This event should be immediately classified since it would create mass panic among the general population and destroy one's belief in the Church.
One can take the bolded section in one of two ways:
1. If you believe in god, why would the existence of aliens prove that god doesn't exist?
Or
2. Why would you deny evidence in front of you?
Frankly, I don't buy it that Churchill actually made the church quote. Until someone proves differently, I think someone pulled that out of their ass.
"The allegations involving Churchill were made by the grandson of one his personal bodyguards, an RAF officer who overheard the discussion, who wrote to the Ministry of Defence in 1999 inquiring about the incident after his grandfather disclosed details to his family."
So what we have is a story passed down over three generations, related third-hand that Churchill said this. Considering the British public's fear of V-weapon atacks, I can see the panic angle. But the religion angle? That sounds like it made its way into the story over the years. It doesn't sound like something Churchill would say.
I'll agree with you in principle, I think the path should be something like LOGO, then BASIC, then Pascal or C.
I don't think "computer classes" should deal with programming at all. Programming classes should teach programming. When most kids take "computer classes", it's because they want to use the computer in ways they currently can't. The vast majority of kids would be bored silly writing programs. What they really want is a class that would be more accurately called "Here's how to do neat things with your PC that you don't yet know how to do". Neat to most teenagers is learning to photoshop or edit MP3 files or edit movie files.
They're bored with spreadsheets and word processing in those classes because A), they already know how to do some of that stuff... they grew up with it, and B) it's boring work. Stuff you do at a job. Kids want "computer" to = "fun".
Kids are so used to using computers from an early age that a class on word processing in high school is analogous to a class on "How to use a pencil". They already know the basics. So the answer isn't putting in more stuff that they won't like, and is much harder to do than edit a paragraph in word.
So it's basically time to phase out the "intro to computing class", unless you have, for instance, a lot of poor immigrant kids that have never used a computer. In most schools, they should just break classes up into different subjects now. Here's your class on photoshopping. Here's your class in BASIC. Here's your class in audio editing. Here's your class on Access. The time of the beginning one-size-fits-all computer class is done.
". The Itanium was Intel's attempt to lock AMD out of the "clone" market because AMD didn't have a cross license to use the Itanium architecture."
Itanium had nothing to do with AMD and everything to do with the belief at Intel's own leadership that X86 was an evolutionary dead end. Only after customers balked and fled to Opteron in the enterprise did Intel look at how to wring more life from X86. Intel overestimated both Itanium's performance and the willingness of the enterprise to undergo a wrenching platform change.
It is extremely hard for our kids to even have an opportunity to learn to love books! They are exposed to so many competing media at such an early age that books get relegated to schools as something they use.
Which is why I think I'm going to start severely limiting how much TV and video game time my kids get. My oldest had a bad grade this year, so he lost the Xbox for the summer, but as soon as I gave it back to him this last weekend, he started drowning himself in it. My wife and I are talking about a 90 minute electronics limit per day... that's TV, computer, and game console combined. We'll give him a couple of hours more on the weekends, but both my wife and I are heavy readers, and always had a book handy in our pre-Internet age youth. So we're a little disturbed by how little the oldest one is reading outside of school. Everything he wants to do is electronic. Everything. He's got the MP3 player plugged in so much, we've started calling him "Borg". We've started mandating some time on the basketball courts, libraries, parks, etc, things he used to do more of before he became a teenager. If we simply leave him to his own devices, it's apparent he'll do the same thing all his friends do... meld with his Xbox and do nothing else. This summer we sent him away to a camp in North Carolina, out in the boonies. It's clear that in creating so many choices and convieniences for ourselves, we tend to become absorbed by them.
Oh, I think book and record stores will make a comeback one day, I just don't think you'll like the form they take: departments at supercenters in places like Wal Mart and Target.
Most Wal Mart supercenters have grocery stores that equal or beat other grocery stores. I don't think it's a stretch to see them subdivide other secions of the store up either. I can easily see a Wal Mart setting a corner of a supercenter aside as the "bookstore" portion, complete with a coffee and sweets bar. Same thing for music and video... set a coner of the store up, put up some snazzy looking partitions, and voila!, instant music store. It makes sense because they'll make the same ruthless pricing deals they do with all other merchandise, and so you can have your box set or your novel for less, and drink your mocha latte too.
But, you'll have to accept that it's evil Wal Mart that's doing it. Decisions, decisions.
The whole textbook business is one of the biggest scams in education, and it only gets worse in college. New editions are churned out for the college market simply to ensure a fresh revenue stream for all involved. I think in 95% of math, science, lit, and history courses, you could go to Dover Publishers (the people that basically make their living reprinting stuff in the public domain), get the books in paperback, and actually get better textbooks in the end. I have a weird hobby of collecting pre-1950 textbooks, and frankly I think kids learned "more" back then from their textbooks than they do today. Obviously, some knowledge has been added here and there, but I've got an 8th grade science textbook that does a much better job imparting the principles of physics and chemistry to kids because of the practical examples used.
I have to disagree with McNealy's push to go all-online though. There's no substitute for having a physical book at times. We just need to get off of the "new textbook" gravy-train.
Why? A crime occured... classified documents were given to unauthorized group, and the government is looking for both who leaked them, and who helped the leaker get the classified documents out. Asking him his opinions on the wars... a prime motivation for the leakers, almost certainly, is no different from investigators asking a suspect opinions like "Do you think the victim deserved it?"... it's all about building a case and establishing motivation. There is absolutely nothing unusual about this. Investigators and prosecuters have been doing it as long as there have been investigators and prosecutors. There's nothing unconstitutional about it all. After all, you DO have the right to remain silent. If you don't, that's your business.
BTW, how is what the leakers did any different than people that gave classified docs to the Soviets and Chinese? Motivation? It's the same motivation. My government is wrong, and the best way to change that is to help their enemies. Here's a bag of classified documents.
Assange is a little different, as he's a foreigner on something of a crusade against "American Imperialism", but Bradley Manning is no different from the couple that were just sentenced to prison for shoveling classified info to Castro for years.
"I think letter grades should be done away with entirely, and a numeric scale used instead, normalized to the maximum credit possible. A letter grade ends up being too subjective and thus prone to manipulation, inflation, or ambiguity in interpretation."
I don't think that would change much. After all, letter grades are usually assigned according to a numeric value. You get an A for a 90-100 score, B for 80-89, C for 70-79, etc. There's a little variation here and there... some schools make their A's from 92 to 100 or 94 to 100, but you get the point.
Further, who says a purely numeric grade would be immune to grade inflation? If a teacher is just bumping a kid from an F to a D to pass him, what's to stop them from simply bumping him from a 50 to a 60? Or in the case of this school district, a 70?
Without getting into the pros and cons of your argument, "All of Europe" is not about 1/3rd the size of the US. The continent of Europe is larger than the total space of the United States, even including Alaska and Hawaii:
Europe - 3,930,000 sq. miles United States - 3,794,101 sq. miles
There is more population density per square mile, but that's more because Europe in total has over twice the population of the US.
That may be the single dumbest thing I've ever read on Slashdot.
"Oppose Internet deregulation"? When was it regulated?
The Internet is successful because government took a hands off approach. And now people like you think they can make it better by having the government exert control over it? Really? And make no mistake, even a simple set of so-called "net neutrality" regs that you want is a matter of control. Do you honestly think the government will stop there once the precedent of regulating the Internet has begun?
Jesus, you're cutting your own throat and you can't even see it.
You can get Leopard Server with unlimited clients on Ebay for under 150 bucks. Why this instead of Linux? Because Apple will still be supporting it for awhile, and its an easy environment to run. The REAL question about what you should do with this box.... retire it, run Linux on it, or buy 10.5 Server.... depends on how much RAM is already in the machine. IIRC, those boxes would hold up to 32 gigs of memory, but if you've only got, say, one gig installed, it might not be worth your while to buy the memory to bring the machine up to speed. If there's enough RAM, a G5 PowerMac would make a nice server.
"In order to be compromised, you must first be compromised! Well, no shit! The author then goes on to explain that this is easy because most people don't change their router's password."
Maybe I'm missing something here, but is the researcher saying that this kind of attack can bypass a router even it if has WAN-side admin access disabled? Is he remotely hijacking the browser, and then attempting to access the router from the inside via a standard address (usually 192.168.0.1)?
If that's the case then this isn't a router vulnerability, it's a browser/OS vulnerability. What am I missing here?
Look it is obvious, Oracle is putting a nail in anything having to do with Solaris. Get over it, move on and start migrating.
No, Oracle is putting a nail in OpenSolaris. They're quite interested in developing commercial Solaris. They just want to be paid for it. You don't make money by not making money. You'd have thought everyone would get that now after the Internet bubble 10 years ago.
Oracle seems determined to destroy everything they acquired from Sun. We had 2 OpenSolaris machines since Zones and ZFS are just hot shit and several SunFire servers. We're moving the OpenSolaris installs to FreeBSD and are probably going to be looking at HP or IBM machines in the future.
And just how much money did Oracle make from your two OpenSolaris machines? If you bought them pre-merger, they made nada. Zip.
Oracle doesn't care about you unless you're willing to spend a lot of money. That's not bad, that's just their business model. They're trying to become the Mercedes-Benz of IT. They're going mostly to the high end of the enterprise. They expect to be well paid for both hardware and software. And I suspect Sun will start making more money on the high end if they do it right. I hear people moaning at Slashdot all the time about how Oracle doesn't care about the little guy, the small shop. Well, you know what? You're right, they don't. You're not their target. You don't have enough money to interest them. So it's best for all involved that you DO move your installs to BSD. So Oracle can concentrate on the big paying customers, and you can concentrate on your shop that doesn't pay for operating systems.
"hile it is true that no party can claim to be free of disinformation, right-wing parties can indeed be singled out for practicing it on an industrial scale. "
Well, gee, now I'm convinced. You say it with righteous indignation, so golly, it must be true. I mean, leftists don't lie on a massive scale. The health care bill is going to lower costs, the wave of green jobs is saving the economy, and the stimulus brought prosperity.
"Just think of Fox, O'Reilly and Beck: no contest."
What about them? One is a news network, the other two are commentators. What "industrial scale lies" has Fox told? I'm sure they've had inaccurate stories before.... the place is run by human beings, after all... but how do those innacuracies stack up to other networks? ABC? NBC? CBS? CNN? Can you offer some stats from a reliable source here about their rate of accuracy vs. the others?
And what about O'Reilly and Beck? What is their fact-to-BS ratio compared to their competitors on the left? Maddow, and Matthews, and especially Olbermann?
What this all comes down to is that these guys are hugely popular and you don't like it. I suspect Glenn Beck could do a show just reading names from a phone book, and you'd still see "lies on an industrial scale". Whether you realize it or not, you may be a prime example of what the article was talking about.
This explains the popularity of right-wingers, ordinary people who would have nothing to gain for voting for right-wing parties, yet who keep doing so.
"Nothing to gain"? Is this the old "voting against their interests" trope? Just what are "their" interests, anyway? Why do you get to define them?
You're confusing competence with ideology. You can be a liberal (or a conservative, or a libertarian, or a Marxist, etc) and still be incapable of getting things done. "Ram it down their throats" isn't a characteristic of any one ideology, necessarily (though some, like Communism, use it to full effect). No matter how popular a politician is, "ram it down their throat" is usually bad bad bad. FDR was popular, but when he tried to pack the Supreme Court, the public started threatening to impeach him, and he never went near the subject again. So the fact that he failed means that he wasn't a liberal, by your reasoning?
Notice how all of the fascist, unconstitutional and Anti-American policies that Bush and Cheney implemented (and should have legitimately resulted in impeachment and at least life sentences in prison ) are still in effect?
Nothing has changed, therefore conservative.
Obama is a conservative, not a liberal.
We have a far right wing fascist party and a moderate right wing fascist party.
Nonsense. He's a not a conservative by any stretch of the imagination. He's an incompetent liberal. And you sound like a snotty child. "No, Daddy, it's not ice cream! Only chocolate is ice cream. It's vanilla, thus, it's liver. I want my ice cream!".
...more pork for the Senators' districts, and science be damned. Damn, these people make me sick.
Far be it from me to defend an institution that P.J. O'Rourke famously called the Parliament of Whores... but you need to re-examine your own "science be damned" statement. Because NASA is not science, and never has been. NASA was an inherently political creation for an inherently political goal: beating the Soviets in the space race. And NASA was born with big, fat, servings of pork to all the necessary states.
Science is, and always has been, a minor sideshow at NASA. If your main concern is science, then NASA is the wrong place to put all your hopes and dreams in. NASA, having served its purpose (Soviet Union, RIP) should be quietly put to death, and its job broken up amongst various existing agencies.
He was talking about "foremost" in the context of the interview, not NASA as a whole.
Yes, he was.
""When I became the NASA administrator -- or before I became the NASA administrator -- he charged me with three things. One was he wanted me to help re-inspire children to want to get into science and math, he wanted me to expand our international relationships, and third, and perhaps foremost, he wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science... and math and engineering,""
Your excuse for the guy was weasel words. He said what he said, and he wasn't taken out of context. Further, the White House itself has gently reprimanded him for his comments:
"But White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said Monday, "That was not his task, and that's not the task of NASA." Gibbs said White House officials have spoken to Bolden and NASA about the comments."
If you'll read the Washington Post link, you'll see that this is just the tip of the iceberg for Bolden. The Post piece refers to him as, and I quote, a "headache for the White House".
But we DO use Facebook for unrest. Just like our newspapers, TV programs, and yes, VOA. When the status quo is a dictatorship, then yeah, pretty much any kind of free press or communications is going to "foment unrest". So what? The only alternative is isolationism.
Now, maybe you could make the argument that we should go back to defacto isolationism; we'll do things our way here, and you do things however you like over there. That used to be the way things were. However, if we change that, then we're abandoning essentially all of our post WW II foreign policy, as the whole idea was the isolationism made WW II worse. To change that was to say that FDR was wrong and his adversaries stateside were right: stay out of their business. It's the Ron Paul school of policy. Eventually that means taking an "I'm OK, you're OK" policy toward a Hitler or a Stalin or a Pol Pot.
But is this really an effective use of taxpayer money?
Blimps and airships are pretty cheap to operate for most things. The Navy has a long history with LTA (lighter than air) craft, using them more prominently than perhaps even Imperial Germany, who really popularized the Zeppelin. The Navy had something of a golden age with their airships, with 4 of their Zeppelin-class airships being commissioned as ships of the line, the same as surface warships. Two of them... the USS Akron and the USS Macon were actually Zeppelin aircraft carriers. They both carried a squadron of Curtis Sparrowhawk fighter planes, which would attach to the mothership via a skyhook. The carriers even had a hangar bay inside the airships, and at 800 ft long, there were nearly as long as modern surface supercarriers.
End the end, it wasn't expense that ended the age of Navy airships, it was safety. Most were destroyed in catastrophic accidents, and they were vulnerable to sudden, violent weather. Billy Mitchell... arguably father of the modern air force... was court martialed in part because he used the airship crashes in his publicity campaign against Naval aviation (which has left a legacy of bitterness between the two services that continues to this day).
The Navy continued to use LTA craft into WWII though, especially as spotter balloons, and even continued to use smaller airships into the 50's for things like anti-submarine patrol. I'm rather glad to see them get back into the LTA business, as you can do a lot with airships very inexpensively. Make them remote-piloted drones, and you can send them up for days at a time as radar AEW craft, reconnaissance craft, or even as remote weapons platforms. Airships... both manned and unmanned.... probably still make more sense as anti-sub platforms than land-based fixed wing aircraft.
Willow was directed by Ron Howard, not Lucas. Granted, he was a producer, but it still wasn't totally "his baby".
Lucas is at his best when he's NOT behind the camera calling all the shots. Raiders of the Lost Ark is probably testament Numero Uno to this. And while Empire and Return were great movies, I think we have to recognize that part of the reason that Star Wars was such a phenomenon is that it came along at exactly the right time and gave the country exactly what it needed... an old fashioned fairy tale of good guys vs. bad guys in the gray, dreary post-Vietnam world.
Had Star Wars been released in any other time, it probably wouldn't have become the legend that it did. Had Star Wars been released in 1955 or 1995 (with appropriate levels of special effects for the period), it probably would have been as awkward as releasing Easy Rider in 1985. So to some extent, Lucas has probably profited from a good deal of lucky timing. Is he talented? Clearly. Is he the wunderkind that everyone thought in 1977? I think the test of time says "No".
Slashdot Mirror
FTFS:
This event should be immediately classified since it would create mass panic among the general population and destroy one's belief in the Church.
One can take the bolded section in one of two ways:
1. If you believe in god, why would the existence of aliens prove that god doesn't exist?
Or
2. Why would you deny evidence in front of you?
Frankly, I don't buy it that Churchill actually made the church quote. Until someone proves differently, I think someone pulled that out of their ass.
"The allegations involving Churchill were made by the grandson of one his personal bodyguards, an RAF officer who overheard the discussion, who wrote to the Ministry of Defence in 1999 inquiring about the incident after his grandfather disclosed details to his family."
So what we have is a story passed down over three generations, related third-hand that Churchill said this. Considering the British public's fear of V-weapon atacks, I can see the panic angle. But the religion angle? That sounds like it made its way into the story over the years. It doesn't sound like something Churchill would say.
I'll agree with you in principle, I think the path should be something like LOGO, then BASIC, then Pascal or C.
I don't think "computer classes" should deal with programming at all. Programming classes should teach programming. When most kids take "computer classes", it's because they want to use the computer in ways they currently can't. The vast majority of kids would be bored silly writing programs. What they really want is a class that would be more accurately called "Here's how to do neat things with your PC that you don't yet know how to do". Neat to most teenagers is learning to photoshop or edit MP3 files or edit movie files.
They're bored with spreadsheets and word processing in those classes because A), they already know how to do some of that stuff... they grew up with it, and B) it's boring work. Stuff you do at a job. Kids want "computer" to = "fun".
Kids are so used to using computers from an early age that a class on word processing in high school is analogous to a class on "How to use a pencil". They already know the basics. So the answer isn't putting in more stuff that they won't like, and is much harder to do than edit a paragraph in word.
So it's basically time to phase out the "intro to computing class", unless you have, for instance, a lot of poor immigrant kids that have never used a computer. In most schools, they should just break classes up into different subjects now. Here's your class on photoshopping. Here's your class in BASIC. Here's your class in audio editing. Here's your class on Access. The time of the beginning one-size-fits-all computer class is done.
". The Itanium was Intel's attempt to lock AMD out of the "clone" market because AMD didn't have a cross license to use the Itanium architecture."
Itanium had nothing to do with AMD and everything to do with the belief at Intel's own leadership that X86 was an evolutionary dead end. Only after customers balked and fled to Opteron in the enterprise did Intel look at how to wring more life from X86. Intel overestimated both Itanium's performance and the willingness of the enterprise to undergo a wrenching platform change.
It is extremely hard for our kids to even have an opportunity to learn to love books! They are exposed to so many competing media at such an early age that books get relegated to schools as something they use.
Which is why I think I'm going to start severely limiting how much TV and video game time my kids get. My oldest had a bad grade this year, so he lost the Xbox for the summer, but as soon as I gave it back to him this last weekend, he started drowning himself in it. My wife and I are talking about a 90 minute electronics limit per day... that's TV, computer, and game console combined. We'll give him a couple of hours more on the weekends, but both my wife and I are heavy readers, and always had a book handy in our pre-Internet age youth. So we're a little disturbed by how little the oldest one is reading outside of school. Everything he wants to do is electronic. Everything. He's got the MP3 player plugged in so much, we've started calling him "Borg". We've started mandating some time on the basketball courts, libraries, parks, etc, things he used to do more of before he became a teenager. If we simply leave him to his own devices, it's apparent he'll do the same thing all his friends do... meld with his Xbox and do nothing else. This summer we sent him away to a camp in North Carolina, out in the boonies. It's clear that in creating so many choices and convieniences for ourselves, we tend to become absorbed by them.
Oh, I think book and record stores will make a comeback one day, I just don't think you'll like the form they take: departments at supercenters in places like Wal Mart and Target.
Most Wal Mart supercenters have grocery stores that equal or beat other grocery stores. I don't think it's a stretch to see them subdivide other secions of the store up either. I can easily see a Wal Mart setting a corner of a supercenter aside as the "bookstore" portion, complete with a coffee and sweets bar. Same thing for music and video... set a coner of the store up, put up some snazzy looking partitions, and voila!, instant music store. It makes sense because they'll make the same ruthless pricing deals they do with all other merchandise, and so you can have your box set or your novel for less, and drink your mocha latte too.
But, you'll have to accept that it's evil Wal Mart that's doing it. Decisions, decisions.
The whole textbook business is one of the biggest scams in education, and it only gets worse in college. New editions are churned out for the college market simply to ensure a fresh revenue stream for all involved. I think in 95% of math, science, lit, and history courses, you could go to Dover Publishers (the people that basically make their living reprinting stuff in the public domain), get the books in paperback, and actually get better textbooks in the end. I have a weird hobby of collecting pre-1950 textbooks, and frankly I think kids learned "more" back then from their textbooks than they do today. Obviously, some knowledge has been added here and there, but I've got an 8th grade science textbook that does a much better job imparting the principles of physics and chemistry to kids because of the practical examples used.
I have to disagree with McNealy's push to go all-online though. There's no substitute for having a physical book at times. We just need to get off of the "new textbook" gravy-train.
That's more worrying than the detention etc.
Why? A crime occured... classified documents were given to unauthorized group, and the government is looking for both who leaked them, and who helped the leaker get the classified documents out. Asking him his opinions on the wars... a prime motivation for the leakers, almost certainly, is no different from investigators asking a suspect opinions like "Do you think the victim deserved it?"... it's all about building a case and establishing motivation. There is absolutely nothing unusual about this. Investigators and prosecuters have been doing it as long as there have been investigators and prosecutors. There's nothing unconstitutional about it all. After all, you DO have the right to remain silent. If you don't, that's your business.
BTW, how is what the leakers did any different than people that gave classified docs to the Soviets and Chinese? Motivation? It's the same motivation. My government is wrong, and the best way to change that is to help their enemies. Here's a bag of classified documents.
Assange is a little different, as he's a foreigner on something of a crusade against "American Imperialism", but Bradley Manning is no different from the couple that were just sentenced to prison for shoveling classified info to Castro for years.
"I think letter grades should be done away with entirely, and a numeric scale used instead, normalized to the maximum credit possible. A letter grade ends up being too subjective and thus prone to manipulation, inflation, or ambiguity in interpretation."
I don't think that would change much. After all, letter grades are usually assigned according to a numeric value. You get an A for a 90-100 score, B for 80-89, C for 70-79, etc. There's a little variation here and there... some schools make their A's from 92 to 100 or 94 to 100, but you get the point.
Further, who says a purely numeric grade would be immune to grade inflation? If a teacher is just bumping a kid from an F to a D to pass him, what's to stop them from simply bumping him from a 50 to a 60? Or in the case of this school district, a 70?
Without getting into the pros and cons of your argument, "All of Europe" is not about 1/3rd the size of the US. The continent of Europe is larger than the total space of the United States, even including Alaska and Hawaii:
Europe - 3,930,000 sq. miles
United States - 3,794,101 sq. miles
There is more population density per square mile, but that's more because Europe in total has over twice the population of the US.
That may be the single dumbest thing I've ever read on Slashdot.
"Oppose Internet deregulation"? When was it regulated?
The Internet is successful because government took a hands off approach. And now people like you think they can make it better by having the government exert control over it? Really? And make no mistake, even a simple set of so-called "net neutrality" regs that you want is a matter of control. Do you honestly think the government will stop there once the precedent of regulating the Internet has begun?
Jesus, you're cutting your own throat and you can't even see it.
You can get Leopard Server with unlimited clients on Ebay for under 150 bucks. Why this instead of Linux? Because Apple will still be supporting it for awhile, and its an easy environment to run. The REAL question about what you should do with this box.... retire it, run Linux on it, or buy 10.5 Server.... depends on how much RAM is already in the machine. IIRC, those boxes would hold up to 32 gigs of memory, but if you've only got, say, one gig installed, it might not be worth your while to buy the memory to bring the machine up to speed. If there's enough RAM, a G5 PowerMac would make a nice server.
"In order to be compromised, you must first be compromised! Well, no shit! The author then goes on to explain that this is easy because most people don't change their router's password."
Maybe I'm missing something here, but is the researcher saying that this kind of attack can bypass a router even it if has WAN-side admin access disabled? Is he remotely hijacking the browser, and then attempting to access the router from the inside via a standard address (usually 192.168.0.1)?
If that's the case then this isn't a router vulnerability, it's a browser/OS vulnerability. What am I missing here?
My problem with it is that it was published in Greedhead Magazine, AKA "Forbes".
If the information is accurate, then what's the problem? Would you have the same objections if it was published in Mother Jones or The Nation?
Look it is obvious, Oracle is putting a nail in anything having to do with Solaris. Get over it, move on and start migrating.
No, Oracle is putting a nail in OpenSolaris. They're quite interested in developing commercial Solaris. They just want to be paid for it. You don't make money by not making money. You'd have thought everyone would get that now after the Internet bubble 10 years ago.
Oracle seems determined to destroy everything they acquired from Sun. We had 2 OpenSolaris machines since Zones and ZFS are just hot shit and several SunFire servers. We're moving the OpenSolaris installs to FreeBSD and are probably going to be looking at HP or IBM machines in the future.
And just how much money did Oracle make from your two OpenSolaris machines? If you bought them pre-merger, they made nada. Zip.
Oracle doesn't care about you unless you're willing to spend a lot of money. That's not bad, that's just their business model. They're trying to become the Mercedes-Benz of IT. They're going mostly to the high end of the enterprise. They expect to be well paid for both hardware and software. And I suspect Sun will start making more money on the high end if they do it right. I hear people moaning at Slashdot all the time about how Oracle doesn't care about the little guy, the small shop. Well, you know what? You're right, they don't. You're not their target. You don't have enough money to interest them. So it's best for all involved that you DO move your installs to BSD. So Oracle can concentrate on the big paying customers, and you can concentrate on your shop that doesn't pay for operating systems.
...who have a much lower viewership than Fox, etc.
Try harder.
So what are you saying? Fewer people watching equals more accuracy? What does viewer numbers have to do with how accurate the network or pundit is?
"hile it is true that no party can claim to be free of disinformation, right-wing parties can indeed be singled out for practicing it on an industrial scale.
"
Well, gee, now I'm convinced. You say it with righteous indignation, so golly, it must be true. I mean, leftists don't lie on a massive scale. The health care bill is going to lower costs, the wave of green jobs is saving the economy, and the stimulus brought prosperity.
"Just think of Fox, O'Reilly and Beck: no contest."
What about them? One is a news network, the other two are commentators. What "industrial scale lies" has Fox told? I'm sure they've had inaccurate stories before.... the place is run by human beings, after all... but how do those innacuracies stack up to other networks? ABC? NBC? CBS? CNN? Can you offer some stats from a reliable source here about their rate of accuracy vs. the others?
And what about O'Reilly and Beck? What is their fact-to-BS ratio compared to their competitors on the left? Maddow, and Matthews, and especially Olbermann?
What this all comes down to is that these guys are hugely popular and you don't like it. I suspect Glenn Beck could do a show just reading names from a phone book, and you'd still see "lies on an industrial scale". Whether you realize it or not, you may be a prime example of what the article was talking about.
This explains the popularity of right-wingers, ordinary people who would have nothing to gain for voting for right-wing parties, yet who keep doing so.
"Nothing to gain"? Is this the old "voting against their interests" trope? Just what are "their" interests, anyway? Why do you get to define them?
You're confusing competence with ideology. You can be a liberal (or a conservative, or a libertarian, or a Marxist, etc) and still be incapable of getting things done. "Ram it down their throats" isn't a characteristic of any one ideology, necessarily (though some, like Communism, use it to full effect). No matter how popular a politician is, "ram it down their throat" is usually bad bad bad. FDR was popular, but when he tried to pack the Supreme Court, the public started threatening to impeach him, and he never went near the subject again. So the fact that he failed means that he wasn't a liberal, by your reasoning?
Notice how all of the fascist, unconstitutional and Anti-American policies that Bush and Cheney implemented (and should have legitimately resulted in impeachment and at least life sentences in prison ) are still in effect?
Nothing has changed, therefore conservative.
Obama is a conservative, not a liberal.
We have a far right wing fascist party and a moderate right wing fascist party.
Nonsense. He's a not a conservative by any stretch of the imagination. He's an incompetent liberal. And you sound like a snotty child. "No, Daddy, it's not ice cream! Only chocolate is ice cream. It's vanilla, thus, it's liver. I want my ice cream!".
Far be it from me to defend an institution that P.J. O'Rourke famously called the Parliament of Whores... but you need to re-examine your own "science be damned" statement. Because NASA is not science, and never has been. NASA was an inherently political creation for an inherently political goal: beating the Soviets in the space race. And NASA was born with big, fat, servings of pork to all the necessary states.
Science is, and always has been, a minor sideshow at NASA. If your main concern is science, then NASA is the wrong place to put all your hopes and dreams in. NASA, having served its purpose (Soviet Union, RIP) should be quietly put to death, and its job broken up amongst various existing agencies.
He was talking about "foremost" in the context of the interview, not NASA as a whole.
Yes, he was.
""When I became the NASA administrator -- or before I became the NASA administrator -- he charged me with three things. One was he wanted me to help re-inspire children to want to get into science and math, he wanted me to expand our international relationships, and third, and perhaps foremost, he wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science ... and math and engineering,""
Your excuse for the guy was weasel words. He said what he said, and he wasn't taken out of context. Further, the White House itself has gently reprimanded him for his comments:
"But White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said Monday, "That was not his task, and that's not the task of NASA." Gibbs said White House officials have spoken to Bolden and NASA about the comments."
If you'll read the Washington Post link, you'll see that this is just the tip of the iceberg for Bolden. The Post piece refers to him as, and I quote, a "headache for the White House".
But we DO use Facebook for unrest. Just like our newspapers, TV programs, and yes, VOA. When the status quo is a dictatorship, then yeah, pretty much any kind of free press or communications is going to "foment unrest". So what? The only alternative is isolationism.
Now, maybe you could make the argument that we should go back to defacto isolationism; we'll do things our way here, and you do things however you like over there. That used to be the way things were. However, if we change that, then we're abandoning essentially all of our post WW II foreign policy, as the whole idea was the isolationism made WW II worse. To change that was to say that FDR was wrong and his adversaries stateside were right: stay out of their business. It's the Ron Paul school of policy. Eventually that means taking an "I'm OK, you're OK" policy toward a Hitler or a Stalin or a Pol Pot.
But is this really an effective use of taxpayer money?
Blimps and airships are pretty cheap to operate for most things. The Navy has a long history with LTA (lighter than air) craft, using them more prominently than perhaps even Imperial Germany, who really popularized the Zeppelin. The Navy had something of a golden age with their airships, with 4 of their Zeppelin-class airships being commissioned as ships of the line, the same as surface warships. Two of them ... the USS Akron and the USS Macon were actually Zeppelin aircraft carriers. They both carried a squadron of Curtis Sparrowhawk fighter planes, which would attach to the mothership via a skyhook. The carriers even had a hangar bay inside the airships, and at 800 ft long, there were nearly as long as modern surface supercarriers.
End the end, it wasn't expense that ended the age of Navy airships, it was safety. Most were destroyed in catastrophic accidents, and they were vulnerable to sudden, violent weather. Billy Mitchell... arguably father of the modern air force... was court martialed in part because he used the airship crashes in his publicity campaign against Naval aviation (which has left a legacy of bitterness between the two services that continues to this day).
The Navy continued to use LTA craft into WWII though, especially as spotter balloons, and even continued to use smaller airships into the 50's for things like anti-submarine patrol. I'm rather glad to see them get back into the LTA business, as you can do a lot with airships very inexpensively. Make them remote-piloted drones, and you can send them up for days at a time as radar AEW craft, reconnaissance craft, or even as remote weapons platforms. Airships... both manned and unmanned.... probably still make more sense as anti-sub platforms than land-based fixed wing aircraft.
Willow was directed by Ron Howard, not Lucas. Granted, he was a producer, but it still wasn't totally "his baby".
Lucas is at his best when he's NOT behind the camera calling all the shots. Raiders of the Lost Ark is probably testament Numero Uno to this. And while Empire and Return were great movies, I think we have to recognize that part of the reason that Star Wars was such a phenomenon is that it came along at exactly the right time and gave the country exactly what it needed... an old fashioned fairy tale of good guys vs. bad guys in the gray, dreary post-Vietnam world.
Had Star Wars been released in any other time, it probably wouldn't have become the legend that it did. Had Star Wars been released in 1955 or 1995 (with appropriate levels of special effects for the period), it probably would have been as awkward as releasing Easy Rider in 1985. So to some extent, Lucas has probably profited from a good deal of lucky timing. Is he talented? Clearly. Is he the wunderkind that everyone thought in 1977? I think the test of time says "No".