Scott Ritter changed his tune abruptly shortly before we invaded Iraq. I never did figure out why but I'm sure there's a story there. Saddam's "hide and seek" game with UN inspectors is well documented. If he hadn't been so defiant, we never would have invaded. You cannot blame Bush for Saddam's behavior.
Sorry I forgot to answer your question about the WMDs. The fact is that nearly everyone believed Iraq had WMDs. Saddam went to great lengths to avoid UN inspections and defy UN resolutions. Blaming Bush for believing something that at the time was considered by most to be true is not being very fair to the man.
I agree with you that MS got off too easy but if you look at how they got off, it had nothing to do with Bush. The first judge made the right call (separate the Windows division from the applications one). He spoke to the media afterward and MS succeeded in having him recused and his decision reversed. There was obviously something going on behind the scenes (and it probably involved large amounts of cash). The president doesn't control the judicial branch other than via appointments. (W) Bush didn't appoint any of the judges involved. He could have possibly influenced the case via the AG but the record does not show any such manipulation.
I'm not even going to respond to your other points for fear of losing even more karma.
We are getting lost in details. My main point was that global warming may or may not exist depending upon your definition (short term, long term, etc.). An attempt by the scientific community has been made to ascertain whether or not global warming is real (and whether or not mankind is responsible for it). There is a lot of data to assimilate and a lot of variables that can influence global temperature. Nobody has yet come up with a working model which can correlate with measured values. Almost none of the models consider the variability of our sun. A bit over thirty years ago the trend lines were all going in the opposite direction and many notable scientists feared a forthcoming ice age and attributed its cause to man-made pollution. We know now that they were wrong but at the time their view was very popular.
In short; science is studying the climate and attempting to make some predictions. Thus far they've been wrong. Now almost anyone can call themselves a scientist (I can too, it's in my job title). Whether or not they are practicing good scientific principals is what I take issue with. Many of them are drawing conclusions too quickly. The ones who are practicing good principals have not yet decided what's going on with our climate, and whether or not there is a problem that we can fix. So the premise of the article which states "scientists are in agreement" is crap. It should raise red flags with anyone who knows anything about science.
You've narrowed the field to the US. I think your first citation covered ALL climatologists. Also unlike his predecessor, Bush II did not aggressively seek to replace all of the partisan government employees throughout the executive branch. It's quite obvious when you look at some of the conflicting policy statements coming from CIA, State, and NASA during his administration. People complained after Gonzales fired some federal prosecutors but Reno fired ALL of them!
My point being that global warming "deniers" don't get as much funding as global warming "believers" because if there is no global warming, then there's nothing to study and it's business as usual. With nothing to study, there's no justification for government grants beyond the routine "monitoring the weather" stuff.
Show me a working model of our planets' atmospheric interactions that supports the theory. There isn't one. Climatologists depend upon largely upon government funding. Their "consensus" is not based upon science but instead upon politics and self preservation. In my view that means you can no longer call them "scientists".
What the heck is a "carbon emission"? We're all made of carbon! We eat carbon and shit carbon. We burn carbon to keep warm and to move us around. Ever heard of the "carbon cycle"? Why is carbon suddenly "bad"?
As far as I know, scientists do not agree that we must reduce our carbon emissions to stop global warming. Opening your story with an obvious fallacy is not a good way to gain credibility. Objectivity is important to science. In fact, there can be no real science without objectivity. I'll stop now. The likelihood of this post ever being seen is infinitesimal anyway.
We're way off topic here but I must know: getting any worse than what? What is so bad about our health care system? Why do people (who can afford it) from other countries come to the US for health care? Please cite an example of a nationalized health care system that's "better" than ours. And by "better" I mean one where you can choose your own doctor and make an appointment to see him within a reasonable period. Many employers already provide health care benefits. Our government (both Federal and State) provides health care for low income and retired individuals. Who's left? What is the problem we are trying to solve by nationalizing our health care system? I just don't get it.
I've read reports stating that Ubuntu's Java machine is faster than Windows'. Some of those speed test sites use Java to implement the test. This is probably the best explanation.
But nearly all of the government players from the dot-com demise era will be back in power as of 1/20/2009. Sometimes "change" isn't necessarily a good thing.
My wife grew up in Communist China during the "Cultural Revolution" and was frequently required to do "community service" during school hours. She would often ditch school and stay at home to read a book.
To me this plan is nothing more than indentured servitude (which I believe is prohibited by the US constitution). People are in school to get an education and not to "serve" the community.
This sort of plan is right in line with Obama's world view. Everyone must contribute for the greater good. It's Carl Marx all over again.
I don't usually buy something when it first appears but in this case I made an exception. I ordered my ROKU on the day it became available and I received it yesterday (Saturday).
My first impression was positive. The unit is much smaller than I was expecting it to be and it can connect to just about anything. The one shortcoming I found is that the unit ships with only minimal cabling. There was no ethernet cable, s-video cable, or hdmi cable included. The only cable provided (besides the power supply) is a 3-pair RCA composite video/analog stereo sound cable. The unit can use WiFi or hard-wired ethernet and I prefer to use hard-wired when possible. Fortunately I had a cable handy and it took me less than 5 minutes to get the hardware set up.
The unit defaults to DHCP so it had no trouble configuring itself to work on my network. The first thing the unit did was to download a software update and restart. I've got a 15 megabit symetrical fiber connection for my Internet service so this went pretty fast. The picture quality is surpurb and the sound is excellent. The unit takes about 3 seconds to buffer content before it will play and it displays a progress meter while buffering. The user interface is simple and easy to navigate. My only complaint at this point is that you cannot browse all the available content from the TV. With one exception, you must log into your Netflix account via the web and add "watch now" selections to your queue. I'm going to complain about this and I fully expect a future software update to address this shortcoming. The exception mentioned above relates to content with multiple episodes. The unit will allow you to browse and view additional episodes (if any) of the shows in your queue.
All in all this is a cool gadget and definately worth the one hundred dollar price.
HP makes about $10B per year in profit from ink alone. They make another $6B or so from everything else so they could easily afford this transaction. It does raise some eyebrows though because EDS has IT support contracts with lots of big companies. If EDS starts exclusively providing/supporting HP products, competitors (think Dell) might have grounds to complain to the DOJ.
I completely agree with your assesment of the qualifications of our MS Exchange focal. POP & IMAP are off in our installation. This is likely due to the perception that it is a "security problem". We're talking about an extremely large (>100K users) Exchange environment. I'm not certain but I would venture to guess that we are the largest one. It sometimes seems as if our company is used as a beta test site for M$ products. There have been scaling problems in the past and there likely will be more in the future.
My post was not FUD. It's all true and I've not posted anonymously.
I work for a fortune 500 company. We migrated from Notes to Exchange about 5 years ago. I liked Notes more.
As an aside, Notes had support for POP3 so you could use any mail client you wanted.
Exchange has its problems. One time a few years ago our company "focal" (lead supporting 50K people) could not resolve a bug which crept into my profile without deleting me from the system and re-creating my account. Unfortunately when this happens, all of the group mail lists and recurring meeting notices with my name got dropped. There was no way to recover aside from manually correcting the lists. This caused headaches for several months afterward.
There is no good way to back up mail on an Exchange server. What I do is to create two rules which run whenever I send mail, and whenever mail comes in. They copy the message to an "archive" folder which is on another network share. Eventually the size will grow so that you'll have to archive your archive. The bottom line is that the burden of backup falls upon the end user.
Why does Microsoft feel the need to re-invent things that already have standard (and superior) solutions?
After looking at the highly ranked comments to this post and finding nothing but conspiracy theorys and Bush bashing, I want to contribute to the discussion with a simple observation: If the FBI obtains a legal warrant to tap somebody's phone and/or obtain their calling records, then there has to be some way to move that information from Verizon to the feds. Doesn't it seem likely that THIS is the way? Our government has many checks and balances. Probably half of the FBI employess are democrats (if their demographics reflect the general population). How long would an illegal program last in such an environment? The main problem with the conspiracy crowd & Bush bashers is that they do not TRUST our government. If they would open their eyes and learn more about it, they would likely change their opinions. To put it more simply, most of the anti-government stuff posted here is founded in ignorance. Sure there are bad people in government just as there are bad people in business. They all eventually go down in flames because there is so much visability.
If ndiswrapper loads proprietary binary-only drivers and provides an API translation between Windows & Linux, then when ndiswrapper itself gets loaded as a kernel module, the kernel's "taint" flag should be set. The purpose of the taint flag is clear and it is quite applicable in this case. I don't think that Linus is saying the ndiswrapper authors cannot release their code under the GPL, what he's saying is that the run-time environment is not "pure GPL".
Giving up my mod rights on this thread by commenting but there's one important point to be made here. If you are EVER held or accused of a crime, NEVER waive your "right to a speedy trial". The court system is overloaded and your own lawyer may ask you to sign a form doing this, if they do then you should get a new lawyer. Better yet, before you get a lawyer you should make sure they won't do this. Lots of people spend unnecessary time in jail simply because their lawyer is too busy to work on their case. (No, I've never been in jail.)
Drivers will always be an issue. The microkernel architecture just moves them all to user space. That doesn't make them any less buggy.
So we are on the same page about microkernels taking a 'slight' performance hit. The same thing applies to IPV6 vs. IPV4. Nobody wants to take the latency hit and the burden of the higher switching load. Most of the time the simpler solution is the 'better' one. Yes, also most of the time the simple solutions are less scalable. I'll take my performance now and worry about scalability when I need to scale up.
I love the fact that my parent post was modded (-1 Troll). I must have hit a nerve somewhere. -- This space for rent
Should we all be considered unqualified to comment on anything that we haven't tried? How about capital murder?
There have been plenty of studies comparing the performance of monolithic vs. microkernel architectures. The monolithic implementations always perform better. Sure they aren't as elegant from a CS perspective - but the same could be said of OO code vs. structured for small implementations.
Show me a good microkernel based OS distribution and I'll give it a try. I haven't seen anything yet that outperforms what I'm using.
I have no opinion as to whether or not there was a cover up, but it is interesting to note that there were never any safety bulletins from the FAA as a result of their investigation.
"There is something fundamentally different from the government having information about you than private parties."
There is no way to interact with the government except THROUGH private parties. Every individual who works for the government is a PRIVATE PARTY. The fact that they are SUPPOSED to be operating in an official capacity makes little difference to me. All it takes is one bad apple to spoil the bunch (or in this case, to abuse my privacy).
History has demonstrated that these kinds of abuses by individuals acting in an official capacity do happen. As long as there are people involved, there's very little that can be done to safeguard information. This goes both ways; people are the greatest weakness when it comes to safeguarding government secrets as well.
The best solution is to enforce laws like the Privacy Act of 1974. Somewhere in there it prohibits the use of an SSN for anything other than Social Security.
GPS units compute your speed by computing the difference between your current position and your previous position divided by the time between samples. There's no other way to do it. Doppler is not involved.
The time between samples is what's important here. If it's only a few seconds then there's a good case for innocence. If on the other hand it's 30 seconds or a minute, the cop with the radar gun wins. BTW, it is the radar gun that uses doppler to measure speed.
Buckyballs have a tendancy to shred your lungs. If a "bullet proof" vest made of this stuff took a hit and saved a person's life, the resulting expulsion of material from the vest might create a toxic cloud which would just as readily kill the wearer (and anybody else nearby).
Slashdot Mirror
Scott Ritter changed his tune abruptly shortly before we invaded Iraq. I never did figure out why but I'm sure there's a story there. Saddam's "hide and seek" game with UN inspectors is well documented. If he hadn't been so defiant, we never would have invaded. You cannot blame Bush for Saddam's behavior.
Sorry I forgot to answer your question about the WMDs. The fact is that nearly everyone believed Iraq had WMDs. Saddam went to great lengths to avoid UN inspections and defy UN resolutions. Blaming Bush for believing something that at the time was considered by most to be true is not being very fair to the man.
I agree with you that MS got off too easy but if you look at how they got off, it had nothing to do with Bush. The first judge made the right call (separate the Windows division from the applications one). He spoke to the media afterward and MS succeeded in having him recused and his decision reversed. There was obviously something going on behind the scenes (and it probably involved large amounts of cash). The president doesn't control the judicial branch other than via appointments. (W) Bush didn't appoint any of the judges involved. He could have possibly influenced the case via the AG but the record does not show any such manipulation.
I'm not even going to respond to your other points for fear of losing even more karma.
We are getting lost in details. My main point was that global warming may or may not exist depending upon your definition (short term, long term, etc.). An attempt by the scientific community has been made to ascertain whether or not global warming is real (and whether or not mankind is responsible for it). There is a lot of data to assimilate and a lot of variables that can influence global temperature. Nobody has yet come up with a working model which can correlate with measured values. Almost none of the models consider the variability of our sun. A bit over thirty years ago the trend lines were all going in the opposite direction and many notable scientists feared a forthcoming ice age and attributed its cause to man-made pollution. We know now that they were wrong but at the time their view was very popular.
In short; science is studying the climate and attempting to make some predictions. Thus far they've been wrong. Now almost anyone can call themselves a scientist (I can too, it's in my job title). Whether or not they are practicing good scientific principals is what I take issue with. Many of them are drawing conclusions too quickly. The ones who are practicing good principals have not yet decided what's going on with our climate, and whether or not there is a problem that we can fix. So the premise of the article which states "scientists are in agreement" is crap. It should raise red flags with anyone who knows anything about science.
You've narrowed the field to the US. I think your first citation covered ALL climatologists. Also unlike his predecessor, Bush II did not aggressively seek to replace all of the partisan government employees throughout the executive branch. It's quite obvious when you look at some of the conflicting policy statements coming from CIA, State, and NASA during his administration. People complained after Gonzales fired some federal prosecutors but Reno fired ALL of them!
My point being that global warming "deniers" don't get as much funding as global warming "believers" because if there is no global warming, then there's nothing to study and it's business as usual. With nothing to study, there's no justification for government grants beyond the routine "monitoring the weather" stuff.
Show me a working model of our planets' atmospheric interactions that supports the theory. There isn't one. Climatologists depend upon largely upon government funding. Their "consensus" is not based upon science but instead upon politics and self preservation. In my view that means you can no longer call them "scientists".
What the heck is a "carbon emission"? We're all made of carbon! We eat carbon and shit carbon. We burn carbon to keep warm and to move us around. Ever heard of the "carbon cycle"? Why is carbon suddenly "bad"?
As far as I know, scientists do not agree that we must reduce our carbon emissions to stop global warming. Opening your story with an obvious fallacy is not a good way to gain credibility. Objectivity is important to science. In fact, there can be no real science without objectivity. I'll stop now. The likelihood of this post ever being seen is infinitesimal anyway.
We're way off topic here but I must know: getting any worse than what? What is so bad about our health care system? Why do people (who can afford it) from other countries come to the US for health care? Please cite an example of a nationalized health care system that's "better" than ours. And by "better" I mean one where you can choose your own doctor and make an appointment to see him within a reasonable period. Many employers already provide health care benefits. Our government (both Federal and State) provides health care for low income and retired individuals. Who's left? What is the problem we are trying to solve by nationalizing our health care system? I just don't get it.
I've read reports stating that Ubuntu's Java machine is faster than Windows'. Some of those speed test sites use Java to implement the test. This is probably the best explanation.
But nearly all of the government players from the dot-com demise era will be back in power as of 1/20/2009. Sometimes "change" isn't necessarily a good thing.
My wife grew up in Communist China during the "Cultural Revolution" and was frequently required to do "community service" during school hours. She would often ditch school and stay at home to read a book.
To me this plan is nothing more than indentured servitude (which I believe is prohibited by the US constitution). People are in school to get an education and not to "serve" the community.
This sort of plan is right in line with Obama's world view. Everyone must contribute for the greater good. It's Carl Marx all over again.
--
JSL
I don't usually buy something when it first appears but in this case I made an exception. I ordered my ROKU on the day it became available and I received it yesterday (Saturday).
My first impression was positive. The unit is much smaller than I was expecting it to be and it can connect to just about anything. The one shortcoming I found is that the unit ships with only minimal cabling. There was no ethernet cable, s-video cable, or hdmi cable included. The only cable provided (besides the power supply) is a 3-pair RCA composite video/analog stereo sound cable. The unit can use WiFi or hard-wired ethernet and I prefer to use hard-wired when possible. Fortunately I had a cable handy and it took me less than 5 minutes to get the hardware set up.
The unit defaults to DHCP so it had no trouble configuring itself to work on my network. The first thing the unit did was to download a software update and restart. I've got a 15 megabit symetrical fiber connection for my Internet service so this went pretty fast. The picture quality is surpurb and the sound is excellent. The unit takes about 3 seconds to buffer content before it will play and it displays a progress meter while buffering. The user interface is simple and easy to navigate. My only complaint at this point is that you cannot browse all the available content from the TV. With one exception, you must log into your Netflix account via the web and add "watch now" selections to your queue. I'm going to complain about this and I fully expect a future software update to address this shortcoming. The exception mentioned above relates to content with multiple episodes. The unit will allow you to browse and view additional episodes (if any) of the shows in your queue.
All in all this is a cool gadget and definately worth the one hundred dollar price.
--
This space for rent
HP makes about $10B per year in profit from ink alone. They make another $6B or so from everything else so they could easily afford this transaction. It does raise some eyebrows though because EDS has IT support contracts with lots of big companies. If EDS starts exclusively providing/supporting HP products, competitors (think Dell) might have grounds to complain to the DOJ.
I completely agree with your assesment of the qualifications of our MS Exchange focal. POP & IMAP are off in our installation. This is likely due to the perception that it is a "security problem". We're talking about an extremely large (>100K users) Exchange environment. I'm not certain but I would venture to guess that we are the largest one. It sometimes seems as if our company is used as a beta test site for M$ products. There have been scaling problems in the past and there likely will be more in the future.
My post was not FUD. It's all true and I've not posted anonymously.
I work for a fortune 500 company. We migrated from Notes to Exchange about 5 years ago. I liked Notes more.
As an aside, Notes had support for POP3 so you could use any mail client you wanted.
Exchange has its problems. One time a few years ago our company "focal" (lead supporting 50K people) could not resolve a bug which crept into my profile without deleting me from the system and re-creating my account. Unfortunately when this happens, all of the group mail lists and recurring meeting notices with my name got dropped. There was no way to recover aside from manually correcting the lists. This caused headaches for several months afterward.
There is no good way to back up mail on an Exchange server. What I do is to create two rules which run whenever I send mail, and whenever mail comes in. They copy the message to an "archive" folder which is on another network share. Eventually the size will grow so that you'll have to archive your archive. The bottom line is that the burden of backup falls upon the end user.
Why does Microsoft feel the need to re-invent things that already have standard (and superior) solutions?
--
This space for rent
After looking at the highly ranked comments to this post and finding nothing but conspiracy theorys and Bush bashing, I want to contribute to the discussion with a simple observation:
If the FBI obtains a legal warrant to tap somebody's phone and/or obtain their calling records, then there has to be some way to move that information from Verizon to the feds. Doesn't it seem likely that THIS is the way? Our government has many checks and balances. Probably half of the FBI employess are democrats (if their demographics reflect the general population). How long would an illegal program last in such an environment? The main problem with the conspiracy crowd & Bush bashers is that they do not TRUST our government. If they would open their eyes and learn more about it, they would likely change their opinions. To put it more simply, most of the anti-government stuff posted here is founded in ignorance. Sure there are bad people in government just as there are bad people in business. They all eventually go down in flames because there is so much visability.
If ndiswrapper loads proprietary binary-only drivers and provides an API translation between Windows & Linux, then when ndiswrapper itself gets loaded as a kernel module, the kernel's "taint" flag should be set. The purpose of the taint flag is clear and it is quite applicable in this case. I don't think that Linus is saying the ndiswrapper authors cannot release their code under the GPL, what he's saying is that the run-time environment is not "pure GPL".
Giving up my mod rights on this thread by commenting but there's one important point to be made here. If you are EVER held or accused of a crime, NEVER waive your "right to a speedy trial". The court system is overloaded and your own lawyer may ask you to sign a form doing this, if they do then you should get a new lawyer. Better yet, before you get a lawyer you should make sure they won't do this. Lots of people spend unnecessary time in jail simply because their lawyer is too busy to work on their case. (No, I've never been in jail.)
--
This space for rent
Drivers will always be an issue. The microkernel architecture just moves them all to user space. That doesn't make them any less buggy.
So we are on the same page about microkernels taking a 'slight' performance hit. The same thing applies to IPV6 vs. IPV4. Nobody wants to take the latency hit and the burden of the higher switching load. Most of the time the simpler solution is the 'better' one. Yes, also most of the time the simple solutions are less scalable. I'll take my performance now and worry about scalability when I need to scale up.
I love the fact that my parent post was modded (-1 Troll). I must have hit a nerve somewhere.
--
This space for rent
Should we all be considered unqualified to comment on anything that we haven't tried? How about capital murder?
There have been plenty of studies comparing the performance of monolithic vs. microkernel architectures. The monolithic implementations always perform better. Sure they aren't as elegant from a CS perspective - but the same could be said of OO code vs. structured for small implementations.
Show me a good microkernel based OS distribution and I'll give it a try. I haven't seen anything yet that outperforms what I'm using.
I have no opinion as to whether or not there was a cover up, but it is interesting to note that there were never any safety bulletins from the FAA as a result of their investigation.
"There is something fundamentally different from the government having information about you than private parties."
There is no way to interact with the government except THROUGH private parties. Every individual who works for the government is a PRIVATE PARTY. The fact that they are SUPPOSED to be operating in an official capacity makes little difference to me. All it takes is one bad apple to spoil the bunch (or in this case, to abuse my privacy).
History has demonstrated that these kinds of abuses by individuals acting in an official capacity do happen. As long as there are people involved, there's very little that can be done to safeguard information. This goes both ways; people are the greatest weakness when it comes to safeguarding government secrets as well.
The best solution is to enforce laws like the Privacy Act of 1974. Somewhere in there it prohibits the use of an SSN for anything other than Social Security.
--
This space for rent
GPS units compute your speed by computing the difference between your current position and your previous position divided by the time between samples. There's no other way to do it. Doppler is not involved.
The time between samples is what's important here. If it's only a few seconds then there's a good case for innocence. If on the other hand it's 30 seconds or a minute, the cop with the radar gun wins. BTW, it is the radar gun that uses doppler to measure speed.
--
This space for rent
Buckyballs have a tendancy to shred your lungs. If a "bullet proof" vest made of this stuff took a hit and saved a person's life, the resulting expulsion of material from the vest might create a toxic cloud which would just as readily kill the wearer (and anybody else nearby).
--
This space for rent
Why not just start a bot that makes random DNS queries? This would eventually make it unprofitable for the squatters to squat.
--
This space for rent