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User: bbsalem

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  1. Re:Bad for us = Good for gov't on Paul's Call To Abolish the TSA, One Year Later · · Score: 1

    BTW it was G. W. Bush who first used the word "Homeland". Car to do the research? I recall it was right after 9-11. I kept thinking "Vaterland". And, No, Obama is not going to declare himself President for live, Erik Holder might try, but Obama is too timid about international affairs and his DOJ is out of control. I just won't vote for any GOP in 2016. I'd vote for Hillary before anyone from the GOP. In fact I think that the GOP may become extinct in some places in 2014. Now, none of this matters, really, since I think that within a few years the populous states will succeed from the Union unless something basic changes. My state . California could easily go it alone, especially if fusion energy comes on board.

  2. Re:Bad for us = Good for gov't on Paul's Call To Abolish the TSA, One Year Later · · Score: 1

    Funny, the government winds up doing all the hidden infrastructure stuff, or the last resort stuff, EMT, firefighting, police, rescue stuff. That is because business types can't do that stuff, or they don't want to. You can complain about gridlock, about committees, about inaction, but those people just do it. And we take for granted. sewers, clean water, interstate highways, begun by government and run by for profit utilities, OK a partnership between govt. and business, but then again a surprising amount of infrastructure is that partnership. If you don't believe me go research the history of railroad standards. Or maybe a to Latin America will help reveal the meaning of all this.

  3. Re:Bad for us = Good for gov't on Paul's Call To Abolish the TSA, One Year Later · · Score: 1

    Yes, and places that can get something done will succeed from the nation you design.

  4. Re:Bad for us = Good for gov't on Paul's Call To Abolish the TSA, One Year Later · · Score: 1

    Sorry, you are an Idiot, with all due respect :-) Both parties are corrupt, but more so the GOP, talking about individual responsibility if you already run a huge financial empire, Mitt Romney. A pox to them both, and I already understand what the threat to out nation is.

    It is the U.S. Consitution, itself, and more precisely in its definition of the Legislative branch and its in apportionment by representation in the Electoral College. It was designed in 1789 through a set of compromises that no longer reflect reality in the nation. The urban states are under represented and the rural states have too much power and that is concentrated in the hands of now wealthier oligarchies, Kansas e.g. This will never be changed and the gridlock in Congress will get worse until the West and North East have had enough with nothing getting done and succeed from the Union. The states that have the balance of power, who more conservative gun culture state will never give up that unfair advantage given them by the Constitution.

    Gov. Jerry Brown of California ought to take back the fusion reactor research being done at Lawerence Berkeley Labs from the Energy Department and get fusion working as a purely University of California project. DOE cannot be trusted to see this work through because it can be leveraged by the oil and gas monopolies in the Midwest who have the west as a political hostage, anyone remember Enron? If California, or any urban state gets fusion, that means almost unlimited energy resources from which any costal state can get energy from sea water, have limitless desalinization and be able to run local agriculture with little dependance on the states in the middle of the Nation. California has one of the top ten biggest economies on its own and it could survive as a separate nation on its own.

    There was talk in Texas just after the election about succeeding from the Union. It was shortlived, but I say Good Riddence, and I say that to most of the states in the South and Midwest as well. We don't need your cockeyed politics dragging us down, we here in California can run circles around you both technologically and without the millstone of fundementalist Christianity or the NRA.

    It is the gun control debate that has informed me the most about these issues. First, that the Congress is an obstructive do-nothing body, prehaps intentionally made that way by Libretarian strategy, and secondly the conflict about how guns are viewed in urban vs. rural settings underscores a deep divide in the country by the coasts vs. the interior. So, the center cannot hold. There are no compromises because wealthy egos now run the show. So within a few years breaking up the Union is the inevitable result unless the Constitution can be changed and unless compromise can be found in politics. The parts can go their own way.

  5. O want musicXML in my browser ;_) on Firefox Is the First Browser To Pass the MathML Acid2 Test · · Score: 1

    Hey, I like to typeset music, What if I want my browser to parse musicXML? I need a plugin, deah!

  6. US Geological Survey publishes in a closed format on UK Benefits Claimants Must Use Windows XP, IE6 · · Score: 1

    This complaint is similar to what I discovered this week trying to get topographic map data on-line! The U.S. Geological Survey does allow the public to get topographic map data, which we are entitled to as taxpayers, but they are in a closed source format that is mostly only usable on Windows. There are non-opensource readers, but the format itself and most of its readers are not open source. So data that was paid for by taxpayers is not available unless you use a proprietary platform. I have written e-mail to the national HG in Reston Va., asking for JPG images of the sheets, come to think of it, they could probably supply decent reproductions in ghostscript. If that turns out to be possible. I will make a request to the Interior Committee of Congress to force USGS to publish its on-line versions of maps in ghostscript.

    Again blame Penny-Wise but Pound Foolish in legislatures the world over for cumbersome procurement processes that are intended to prevent fraud but result in leaving most government agencies left in the dust as technology passes them by, often leaving critical operations reliant on broken or unsupportable platforms.

    I worked for USGS from 1976 to 1983 and left primarily because I was tired to asking the agency, the Geologic Division, to adopt UNIX. When I started there they had a Honeywell mainframe running Multics, so I learned about regular expressions and what would become ex inside vi before I had access to UNIX, so that wasn't a total loss. The earthquake research people were getting UNIX by 1980, but the rest of the agency was resisting.

  7. Sci-Fi and Utopianism on Politician Wants Sci-fi To Be Mandatory In School · · Score: 1

    Science Fiction gives carte blanche to the writer to invent any utopian vision he likes. To invent a dream land with little relation to reality, to act out his political fantasy. with little regard to human or alien nature, history, or physics. So, all constraints are off. Gulliver's Travelers would be called Sci Fi by today's standards even though it was political allogory by the standards of the 18th Century. I'm not surprised that a politician would want to make dream land mandatory reading, since most of them are in dream land anyway, not that it is an awful idea, actually, but next we will make Ayn Rand mandatory and teach her as fact, which she isn't. I'm sure there has been plenty of criticism of her where she has gone off the rails, and much of that has to do with fantasy vs. reality.

  8. No God needed! on Belief In God Correlates With Better Mental Health Treatment Outcomes · · Score: 1

    Higher Power doesn't always mean anthropomorphic paternalistic personified deity. It may just mean that there is reality in the Universe greater than oneself, the opposite of Solipsism. If one is consumed with experience originating in one's own consciousness, in a self-centered way, and one feels hopeless about the outcome than it might be hard to hold out hope against depression, whereas if one sees the pain as something to embrace, that will pass, that has external causes, possibly, and can find a solution that involves new experience, than certaintly the prognosis will be better.

    I knew someone I wold characterize as a megalomainic, who had bouts of suicidal depression. This person believed in too much personal power and in not trusting the outside world to either disprove the need to control it or other solutions than to fight everything. The person really didn't trust in any kind of higher order.

  9. What the geochemistry tells us. on Earth's Core Far Hotter Than Thought · · Score: 2

    The Phase Equilibria do matter, Much of geophysics is based on lab experiments that try to match conditions at model temperatures and pressures. The result appears to be that the phase boundary for metal alloys as solid vs. liquid at the pressures in the earth's core allows for a higher temperature at the modeled pressure. This has significance in modeling the thernal history of the core. Eventually the core will freeze when the temperature drops so the molten phases freeze. That will have dire consequences for us on the surface for the geomangnetic dynamo that makes the magnetic field that protects life as we know it from high-energy particles from the sun and cosmos will collapse. It prevents the solar wind from eroding away our atmosphere, for example, compounding the risk to life from high-energy radiation. The history of the core may be important to plate tectonics, which is essential to the history of life on Earth.

    Mars is probably lifeless today and lost what life it may have had, or it never had the chance to evolve into anything complex because its core froze too soon in its history. The solar wind has blown off its atmosphere and if it had any plate tectonics, it has long since shut down.

    It is the decay of radioactive isotopes that occur naturally in the material of the solar system that when collected together in the core of a planet heat it up and melt its interior allowing for processes like we see on earth. We own our very existence to these processes. Mars will tell us all about that.

  10. Whose Sandbox is it? on Shuttleworth Calls Ubuntu Performance Art, Calls Out Critics · · Score: 1

    Look, I've used Ubuntu since 8.10 and am now running 12.04.02 and tested Unity. It isn't that I hate Unity, but it clearly was intended for a tablet and smartphone, much less for the desktop. I have since installed Gnome Classic and I sincerely hope that Ubuntu continues to support legacy, including X11 or at least compatability with it.

    The main problems I've had with the changes since 10.10 is the number of legacy applications that are still in the repositories that break in great and small ways because the standards of the core are quicksand. For example I have found that whereas once the menus in the Emacs 23 GTK client worked just fine in U 11.10, that something about the Unity and Gnome Classic transition broke them. That is lost functionality. The little things will kill a distro. Connonical should be far more vigilant that things that worked once don't break and that they had better have a better justification that a Billionaire told me to change it. Besides Shuttleworth's idea of competative advantage is somewhat a problem of his own ego if Linus distros are supposed to be free and opensouce. Who does it belong to anyway? One could argue that since he is obviously the main financer that maybe he has put more effort into hyping Ubuntu and stroking his own ego than he does is making sure that "it just works", it dosen't, And if the issue is that he is competing with Mac, then Apple wins and Shuttleworth's decisions are flawed and hurts acceptance of Linux.

    Let me add that I first used UNIX when all you had was the shell. I really respect the shells and have a terminal open most of the time because there are lots of things you can do from the command line better than from a file manager or window manager. Still i like multimedia tools and GUI applications and although Ubuntu is bloat ware I do like that I can try out some very new tools as soon as they appear in the repositories. If I wanted a spartan Linux I'd have many choices that are better than Ubuntu. But I'd love to see the end of Windows domination of the desktop, and without the expensive hardware and elitism of Mac, and I am most critical of Mark Shuttleworth because his actions have hurt the credibility of Linux more than it has helped. We can omly thank Windows 8 from being a bigger disaster than Ubuntu has become.

  11. Re:A Black Eye for Female CEOs on How To Build a $30M Startup Without Spending Any of Your Money · · Score: 1

    What is most significant about these three isn't that they are women, or even Republican women, although their background may be more significant for the latter, and as for Libertarians supporting either major party and Obama's security and privacy policies supporting the 1%, both parties are being leveraged by the rich.

    No, the issue with these three and many more is that they are financial people and not technologists. They sit on multiple Boards of Directors of corporations where all they know is quarterly reports and bottom lines. These are the kind of people you bring in when the business is mature and you just want it to perform financially, maybe even after its growth has peaked and even on decline to find a path to buy out or liquidation. One can't expect these people to be as creative or as smart as the people who really invented the business, and even then, if their role has just been to do something that is not really innovative at all, but just requires mot making a huge mistake or miscalculation. About the only damage they can do is to say something at the wrong time and place and cause the stock price to tumble. As they say loose lips sink ships!

  12. Re:Nope on Stop Standardizing HTML · · Score: 1

    Shhh.. if HTML5 is truly backward compatible with XHTML than you can code your own ad-hoc XML without a DTD. I did this for shits and grins once, and styled the XML. The browser didn't care. It didn't care if I mixed HTML and XML either. I don't know how strictly HTML5 can enforce its own data definition, but I'll bet you could code your own well-formed XML.

  13. Re: Nope on Stop Standardizing HTML · · Score: 1

    But then he will talk with a Lisp?

  14. Re:Helps but not a complete solution. on Some Windows XP Users Can't Afford To Upgrade · · Score: 3, Informative

    I worked in Govt. IT years ago. This resulted in my slogan for it "Yesterday's Technology, today". Everytime I visit some govt. office and I see the ancient hardware they have to use I think that. The reason is that because legislators write the laws, they are penny wise and pound foolish, the procurement process, which is glacial gets in the way of upgrades and they are stuck with outdated systems whose poor integration results in much more waste than if they junked them a decade ago.

    Another problem is that the tech-savvy of the average govt. employee is low and for their management, even worse. Even if you learn what is current you have an uphill battle to get change adopted even if it is obviously cheaper and superior.

    Of course this problem is not restricted to government, any large organization has the problem of inertia and of in-house politics. This all came to a head for me in 1983. I couldn't persuade my Federal employer that Unix and an RDBMS would save costs and I left the government and went to work in a University which had its own internally developed network database that turned out to be a total disaster. They sunk $1 million into trying to develop a student database and had to abandon the project. I'm pretty sure they were running Solaris and Oracle a few years later, by which time I had gone on to Sun Microsystems.

    The issue presented in this thread is that a small medical office is locked in to ancient and unsupported software because they don't have the time to understand the technical choices available to them and they may not want to pay the cost of migrating to some application that is supportable. It is even so bad that they may not have the time or knowledge to understand the experience and expertise shown in this thread and make decisions to change. That is pretty unfortunate. Some standard for medical records that can be supplied to them on a supported platform is needed, but still the far greater cost will be that of migrating their current data to that. There will come a time when they will be forced to do that, even if they have to shutdown their business for several days or weeks to do so.

  15. Beware of fstype and other processes. on Improving the Fedora Boot Experience · · Score: 1

    Beware of issues with non-native filesystem types and processes other than fsck slowing your disks to a crawl.

    I have one big ext4 boot partition with Ubuntu 12.04 and one external NTFS systen. Fsck hasn't given me much problem even if a shutdown left the boot partition dirty and it needs to run on the next boot.

    Dealing with NTFS from linux can be dicey, especially if the hardware does not perform well. I have a slow disk that I have had to umount a couple of times to get through some problems.

    Gnome can impose some overhead after boot or during boot if things its does, genome tracker, happens in parallel with fsck of the boot partition or shortly there after. On my hardware Gnome Tracker does so poorly that I had to disable it going out to that NTFS filesystem. It was pegging my Athlon 64 dual core.

    Run top(1) to let you see if there are disk hogs after the boot.

  16. Re:WIndows system files on Botched Security Update Cripples Thousands of Computers · · Score: 1

    Well.. they are pretty evil..

    Is that because like many a business transaction, there is a conflict of interest between serving the customer and helping yourself into the customer's wallet, going so far as to plant malware to make it look like the system needs repair, expensive repair? I am suspicious of Microsoft having unbundled much of what should be a secure core of an OS to the third parties. It is as if they did only 80% of the job in order to allow for their business partners to charge even more for the extra 20% needed to make Windows a minimally secure system in which many users don't bother, because they aren't forced, to set secure passwords and enact other safeguards. I think many of the security problems in Windows are intentional aspects of its business partnerships.

  17. Letting in its business partners is not secure! on Botched Security Update Cripples Thousands of Computers · · Score: 1

    I might have a simplistic view of all this.

    I run Linux but have seen nearly every Microsoft product up to Windows 7. I know Linux is hackable, but something really simple has bothered me a great deal about Windows. It is that Microsoft's business partners get to nag you about buying their services, i.e. Norton, even as you boot windows for the first time. unsolicited, from the Internet. It may not take much imagination or smarts for a hacker to exploit that, and not setting Administrator password, or asking for information over an unsecured link, only makes things easier for the bad guys. I think you start with a leg down just by booting Windows. It happens to be on many systems I've owned because of the OEM agreement Microsoft extorts from commercial PC-makers, which should be declared illegal under anti-trust law. And from time to time I have to boot a Windows system, but it makes me uneasy, and I try to avoid it, using Wine whenever I can to run Windows apps when I need to.

  18. Re:Microsoft Security Essentials... on Botched Security Update Cripples Thousands of Computers · · Score: 1

    Then it is midASS?

  19. Re:Loaded language? on Browser Choice May Affect Your Job Prospects · · Score: 1

    I appreciate your candor, and sympathize about the time taken from useful work to screen applicants, having myself been on hiring committees in the past. Since I know that I am far from perfect, i try to avoid the HR game because I'd much rather get my next job because the person who wants what I do got to know me, warts and all, and is not going to eliminate me from consideration because of some silly criterion. Choosing candidates randomly from a stack of resumes is almost more fair. It helps, then to have a network and only use the HR game as a secondary process to legally getting a job. That has worked for me in the past.

  20. Re:Loaded language? on Browser Choice May Affect Your Job Prospects · · Score: 1

    I think that you will find that for many categories, HR types, simply do not have reliable criteria to select candidates. Hiring managers might as well use a random function. I wonder if anyone has studied this? I bet the HR types don't do much better than random choice.

  21. Re:Loaded language? on Browser Choice May Affect Your Job Prospects · · Score: 1

    Yeah, I agree. The best jobs I've held were as a result of an end around of HR people. For tech jobs most of them are useless, as are job development and recruitment people, and I live in Silicon Valley, and they still can't keep up with it.

  22. Re:That really makes no sense on Why PC Sales Are Declining · · Score: 1

    Waitda minute, M$ puts their OS on PCs as an OEM and the price is bundled with the price of the whole system. Just try to go into any retail store and ask fro a PC without Windows and not to pay the Licensing Fee for windows. You can't. even if you are going to scrub the disk and install Linux. The best you could do is to build the machine from scratch with OEM parts and then install Linux.

  23. The're ruined for life.... on 'CodeSpells' Video Game Teaches Children Java Programming · · Score: 1

    Imagine kids whose first exposure to programming is Java, with the standard libs as written by Sun. They will be wrecked for life..

    public static void main( string args[]) .... indeed, poor things...

    lets hope they use the acm.jar at least.

  24. Oh, NK... on Where Will Apple Get Flash Memory Now? · · Score: 1

    I get it, did you notice the Mac on Kin Jung Un's desk? Maybe his rhetoric is an Apple plot. He is an Apple agent, by putting the hurt on Samsung he could change the supply problem in an, er... flash!

  25. Re:What about PuppyLinux or DamnSmallLinux? on Linux Fatware: Distros That Need To Slim Down · · Score: 1

    I am really interested in the IDEA of Puppy, not that I like its GUI all that much. What I like about it is that it comes as archives of parts of the OS that could be stored anywhere. It doesn't care about disk partitions or filesystem types. I haven't done it, but I'll bet you could plunk all of puppy , everything you could get, all the Slackware or Ubuntu Packages into an NTFS with grub and get it to boot just file.

    I know that very likely the filesystem types supported on most Linux distributions might be better than NTFS, but puppy is the best idea of a Windows-killer virus I can think of, especially if you don.t have to repartition the drive and then replace windows MBR with grub and boot either. Ubuntu has been able to do this for some time but it is too easy to clobber the first disk MBR and lose the link to it within a Windows Partition if you have other Linux Partitions and have to update grub. So do away with partitions altogether, if you are trying to get Linux onto to Windows computers.

    Of course, I.m not advocating this for servers or production systems, but if you wanted to allow novices to get at Linux, you could do better than Cygwin, which I like, but it is still dependent on Windows ans its huge security holes, why not just put the puppy archive files on a Windows system and then do grub.cfg to boot from it ignoring windows except to run its applications with wine?

    This idea could be generalized without the hassle of virtualizing, by doing packaging of parts of any Linux dstro and using directories instead of partitioning as a way to install, boot and test. At worst you might want two partitions, one NTFS and the other some Linux Native, but do away with partitioning to house your distro. In this scheme, windows is Virtualizable or directly booted, but any Linux disro is bootable because grub can boot from images or directories within another filesystem.