I was fortunate enough to attend a very memorable and informative lecture, by
Len Kleinrock, one of the creators of the Arpanet, in 1977. He spoke about the redundant paths, the ability to re-route, and so on, and the kinds of disasters they were meant to cope with. And that was things like back-hoe operators digging up communication cables, fires, power failures, rodents chewing through insulation. I also read the book,
"Where Wizards stay up late: The origins of the Internet".
Yes, I am aware that a single highly speculative paper had been written, imagining a network that could survive a nuclear war. But, I believe, the guy who wrote it was not one of creators of the Arpanet. I specifically chose the word "built" as opposed to "designed" in anticipation of questions from those who heard an echo of this early paper.
The reason I mentioned this meme is that it is so entertaining that it is often repeated in the more entertaining form, that, "the internet was built to survive a nuclear war". I mentioned it as an example of an example where the falsehood has more power than the truth -- because it is entertaining.
Without their host planets, they would float off, wheareas the moon would continue orbiting the sun quite contently.
I have been interested in Astronomy since I was about six years old.
Just over forty years. I have heard what you suggest before -- but only in the last few years. And I don't understand it any more this time than I did on the earlier occasions.
Frankly, I strongly suspect it is a false factoid, like that the internet was built to survive a Nuclear War. I strongly suspect it is a bullshit meme that keep being repeated because it sounds cool, but is completely false.
Pray explain what you mean when you say the other 138 moons would float off?
I am trying to do the "thought experiment" of silently, quietly erasing the principals of those moons, mass and all. I am finding this difficult to do. I don't believe there is any way this could occur, in our Universe.
So, instead I imagined doing something to accelerate a moon, any moon, to the escape velocity of its principal. What happens then? Well, the object accelerated to just beyond a planet's escape velocity will assume an orbit very similar to that of the Planet it just escaped from. Sometime in the last couple of years ago there was a flap about a small
object that seemed to have been temporarily captured in the Earth-Moon system. But it turned out to be NASA space debris. It appeared to be the discarded upper stage of an Apollo moon shot.
Is this a decision based on Science? Or is it based on Politics and emotion?
Did you know that in 1998 Senator Patrick Leahy, of Vermont, got his State's largest Lake, Lake Champlain, to be reclassified as the
6th Great Lake? At least as far as the awarding of researh grants. Being considered a "Great Lake" made the academic institutions in his constituency eligible to apply for certain research grants.
There is talk of sending a probe to Pluto. Is it possible that it is easier to sell a probe to "planet Pluto" than to send one to Kuiper-belt object Pluto?
I remember, back in the days when I tuned in to debates as to which newsgroups should be created, the big debate as to whether a new group should be talk.acquaria, rec.acquaria or sci.acquaria.
In Leahy's defence, these were environmental research grants, and I should probably assume he added this line to the bill to protect his constituent's natural environment -- not for the petty partisan purposes.
Somone pumping out 500 pages a month, on an inkjet, would go through a lot more than 6 refills. Inkjets generally claim that a cartridge is good for 500 pages. So, correcting the frequency of refills, your price per page is more like ten cents a page.
Any printing with graphics, or colour, will be even more expensive.
The figures the manufacturer's claim for 500 pages are open to question too.
But... don't lexmark printers also come with the nozzle in the cartridge?
different printer models have different business models behind them. Are they cheap upfront, but more expensive on consumables (typical for a consumer printer), or more expensive upfront but with lower running costs (typically a business printer)? Making the print heads incompatible allows the market separation that in turn allows these different strategies.
I don't think you have put your finger on their business models. It seems to me that the expensive printers have expensive cartridges too. Do you know of a single expensive printer that has cheaper cartridges than that manufacturer's less expensive printer?
A feature in the word-processing software tracks changes to documents, who made those changes, and when they were made. These notations typically are invisible to someone reading a Word document. But as some lawyers, businesspeople and politicians have learned the hard way, Word can also display so-called metadata in the document--including the original version and all subsequent changes. This information is available by viewing the document under "original showing markup" or "final showing markup."
Is slashdot corrupt? I have been pondering this question since I wrote the article above.
I pose this as a question, not a certainty, because I am not sure that I completely understand how slashdot moderation is supposed to work.
Some slashdot readers have complained that the slashdot staff have unlimited mod points -- and use them capriciously. Should they have unlimited mod points? If they have them, but it is for the purpose of dealing with software anomalies, like a bug giving someone a falsely high or falsely low Karma score, would using that power to promote opinion peices that agree with their personal views be corrupt? I believe it would be.
So, do the slashdot editors actually do this?
Some slashdot contributors say they have lost their privileges to moderate. I myself have not been invited to moderate in ages. It feels like it has been well over a year. I still get invited to meta-moderate though.
Some jurisdictions... their principal mistakes is that they
have contracted out the software for the systems, and the source
code is not being made available for public inspection. Consequently,
there are pockets of the electorate who don't trust the systems...
You write as if this is a problem of perception. But weren't those elections truly insecure -- and therefore truly unreliable?
Electronic voting is inevitable you say? But you fail to explain why. Is it simpler? It doesn't sound simpler from your description.
You are correct, the secret ballot is central to our system of voting. You mention intimidation for voting the wrong way as the reason why secret ballots are important. You left out what I see as a more important reason. Many of the people following up your article suggest that the voting machine print a receipt, for the voter, so they will have confidence that their vote was recorded correctly. The problem with receipts is that this introduces the possibility of buying votes. Hands up if you know anyone who would vote for, let's say, Pat Buchanan, if they knew that a receipt showing they voted for Buchanan could be traded for a free drink at their neighbourhood Hooters? Aren't there yahoos, who by the time they were on their way over to Hooters, would have convinced themselves they would have vote fot Buchanan anyhow?
You suggest a special elections committee be charged with the responsibility to hold the private keys. I am not sure I fully understand this suggestion. And I don't think all the people who think they agreed with you, and yet suggested voters be given receipts really understood you either.
It seems to me that this system has some problems not associated with a paper system.
If I were an American why should I trust a "special elections committee"? In the procedure you suggest only the members of that special elections committee could verify the election. A small group is more easily subverted. With paper elections you have to subvert all the officials. And the procedure for verifying the election? It is not open and transparent. It relies solely on software, which could contain bugs or trojan horses.
Hasn't Diebold already been found to be running elections on their machines using versions of their software that were not the ones that had been certified?
What if I misplace the document my key was issued on? Does that mean I don't get to vote? With the current system I would bring my passport, driver's liscence, provincial health card. The election officials would use one of those to verify my identity and issue me a ballot.
What keeps me from selling my voter authorization key prior to the election?
The municipal elections here in Toronto use ballots that are read by an optical scanner. The scanner reads the ballot prior to it going into the ballot box. The scanner is capable of detecting a problem with the ballot before the voter leaves the voting hall. This is a good thing. This system is easy to use. But, I believe, the official count is based on the paper ballot not the count kept by the scanning machine. This is the way it should work. No messy receipts. A verifiable audit trail. And to subvert the counts would require subverting all the officials.
Microsoft Word has a very nasty bug, existing in all version for the last 20 odd years. The standard way of saving a file in Word does not truly erase all the text you have erased. If you look through the RISKS archives you can see lots of instances.
Perhaps MS will not remove this dangerous feature because it allows you to undo changes, even if you have saved the file, and come back and open it later?
But it seems like a pretty bad feature to me. Perhaps lawyers agree?
Two years ago or so there was a
story here on slashdot about Microsoft's answer to those ads Apple had were they presented actual users, including that girl, Ellen Fliess, that everyone thought sounded like a pot-head.
Microsoft responded with an ad that featured a picture of a pretty girl, who wrote some trash about just moving from an Apple environment to Microsoft, and being pleasantly surprised by how easy it was to use. A wily slashdot reader had recognized that the picture of the pretty girl was taken from a commercial catalogue of images one could liscense. It wasn't a candid photo of an actual user. And the text of her Microsoft testimonial had very foolishly actually been written with Microsoft software. The proof, IIRC, was that the hidden info in the file revealed the anonymous author to be an advertizing executive at the ad firm Microsoft had hired to run that campaign.
So, how does this bug hit people? Somebody has to write an official letter to someone they dislike. To make the process more pleasant throughout the letter they address their nemesis as "asshole" or reasonable equivalent. When they are finished with their revisions they do a global change of "asshole" to "Mr Client". Then they save it.
If they transmit it to another naive Word user -- no problem.
But if they transmit it to someone who doesn't use Word there is a very good chance that their disrespect will become apparent. Perhaps lawyers feel it is a professional requirement to be aware of these kinds of gaffes.
Wordperfect lacks this "feature".
Worth noting, Microsoft keeps "improving" its native file format, so you can't always open new.doc files with older versions of Word. Wordperfects of fifteen years ago can open.wdp files created with the most recent software.
First off, will you agree that no one censured the members of the "nuclear club" for building more warheads?
As for the reliability of US intelligence reports... Well, is there anything less reliable?
There is a long history of terrible distortion during the "analysis" phase of US intelligence collection. Do you remember "team B"?
George Bush Senior was the Director of the CIA during 1976. The CIA had taken a beating, from Congress, in previous years -- part of the fallout of Watergate. Embarrassing things had come out, like bizarre plots to assasinate Castro by poisoning his cigars.
What the USA really needs is a non-partisan, objective intelligence establishment, that doesn't have its head up its ass because it is blinded by a doctrinaire cold-war mind-set.
Well, Bush was blinded by a cold-war mind-set. Either that or he was very cynically willing to make political capital by allying himself with those who were. He wasn't happy with the conclusions of recent CIA analyses.
While the Intelligence establishment was charged with making an estimate of the inventory of the Soviet arsenal it was also charged with making an estimate of the efficiency of the Soviet economy. And the recent analyses had come to a very interesting conclusions.
First, they believed that their inventory of the Soviet arsenal was correct. But they decided that a deeper, more meaningful analysis of the Soviet economic system meant that previous estimates were way off. They concluded that the Soviet economy was only half as efficient as they had previously thought.
How could they be off by a factor of two? Well, apparently, estimating the efficiency of an economy is complicated. They did it by comparing the Soviet economy to the American economy. They would look at things, and say, "how much would it cost us to build this in the USA?" But the USA was under capitalism, and the Soviet Union was under a command economy, so they would then have to apply various fudge factors, because, under a command economy you could not directly compare the cost of labor to the cost of labor under capitalism.
Shouldn't this have been a cause for relief? The Soviet Union didn't have any more weapons than before. But it turns out that building them had consumed twice as much of their economic power as the US had thought before.
Bush wasn't happy with these conclusions. So he brought in a team of outsiders to come to new conclusions. Richard Perle types. Maybe Richard Perle was one of them? Doctrinaire ideologues.
Remember, no new weapons had been discoverd.
This team of outside analysts trumpeted the conclusion: "Alarm, alarm, alarm! The Soviets have been spending twice as much on the military as we estimated in the past! The Soviets have been spending twice as much on the military as we estimated in the past!"
The US public needs intelligence agencies that are objective, that are not blinded by ideology. The US public needs intelligence agencies that will be loyal to the public, not to their political masters. The US public needs an intelligence establishment that is capable of protecting the public when a rogue executive branch tries to cherry-pick and distort the facts in order to build war hysteria.
There was no imminent threat of "Weapons of Mass Destruction". There was no political alliance between Al Queda and Iraq. A rogue executive branch tried to heat up war hysteria in the USA to a fever pitch, and they succeeded.
And they seem to have succeeded. Will they get away with it? It looks like they will.
Sorry, someone has already patented the technique of using a laser pointer to play with your cat. FWIW, I got two cats, sisters, who got lots of attention. And yet one chewed cables and one didn't. Some plastics are made from animal fats, I am told, and they like the taste.
My solution was even more unsightly than yours. When garden hose was on sale I bought a couple of rolls, cut it in appropriate lengths, slit it down the middle, and put my important cables inside. It looks like hell. But you are a bachelor anyhow, right?
I read a discussion of resurrecting dead drives on Usenet, years ago. Various correspondents then, as now, recommended putting the drive in the freezer. I came across the term "stiction" for the first time.
And somebody recommended that, if you felt it was necessary to open the drive, you could build yourself an impromptu clean room quite easily... They recommended that one put on one of those flashlights that strap to your head and put your head and torso in a brand new garbage bag. They argued that not only would it be clean and dust free in there, but that the slight static charge from opening the bag would attract all the dust that came in with us to the bag.
I dunno. I have thought about trying this. Never had an occasion. What about the static from the bag zapping the drive's electronics? If you hold the drive at all times can you be sure you and the drive will be mutually grounded?
... what are [the] requirements for such a rock to survive its way through [the] atmosphere?
I looked this info up during an earlier discussion of planet killing asteroids. Sorry, I don't have the references handy. My recollection was that it didn't matter what the composition was if it were only a little bigger than the estimated size of the Tunguska rock... IIRC if an asteroid were about 100 meters in diameter, it would be sure to strike the surface and dig a crater.
From the lack of a crater the Tunguska rock was seen as one of the more fragile kinds. But, in terms of killing a city, the mass and velocity of the rock is what matters most, not its composition. Nickel-Iron rocks are thought to be more robust, and able to survive to hit the surface, and dig a crater, even if they are smaller than Tunguska.
I also came across the very interesting suggestion that the Tunguska event may not have been extraterrestrial at all. Tunguska is an area with huge natural gas deposits. The other suggestion was that seismic activity allowed a jet of Natural gas to jet out, that its fumes had been accumulating for days, until lightning set it off. This theory explained some aspects of the Tunguska event that the asteroid theory didn't.
Unknown asteroid -- we can only guess at its composition and structure. We can only guess at the result if we tried to blow it up. It could shatter into a cloud of rubble. Said cloud of rubble would have the same average velocity as the original asteroid. Would having the Earth hit by a trillion tons of rubble be all that much better than being hit by a single trillion ton rock?
Your suggestion that a Ballistic Missile Defense could shoot down an incoming asteroid is laughable.
Ha ha
Ballistic Missile Defense systems aim at objects just barely out of the Earth's atmosphere. Even if they could be boosted to strike your incoming asteroid a couple of million kilometers in advance, how much diversion do you think even the biggest Nuke could do?
Would diverting the a planet killing asteroid be possible with the technology within our grasp? Sure, with decades or centuries of lead time. With enough lead time changing its delta-V just a centimeter per second would be enough.
Here is an exercise for the reader. An asteroid is headed straight for the center of the Earth. You have a diversion mechanism that can divert it one centimeter per second off course. How many seconds in advance should the asteroid to be diverted in order to miss the Earth?
The Apaches cost $25 million a pop. The Comanche program was budgeted at $38 billion, for 600 copters. That is about $65 million a pop -- if they could bring the spiraling development budget under control.
The non-proliferation treaty defined two kinds of proliferation. "Horizontal proliferation" was the spread of nuclear weapons to nations that hadn't had them before the treaty. This was considered a bad thing. "Vertical proliferation" was an increase in the number of nuclear weapons by nations that had already had nuclear weapons before the treaty. This was also considered a bad thing.
All the members of the nuclear club increased the size of their nuclear arsenals without regard to their treaty obligations. And the USA won. The USA is the pre-eminent super-power now because it won the Arms Race. It wouldn't be the pre-eminent super-power if the smart bombs were not backed up by a nuclear arsenal. It wouldn't be the pre-eminent super-power if the B2 wasn't backed up by a nuclear arsenal.
Oh yeah, there was another clause in the non-proliferation treaty. Part of the Quid Pro Quo was that the nations with Nuclear power were supposed to make sure the nations without Nuclear power shared in the benefits of Nuclear Power. We haven't see much of that happening, have we?
Maybe ordinary human beings fill standards boards. Ordinary human beings have great powers of rationalization. Without the benefit of clear standards and some training most ordinary human beings slip into practices that could be categorized as corrupt...
How does this happen? The opportunity that presents itself doesn't seem like a bribe. It seems like an opportunity that would otherwise go to waste.
Let me give an example. About a dozen years ago I was the (volunteer) treasurer of a non-profit organization. As such I chaired the Finance committee (also volunteers). We banked at the Metro Credit Union, an institution like a bank, except you become a (voting) member, not a client, when you open your account. The Credit Union offered a "member appreciation dinner" to all members who attended the Annual General Meeting. And my organization was allowed to send one member.
As Treasurer I could have attended without any paperwork. But I was already a member of the Credit Union, in my personal capacity. To delegate someone else required the signature of two members of my organization's Board of Directors.
Well, the Finance Committee could have discussed who could attend, and the Board could have discussed who could attend. But they only met once a month, so the President and I had a brief informal meeting, and she agreed to sign the document, allowing a buddy of mine, who sat on the Finance Committee to go.
Small potatoes, but that is how corruption starts. You are not behaving corruptly, you are making sure something doesn't go to waste.
So, those in positions where they can be tempted need written standards, that spell out what is allowed and what isn't.
I believe, in America, public office holders are not allowed to accept gifts worth more than $50. It clearly hasn't stopped them from having some very corrupt politicians. Starting with
George Washington.
Although Kitman's two books, George Washington's Expense Account and The Making of the President, 1789 are written in a humourous tone they do expose some very nasty corruption.
The discoverers of this object keep refering to which of these objects are closer than others of them. Well, hold on, they are all in a 3:2 resonance with Neptune, orbiting the sun twice for every three orbits Neptune makes.
So, is it really all that meaningful to compare them based on their distance from us today? If they all share the same period don't they all have the same, um, I don't know what it would be called... But their kinetic energy per unit mass would all be the same.
If they all have the same period, then wouldn't their average distance from the Sun be directly proportional to the eccentricity of their orbit?
I had read Science Fiction novels where soldiers would be doped up, on purpose, prior to battle. I didn't know it was already SOP.
It came out during the investigation into why the USAF bombed a body of Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan. It turned out that one of the reasons the USAF's pilots disobeyed orders was that their judgement was impaired because they were high on "speed". These amphetamines were issued to enhance the pilots alertness on long missions.
The trouble was they were so alert they were trigger-happy.
...plankton, which are the largest consumers of CO2 gas in the atmosphere...
Excuse me, but how can ocean plankton be the largest consumers of CO2 in the atmosphere?
With the exception of those animicules that die, dropping a calcium carbonate shell to the ocean floor what happens to plankton blooms? Don't they get eaten, metabolized, and turned back into CO2? Or, if they don't get eaten, don't they poison the water, rot anaerbically, producing CO2 and CH4?
With the exception of animicules that leave a calcium carbonate shell, can ocean animicules be regarded as long term carbon sinks?
Temperature is absolutely not the limiting factor on the growth of plankton. Nutrients are the limiting factor. The areas which are most productive of bio-mass, the rich fishing grounds, are places where cold currents, full of nutrients, meet warm currents, full of oxygen, like the Grand Banks.
The greenland icecap is... on par with the antarctic icecap in terms of volume of ice.
Are you sure? The CIA factbook says that Greenland is three times the size of Texas, and that Antarctica is 1.5 times the size of the USA. The CIA factbook says Greenland has 1,755,637 sq km ice-covered, and Antarctica has 13.72 million sq km ice-covered.
...The greenland icecap is situated between a couple mountain ranges, and is in places more than 3 miles thick, with a bottom well below sea level. If it all melts, it becomes a huge lake...
I dibs the hydroelectric rights to that lake! Lol.
Seriously, do you think those buried mountains don't have buried mountain passes? Do you think that a head of water 3 miles thick and the size of texas wouldn't carve out some passes the size of the Grand Canyon?
FWIW, isn't the ice in Antarctica is, in places, five miles thick?
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, I am aware that a single highly speculative paper had been written, imagining a network that could survive a nuclear war. But, I believe, the guy who wrote it was not one of creators of the Arpanet. I specifically chose the word "built" as opposed to "designed" in anticipation of questions from those who heard an echo of this early paper.
The reason I mentioned this meme is that it is so entertaining that it is often repeated in the more entertaining form, that, "the internet was built to survive a nuclear war". I mentioned it as an example of an example where the falsehood has more power than the truth -- because it is entertaining.
I have been interested in Astronomy since I was about six years old. Just over forty years. I have heard what you suggest before -- but only in the last few years. And I don't understand it any more this time than I did on the earlier occasions.
Frankly, I strongly suspect it is a false factoid, like that the internet was built to survive a Nuclear War. I strongly suspect it is a bullshit meme that keep being repeated because it sounds cool, but is completely false.
Pray explain what you mean when you say the other 138 moons would float off ?
I am trying to do the "thought experiment" of silently, quietly erasing the principals of those moons, mass and all. I am finding this difficult to do. I don't believe there is any way this could occur, in our Universe.
So, instead I imagined doing something to accelerate a moon, any moon, to the escape velocity of its principal. What happens then? Well, the object accelerated to just beyond a planet's escape velocity will assume an orbit very similar to that of the Planet it just escaped from. Sometime in the last couple of years ago there was a flap about a small object that seemed to have been temporarily captured in the Earth-Moon system. But it turned out to be NASA space debris. It appeared to be the discarded upper stage of an Apollo moon shot.
Did you know that in 1998 Senator Patrick Leahy, of Vermont, got his State's largest Lake, Lake Champlain, to be reclassified as the 6th Great Lake? At least as far as the awarding of researh grants. Being considered a "Great Lake" made the academic institutions in his constituency eligible to apply for certain research grants.
There is talk of sending a probe to Pluto. Is it possible that it is easier to sell a probe to "planet Pluto" than to send one to Kuiper-belt object Pluto?
I remember, back in the days when I tuned in to debates as to which newsgroups should be created, the big debate as to whether a new group should be talk.acquaria, rec.acquaria or sci.acquaria.
In Leahy's defence, these were environmental research grants, and I should probably assume he added this line to the bill to protect his constituent's natural environment -- not for the petty partisan purposes.
I question your math.
Somone pumping out 500 pages a month, on an inkjet, would go through a lot more than 6 refills. Inkjets generally claim that a cartridge is good for 500 pages. So, correcting the frequency of refills, your price per page is more like ten cents a page.
Any printing with graphics, or colour, will be even more expensive.
The figures the manufacturer's claim for 500 pages are open to question too.
I don't think you have put your finger on their business models. It seems to me that the expensive printers have expensive cartridges too. Do you know of a single expensive printer that has cheaper cartridges than that manufacturer's less expensive printer?
I pose this as a question, not a certainty, because I am not sure that I completely understand how slashdot moderation is supposed to work.
Some slashdot readers have complained that the slashdot staff have unlimited mod points -- and use them capriciously. Should they have unlimited mod points? If they have them, but it is for the purpose of dealing with software anomalies, like a bug giving someone a falsely high or falsely low Karma score, would using that power to promote opinion peices that agree with their personal views be corrupt? I believe it would be.
So, do the slashdot editors actually do this?
Some slashdot contributors say they have lost their privileges to moderate. I myself have not been invited to moderate in ages. It feels like it has been well over a year. I still get invited to meta-moderate though.
You write as if this is a problem of perception. But weren't those elections truly insecure -- and therefore truly unreliable ?
Electronic voting is inevitable you say? But you fail to explain why . Is it simpler ? It doesn't sound simpler from your description.
You are correct, the secret ballot is central to our system of voting. You mention intimidation for voting the wrong way as the reason why secret ballots are important. You left out what I see as a more important reason. Many of the people following up your article suggest that the voting machine print a receipt, for the voter, so they will have confidence that their vote was recorded correctly. The problem with receipts is that this introduces the possibility of buying votes. Hands up if you know anyone who would vote for, let's say, Pat Buchanan, if they knew that a receipt showing they voted for Buchanan could be traded for a free drink at their neighbourhood Hooters? Aren't there yahoos, who by the time they were on their way over to Hooters, would have convinced themselves they would have vote fot Buchanan anyhow?
You suggest a special elections committee be charged with the responsibility to hold the private keys. I am not sure I fully understand this suggestion. And I don't think all the people who think they agreed with you, and yet suggested voters be given receipts really understood you either.
It seems to me that this system has some problems not associated with a paper system.
If I were an American why should I trust a " special elections committee "? In the procedure you suggest only the members of that special elections committee could verify the election. A small group is more easily subverted. With paper elections you have to subvert all the officials. And the procedure for verifying the election? It is not open and transparent. It relies solely on software, which could contain bugs or trojan horses.
Hasn't Diebold already been found to be running elections on their machines using versions of their software that were not the ones that had been certified ?
What if I misplace the document my key was issued on? Does that mean I don't get to vote? With the current system I would bring my passport, driver's liscence, provincial health card. The election officials would use one of those to verify my identity and issue me a ballot.
What keeps me from selling my voter authorization key prior to the election?
The municipal elections here in Toronto use ballots that are read by an optical scanner. The scanner reads the ballot prior to it going into the ballot box. The scanner is capable of detecting a problem with the ballot before the voter leaves the voting hall. This is a good thing. This system is easy to use. But, I believe, the official count is based on the paper ballot not the count kept by the scanning machine. This is the way it should work. No messy receipts. A verifiable audit trail. And to subvert the counts would require subverting all the officials.
Perhaps MS will not remove this dangerous feature because it allows you to undo changes, even if you have saved the file, and come back and open it later?
But it seems like a pretty bad feature to me. Perhaps lawyers agree?
Two years ago or so there was a story here on slashdot about Microsoft's answer to those ads Apple had were they presented actual users, including that girl, Ellen Fliess, that everyone thought sounded like a pot-head.
Microsoft responded with an ad that featured a picture of a pretty girl, who wrote some trash about just moving from an Apple environment to Microsoft, and being pleasantly surprised by how easy it was to use. A wily slashdot reader had recognized that the picture of the pretty girl was taken from a commercial catalogue of images one could liscense. It wasn't a candid photo of an actual user. And the text of her Microsoft testimonial had very foolishly actually been written with Microsoft software. The proof, IIRC, was that the hidden info in the file revealed the anonymous author to be an advertizing executive at the ad firm Microsoft had hired to run that campaign.
So, how does this bug hit people? Somebody has to write an official letter to someone they dislike. To make the process more pleasant throughout the letter they address their nemesis as "asshole" or reasonable equivalent. When they are finished with their revisions they do a global change of "asshole" to "Mr Client". Then they save it.
If they transmit it to another naive Word user -- no problem.
But if they transmit it to someone who doesn't use Word there is a very good chance that their disrespect will become apparent. Perhaps lawyers feel it is a professional requirement to be aware of these kinds of gaffes.
Wordperfect lacks this "feature".
Worth noting, Microsoft keeps "improving" its native file format, so you can't always open new .doc files with older versions of Word. Wordperfects of fifteen years ago can open .wdp files created with the most recent software.
As for the reliability of US intelligence reports... Well, is there anything less reliable?
There is a long history of terrible distortion during the "analysis" phase of US intelligence collection. Do you remember "team B"?
George Bush Senior was the Director of the CIA during 1976. The CIA had taken a beating, from Congress, in previous years -- part of the fallout of Watergate. Embarrassing things had come out, like bizarre plots to assasinate Castro by poisoning his cigars.
What the USA really needs is a non-partisan, objective intelligence establishment, that doesn't have its head up its ass because it is blinded by a doctrinaire cold-war mind-set.
Well, Bush was blinded by a cold-war mind-set. Either that or he was very cynically willing to make political capital by allying himself with those who were. He wasn't happy with the conclusions of recent CIA analyses.
While the Intelligence establishment was charged with making an estimate of the inventory of the Soviet arsenal it was also charged with making an estimate of the efficiency of the Soviet economy. And the recent analyses had come to a very interesting conclusions.
First, they believed that their inventory of the Soviet arsenal was correct. But they decided that a deeper, more meaningful analysis of the Soviet economic system meant that previous estimates were way off. They concluded that the Soviet economy was only half as efficient as they had previously thought.
How could they be off by a factor of two? Well, apparently, estimating the efficiency of an economy is complicated. They did it by comparing the Soviet economy to the American economy. They would look at things, and say, "how much would it cost us to build this in the USA?" But the USA was under capitalism, and the Soviet Union was under a command economy, so they would then have to apply various fudge factors, because, under a command economy you could not directly compare the cost of labor to the cost of labor under capitalism.
Shouldn't this have been a cause for relief? The Soviet Union didn't have any more weapons than before. But it turns out that building them had consumed twice as much of their economic power as the US had thought before.
Bush wasn't happy with these conclusions. So he brought in a team of outsiders to come to new conclusions. Richard Perle types. Maybe Richard Perle was one of them? Doctrinaire ideologues.
Remember, no new weapons had been discoverd.
This team of outside analysts trumpeted the conclusion: "Alarm, alarm, alarm! The Soviets have been spending twice as much on the military as we estimated in the past! The Soviets have been spending twice as much on the military as we estimated in the past!"
The US public needs intelligence agencies that are objective, that are not blinded by ideology. The US public needs intelligence agencies that will be loyal to the public, not to their political masters. The US public needs an intelligence establishment that is capable of protecting the public when a rogue executive branch tries to cherry-pick and distort the facts in order to build war hysteria.
There was no imminent threat of "Weapons of Mass Destruction". There was no political alliance between Al Queda and Iraq. A rogue executive branch tried to heat up war hysteria in the USA to a fever pitch, and they succeeded.
And they seem to have succeeded. Will they get away with it? It looks like they will.
My solution was even more unsightly than yours. When garden hose was on sale I bought a couple of rolls, cut it in appropriate lengths, slit it down the middle, and put my important cables inside. It looks like hell. But you are a bachelor anyhow, right?
And somebody recommended that, if you felt it was necessary to open the drive, you could build yourself an impromptu clean room quite easily... They recommended that one put on one of those flashlights that strap to your head and put your head and torso in a brand new garbage bag. They argued that not only would it be clean and dust free in there, but that the slight static charge from opening the bag would attract all the dust that came in with us to the bag.
I dunno. I have thought about trying this. Never had an occasion. What about the static from the bag zapping the drive's electronics? If you hold the drive at all times can you be sure you and the drive will be mutually grounded?
I looked this info up during an earlier discussion of planet killing asteroids. Sorry, I don't have the references handy. My recollection was that it didn't matter what the composition was if it were only a little bigger than the estimated size of the Tunguska rock... IIRC if an asteroid were about 100 meters in diameter, it would be sure to strike the surface and dig a crater.
From the lack of a crater the Tunguska rock was seen as one of the more fragile kinds. But, in terms of killing a city, the mass and velocity of the rock is what matters most, not its composition. Nickel-Iron rocks are thought to be more robust, and able to survive to hit the surface, and dig a crater, even if they are smaller than Tunguska.
I also came across the very interesting suggestion that the Tunguska event may not have been extraterrestrial at all. Tunguska is an area with huge natural gas deposits. The other suggestion was that seismic activity allowed a jet of Natural gas to jet out, that its fumes had been accumulating for days, until lightning set it off. This theory explained some aspects of the Tunguska event that the asteroid theory didn't.
Unknown asteroid -- we can only guess at its composition and structure. We can only guess at the result if we tried to blow it up. It could shatter into a cloud of rubble. Said cloud of rubble would have the same average velocity as the original asteroid. Would having the Earth hit by a trillion tons of rubble be all that much better than being hit by a single trillion ton rock?
Your suggestion that a Ballistic Missile Defense could shoot down an incoming asteroid is laughable.
Ha ha
Ballistic Missile Defense systems aim at objects just barely out of the Earth's atmosphere. Even if they could be boosted to strike your incoming asteroid a couple of million kilometers in advance, how much diversion do you think even the biggest Nuke could do?
Would diverting the a planet killing asteroid be possible with the technology within our grasp? Sure, with decades or centuries of lead time. With enough lead time changing its delta-V just a centimeter per second would be enough.
Here is an exercise for the reader. An asteroid is headed straight for the center of the Earth. You have a diversion mechanism that can divert it one centimeter per second off course. How many seconds in advance should the asteroid to be diverted in order to miss the Earth?
The Apaches cost $25 million a pop. The Comanche program was budgeted at $38 billion, for 600 copters. That is about $65 million a pop -- if they could bring the spiraling development budget under control.
That would have to be the one with sub-contractor in every Congressional district.
All the members of the nuclear club increased the size of their nuclear arsenals without regard to their treaty obligations. And the USA won. The USA is the pre-eminent super-power now because it won the Arms Race. It wouldn't be the pre-eminent super-power if the smart bombs were not backed up by a nuclear arsenal. It wouldn't be the pre-eminent super-power if the B2 wasn't backed up by a nuclear arsenal.
Oh yeah, there was another clause in the non-proliferation treaty. Part of the Quid Pro Quo was that the nations with Nuclear power were supposed to make sure the nations without Nuclear power shared in the benefits of Nuclear Power. We haven't see much of that happening, have we?
How does this happen? The opportunity that presents itself doesn't seem like a bribe. It seems like an opportunity that would otherwise go to waste.
Let me give an example. About a dozen years ago I was the (volunteer) treasurer of a non-profit organization. As such I chaired the Finance committee (also volunteers). We banked at the Metro Credit Union, an institution like a bank, except you become a (voting) member, not a client, when you open your account. The Credit Union offered a "member appreciation dinner" to all members who attended the Annual General Meeting. And my organization was allowed to send one member.
As Treasurer I could have attended without any paperwork. But I was already a member of the Credit Union, in my personal capacity. To delegate someone else required the signature of two members of my organization's Board of Directors.
Well, the Finance Committee could have discussed who could attend, and the Board could have discussed who could attend. But they only met once a month, so the President and I had a brief informal meeting, and she agreed to sign the document, allowing a buddy of mine, who sat on the Finance Committee to go.
Small potatoes, but that is how corruption starts. You are not behaving corruptly, you are making sure something doesn't go to waste.
So, those in positions where they can be tempted need written standards, that spell out what is allowed and what isn't.
I believe, in America, public office holders are not allowed to accept gifts worth more than $50. It clearly hasn't stopped them from having some very corrupt politicians. Starting with George Washington. Although Kitman's two books, George Washington's Expense Account and The Making of the President, 1789 are written in a humourous tone they do expose some very nasty corruption.
Earth day == "day" Mars day == "Sol" Lunar day == ? Jupiter day == ? Saturn day == "Saturnalia" Venereal day == "Lucky"
So, is it really all that meaningful to compare them based on their distance from us today? If they all share the same period don't they all have the same, um, I don't know what it would be called... But their kinetic energy per unit mass would all be the same.
If they all have the same period, then wouldn't their average distance from the Sun be directly proportional to the eccentricity of their orbit?
It came out during the investigation into why the USAF bombed a body of Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan. It turned out that one of the reasons the USAF's pilots disobeyed orders was that their judgement was impaired because they were high on "speed". These amphetamines were issued to enhance the pilots alertness on long missions.
The trouble was they were so alert they were trigger-happy.
Excuse me, but how can ocean plankton be the largest consumers of CO2 in the atmosphere ?
With the exception of those animicules that die, dropping a calcium carbonate shell to the ocean floor what happens to plankton blooms? Don't they get eaten, metabolized, and turned back into CO2? Or, if they don't get eaten, don't they poison the water, rot anaerbically, producing CO2 and CH4?
With the exception of animicules that leave a calcium carbonate shell, can ocean animicules be regarded as long term carbon sinks?
Temperature is absolutely not the limiting factor on the growth of plankton. Nutrients are the limiting factor. The areas which are most productive of bio-mass, the rich fishing grounds, are places where cold currents, full of nutrients, meet warm currents, full of oxygen, like the Grand Banks.
Here is the decent overview article.
Here is the article on deep ocean microbes.
Here is the article on killer lakes.
Are you sure? The CIA factbook says that Greenland is three times the size of Texas, and that Antarctica is 1.5 times the size of the USA. The CIA factbook says Greenland has 1,755,637 sq km ice-covered, and Antarctica has 13.72 million sq km ice-covered.
I dibs the hydroelectric rights to that lake! Lol.
Seriously, do you think those buried mountains don't have buried mountain passes? Do you think that a head of water 3 miles thick and the size of texas wouldn't carve out some passes the size of the Grand Canyon?
FWIW, isn't the ice in Antarctica is, in places, five miles thick?
Doesn't Hubble use Solar energy?