In addition, they're allowing you to profit from selling the software commercially, which is also not in the strict open source definition.
False. A license that forbids this is not considered open source nor free.
Don't be ridiculous - that would mean than the BSD, MIT, and X licenses are niether Open Source nor free. (In reality, they are both. In fact, these "truly free" licenses are *less* restrictive than the GPL. They just don't have a social agenda, as is appropriate for a piece of technology.)
Unlike the 737 and 747, which have been continuously upgraded, [the Concorde's] essentially unchanged. Almost as outdated as the 707.
Really, more outdated than that - many 707's have had their noisy, smoky, and inefficient turbojet engines replaced with turbofans (sometimes high-bypass) and noise-damping nacelles. The Concorde soldiers on with engines that were not a particularly great design when they were new. (The fairly basic Olympus, designed to reduce maintenance costs, has been left far behind. Even supersonic jet fighters are now using turbofans...)
Here's hoping we see supersonic flight again in our lifetimes. I wouldn't bet on it, though. If Boeing were to announce today that they've got a cheap, efficient replacement developed and ready for sale, the enviros would tie up its launch for years. I'm afraid we're seeing the end of the jet age that marked an "onward and upward" progress in aviation - and the rest of the jet airline business is none too healthy, either.
It really is true: With lower speed limits on highways, and now this, we are the first generation in human history to travel slower than our ancestors. That's nothing to brag about.
Until there's a mainstream non-Java Freenet implementation, Freenet will probably never become terribly popular. The current Freenet implementation sucks down memory like there's no tomorrow...
Freenet's not exactly lighting the world on fire even in a post-Napster P2P balkanized world. Face the facts: Freenet isn't popular for the very simple reason that you have *no* control over what's on your machine. (Just try explaining your "rights" to the FBI as they haul you off with several gigabytes of kiddie porn or terrorist training materials on your hard disk.) Even if getting "caught" were not a risk, a great many of us would never consider being part of Freenet simply because of the likelihood that we would unknowingly promote reprehensible things.
I almost never agree with Alan Dershowitz, but he was right when he pointed out recently, "You have a right to privacy. You have NO right to anonymity."
You have to hand it to MS - they have been *very* good at applying pressure to hardware vendors to get them to support CE, in most cases to the exclusion of anythign else. (Take a look at tiqit.com, the people who used to have the tiny little x86 borads for an example where they're about 75% don with the conversion - CE is clearly the emphasis, although they're not yet getting all the MS marketing dollars they can by removing any reference to competing OSes as some others have. Intrynsic is another example of a vendor in the process of switching to CE.)
Seriously, this is a *real* problem - right now, I'm looking for a very tiny, low-power embedded board that can support either wired Ethernet or 802.11. (Any pointers greatly appreciated!) First, there are far fewer choices than there were a year ago - it's amazing how many hardware platforms have died in this space, many of them casualties of the embedded Linux movement (for instance, Lineo and Metroworks are no longer interested in selling hardware, and their products just died off, leaving a real void.)
I don't want to use CE for this device, but I may, if only because it's *far* easier to get CE support on the new highly capable hardware. No one wants to own Linux or NetBSD drivers and the like, so it's a quagmire - MS, on the other hand is throwing beaucoup dollars at making sure CE runs (and is supported) on everything that matters. As a result, it's getting hard to avoid making the decision to design CE into new embedded products. Yess, it's a stupidly designed environment, but there's no question it's already far better supported than Linux and BSD for quick time-to-market embedded systems development.
I don't like that, but it's reality. And I don't think I see any way for it to change real soon, either. They are quite simply, being very successful at buying this market. This is a real shame, as the ELCPS (Embedded Linux Consortium PLatform Specification) should breathe some life into things, but instead, it appears that the hardware vendors are leaving Linux behind so long as Microsoft is waving dollars at them.
In addition to the usual tools many people have mentioned (the SysInternals tools, various partition, disk image, and repair tools, etc.), I always like to have a copy of these (the implicit assumption here is that you'll be in a mostly Windows environment - if you want to really free them, take a pair of FreeBSD boot floppies...
Ethload - A very old, but very useful and reliable ethernet analyzer. You'll need a NIC, of course, and a packet driver, too, since this is a DOS thing. In spite of it's age and limitations, it's still one of the very best tools I've seen for doing network traffic characterization. It's not a true packet sniffer, but it's much more useful than most that are. Only Etherman/Etherape even come close, and Ethload does a better job on Novell networks, of which there are still quite a few out there. Unfortunately, it's starting to get hard to find packet drivers for new cards...;-)
CyberKit - This one's essential if you're working on Windows in an IP environment: it's sort of an Internet diag software Leatherman tool. It includes ping, traceroute, nslookup (a real one, that lets you set servers, ask for particular responses, etc., not just go through the Winsock lookup, which it can do, too), NTP, and a bunch more. Highly recommended.
AxCrypt - Handy if you'll need to protect anything, or exchange protected data with anyone over there. I use this (among other things) to exchange info with missionaries in countries that kill known or suspected Christians. It also has the significant advantage of being easy for non-computer people and working on Windows and Linux. You may not need it, but it's handy to know about, anyway.
ZoneAlarm - a decent personal firewall. It's best to build your network so you don't need this sort of thing, but let's face it, if you need it, you need it bad. Also essential for wireless users that ever want to roam. Free for personal use, reasonable license for others.
U/Win - Some have suggested Cygwin for a Unix shell environment on the PC, but that's awfully heavy for a little fixing here or there, and Cygwin requires *way* too long to install for a quick fix. U/Win is smaller, lighter, and has better online documentation, not to mention a real sho-nuff Korn shell (it's written by David Korn, among others.)
HTMLDOC - If you're going to be doing any web work (wanna bet you won't?), HTMLDOC and curl (wget just wishes it was curl) can be really handy.
Finally, FWIW, Knoppix is a decent Linux playground, but I really think it's not in the game as a diagnostic distro, and way too piggy and slow to ever be a good tool for that. It appears there are way too many Linux bigots here on Slashdot - what else is new? There are several diag distros out there, all of which will do far better than knoppix.
Oh, one final thought: remember that most of the world's CD-ROM drives will NOT read CD-RWs at all (especially all but the newest laptops), and many won't even read CD-R's reliably, so dragging your toolkit may be tougher than you think. Although clunky, a parallel port Zip drive works darn near everywhere. Just pack it well, as Zip drives have very low ratings even for non-operating shock.
Half the beer of front, half of the beer when you deliver.
I'm constantly amazed at how everyone here on/. just glosses over the serious real-world difficulties of implementing such policies.
Come on, just HOW are we going to equitably determine a priori how much beer is "half of all the beer you can drink"? This is a "non-trivial" problem with significant temporal, and FAIK, quantum entanglement.
At the very least, projecting such a value would require significant data collection over a long period of time to determine whether variables such as the quality of the beer affect the projected consumtion volume. (Evidence from Merkle, for instance, suggests that such quality considerations may have a large effect, and in fact are the vapid result of feminism ruining our beer. Not to mention the further legal and ethical considerations involved if you have to drive yourself back home...):-)
Think about it this way. I was "on" the internet back when it was spam free. We could carry out business dicsussions and get work done without intrusive interruptions. Today, we have...
Those of us who have really been using Internet mail for a long time remember when business use was prohibited by the AUPs (Acceptable Use Policies) of all backbone connectivity providers.
Unfortunately, the anti-business academic Internet folks that largely controlled things back then decided to lump any and all "commercial" use in with all sorts of undesirable things, like porn and spam. Unfortunately, in order to open up the net to commerce, it was necessary to deal with all the other crap as well. This wasn't helped by legions of pubescent future Slashdotters who only wanted the net to be thier private pornucopia, and so argued vehemently for no AUPs at all as ISPs began to emerge in the early 90s.
I for one would love to bring back AUPs, and a network of backbone providers that support them - Few things would make my net experience happier than never seeing either porn or spam again...
(Interestingly, such AUPs would *lower* the cost of delivering service for those service providers, but they could charge a *higher* price. Sometimes less really is more.)
I like the concept and promise of the XUL-based approach, but I've been very seriously underwhelmed with every aspect of Phoenix, and I've made a real effort to try it on two recent occasions.
I really don't see why everyone thinks Phoenix is so great - I tend to use older, slower computers (my primary box is a 600 MHz P3, my secondary a 300 MHZ P3), and Mozilla/Netscape is just fine. Phoenixreally seems like a fast, grossly incomplete pile of bugs. Sure I want speed, but I value stability far more, which is the main reason I have a strong preference for Netscape 7 over Mozilla - it's just *way* more stable and reliable, at least on Windows, which is all I use for on the desktop anymore. (There are actually two big reasons I stick with NS over Moz: General stability/reliability and the only NS-only feature I care about: The sidebar, which is well worth having even if you only use it for bookmarks as I do - all other tabs are a PITA from what I can tell, but it *greatly* eases bookmarks management, which has always been a strong point of Netscape over IE.)
Here's one more person hoping we're not all forced to go to Phoenix - I'm just not really interested in making that trip, especially since I love the NS mail tool and use composer nearly every day along with HTMLDOC as a sophisticated two-birds-with-one-stone tool for generating all kinds of documents. (If it only had a toolbar to insert HTMLDOC markup comments in the code, it'd be darn near perfect...)
Who says cassettes are dead?? A tape transport ripped from a car radio could easily fit into a 5in drive bay, the audio in/out spliced into the soundcard.
You can even use them for data transfer! I can't be the only one here old enough to remember the Kansas City Standard, am I?
Sick idea: a USB driven servo-controlled tape mechanism spitting data out an audio port to a sound card input at 300 bps!
SVG is beautiful, elegant, powerful, and open. It's possible to completely define a very complex and dynamic user interface in it. And that's exactly why we'll never see it in any browsers that matter - not in IE because of the obvious threat to MS UI hegemony, and not in Netscape/Mozilla because there's just not enough interest and not enough capable programmers.
It's sad, because SVG is probably one of the best an most important technologies of the early 21st century, but barring huge changes in the world, it will probably not be allowed to set us free.
FWIW, I would despereately love to use SVG, but just this week decided aginst it in a new project, simply because the world is not ready for it, and Batik is the closest thing there is to a real SVG viewer, and it is certainly not really usable in the world at large. I really hope this changes, but I'm not too optimistic right now.
First of all, there are a large number of translations of the Bible that are not copyrighted, and a good number of them are even available as E-texts. Secondly, the KJV/AV is actually quite faithful, and a truly remarkable academic achievement for its time. It's probably not a stretch to say that there had never been such a large distrubuted scholarly collaboration before, and precious few since. Especially given that the KJV translators had access to far fewer manuscripts than anyone today can easily access in any good library, they did a very impressive job.
The only "problem" is that many of the newer translations are copyrighted, although it's very important to recognize that those that are (justifiably) concerned about groups that intentionally corrupt the scriptures through deliberately incorrect translations resort to copyright to prevent corruption of the scripture just as the GPL resorts to copyright to prevent "corruption" of program source.
There have been several good articles on this in the past couple of years: some rather blatant misconduct, even by pagan standards, by Zondervan was one of the things that led to the new English Standard Version (ESV) translation, with the copyright carefully held to prevent abuses like the TNIV. Copyright cuts both ways, never forget that: A world with no copyrights would be a world with little to no academic integrity. (Not to mention the GPL would cease to exist...)
Yes, it can be done. Use a VNC session on the server, then start a VNC client fullscreen as your session on the "sunray".
When you logout, all you close is the display, and the session in the server doesn't notice.
Well, sort of. First, let me say that I'm a huge fan of VNc and it makes life much easier. Second, it is in NO WAY equivalent to the Sunray in the real world. VNC is horribly slow, and even the bext implementations (probably Konstantin Chaplinsky's TightVNC) are still at least an order of magnitude slower than Microsoft's RDP protocol, and the Sunrays (at least the newer ones) seem even faster than that to me.
I like VNC, but it's really not in this game - even though VNC is probably the only other reasonable way to get real session transparency...
It turns out that liquid water at 1 atmosphere pressure is most dense at about 4 degrees Centigrade, where its density is 0.9999750 g/cm^3. at closer to room temperature- at 22 degrees C- its density is only.9977735 g/cm^3. It never actually gets up to 1 g/cm^3 the unit system was originally designed to use, I think because of the limits of accuracy of measurements when the current definitions of individual units were set.
This extremely unusual quirk of water (along with its inverse density as a solid) is one of the chief reasons that stable oceans are pretty much impossible with other substances, despite waht science fiction authors like to imagine: Because water is densest at 4 C, the entire volume of a body of water has to first reach that temperature (since it sinks to the bottom at that temp) before freezing at the top. Any other scenario results in bad things happening, like, say, all bodies of water freezing solid, making the continuation of life through winter rather difficult for aqautic species... One more reason to question whether naturalistic notions of origins really hold up under close scrutiny. (Don't even get me started on eclipses...)
There are good reasons to hate the metric system, other than because it's French.
Case in point - I was working with pressure instrumentation this week, and have a new appreciation of what absolutely *insane* units have to be used by the poor folks that prefer metric.
I'm talking, of course about that riduculous unit the Pascal, that defames the name of one of history's great scientists and thinkers.
The idiot who decided that a pressure as ridiculously low as one Newton per square meter was a useful unit of pressure should have been stood up against the wall and summarily shot. That such a thing exists as an ISO standard seems to fit the inherent silliness of every ISO-developed standard I've ever encountered.
I'm only half joking. This is such a ridiculously low pressure that any sort of real-world engineering use requires kilo-, or more likely megaPascals in order to express it. To put this silliness in perspective, realize that the very low pressure of 1 Atmosphere is equivalent to 101,325 Pascals. No wonder the civilized world calls it 14.7 psi instead...:-)
You'd rather have a P4 GHz and a cheap monitor than an LCD that is easier on the eyes? I for one am planning to buy an LCD long before I upgrade my "slow" 1.2GHz CPU.
Agreed, St0rmcold (or stormc0ld or whatever - I never get script kiddie spelling) is way off on this one. I've been burned enough times over hte years to understand very clearly that the computer itself is absolutely the *worst* place to put your money, as it's the area that changes the quickest, and loffers the least benefit.
I put the money last time around into a nice 17" Envision LCD, and I'm really glad I did. So glad, that I'd *much* rather keep my (not so fast) P3 and add another couple of screens to flank this one than have the latest and greatest 2+ GHz machine. The improved desktop ergonomics alone of the flat screen are well worth the money - for the first time, my monitor can sit comfortably on my desk and not be too close. If I was a graphic artist or radiologist, I'd insist on a CRT, otherwise, today's LCDs are a far better choice.
Seriously, the money is nearly a wash if you shop hard, especially with today's falling LCD prices. (What we need is enough volume on Samsung's beautiful 24" 16:9 LCD to be able to put three of *those* in front of me for a thousand per copy. Oh, yeah...)
Putting most of the money in nice peripherals makes sense: they last longer, can be used with several conputers, and they're the part you actually use and interact with. (I know this will get me laughed at, but my policy for the past ten years has been to never pay more than $600-800 for the computer itself, including disks and all. The LCD and top-end keyboard, mouse, printer/scanner (one reason I don't use Linux on the desktop) get used on at least two generations of computers before they're replaced. I only upgrade the computer itself when there's a *really good* (as in paying client) reason to change it.
Now granted, I don't stay at the bleeding edge (I've never thought PC gaming was a very good idea), but still, my approach gives me a far more usable configuration for far less money for far longer than the alternative. (I'd rather have the advantages of having multiple servers, a decent primary desktop with a nice LCD, and a decent laptop than one big honking, fast desktop machine...)
And let's face it, if you don't do heavy-duty gaming, anything above 300-400 MHz is almost undetectable under Linux or Win9X, or about twice that for the bloated Win2K/XP. Memory, disk and nice user interface stuff is a far better investment, and it makes the experience much more enjoyable, too.
Of course the computer OEMs hate that thinking, but many of us who have worked for them laugh at the way people continually fall for the upgrade ploy.
Those of us who are are good shots sit in upper windows taking pot shots at officers....and since we assume anyone near the officer is a bad guy, missing is not a problem)
Although I've not served in anything like the infantry, the historical accounts I've read of those that have stress that officers are the *least* likely and least useful targets.
Read these words of Sam Watkins from the War Between the States (BTW, that's the official designation by the US Congress of the war often mistakenly called a "Civil War"):
I always shot at privates. It was they that did the shooting and killing, and if I could kill or wound a private, why, my chances were so much the better. I always looked upon officers as harmless personages.... If I shot at an officer, it was at long range, but when we got down to close quarters I always tried to kill those that were trying to kill me.
These are real people who will be dying as a result of software that guides these weapons. They have sons, daughters, brothers, mothers, and community that they love. Please, please consider who you are giving the power to kill.
Agreed. And that's all the more reason why removing that power from the hands of a dictator like Saddam Hussein, even by force if necessary, is the correct way to ensure future peace.
Remember, tens of millions of people died in the twentieth century because of the peaceniks' insistence on appeasement in the name of preventing "war". No diplomatic tactic in history has been more thoroughly and repeatedly proven to fail, with more disastrous consequences.
If you have any doubts that World War II, for instance, could have been prevented by actions against Hitler quite similar to the ones we're now contemplating against Hussein, read "The Gathering Storm", volume I of Winston Churchill's history of WWII. Churchill was virtually alone in calling for dealing with Hitler by force at the time when doing so was easy and would cost a minimum of replaceable resources and irreplaceable lives.
The similarities to today's situation are eerie and justifiably frightening. Churchill sums up the theme of that volume this way, "How the English-speaking peoples through their unwisdom, carelessness, and good nature allowed the wicked to re-arm." Now there's a lesson we can apply to today's world...
The only reason I don't use minidics is because it was a proprietary Sony format and the players cost $500. If the data really is $1 ea and the players have come down in price it might actually be worth it.
The few folks I know that have minidisc players are not nearly so thrilled with them as people here seem to be. Always remember the following relationship:
Sony:hardware::Microsoft:software
For my money, almost any flash memory technology is vastly superior to the huge honking, battery-hungry MiniDisc. If these things were really any good, you'd think we'd see them in digital cameras, which is today's killer market for portable digital storage. Even Sony doesn't do that...
"Baroque" in this context is prety clearly intended to be a perjorative reference to unneeded and unnecessary complexity and ornamentation.
But Linus' transmetaphor is not really the right one, though, because the x86 instruction set isn't merely baroque, but downright rococo, the style in which every possible surface is covered with ornamentation for its own sake.
Is it just me, or is the rococo ennui getting a little deep in here?:-)
In any case, there's a very good reason why everyone that I know that's worked with an Intel white box refers to the chip as "Itanic" - by all reports, it's really pretty much impossible to build good, solid applications with the flaws present in the existing chips and compilers, and even if they worked as designed, it would still be two orders of magnitude more difficult than it has any right to be.
I know two formerly-committed Itanium developers (all with enough pull to get comp'ed white box hardware) who have gone back to SPARC/Solaris for thier 64-bit apps, and two more that are only sticking with it because HP and/or Intel are paying them to complete a crappy port just so they can calim something runs on it...
Tcl has a lot of redeeming qualities, the first that come to mind are:
1) It's not just a language, it's a library, so it's really quite easy to add or extend scripting language support into whatever applicaiton you happen to be writing. This is something that's really not nearly so doable with anything else.
2) I've yet to find anything that gets more done with fewer lines of code. I'm not really very good at Tcl, but there's a good reason many Tcl bigots calim it stands for "Try Coding Less" - the language really does offer awesome leverage.
3) Tk. There's nothing else like it. Sure, you can use Tk with Perl, Python, or something else, but if you're going to carry around the Tcl infrastructure anyway to run your GUI environment, why not just keep things clean and write the app in Tcl, too?
4) A truly excellent set of tools and libraries that recognize the importance of text-based processing to an even greater degree than Perl. Good examples are expect and the/rdb-derived Starbase database that allows fast operation on ASCII formatted dagta tables using the stream/operator paradigm.
Like I said, I'm not even a Tcl bigot - and certainly not an expert Tcl programmer, but the language has some very significant real-world advantages that should not be ignored. Look at it again, and you might form a different opinion.
The only reason Tcl isn't far more popular is that it doesn't have the strident advocacy crowd that both blesses and plagues the Perl community...
In many ways, the BIOS is completely archaic and deserves to be tossed on the scrapheap of history.
It's also, ugly as it is, one of the only things that allows complete transparency w.r.t. which type of OS is loaded or allowed to load.
Be very wary of any attempt, especially by Wintel, to "simplify" and "secure" the boot process. Eliminating the BIOS has been a Microsoft goal for years, and lately, they're injecting their signed code requirements into the hardware standards. Don't ever forget that Microsoft controls PC architecture through its PC9X and OS-specific WHCL standards far more than even Intel does.
Net-net: Should the BIOS go away? Definetely. (...unless it has advanced capabilities like those Phoenix is proposing.) Should we let Microsoft and Intel decide by fiat what replaces it? Not a chance. Unfortunately, it's likely that MS will simply disctate the new BIOS replacement as the next PCXX standard, and the OEMs will have no choice but to fall quickly in line: If they don't, MS will simply make their entire company financially unviable with a single e-mail offering OEM license fees at retail shelf prices. Microsoft has killed comapnies this way in the past, and may well do it again...
P.S.: If you knew what went into making your BIOS (I do, if you have a Dell laptop), then the making of law and sausages becomes downright appealing. At times, it's jsut ugly beyond belief.
Given that you can find iBooks for just a bit more (around $999), I think I'd rather have the Aqua interface.
Need I point out that your "a bit more" is a full 25% more in this case? If that doesn't bother you, please figure an extra 25% on your house payment, gasoline bill, car payments, etc. and send me a check for the extra 25% every month.
Don't you dare gripe about gas prices rising from $1.50 a gallon to $1.88 a gallon, either. After all, it's only "a bit more".
Seriously, had I not just scored a brand-new in the factory box ThinkPad 570E with all the nice accessories for $650, I'd be all over this deal. Don't forget that most of the price comparisons people are making here are with heavy, bulky, power-hungry laptops. Thin and lights are the only laptops many of us will consider, however. I for one will never again own a computer that requires its own luggage - if I can't throw it in my breifcase as an aftherthought, I don't want it.
Hrmmm,let's see. Two thousand dollars... Do I get an HDTV or a tankless water heater?
Definitely go for the water heater. It's a better deal, and more entertaining to boot. HD drivel is no better than NTSC drivel...
I can deal with my current sets. I'm going for the new water heater. When they switch in 2006 I'll have saved enough money to buy a set big enough to cover my living room wall and one for the basement to boot.
Except I don't think they'll ever force the switch to digital, for the very simple reason that there are a LOT of us that won't upgrade at all, but probably just throw the TV out for good instead. When push comes to shove, neither the networks nor the FCC will prove to have the stomach for such a game of chicken with millions of TV viewers.
Not to mention that US HDTV really won't be viable for several years yet due to the very serious multipath problems inherent in the 8-VSB modulation method we have to use here. This is a very real and very serious technical problem - read up on it, if you're not familiar with it. So far, there is no really good solution for it, either. Thisi s just one reason HD will not likely be ready for prime time by 2006, or if it is, it'll still be too expensive and they'll push the schedule back yet again, anyway...
I think you just talked me into a water heater...:-)
Actually, on most any machine whose BIOS supports PXE booting (pretty much all of them, since it's an Intel/Microsoft standard) it's already possible to re-flash the BIOS remotely, among other equally invasive things.
That's really what it was made for: PXE stands for Pre-boot eXecution Environment, remember???
Pearl Harbour, if anything was a major strategic win for Japan, nothing more, nothing less...
In reality, Pearl Harbor was a near-complete cock-up - the majority of the US fleet was safely at sea, especially the vital aircraft carriers, and the attack failed to take out the enormous fuel tanks only a short distance from the Navy yard. Without that fuel supply, the US would have had no choice but to sit idly by for a year or more, with no hope of mounting effective opposition. With the fuel intact, the losses at Pearl were bad, but quite manageable, and the US was able to respond quickly and with force in a very short time. It was a powerful symbolic attack, to be sure, but it was not a significant victory strategically, and only a minor one at best tactically.
That last statement is, of course, if we all play nice, and really believe the US was *completely unaware* of the impending attack (which I believe is bullshit)...
To be honest, I'm constantly amazed at the number of people that have been indoctrinated to believe this. As I pointed out above, it was only poor Japanese planning and specific orders to only hit designated targets that prevented the entire fuel reserves of the US forces in the Pacific from going up in flames in a matter of minutes. While Kimmel and Short *may* have had enough info to reasonably suspect an attack, and if so (which is far from certain), did not respond appropriately, it is quite certain that neither they nor any other American officer of political official would have been stupid enough to run the risk that the Japanese might bomb those fuel tanks, demoting the US to a 19th century power for a year or two while the Japanese ran unchecked throughout the Pacific. On such mistakes hinge the fate of nations.
Know your history, and you can see many very striking paralels...
I suggest you read a bit of history yourself, concentrating on primary sources, not the predigested propaganda you've seem to have fallen for. The good news is that WWII was well-chronicled, and a good many first-hand accounts are available - although not so many perhaps as written during the War Between the States and certainly not of that surpassing quality. The letters of the average infantryman in that war are literate, well-reasonsed, intricate in structure, and powerful - and make an even more powerful statement about the total failure of our modern educational system, FWIW.
Do you *really* think the US was unaware of the actions of Bin Laden?
I don't think even someone with the moral deficit of Bill Clinton:-) would stand by and allow an attack of that nature, even though the total death toll on September 11th, 2001 was only equivalent to the daily death toll in American abortion "clinics"...
Slashdot Mirror
In addition, they're allowing you to profit from selling the software commercially, which is also not in the strict open source definition.
False. A license that forbids this is not considered open source nor free.
Don't be ridiculous - that would mean than the BSD, MIT, and X licenses are niether Open Source nor free. (In reality, they are both. In fact, these "truly free" licenses are *less* restrictive than the GPL. They just don't have a social agenda, as is appropriate for a piece of technology.)
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Unlike the 737 and 747, which have been continuously upgraded, [the Concorde's] essentially unchanged. Almost as outdated as the 707.
Really, more outdated than that - many 707's have had their noisy, smoky, and inefficient turbojet engines replaced with turbofans (sometimes high-bypass) and noise-damping nacelles. The Concorde soldiers on with engines that were not a particularly great design when they were new. (The fairly basic Olympus, designed to reduce maintenance costs, has been left far behind. Even supersonic jet fighters are now using turbofans...)
Here's hoping we see supersonic flight again in our lifetimes. I wouldn't bet on it, though. If Boeing were to announce today that they've got a cheap, efficient replacement developed and ready for sale, the enviros would tie up its launch for years. I'm afraid we're seeing the end of the jet age that marked an "onward and upward" progress in aviation - and the rest of the jet airline business is none too healthy, either.
It really is true: With lower speed limits on highways, and now this, we are the first generation in human history to travel slower than our ancestors. That's nothing to brag about.
Until there's a mainstream non-Java Freenet implementation, Freenet will probably never become terribly popular. The current Freenet implementation sucks down memory like there's no tomorrow...
Freenet's not exactly lighting the world on fire even in a post-Napster P2P balkanized world. Face the facts: Freenet isn't popular for the very simple reason that you have *no* control over what's on your machine. (Just try explaining your "rights" to the FBI as they haul you off with several gigabytes of kiddie porn or terrorist training materials on your hard disk.) Even if getting "caught" were not a risk, a great many of us would never consider being part of Freenet simply because of the likelihood that we would unknowingly promote reprehensible things.
I almost never agree with Alan Dershowitz, but he was right when he pointed out recently, "You have a right to privacy. You have NO right to anonymity."
You have to hand it to MS - they have been *very* good at applying pressure to hardware vendors to get them to support CE, in most cases to the exclusion of anythign else. (Take a look at tiqit.com, the people who used to have the tiny little x86 borads for an example where they're about 75% don with the conversion - CE is clearly the emphasis, although they're not yet getting all the MS marketing dollars they can by removing any reference to competing OSes as some others have. Intrynsic is another example of a vendor in the process of switching to CE.)
Seriously, this is a *real* problem - right now, I'm looking for a very tiny, low-power embedded board that can support either wired Ethernet or 802.11. (Any pointers greatly appreciated!) First, there are far fewer choices than there were a year ago - it's amazing how many hardware platforms have died in this space, many of them casualties of the embedded Linux movement (for instance, Lineo and Metroworks are no longer interested in selling hardware, and their products just died off, leaving a real void.)
I don't want to use CE for this device, but I may, if only because it's *far* easier to get CE support on the new highly capable hardware. No one wants to own Linux or NetBSD drivers and the like, so it's a quagmire - MS, on the other hand is throwing beaucoup dollars at making sure CE runs (and is supported) on everything that matters. As a result, it's getting hard to avoid making the decision to design CE into new embedded products. Yess, it's a stupidly designed environment, but there's no question it's already far better supported than Linux and BSD for quick time-to-market embedded systems development.
I don't like that, but it's reality. And I don't think I see any way for it to change real soon, either. They are quite simply, being very successful at buying this market. This is a real shame, as the ELCPS (Embedded Linux Consortium PLatform Specification) should breathe some life into things, but instead, it appears that the hardware vendors are leaving Linux behind so long as Microsoft is waving dollars at them.
In addition to the usual tools many people have mentioned (the SysInternals tools, various partition, disk image, and repair tools, etc.), I always like to have a copy of these (the implicit assumption here is that you'll be in a mostly Windows environment - if you want to really free them, take a pair of FreeBSD boot floppies...
;-)
Ethload - A very old, but very useful and reliable ethernet analyzer. You'll need a NIC, of course, and a packet driver, too, since this is a DOS thing. In spite of it's age and limitations, it's still one of the very best tools I've seen for doing network traffic characterization. It's not a true packet sniffer, but it's much more useful than most that are. Only Etherman/Etherape even come close, and Ethload does a better job on Novell networks, of which there are still quite a few out there. Unfortunately, it's starting to get hard to find packet drivers for new cards...
CyberKit - This one's essential if you're working on Windows in an IP environment: it's sort of an Internet diag software Leatherman tool. It includes ping, traceroute, nslookup (a real one, that lets you set servers, ask for particular responses, etc., not just go through the Winsock lookup, which it can do, too), NTP, and a bunch more. Highly recommended.
AxCrypt - Handy if you'll need to protect anything, or exchange protected data with anyone over there. I use this (among other things) to exchange info with missionaries in countries that kill known or suspected Christians. It also has the significant advantage of being easy for non-computer people and working on Windows and Linux. You may not need it, but it's handy to know about, anyway.
ZoneAlarm - a decent personal firewall. It's best to build your network so you don't need this sort of thing, but let's face it, if you need it, you need it bad. Also essential for wireless users that ever want to roam. Free for personal use, reasonable license for others.
U/Win - Some have suggested Cygwin for a Unix shell environment on the PC, but that's awfully heavy for a little fixing here or there, and Cygwin requires *way* too long to install for a quick fix. U/Win is smaller, lighter, and has better online documentation, not to mention a real sho-nuff Korn shell (it's written by David Korn, among others.)
HTMLDOC - If you're going to be doing any web work (wanna bet you won't?), HTMLDOC and curl (wget just wishes it was curl) can be really handy.
Finally, FWIW, Knoppix is a decent Linux playground, but I really think it's not in the game as a diagnostic distro, and way too piggy and slow to ever be a good tool for that. It appears there are way too many Linux bigots here on Slashdot - what else is new? There are several diag distros out there, all of which will do far better than knoppix.
Oh, one final thought: remember that most of the world's CD-ROM drives will NOT read CD-RWs at all (especially all but the newest laptops), and many won't even read CD-R's reliably, so dragging your toolkit may be tougher than you think. Although clunky, a parallel port Zip drive works darn near everywhere. Just pack it well, as Zip drives have very low ratings even for non-operating shock.
Half the beer of front, half of the beer when you deliver.
/. just glosses over the serious real-world difficulties of implementing such policies.
:-)
I'm constantly amazed at how everyone here on
Come on, just HOW are we going to equitably determine a priori how much beer is "half of all the beer you can drink"? This is a "non-trivial" problem with significant temporal, and FAIK, quantum entanglement.
At the very least, projecting such a value would require significant data collection over a long period of time to determine whether variables such as the quality of the beer affect the projected consumtion volume. (Evidence from Merkle, for instance, suggests that such quality considerations may have a large effect, and in fact are the vapid result of feminism ruining our beer. Not to mention the further legal and ethical considerations involved if you have to drive yourself back home...)
Think about it this way. I was "on" the internet back when it was spam free. We could carry out business dicsussions and get work done without intrusive interruptions. Today, we have...
Those of us who have really been using Internet mail for a long time remember when business use was prohibited by the AUPs (Acceptable Use Policies) of all backbone connectivity providers.
Unfortunately, the anti-business academic Internet folks that largely controlled things back then decided to lump any and all "commercial" use in with all sorts of undesirable things, like porn and spam. Unfortunately, in order to open up the net to commerce, it was necessary to deal with all the other crap as well. This wasn't helped by legions of pubescent future Slashdotters who only wanted the net to be thier private pornucopia, and so argued vehemently for no AUPs at all as ISPs began to emerge in the early 90s.
I for one would love to bring back AUPs, and a network of backbone providers that support them - Few things would make my net experience happier than never seeing either porn or spam again...
(Interestingly, such AUPs would *lower* the cost of delivering service for those service providers, but they could charge a *higher* price. Sometimes less really is more.)
I like the concept and promise of the XUL-based approach, but I've been very seriously underwhelmed with every aspect of Phoenix, and I've made a real effort to try it on two recent occasions.
I really don't see why everyone thinks Phoenix is so great - I tend to use older, slower computers (my primary box is a 600 MHz P3, my secondary a 300 MHZ P3), and Mozilla/Netscape is just fine. Phoenixreally seems like a fast, grossly incomplete pile of bugs. Sure I want speed, but I value stability far more, which is the main reason I have a strong preference for Netscape 7 over Mozilla - it's just *way* more stable and reliable, at least on Windows, which is all I use for on the desktop anymore. (There are actually two big reasons I stick with NS over Moz: General stability/reliability and the only NS-only feature I care about: The sidebar, which is well worth having even if you only use it for bookmarks as I do - all other tabs are a PITA from what I can tell, but it *greatly* eases bookmarks management, which has always been a strong point of Netscape over IE.)
Here's one more person hoping we're not all forced to go to Phoenix - I'm just not really interested in making that trip, especially since I love the NS mail tool and use composer nearly every day along with HTMLDOC as a sophisticated two-birds-with-one-stone tool for generating all kinds of documents. (If it only had a toolbar to insert HTMLDOC markup comments in the code, it'd be darn near perfect...)
Who says cassettes are dead??
A tape transport ripped from a car radio could easily fit into a 5in drive bay, the audio in/out spliced into the soundcard.
You can even use them for data transfer! I can't be the only one here old enough to remember the Kansas City Standard, am I?
Sick idea: a USB driven servo-controlled tape mechanism spitting data out an audio port to a sound card input at 300 bps!
SVG is beautiful, elegant, powerful, and open. It's possible to completely define a very complex and dynamic user interface in it. And that's exactly why we'll never see it in any browsers that matter - not in IE because of the obvious threat to MS UI hegemony, and not in Netscape/Mozilla because there's just not enough interest and not enough capable programmers.
It's sad, because SVG is probably one of the best an most important technologies of the early 21st century, but barring huge changes in the world, it will probably not be allowed to set us free.
FWIW, I would despereately love to use SVG, but just this week decided aginst it in a new project, simply because the world is not ready for it, and Batik is the closest thing there is to a real SVG viewer, and it is certainly not really usable in the world at large. I really hope this changes, but I'm not too optimistic right now.
First of all, there are a large number of translations of the Bible that are not copyrighted, and a good number of them are even available as E-texts. Secondly, the KJV/AV is actually quite faithful, and a truly remarkable academic achievement for its time. It's probably not a stretch to say that there had never been such a large distrubuted scholarly collaboration before, and precious few since. Especially given that the KJV translators had access to far fewer manuscripts than anyone today can easily access in any good library, they did a very impressive job.
:
The only "problem" is that many of the newer translations are copyrighted, although it's very important to recognize that those that are (justifiably) concerned about groups that intentionally corrupt the scriptures through deliberately incorrect translations resort to copyright to prevent corruption of the scripture just as the GPL resorts to copyright to prevent "corruption" of program source.
There have been several good articles on this in the past couple of years: some rather blatant misconduct, even by pagan standards, by Zondervan was one of the things that led to the new English Standard Version (ESV) translation, with the copyright carefully held to prevent abuses like the TNIV. Copyright cuts both ways, never forget that: A world with no copyrights would be a world with little to no academic integrity. (Not to mention the GPL would cease to exist...)
Here are a few links about this
Overview of the ESV
How Zindervan and the IBS have engaged in outright lying and deception
How Zondervan has literally bullied Christian publishers that dare to speak out against it.
Susan Olasky's excellent cover story on the TNIV controversy.
There are more than a few lessons in there...
Yes, it can be done. Use a VNC session on the server, then start a VNC client fullscreen as your session on the "sunray".
When you logout, all you close is the display, and the session in the server doesn't notice.
Well, sort of. First, let me say that I'm a huge fan of VNc and it makes life much easier. Second, it is in NO WAY equivalent to the Sunray in the real world. VNC is horribly slow, and even the bext implementations (probably Konstantin Chaplinsky's TightVNC) are still at least an order of magnitude slower than Microsoft's RDP protocol, and the Sunrays (at least the newer ones) seem even faster than that to me.
I like VNC, but it's really not in this game - even though VNC is probably the only other reasonable way to get real session transparency...
It turns out that liquid water at 1 atmosphere pressure is most dense at about 4 degrees Centigrade, where its density is 0.9999750 g/cm^3. at closer to room temperature- at 22 degrees C- its density is only .9977735 g/cm^3. It never actually gets up to 1 g/cm^3 the unit system was originally designed to use, I think because of the limits of accuracy of measurements when the current definitions of individual units were set.
This extremely unusual quirk of water (along with its inverse density as a solid) is one of the chief reasons that stable oceans are pretty much impossible with other substances, despite waht science fiction authors like to imagine: Because water is densest at 4 C, the entire volume of a body of water has to first reach that temperature (since it sinks to the bottom at that temp) before freezing at the top. Any other scenario results in bad things happening, like, say, all bodies of water freezing solid, making the continuation of life through winter rather difficult for aqautic species... One more reason to question whether naturalistic notions of origins really hold up under close scrutiny. (Don't even get me started on eclipses...)
There are good reasons to hate the metric system, other than because it's French.
:-)
Case in point - I was working with pressure instrumentation this week, and have a new appreciation of what absolutely *insane* units have to be used by the poor folks that prefer metric.
I'm talking, of course about that riduculous unit the Pascal, that defames the name of one of history's great scientists and thinkers.
The idiot who decided that a pressure as ridiculously low as one Newton per square meter was a useful unit of pressure should have been stood up against the wall and summarily shot. That such a thing exists as an ISO standard seems to fit the inherent silliness of every ISO-developed standard I've ever encountered.
I'm only half joking. This is such a ridiculously low pressure that any sort of real-world engineering use requires kilo-, or more likely megaPascals in order to express it. To put this silliness in perspective, realize that the very low pressure of 1 Atmosphere is equivalent to 101,325 Pascals. No wonder the civilized world calls it 14.7 psi instead...
You'd rather have a P4 GHz and a cheap monitor than an LCD that is easier on the eyes? I for one am planning to buy an LCD long before I upgrade my "slow" 1.2GHz CPU.
Agreed, St0rmcold (or stormc0ld or whatever - I never get script kiddie spelling) is way off on this one. I've been burned enough times over hte years to understand very clearly that the computer itself is absolutely the *worst* place to put your money, as it's the area that changes the quickest, and loffers the least benefit.
I put the money last time around into a nice 17" Envision LCD, and I'm really glad I did. So glad, that I'd *much* rather keep my (not so fast) P3 and add another couple of screens to flank this one than have the latest and greatest 2+ GHz machine. The improved desktop ergonomics alone of the flat screen are well worth the money - for the first time, my monitor can sit comfortably on my desk and not be too close. If I was a graphic artist or radiologist, I'd insist on a CRT, otherwise, today's LCDs are a far better choice.
Seriously, the money is nearly a wash if you shop hard, especially with today's falling LCD prices. (What we need is enough volume on Samsung's beautiful 24" 16:9 LCD to be able to put three of *those* in front of me for a thousand per copy. Oh, yeah...)
Putting most of the money in nice peripherals makes sense: they last longer, can be used with several conputers, and they're the part you actually use and interact with. (I know this will get me laughed at, but my policy for the past ten years has been to never pay more than $600-800 for the computer itself, including disks and all. The LCD and top-end keyboard, mouse, printer/scanner (one reason I don't use Linux on the desktop) get used on at least two generations of computers before they're replaced. I only upgrade the computer itself when there's a *really good* (as in paying client) reason to change it.
Now granted, I don't stay at the bleeding edge (I've never thought PC gaming was a very good idea), but still, my approach gives me a far more usable configuration for far less money for far longer than the alternative. (I'd rather have the advantages of having multiple servers, a decent primary desktop with a nice LCD, and a decent laptop than one big honking, fast desktop machine...)
And let's face it, if you don't do heavy-duty gaming, anything above 300-400 MHz is almost undetectable under Linux or Win9X, or about twice that for the bloated Win2K/XP. Memory, disk and nice user interface stuff is a far better investment, and it makes the experience much more enjoyable, too.
Of course the computer OEMs hate that thinking, but many of us who have worked for them laugh at the way people continually fall for the upgrade ploy.
Although I've not served in anything like the infantry, the historical accounts I've read of those that have stress that officers are the *least* likely and least useful targets.
Read these words of Sam Watkins from the War Between the States (BTW, that's the official designation by the US Congress of the war often mistakenly called a "Civil War"):
These are real people who will be dying as a result of software that guides these weapons. They have sons, daughters, brothers, mothers, and community that they love. Please, please consider who you are giving the power to kill.
Agreed. And that's all the more reason why removing that power from the hands of a dictator like Saddam Hussein, even by force if necessary, is the correct way to ensure future peace.
Remember, tens of millions of people died in the twentieth century because of the peaceniks' insistence on appeasement in the name of preventing "war". No diplomatic tactic in history has been more thoroughly and repeatedly proven to fail, with more disastrous consequences.
If you have any doubts that World War II, for instance, could have been prevented by actions against Hitler quite similar to the ones we're now contemplating against Hussein, read "The Gathering Storm", volume I of Winston Churchill's history of WWII. Churchill was virtually alone in calling for dealing with Hitler by force at the time when doing so was easy and would cost a minimum of replaceable resources and irreplaceable lives.
The similarities to today's situation are eerie and justifiably frightening. Churchill sums up the theme of that volume this way, "How the English-speaking peoples through their unwisdom, carelessness, and good nature allowed the wicked to re-arm." Now there's a lesson we can apply to today's world...
The only reason I don't use minidics is because it was a proprietary Sony format and the players cost $500. If the data really is $1 ea and the players have come down in price it might actually be worth it.
The few folks I know that have minidisc players are not nearly so thrilled with them as people here seem to be. Always remember the following relationship:
Sony:hardware::Microsoft:software
For my money, almost any flash memory technology is vastly superior to the huge honking, battery-hungry MiniDisc. If these things were really any good, you'd think we'd see them in digital cameras, which is today's killer market for portable digital storage. Even Sony doesn't do that...
"Baroque" in this context is prety clearly intended to be a perjorative reference to unneeded and unnecessary complexity and ornamentation.
:-)
But Linus' transmetaphor is not really the right one, though, because the x86 instruction set isn't merely baroque, but downright rococo, the style in which every possible surface is covered with ornamentation for its own sake.
Is it just me, or is the rococo ennui getting a little deep in here?
In any case, there's a very good reason why everyone that I know that's worked with an Intel white box refers to the chip as "Itanic" - by all reports, it's really pretty much impossible to build good, solid applications with the flaws present in the existing chips and compilers, and even if they worked as designed, it would still be two orders of magnitude more difficult than it has any right to be.
I know two formerly-committed Itanium developers (all with enough pull to get comp'ed white box hardware) who have gone back to SPARC/Solaris for thier 64-bit apps, and two more that are only sticking with it because HP and/or Intel are paying them to complete a crappy port just so they can calim something runs on it...
Tcl has a lot of redeeming qualities, the first that come to mind are:
/rdb-derived Starbase database that allows fast operation on ASCII formatted dagta tables using the stream/operator paradigm.
1) It's not just a language, it's a library, so it's really quite easy to add or extend scripting language support into whatever applicaiton you happen to be writing. This is something that's really not nearly so doable with anything else.
2) I've yet to find anything that gets more done with fewer lines of code. I'm not really very good at Tcl, but there's a good reason many Tcl bigots calim it stands for "Try Coding Less" - the language really does offer awesome leverage.
3) Tk. There's nothing else like it. Sure, you can use Tk with Perl, Python, or something else, but if you're going to carry around the Tcl infrastructure anyway to run your GUI environment, why not just keep things clean and write the app in Tcl, too?
4) A truly excellent set of tools and libraries that recognize the importance of text-based processing to an even greater degree than Perl. Good examples are expect and the
Like I said, I'm not even a Tcl bigot - and certainly not an expert Tcl programmer, but the language has some very significant real-world advantages that should not be ignored. Look at it again, and you might form a different opinion.
The only reason Tcl isn't far more popular is that it doesn't have the strident advocacy crowd that both blesses and plagues the Perl community...
In many ways, the BIOS is completely archaic and deserves to be tossed on the scrapheap of history.
It's also, ugly as it is, one of the only things that allows complete transparency w.r.t. which type of OS is loaded or allowed to load.
Be very wary of any attempt, especially by Wintel, to "simplify" and "secure" the boot process. Eliminating the BIOS has been a Microsoft goal for years, and lately, they're injecting their signed code requirements into the hardware standards. Don't ever forget that Microsoft controls PC architecture through its PC9X and OS-specific WHCL standards far more than even Intel does.
Net-net: Should the BIOS go away? Definetely. (...unless it has advanced capabilities like those Phoenix is proposing.) Should we let Microsoft and Intel decide by fiat what replaces it? Not a chance. Unfortunately, it's likely that MS will simply disctate the new BIOS replacement as the next PCXX standard, and the OEMs will have no choice but to fall quickly in line: If they don't, MS will simply make their entire company financially unviable with a single e-mail offering OEM license fees at retail shelf prices. Microsoft has killed comapnies this way in the past, and may well do it again...
P.S.: If you knew what went into making your BIOS (I do, if you have a Dell laptop), then the making of law and sausages becomes downright appealing. At times, it's jsut ugly beyond belief.
Given that you can find iBooks for just a bit more (around $999), I think I'd rather have the Aqua interface.
Need I point out that your "a bit more" is a full 25% more in this case? If that doesn't bother you, please figure an extra 25% on your house payment, gasoline bill, car payments, etc. and send me a check for the extra 25% every month.
Don't you dare gripe about gas prices rising from $1.50 a gallon to $1.88 a gallon, either. After all, it's only "a bit more".
Seriously, had I not just scored a brand-new in the factory box ThinkPad 570E with all the nice accessories for $650, I'd be all over this deal. Don't forget that most of the price comparisons people are making here are with heavy, bulky, power-hungry laptops. Thin and lights are the only laptops many of us will consider, however. I for one will never again own a computer that requires its own luggage - if I can't throw it in my breifcase as an aftherthought, I don't want it.
Hrmmm,let's see. Two thousand dollars... Do I get an HDTV or a tankless water heater?
:-)
Definitely go for the water heater. It's a better deal, and more entertaining to boot. HD drivel is no better than NTSC drivel...
I can deal with my current sets. I'm going for the new water heater. When they switch in 2006 I'll have saved enough money to buy a set big enough to cover my living room wall and one for the basement to boot.
Except I don't think they'll ever force the switch to digital, for the very simple reason that there are a LOT of us that won't upgrade at all, but probably just throw the TV out for good instead. When push comes to shove, neither the networks nor the FCC will prove to have the stomach for such a game of chicken with millions of TV viewers.
Not to mention that US HDTV really won't be viable for several years yet due to the very serious multipath problems inherent in the 8-VSB modulation method we have to use here. This is a very real and very serious technical problem - read up on it, if you're not familiar with it. So far, there is no really good solution for it, either. Thisi s just one reason HD will not likely be ready for prime time by 2006, or if it is, it'll still be too expensive and they'll push the schedule back yet again, anyway...
I think you just talked me into a water heater...
Actually, on most any machine whose BIOS supports PXE booting (pretty much all of them, since it's an Intel/Microsoft standard) it's already possible to re-flash the BIOS remotely, among other equally invasive things.
That's really what it was made for: PXE stands for Pre-boot eXecution Environment, remember???
Pearl Harbour, if anything was a major strategic win for Japan, nothing more, nothing less...
:-) would stand by and allow an attack of that nature, even though the total death toll on September 11th, 2001 was only equivalent to the daily death toll in American abortion "clinics"...
In reality, Pearl Harbor was a near-complete cock-up - the majority of the US fleet was safely at sea, especially the vital aircraft carriers, and the attack failed to take out the enormous fuel tanks only a short distance from the Navy yard. Without that fuel supply, the US would have had no choice but to sit idly by for a year or more, with no hope of mounting effective opposition. With the fuel intact, the losses at Pearl were bad, but quite manageable, and the US was able to respond quickly and with force in a very short time. It was a powerful symbolic attack, to be sure, but it was not a significant victory strategically, and only a minor one at best tactically.
That last statement is, of course, if we all play nice, and really believe the US was *completely unaware* of the impending attack (which I believe is bullshit)...
To be honest, I'm constantly amazed at the number of people that have been indoctrinated to believe this. As I pointed out above, it was only poor Japanese planning and specific orders to only hit designated targets that prevented the entire fuel reserves of the US forces in the Pacific from going up in flames in a matter of minutes. While Kimmel and Short *may* have had enough info to reasonably suspect an attack, and if so (which is far from certain), did not respond appropriately, it is quite certain that neither they nor any other American officer of political official would have been stupid enough to run the risk that the Japanese might bomb those fuel tanks, demoting the US to a 19th century power for a year or two while the Japanese ran unchecked throughout the Pacific. On such mistakes hinge the fate of nations.
Know your history, and you can see many very striking paralels...
I suggest you read a bit of history yourself, concentrating on primary sources, not the predigested propaganda you've seem to have fallen for. The good news is that WWII was well-chronicled, and a good many first-hand accounts are available - although not so many perhaps as written during the War Between the States and certainly not of that surpassing quality. The letters of the average infantryman in that war are literate, well-reasonsed, intricate in structure, and powerful - and make an even more powerful statement about the total failure of our modern educational system, FWIW.
Do you *really* think the US was unaware of the actions of Bin Laden?
I don't think even someone with the moral deficit of Bill Clinton