They're digging up aircraft and tanks buried in the sand to keep them from being blown up.
California is about the size of Iraq. There are places in Humboldt County, I hear, where they've been working at supplying the marijuana requirements of San Francisco for decades without being found out and raided.
For all I know, the conventional wisdom is right and there were no WMDs. Real communication only occurs between equals, so it seems possible that Saddam ordered the weapons built and his infrastructure didn't and said they did. Or, they did develop them, and the people who hid them have no good reason to point to them.
There's an Iraqi blogger. His relative worked at a military facility, so he knew they had Scuds there, being modified for longer range. He saw the convoy that moved them out of there, and he saw the cruise missiles destroy the facility. When he asks "Where are the WMDs?", he asks the anti-war people to account for WMDs he saw with his own eyes.
With closed captioning, watching dialogue is doable. This chunk of closed captioning says "I say we fuck his shit up", you just mute it and RegEx the CC, saying "I say we mess his stuff up" or the like. OK, it's inelegant and dependent on something this isn't necessarily there, but it's a robust hack in most situations.
But identifying this curve as a breast? That'd be hard. I know a prof whose work is this (and thus has a huge university-sponsored porn archive) and I didn't think he was anywhere near prime time on it.
It seems sorta unstable, but if your HD's just a high-level cache between the CPU and MP3 and pr0n servers, then there'd be nothing on the megagig disk that isn't replacable anyway.
I think that might be a bit of a problem. It's easier to say to a small groups "relate to each other" rather than to say "relate with the world" to one person. It's a smaller, more managable challenge.
And, of course, if that small group is geek-intensive, each individual is likely to be a thornier person to relate to than most.
And, in a related note, I've noticed that geek interaction can be incredibly put-down related, because geeks love the verbal wordplay. In the past, I was the weakest of the combat punsters among my group, but my standard, weak comebacks would label me as mean among non-geek friends.
The system for us has five nines for reliability, except for the IP stack bolted to the side which has died in the middle of business five times in the last calendar year.
Mostly, I gripe because the app we run on it is absolute shit, yet 100% necessary, yet tertiary enough that training dollars are unavailable.
Yeah. I remember that. They wanted Unix, too, I remember, but VMS was prime on their lists. Compilers were big, too. The details are sketchy, as I read this about a decade ago. I went for the GNU and Unix jokes because they're funnier.
I now admin a VMS system. If Soviet computing was that hooked on VMS and Vax, I'm not surprised it died out.
In the second segment of Hafner and Markoff's Cyberpunk, they write about the crackers that Cliff Stoll found, and reveal that they went to the Soviets, saying they could hack into several government and military sites. The Soviets said what they'd rather have is Unix source code. So, while the rest of the crew had fun getting into NORAD looking for the WOPR, the one with a job as a sysadmin cut a couple extra tapes in the backup schedule and carried them through Brandenberg Gate.
Well, in general, I do more sysadmin than programming, but when I'm dealing with programming, the only stress I feel is when people want to drag me away from programming. I love to make the electrons dance!
But, in the sysadmin side, I've had a stressful week when I did a routine thing that should've made the main system I admin much better and cooler, but ended up destroying critical data, and the helpdesk people who could help did not consider my cries for help and the rising chants for my head to be implaled on a pike and placed in front of AR as a warning did not constitute justification for their assistance. So, I was powerless to effect change but held responsible for said change. Therefore, insufficiently understood technology is indistinguishable from stress. Or something.
There are other technologies I use. My family has TVs and VCRs and have been known to record shows in order to watch them later. (No DVR yet.) We also have DVD players. My wife does not understand the controllers and is thus stressed by them. I set everything up and thus understand them fully and have no stress.
There are also phones. We have a land line and two cell phones. I only get stressed out by that technology when 1) I'm in a place where it doesn't work, like the two drop-off points on the way home; 2) the device is resistant to understanding and modification, like the inability to upload or download ringtones (although I can program them via the keyboard); 3) The technology is used to invade my life. Telemarketers, popups, spam, are all intrusive, stress-creating technologies by design.
Most other technology-related stress points are more cultural than technology. Is the stress over carrying the midnight reboot beeper stress over beeper technology, or is it because we have a culture that values responsiveness and runs ever-more 24-7? At best (worst?), technology enables workaholics with that sort of total communication, ever on-call capabilities the same way it enables slackers with gaming systems and on-demand pizza delivery.
Shock and Awe is truly important if all we're doing is punitive attacks, but this thing will only be solved by our diplomats and our light infantry. I think our light infantry is up to the job, but Paul Bremer and the CPA hasn't impressed me yet.
In Vietnam, they used B52s to drop bombs, tons of 'em right onto the same place until it's a crater. Made the best daylight precision bombing of WWII look like indescriminate fire.
Word I hear, today's B52 optics and aiming make Arclight look like WWII.
The ability to take out enemy satellites is also interesting. As an American, I cant' help but notice that the rules of engagement have been as follows: "Foreign countries are allowed to have weapons, as LONG as they're not as powerful as our own." which is obviously okay with me, as an American, however, so much for a fair playing field.
If you're in a fair fight, you planned wrong. Ask your roommate.
America chooses it's battles lightly, especially post-Vietnam, and Powell would have us Come Down Like The Hand Of God upon any enemy that chooses to oppose.
On the one hand, I can see it. Things like the Rocket From Orbit, Stealth planes and any jet plane not old enough to drive are there not to meet anything that can challenge it but to discourage the development of anything that can challenge it. On the other hand, a lot of what the Air Force spends money on seems more to allow this generation of pilots to be cooler than the last because they fly an X++ Generation Fighter instead of taking their right purpose as being the air wing of The Hand Of God. The A10 is flown primarily by reserve units because the pilots would rather be Top Gun than be useful.
I've read a story in a blog about an Iraqi whose uncle used to work in a Scud warehouse, and he watched from his roof as the Scuds were trucked out, and two weeks later, he watched from his roof as the cruise missiles flattened where the Scuds were. True, orbital launch platforms would cut down on the things falling short and hitting neighborhoods on the way, but it is a glaring failure in intelligence.
Which gets to the other line:
I'll never figure out why we'll use a bomb which costs hundreds of thousands of dollars to snipe someone... when a 10 cent bullet would do the trick just fine. Now we can do it from space?
A bomb doesn't bleed. A cruise missile doesn't have a mom at home who will cry in front of CNN cameras. "Bring the launch platforms home by Christmas" isn't as emotionally powerful as "Bring the boys home by Christmas." That's why we don't use men.
Some 12 years or so ago, I took a creative writing course. For the first assignment, which was two poems, we were to type out our assignment on mimeo paper and he'd run off enough for the class. He gave me two sheets. I went to the school newspaper office, put the sheets in, and discovered that I could not type on a typewriter. I typed every day for journalism classes and for the student paper, plus 2-3 hours a day on email discussion lists, but everything I touched had a working backspace, so there was no problem correcting errors, and this typewriter you couldn't. Especially on mimeo paper.
I printed my poetry out, took the sheet to the J-School office to make 20 photocopies and left a note at the prof's office, saying I hoped this was OK, but I couldn't do it any other way. Everyone else must've had the same problem, because next assignment, we had to turn in something to be photocopied.
OK, saying that they won't run the moveon.org ad because they don't do "issue" advertising and then playing the anti-tobacco ad is a bit hinky. I must agree on that. And, I must say I was doing stuff on the computer during most of the game, so the big yardage play and most of the commercials were ignored by me. I even missed the titty. But I didn't see a pro-Republican ad in the mix.
0f course, all the Republicans I know are non-smokers and non-drinkers, and the last Democrat politician I met was a liquor distributor, so I skew the Bud ads pro-Dem. Your mileage may vary on that.
I disagree, to some extent, because the election of the head of the federal government is a federal matter, not a state matter. Then again, in truth, we aren't voting for that leader, we're voting for an anonymous elector, a state official who will vote for that leader in our stead.
Looking at it fairly objectively, having voted but not really being too impressed or drawn by either, it struck me that the Florida Supreme Court was bending over backwards, and while they were at it, wiping themselves with state law and the state constitution, in order to allow Gore to get Florida, and the US Supreme Court was reacting to that.
Yeah, but their personnel policies, last time I heard, were very liberal, as was the Gates Foundation's charity giving. I'm guessing that contributing to only one side left them without political favor when a certain anti-trust lawsuit came to court.
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I never did like the PDF reader on my iPaq. Perhaps, if it hadn't died, I'd have learned to love it.
I lent a copy to a friend a while ago. I just asked for it back.
When's the last time you had a PDF book as bathroom reading?
They're digging up aircraft and tanks buried in the sand to keep them from being blown up.
California is about the size of Iraq. There are places in Humboldt County, I hear, where they've been working at supplying the marijuana requirements of San Francisco for decades without being found out and raided.
For all I know, the conventional wisdom is right and there were no WMDs. Real communication only occurs between equals, so it seems possible that Saddam ordered the weapons built and his infrastructure didn't and said they did. Or, they did develop them, and the people who hid them have no good reason to point to them.
There's an Iraqi blogger. His relative worked at a military facility, so he knew they had Scuds there, being modified for longer range. He saw the convoy that moved them out of there, and he saw the cruise missiles destroy the facility. When he asks "Where are the WMDs?", he asks the anti-war people to account for WMDs he saw with his own eyes.
I'm far from convinced that the story is over.
If the Florida Executive Branch had violated the law, that would've been one thing. I didn't see any violation of the law, except by court order.
With closed captioning, watching dialogue is doable. This chunk of closed captioning says "I say we fuck his shit up", you just mute it and RegEx the CC, saying "I say we mess his stuff up" or the like. OK, it's inelegant and dependent on something this isn't necessarily there, but it's a robust hack in most situations.
But identifying this curve as a breast? That'd be hard. I know a prof whose work is this (and thus has a huge university-sponsored porn archive) and I didn't think he was anywhere near prime time on it.
"You do not need 3D accelleration to run a window manager. Yet."
It seems someone want to make that a requirement. When I have a machine in my house over 550MHz, I'll worry about such stuff.
It seems sorta unstable, but if your HD's just a high-level cache between the CPU and MP3 and pr0n servers, then there'd be nothing on the megagig disk that isn't replacable anyway.
Spoken like someone who didn't receive damage from jocks that included bone damage, hospitalization and casts from jocks in high school.
As for me, I follow Kurtz: Exterminate the brutes!
I think that might be a bit of a problem. It's easier to say to a small groups "relate to each other" rather than to say "relate with the world" to one person. It's a smaller, more managable challenge.
And, of course, if that small group is geek-intensive, each individual is likely to be a thornier person to relate to than most.
And, in a related note, I've noticed that geek interaction can be incredibly put-down related, because geeks love the verbal wordplay. In the past, I was the weakest of the combat punsters among my group, but my standard, weak comebacks would label me as mean among non-geek friends.
For myself I realized that wearing headphones was not a good idea since the tendency was to drown out external stimuli.
Is there something wrong with drowning out unwanted external stimuli?
Word. It's been 10 years or so since I bought my last Appleseed, and I'm still a big fan of Deaunan and Briarios.
The system for us has five nines for reliability, except for the IP stack bolted to the side which has died in the middle of business five times in the last calendar year.
Mostly, I gripe because the app we run on it is absolute shit, yet 100% necessary, yet tertiary enough that training dollars are unavailable.
Yeah. I remember that. They wanted Unix, too, I remember, but VMS was prime on their lists. Compilers were big, too. The details are sketchy, as I read this about a decade ago. I went for the GNU and Unix jokes because they're funnier.
I now admin a VMS system. If Soviet computing was that hooked on VMS and Vax, I'm not surprised it died out.
In the second segment of Hafner and Markoff's Cyberpunk, they write about the crackers that Cliff Stoll found, and reveal that they went to the Soviets, saying they could hack into several government and military sites. The Soviets said what they'd rather have is Unix source code. So, while the rest of the crew had fun getting into NORAD looking for the WOPR, the one with a job as a sysadmin cut a couple extra tapes in the backup schedule and carried them through Brandenberg Gate.
Gee, I guess GNU really is communist. B)
Well, in general, I do more sysadmin than programming, but when I'm dealing with programming, the only stress I feel is when people want to drag me away from programming. I love to make the electrons dance!
But, in the sysadmin side, I've had a stressful week when I did a routine thing that should've made the main system I admin much better and cooler, but ended up destroying critical data, and the helpdesk people who could help did not consider my cries for help and the rising chants for my head to be implaled on a pike and placed in front of AR as a warning did not constitute justification for their assistance. So, I was powerless to effect change but held responsible for said change. Therefore, insufficiently understood technology is indistinguishable from stress. Or something.
There are other technologies I use. My family has TVs and VCRs and have been known to record shows in order to watch them later. (No DVR yet.) We also have DVD players. My wife does not understand the controllers and is thus stressed by them. I set everything up and thus understand them fully and have no stress.
There are also phones. We have a land line and two cell phones. I only get stressed out by that technology when 1) I'm in a place where it doesn't work, like the two drop-off points on the way home; 2) the device is resistant to understanding and modification, like the inability to upload or download ringtones (although I can program them via the keyboard); 3) The technology is used to invade my life. Telemarketers, popups, spam, are all intrusive, stress-creating technologies by design.
Most other technology-related stress points are more cultural than technology. Is the stress over carrying the midnight reboot beeper stress over beeper technology, or is it because we have a culture that values responsiveness and runs ever-more 24-7? At best (worst?), technology enables workaholics with that sort of total communication, ever on-call capabilities the same way it enables slackers with gaming systems and on-demand pizza delivery.
Shock and Awe is truly important if all we're doing is punitive attacks, but this thing will only be solved by our diplomats and our light infantry. I think our light infantry is up to the job, but Paul Bremer and the CPA hasn't impressed me yet.
Look up Arclight.
In Vietnam, they used B52s to drop bombs, tons of 'em right onto the same place until it's a crater. Made the best daylight precision bombing of WWII look like indescriminate fire.
Word I hear, today's B52 optics and aiming make Arclight look like WWII.
Absolutely, positively badass.
The ability to take out enemy satellites is also interesting. As an American, I cant' help but notice that the rules of engagement have been as follows: "Foreign countries are allowed to have weapons, as LONG as they're not as powerful as our own." which is obviously okay with me, as an American, however, so much for a fair playing field.
If you're in a fair fight, you planned wrong. Ask your roommate.
America chooses it's battles lightly, especially post-Vietnam, and Powell would have us Come Down Like The Hand Of God upon any enemy that chooses to oppose.
On the one hand, I can see it. Things like the Rocket From Orbit, Stealth planes and any jet plane not old enough to drive are there not to meet anything that can challenge it but to discourage the development of anything that can challenge it. On the other hand, a lot of what the Air Force spends money on seems more to allow this generation of pilots to be cooler than the last because they fly an X++ Generation Fighter instead of taking their right purpose as being the air wing of The Hand Of God. The A10 is flown primarily by reserve units because the pilots would rather be Top Gun than be useful.
I've read a story in a blog about an Iraqi whose uncle used to work in a Scud warehouse, and he watched from his roof as the Scuds were trucked out, and two weeks later, he watched from his roof as the cruise missiles flattened where the Scuds were. True, orbital launch platforms would cut down on the things falling short and hitting neighborhoods on the way, but it is a glaring failure in intelligence.
Which gets to the other line:
I'll never figure out why we'll use a bomb which costs hundreds of thousands of dollars to snipe someone... when a 10 cent bullet would do the trick just fine. Now we can do it from space?
A bomb doesn't bleed. A cruise missile doesn't have a mom at home who will cry in front of CNN cameras. "Bring the launch platforms home by Christmas" isn't as emotionally powerful as "Bring the boys home by Christmas." That's why we don't use men.
Early hiphop was heavily influenced by Kraftwerk, esp. "Trans-Europe Express". That the birds come home to roost surprises me very little.
Some 12 years or so ago, I took a creative writing course. For the first assignment, which was two poems, we were to type out our assignment on mimeo paper and he'd run off enough for the class. He gave me two sheets. I went to the school newspaper office, put the sheets in, and discovered that I could not type on a typewriter. I typed every day for journalism classes and for the student paper, plus 2-3 hours a day on email discussion lists, but everything I touched had a working backspace, so there was no problem correcting errors, and this typewriter you couldn't. Especially on mimeo paper.
I printed my poetry out, took the sheet to the J-School office to make 20 photocopies and left a note at the prof's office, saying I hoped this was OK, but I couldn't do it any other way. Everyone else must've had the same problem, because next assignment, we had to turn in something to be photocopied.
And that was the last time I used a typewriter.
OK, saying that they won't run the moveon.org ad because they don't do "issue" advertising and then playing the anti-tobacco ad is a bit hinky. I
must agree on that. And, I must say I was doing stuff on the computer during most of the game, so the big yardage play and most of the commercials were ignored by me. I even missed the titty. But I didn't see a pro-Republican ad in the mix.
0f course, all the Republicans I know are non-smokers and non-drinkers, and the last Democrat politician I met was a liquor distributor, so I skew the Bud ads pro-Dem. Your mileage may vary on that.
And you can be a Republican (or Democrat) and not be evil.
(It's those damn Commies who're evil, of course.) B)
But the point I was making is that they're likely not Republican, but contributing to both sides in order to protect themselves.
I disagree, to some extent, because the election of the head of the federal government is a federal matter, not a state matter. Then again, in truth, we aren't voting for that leader, we're voting for an anonymous elector, a state official who will vote for that leader in our stead.
My governmental system confuses me sometimes.
Looking at it fairly objectively, having voted but not really being too impressed or drawn by either, it struck me that the Florida Supreme Court was bending over backwards, and while they were at it, wiping themselves with state law and the state constitution, in order to allow Gore to get Florida, and the US Supreme Court was reacting to that.
Yeah, but their personnel policies, last time I heard, were very liberal, as was the Gates Foundation's charity giving. I'm guessing that contributing to only one side left them without political favor when a certain anti-trust lawsuit came to court.