That seems a little harsh. Americans are active pursuers of all sorts of intellectual activity, from art to literature to science to technology. Many open-source developers are Americans. Americans have a boatload of Nobel prizes.
So chess doesn't happen to be the obsession here that it is in Russia. They're not so good at soccer, either. BFD. It doesn't mean that they do nothing but watch reality TV.
You can also detect planets by watching the way the star dims slightly when it's eclipsed. You can only detect really big planets this way; you wouldn't notice the transit of Venus from that far away.
But once you've found a planet that big, you can look even more closely and see what color changes you observe during the dim period. You can chalk that up to wavelengths of light absorbed by the planet's atmosphere, which you can use to hazard a guess as to what the planet's made of.
In all likelihood it's pretty much the same as Jupiter, which is to say pretty much like the sun itself: mostly hydrogen and some helium. But you might be able to detect faint signals of nitrogen, oxygen, maybe some carbon, and perhaps a bit of ammonia. The ratios of hydrogen to helium will suggest a lot about the way the planet was formed.
If the bomb were on a timer, it would blow up. I doubt the owner of the bomb comes back to claim it.
The bomb might have a pressure fuse to keep it from blowing up prematurely in the event of a delayed flight; I don't know how sophisticated they are. That would keep the bomb from being detected.
I imagine that once the luggage has sat for months that they open it up to see who it belongs to, or maybe they sell it at a yard sale, but perhaps they just throw it out.
It's annoying, but it's damn suspicious. Pan Am flight 107 blew up over Lockerbie due to a bomb placed in luggage which was checked but the person associated with it never made it on. Ever since then they yank lugguage without a passenger.
Sure, most of the time it's probably a missed connection, but it's definitely worth it.
However, to my knowledge, there has never been an actual bomb detected this way.
You have to run it on every database. And you have to deal with every program that operates on it and allocates exactly 17 characters for the space. That means scanning the source code, which is wildly expensive (assuming you even still have the source code).
Every program which parses the VIN will be confused by a change in the format. Again, more code scanning.
When any two databases pass VINs to one another, they both have to use the same standard.
Once the code is fixed, you have to install it on every computer. You have to synchronize the database update and the code install, and every set of databases that hook up with each other. You can make things compatible enough to be prepared to communicate with non-upgraded databases, but that means more code, and more testing.
You have to test the bejeezus out of it, too, because some of these systems can't afford to crash.
So the change is going to be a lot more expensive than one SQL query.
Even the time spent re-encoding files may not be a problem. Sony provides its own software for moving music to the player. A fast CPU can encode it faster than the hard disk can accept it, so you don't even know it's going on. For all most people know, that's what's going on anyway. You wouldn't notice it unless you were listening for the changed quality, or tried to pull the files back off.
That gets in the way of using your music device as a sneakernet, but I don't know how many people use theirs that way.
Many ISP mail servers refuse to relay mail. If neither the FROM nor the TO addresses belong to that server, they'll reject your message. That means you end up receiving mail on the ISP's mail server, and that completely obliterates the point of running your own mail server.
The reason for that is obvious: it prevents the mail server from being used to relay spam. But it's also very frustrating if you want more flexbility and you're not a spammer. I don't know comcast's policy; perhaps they'll accept relaying from inside their network.
It's not just braking. It appears to move the entire blade out of the way. Take a look at the videos. At least, that's how it works for the circular saws. For the band saw it actually stops the band.
It's really impressive. You get an ugly cut for your trouble, but it's a hell of a lot better than losing a digit.
For me on 0.9 it's an intermittent bug; refreshing will often resolve it. But I'd have to use 0.9.1 for a few days to say that it's gone, and from some sibling posts it sounds like it's not. It doesn't bother me too badly; I don't even usually bother refreshing.
I had always understood "nickel and dimed" to refer to being forced to pay for a lot of little things that you expect to get for free, usually included with some other payment. A couple of cites from Google:
"Watch you bill, they tend to 'accidentally' add extra items when there is a large party. Also, don't expect a free piece of cake for the birthday boy, regardless of the size of the bill. Felt nickel and dimed when the bill came."
"I felt nickel-and-dimed by CellularONE's options package--a $35/month package became $52 when I added on voice-mail, detailed billing (!!!) and 300 weekend calling minutes"
My point is that it's not necessarily true that people object to a pay-as-you-go plan making many little payments; that's not what they made up the term "nickel and dimed" for. They object to paying more than they feel they agreed to.
It's true: in theory an OS could be written to support application-level fine-grained security models. Some operating systems do.
It's harder to do it in a component fashion. An ActiveX program runs in the same space as Internet Explorer, and in theory could even modify IE's own program code in memory. It would be possible to write an OS which segmented parts of a process' memory space, but I'm not aware of any which does so. Such an operation would involve some performance overhead.
At a purely theoretic level, the JVM and Windows are just Turing machines and are equivalent in expressive power. But there's a difference between the theoretical and the feasible. It is more convenient for a bytecode-driven application to check the memory accesses than for a native code one (using existing native code sets).
The intent of the sandbox was not to make it impossible for Java applets to do work, but rather to limit their capabilities at a fine granularity.
ActiveX has an all-or-nothing security model because it's written in native code. Very fast, low overhead, incredibly dangerous.
A Java security policy can say, "Applications signed by this signer can write files into directory foo, and access the internet but not the printer."
There's a lot of overhead, and I never saw a way to make it easy. You can do it by modifying config files, and I'm sure there's a GUI out there somewhere for the config files, but it's still pretty inconvenient. Convenience and security are frequently at odds.
There should have been a good compromise, but Sun seems to have largely abandonded the applet in favor of server-side work (and to a lesser degree, non-applet applications work). They're gradually making it better with Java Web Start, but I haven't seen it used very much, since applets got themselves such a bad name at the start.
(And with good reason. I adore Java on the server side, and find it easier than C++ on the client side, but never liked applets.)
Nor the country of England, nor the country of Spain. A friend of mine from England was bewildered at the overwhelmingly positive acceptance of Blair in America. He really did go over with a bang; everybody liked him. He looked smart and competent, much more so than Bush, and it was Blair's acceptance of Bush's arguments that helped bring American opinion in favor of the war.
But in England they just despise him, universally, according to my friend.
Nonetheless, I think that the opinions of the governments are relevant, independently of the opinions of the people. The governments are privy to secret information, both from the US and from their own intelligence gathering agencies. At least, that's what the American people assumed.
I am personally still surprised that the WMD argument, which was apparently accepted even among opposing countries (Putin claims to have given WMD clues to te US), has been so utterly disproven. I hope someday I find out the full story.
I don't believe that he told lies, and yet I do believe that he was dishonest. Honesty is a much higher standard than telling the truth.
Honesty means telling the entire truth, or at least the entire relevant truth. Most of the things I listed were cases where Moore knew things and did not include them, because they weaken his case. His case is strong enough to withstand those facts, and I'd have liked to see him include them. Show a map; show what a tiny percentage of the world the "coalition of the willing" comprised. Then you could include the entire truth without compromising your argument. To do otherwise is manipulative and dishonest.
Understood, and agreed. Nonetheless, I consider it dishonest of Moore to bring up only those countries that support his thesis while knowing and ignoring ones that count against it.
I know that the world hates America, and I hope we can regain some of their trust by voting Bush out in November. If he's re-elected, God help us.
I wish I could believe your 24-month hypothesis, but I'm afraid it's unlikely. The lock-in is extremely strong. Offices are reluctant to switch because of the retraining costs and incompatabilities with existing systems (making a phased switch-over even more expensive.) Home users are comfortable with Windows, which are cheap and readily available. People are reluctant to use one system at work and another at home, making a feedback loop.
I wish security were a strong enough consideration, but given how many people are spyware-riddled and don't even know it, I suspect security is just not on people's minds when they choose a computer. Perhaps when enough people lose enough money or data to an exploit this will change, but today price and familiarity are more important to them.
That doesn't mean that there aren't opportunities. The lengthy delays in Longhorn are a huge opportunity for Apple and Linux. As people buy new computers, they expect new ones to be better than old ones. If they go to the store and say, "XP again? I had it and it's really buggy," they'll start looking for alternatives. They expect bugs, but they also expect each new release to be better than the old one. Deprive them of that and they may start looking around.
Another well-reasoned response. (You do know that this is Slashdot, right?/joke)
My goal was not to prove that Moore was dishonest in every instance, but to answer the orignal poster's challenge to find a single instance of dishonesty in the film. I believe I found instances where Moore made stronger claims than were warranted by the facts he brought up, akin to the adminstration's willingness to let people believe that their statement "there are connections between Iraq and al Qaeda" (true) mean "Iraq participated in 9/11" (false), allowing them to claim now that they told the truth when the intent was clearly to lie.
I don't expect Moore to be objective, but I wish to hold him to a higher standard than Cheney and Limbaugh et al, because he's on my side. In the end, if the movie serves no other purpose than to infuriate the Democratic base and get them out in November, it will be a purpose well served. If truth-bending is required to counter Republican fabrications, so be it.
That makes it good political theater, and perhaps it's appropriate that in Cannes it won an award usually reserved for emotionally involving but fictional films.
I don't feel I need my monstrosity meter recalibrated. If Bush is guilty of all that Moore accuses him of, then he is the most horrific mass murderer in decades. But I found that Moore's accusations were not as well backed up with facts as I'd like.
I will have go to read the book you mention. If there is a convincing case to be made that Osama is not as estranged from the rest of the bin Ladens as they claim, then the entire picture Moore was trying to paint becomes clear, and the monstrosity meter is pegged. That, for me, is the argument Moore failed to make sufficiently well.
I don't belive Iraq was a living hell, but only that Moore's apparent goal wasn't entirely honest. No, Saddam hadn't attacked the US, and may not have planned to, but he had attacked US allies (not that Kuwait is exactly a bastion of democracy either, but he did throw missiles at Israel). I'm sure Iraq was full of similing, happy children, but it wasn't the full story.
Moore's goal was to tell "the other side of the story", with the idea that you'd already heard Bush's side of the story, but somehow two unbalanced stories do not make a balanced story between them.
I weep for the children killed. I wish it had been worth it to free them from a dictator, but it simply doesn't appear to have been the case.
You're right: I'd forgotten that he does in fact mention the Netherlands. The gag made me laugh out loud, as the movie did in several places. Moore is definitely a gifted comic filmmaker.
(It didn't hurt that I saw it in Greenbelt, Maryland, not always affectionately known as "The People's Republic of Greenbelt", founded as a damn-near-socialist experiment by Eleanor Roosevelt and a very, very liberal place. Comedies are funnier when everybody is laughing.)
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That seems a little harsh. Americans are active pursuers of all sorts of intellectual activity, from art to literature to science to technology. Many open-source developers are Americans. Americans have a boatload of Nobel prizes.
So chess doesn't happen to be the obsession here that it is in Russia. They're not so good at soccer, either. BFD. It doesn't mean that they do nothing but watch reality TV.
Continuity errors bore me, and I try to ignore the plot holes, but The IMDB's trivia page is often fascinating.
You can also detect planets by watching the way the star dims slightly when it's eclipsed. You can only detect really big planets this way; you wouldn't notice the transit of Venus from that far away.
But once you've found a planet that big, you can look even more closely and see what color changes you observe during the dim period. You can chalk that up to wavelengths of light absorbed by the planet's atmosphere, which you can use to hazard a guess as to what the planet's made of.
In all likelihood it's pretty much the same as Jupiter, which is to say pretty much like the sun itself: mostly hydrogen and some helium. But you might be able to detect faint signals of nitrogen, oxygen, maybe some carbon, and perhaps a bit of ammonia. The ratios of hydrogen to helium will suggest a lot about the way the planet was formed.
If the bomb were on a timer, it would blow up. I doubt the owner of the bomb comes back to claim it.
The bomb might have a pressure fuse to keep it from blowing up prematurely in the event of a delayed flight; I don't know how sophisticated they are. That would keep the bomb from being detected.
I imagine that once the luggage has sat for months that they open it up to see who it belongs to, or maybe they sell it at a yard sale, but perhaps they just throw it out.
It's annoying, but it's damn suspicious. Pan Am flight 107 blew up over Lockerbie due to a bomb placed in luggage which was checked but the person associated with it never made it on. Ever since then they yank lugguage without a passenger.
Sure, most of the time it's probably a missed connection, but it's definitely worth it.
However, to my knowledge, there has never been an actual bomb detected this way.
Probably not. But I've heard it posited that there might be other numbers. Perhaps you could patent those.
You have to run it on every database. And you have to deal with every program that operates on it and allocates exactly 17 characters for the space. That means scanning the source code, which is wildly expensive (assuming you even still have the source code).
Every program which parses the VIN will be confused by a change in the format. Again, more code scanning.
When any two databases pass VINs to one another, they both have to use the same standard.
Once the code is fixed, you have to install it on every computer. You have to synchronize the database update and the code install, and every set of databases that hook up with each other. You can make things compatible enough to be prepared to communicate with non-upgraded databases, but that means more code, and more testing.
You have to test the bejeezus out of it, too, because some of these systems can't afford to crash.
So the change is going to be a lot more expensive than one SQL query.
Even the time spent re-encoding files may not be a problem. Sony provides its own software for moving music to the player. A fast CPU can encode it faster than the hard disk can accept it, so you don't even know it's going on. For all most people know, that's what's going on anyway. You wouldn't notice it unless you were listening for the changed quality, or tried to pull the files back off.
That gets in the way of using your music device as a sneakernet, but I don't know how many people use theirs that way.
Apparently at least one guy bothered.
Reply-to, which not every mail client honors.
Many ISP mail servers refuse to relay mail. If neither the FROM nor the TO addresses belong to that server, they'll reject your message. That means you end up receiving mail on the ISP's mail server, and that completely obliterates the point of running your own mail server.
The reason for that is obvious: it prevents the mail server from being used to relay spam. But it's also very frustrating if you want more flexbility and you're not a spammer. I don't know comcast's policy; perhaps they'll accept relaying from inside their network.
It's not just braking. It appears to move the entire blade out of the way. Take a look at the videos. At least, that's how it works for the circular saws. For the band saw it actually stops the band.
It's really impressive. You get an ugly cut for your trouble, but it's a hell of a lot better than losing a digit.
For me on 0.9 it's an intermittent bug; refreshing will often resolve it. But I'd have to use 0.9.1 for a few days to say that it's gone, and from some sibling posts it sounds like it's not. It doesn't bother me too badly; I don't even usually bother refreshing.
I had always understood "nickel and dimed" to refer to being forced to pay for a lot of little things that you expect to get for free, usually included with some other payment. A couple of cites from Google:
"Watch you bill, they tend to 'accidentally' add extra items when there is a large party. Also, don't expect a free piece of cake for the birthday boy, regardless of the size of the bill. Felt nickel and dimed when the bill came."
"I felt nickel-and-dimed by CellularONE's options package--a $35/month package became $52 when I added on voice-mail, detailed billing (!!!) and 300 weekend calling minutes"
My point is that it's not necessarily true that people object to a pay-as-you-go plan making many little payments; that's not what they made up the term "nickel and dimed" for. They object to paying more than they feel they agreed to.
It's true: in theory an OS could be written to support application-level fine-grained security models. Some operating systems do.
It's harder to do it in a component fashion. An ActiveX program runs in the same space as Internet Explorer, and in theory could even modify IE's own program code in memory. It would be possible to write an OS which segmented parts of a process' memory space, but I'm not aware of any which does so. Such an operation would involve some performance overhead.
At a purely theoretic level, the JVM and Windows are just Turing machines and are equivalent in expressive power. But there's a difference between the theoretical and the feasible. It is more convenient for a bytecode-driven application to check the memory accesses than for a native code one (using existing native code sets).
The intent of the sandbox was not to make it impossible for Java applets to do work, but rather to limit their capabilities at a fine granularity.
ActiveX has an all-or-nothing security model because it's written in native code. Very fast, low overhead, incredibly dangerous.
A Java security policy can say, "Applications signed by this signer can write files into directory foo, and access the internet but not the printer."
There's a lot of overhead, and I never saw a way to make it easy. You can do it by modifying config files, and I'm sure there's a GUI out there somewhere for the config files, but it's still pretty inconvenient. Convenience and security are frequently at odds.
There should have been a good compromise, but Sun seems to have largely abandonded the applet in favor of server-side work (and to a lesser degree, non-applet applications work). They're gradually making it better with Java Web Start, but I haven't seen it used very much, since applets got themselves such a bad name at the start.
(And with good reason. I adore Java on the server side, and find it easier than C++ on the client side, but never liked applets.)
Fascinating reading. Thank you.
I was distantly aware of the WAMY case; the Washington Post is my daily newspaper. I didn't realize that there were bin Ladens involved.
Nor the country of England, nor the country of Spain. A friend of mine from England was bewildered at the overwhelmingly positive acceptance of Blair in America. He really did go over with a bang; everybody liked him. He looked smart and competent, much more so than Bush, and it was Blair's acceptance of Bush's arguments that helped bring American opinion in favor of the war.
But in England they just despise him, universally, according to my friend.
Nonetheless, I think that the opinions of the governments are relevant, independently of the opinions of the people. The governments are privy to secret information, both from the US and from their own intelligence gathering agencies. At least, that's what the American people assumed.
I am personally still surprised that the WMD argument, which was apparently accepted even among opposing countries (Putin claims to have given WMD clues to te US), has been so utterly disproven. I hope someday I find out the full story.
I don't believe that he told lies, and yet I do believe that he was dishonest. Honesty is a much higher standard than telling the truth.
Honesty means telling the entire truth, or at least the entire relevant truth. Most of the things I listed were cases where Moore knew things and did not include them, because they weaken his case. His case is strong enough to withstand those facts, and I'd have liked to see him include them. Show a map; show what a tiny percentage of the world the "coalition of the willing" comprised. Then you could include the entire truth without compromising your argument. To do otherwise is manipulative and dishonest.
Understood, and agreed. Nonetheless, I consider it dishonest of Moore to bring up only those countries that support his thesis while knowing and ignoring ones that count against it.
I know that the world hates America, and I hope we can regain some of their trust by voting Bush out in November. If he's re-elected, God help us.
I wish I could believe your 24-month hypothesis, but I'm afraid it's unlikely. The lock-in is extremely strong. Offices are reluctant to switch because of the retraining costs and incompatabilities with existing systems (making a phased switch-over even more expensive.) Home users are comfortable with Windows, which are cheap and readily available. People are reluctant to use one system at work and another at home, making a feedback loop.
I wish security were a strong enough consideration, but given how many people are spyware-riddled and don't even know it, I suspect security is just not on people's minds when they choose a computer. Perhaps when enough people lose enough money or data to an exploit this will change, but today price and familiarity are more important to them.
That doesn't mean that there aren't opportunities. The lengthy delays in Longhorn are a huge opportunity for Apple and Linux. As people buy new computers, they expect new ones to be better than old ones. If they go to the store and say, "XP again? I had it and it's really buggy," they'll start looking for alternatives. They expect bugs, but they also expect each new release to be better than the old one. Deprive them of that and they may start looking around.
Another well-reasoned response. (You do know that this is Slashdot, right? /joke)
My goal was not to prove that Moore was dishonest in every instance, but to answer the orignal poster's challenge to find a single instance of dishonesty in the film. I believe I found instances where Moore made stronger claims than were warranted by the facts he brought up, akin to the adminstration's willingness to let people believe that their statement "there are connections between Iraq and al Qaeda" (true) mean "Iraq participated in 9/11" (false), allowing them to claim now that they told the truth when the intent was clearly to lie.
I don't expect Moore to be objective, but I wish to hold him to a higher standard than Cheney and Limbaugh et al, because he's on my side. In the end, if the movie serves no other purpose than to infuriate the Democratic base and get them out in November, it will be a purpose well served. If truth-bending is required to counter Republican fabrications, so be it.
That makes it good political theater, and perhaps it's appropriate that in Cannes it won an award usually reserved for emotionally involving but fictional films.
A well-reasoned refutation; thank you.
I don't feel I need my monstrosity meter recalibrated. If Bush is guilty of all that Moore accuses him of, then he is the most horrific mass murderer in decades. But I found that Moore's accusations were not as well backed up with facts as I'd like.
I will have go to read the book you mention. If there is a convincing case to be made that Osama is not as estranged from the rest of the bin Ladens as they claim, then the entire picture Moore was trying to paint becomes clear, and the monstrosity meter is pegged. That, for me, is the argument Moore failed to make sufficiently well.
I don't belive Iraq was a living hell, but only that Moore's apparent goal wasn't entirely honest. No, Saddam hadn't attacked the US, and may not have planned to, but he had attacked US allies (not that Kuwait is exactly a bastion of democracy either, but he did throw missiles at Israel). I'm sure Iraq was full of similing, happy children, but it wasn't the full story.
Moore's goal was to tell "the other side of the story", with the idea that you'd already heard Bush's side of the story, but somehow two unbalanced stories do not make a balanced story between them.
I weep for the children killed. I wish it had been worth it to free them from a dictator, but it simply doesn't appear to have been the case.
You're right: I'd forgotten that he does in fact mention the Netherlands. The gag made me laugh out loud, as the movie did in several places. Moore is definitely a gifted comic filmmaker.
(It didn't hurt that I saw it in Greenbelt, Maryland, not always affectionately known as "The People's Republic of Greenbelt", founded as a damn-near-socialist experiment by Eleanor Roosevelt and a very, very liberal place. Comedies are funnier when everybody is laughing.)