any crypto protection on the control signals. They don't want extra boxes to go wrong.
It is not unlikely that the shuttle had encryption boxes on it. However I would not expect them to be used for the bulk of the signals. I certainly would not expect the shuttle to be carrying crypto boxes whose contents could compromise any NATO systems. The probability of the shuttle comming down in the wrong place was always significant. That is why the shuttle crews went on survival courses.
Also the real secure crypto boxes have explosives embedded to make sure the contents get wiped. I doubt NASA would want to carry such boxes without a really good reason.
I would however doubt anything told me in a press report. First off the journalist probably does not know the difference between a crypto box and an IFF box so the fact a distinction is not drawn in the article is not significant. There are probably a lot of components that the US govt would not want in the wrong hands.
Secondly the US media is quite happy to report any old garbage told it when it comes to this type of incident. So I prefer to check any info I receive against my own sources.
No. There's no "sizeable chance"; the shuttle is not a capsule with little/no control.i>
Events kinda disprove that assertion. And in any case astronauts have always received training in case they come down in the wrong location. I kinda thought the training was kinda wierd since the probability the craft would come down in one piece in a really out of the way place unobserved seemed unlikely. However whoever was in charge of the crypto hardware would have reconned that the probability that another shuttle came to a sticky end would be well within probabilities that lead to concern.
No. Missiles do not do friend-or-foe identification. It's done by radar systems at fixed installations or on vehicles, not munitions.
You would probably want the radars to have the ability to identify the shuttle though...
The use infrared guidance to find the target. They may use IFOF to identify non-tagets.
I can't find any authoritative source like Jane's that lists this capability. However the idea of denying ordinance to the enemy has been known for years. The term 'spiking his guns' refers to the practice of carrying soft copper nails into battle to drive into the touchports of any captured weapons to stop them being used against them if the tide of battle turns again. Alternatively they might be used to prevent weapons that are about to be lost being turned against them (a less likely occurrence since the guns would usually be aimed in the wrong direction).
That is pure dogma. The biggest enemy of security is dogma in place of thought.
The Germans had good reason to use security through obscurity. At the time there were NO ciphers available that were not vulnerable to analysis. It would not have taken an insane amount of additional computing power to break the allied codes. They were only slightly better by modern standards.
The enigma codes were broken in part because the Allies captured several enigma machines and code books. But the Germans knew that it was likely that this would happen. The Enigma system had been designed to be resistant to such attacks. It failed because it had one non obvious flwa - a letter never encrybecpted to itself and the operators were indisciplined.
The reason that security through obscurity is bad is it leads to complacency. But it is not the only way people can become complacent. As recently as 1992 I was arguing with UNIX sysadmins on comp.sys.computing that shaddow passowrds were necessary for UNIX since crack etc. were a real threat. Oh no came the reply you are ignorant, you don't understand, you are promoting security through obscurity.
The box is most likely an Identify Friend Or Foe box. Any encryption of actual data would be handled by the applications sending it.
IFOF boxes are standard on all military vehicles. The shuttle is a military vehicle as defined by the relevant treaties as it has been used to launch military satelites. It would carry an IFOF box in any case as a matter of course since there is a sizable probability it might end up comming down in non-US airspace.
One of the alleged features of IFOF is the ability to identify itself to other 'friendly' airborne objects and avoid an attack. For example a passing stinger missile obtained from Uncle Sam by way of the Taleban.
It is unlikely such a box would have an amazingly complex crypto system. After all you don't want your stinger missile to be doing DH calculations before deciding whether to explode. So there could be some real importance there.
After all as an omen the shuttle does look bad. It is named after the discover of America (what do you think the yacht was named after). It carries the first Israeli in space and the parts fall first on Palestine Texas - the home state of Cheney and Bush.
OK so you probably don't belive in such things. But the President does, or at least he believes in the bible which is full of such interpretations of events. More importantly the loonie fundamentalist Islamic types believe in such stuff.
So this is going to be the next spam, get your secret shuttle part, only $30