Nope. Bad idea. A good program isn't written serially in sequence. Parts are added and deleted as requirements change and parts evolve. What's more having code in computer form makes it searchable.
When is the last time you wrote a non-trivial piece of code in sequence? Be honest now.
What are you working on, a roll of masking tape? Or one of those old egyptian reed scrolls?
We've got random access paper now. It comes in sheets of various sizes and you can hop around all you want.
No one is saying Gore invented electrons (though, I wouldn't be surprised if there weren't some wingnuts claiming that he claimed it--after all, there were little pockets of the Japanese army still holed up and fighting on islands in the South Pacific for a long time after WWII was over, and no doubt Election 2000 has its share).
No one is saying that he invented transistors either. In fact, there are a whole slew of steps to creating "the Internet" (ASCII, anyone?), and no one person could possibly have contributed to more than a small fraction of them. And, consequently, no one expects that anyone seriously believes this.
So, expecting you to be intellectually honest, I wrote the sentence which you quote:
"[Gore] started working towards a goal before others joined in, and that is obviously true in this case."
But given how hard you were working to twist Gore's words, I was foolish to expect that you'd leave mine untwisted. Your response:
Gore start working toward what? Creating the internet? Before others joined in? And this is "Obviously true"? Your sources?
...is amazingly obtuse. My sources? How about you? You admit that Gore started working towards the goal of creating the internet sometime in the 1980's. Unless you are claiming that no one hopped on the Internet bandwagon in the 1990's this was clearly before others (in fact, given the growth of the internet in the 1990's, clearly before the vast majority of others) joined in. And, as the quotes I cited demonstrate, the people who were deeply invoved at the time support Gore's statement.
I know you'd like Gore to have said that he created the internet. But he didn't say that because it isn't true. I know you'd like me to have said that taking the initiative means "doing something before anyone else" but I didn't say that because it doesn't mean that. You can take the initiative in getting your friends to "go watch the game in person instead of on TV" even if there are thousands of people in the stands already. Taking initiative isn't about being first, it's about moving forward when the people around you aren't.
Re: your reference to Bush & Co -- "oh, look over there!"
Yes, exactly. At least here you claim to have understood my point. Why are you waisting your time beating this horse? Look over there! A bunch of madmen have taken over your country and are bankrupting it, building a monstrous police state, and killing tens of thousands of innocent people, all based on transparent lies. And you're still trying to malign somebody who had the effrontery to try (but fail) to stop them.
If you really want to teach programming (instead of teaching "using a computer"), start them out on paper and make them actually think about what they're trying to do instead of getting caught up in using the interface. Then have them work in groups using a whiteboard, and don't let them test their code until they've all agreed that it's correct. Teach them to look out for their own mistakes, and the mistakes of others, rather than counting on the computer to do their thinking for them.
There was a definite advantage to the old submit-a-deck-of-cards system, in that mistakes were annoying and you worked hard to avoid them. To do this, you had to really think about what you were trying to accomplish, how you planed to do it, and what might go wrong. In other words, you were really learning to program.
On the other hand, with highly interactive environments (which are extremely useful once you know what you are doing) beginners are all to tempted to fall into a trial and error loop until they get something that "works"--which is to say, it happens to produce reasonable results for whatever limited test case they are using--without ever really thinking about the program.
Suppose you were teaching flying. Would you start your students out in an advanced aircraft with an autopilot that could take off and land unassisted, and all sorts of doodads to make flying easy--or would you sit them down with a pad of paper and make them work out things like stall speed and fuel requirement problems until they really understood the issues?
During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet.
That is the key point.
You've proved the Internet would not be where it is today without Gore's help.
You haven't proved that the Internet was created due to Gore's initiative.
Nuts. Saying you took the initiative in doing something does not mean that you accomplished it single handedly, or even that you cause it to happen. It means that you got off your butt and started working towards a goal before others joined in, and that is obviously true in this case.
RMS, for example, clearly took the initiative in creating the free software movement, even though Linux got done long before the Hurd.
-- MarkusQ
P.S. If a statement like Gore's, that can be misread to imply something that is (harmlessly) false sets your blood boiling, I'll bet you are fuming mad when you hear politicians say more outrageous stuff, like:
"Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction."- Dick Cheney, Vice President, Speech to VFW National Convention, 8/26/2002
"Iraq has stockpiled biological and chemical weapons, and is rebuilding the facilities used to make more of those weapons. We have sources that tell us that Saddam Hussein recently authorized Iraqi field commanders to use chemical weapons -- the very weapons the dictator tells us he does not have."- George W. Bush, President, Radio Address, 10/5/2002
"The Iraqi regime...possesses and produces chemical and biological weapons. It is seeking nuclear weapons. We know that the regime has produced thousands of tons of chemical agents, including mustard gas, sarin nerve gas, VX nerve gas."- George W. Bush, President, Cincinnati, Ohio Speech, 10/7/2002
"We know for a fact that there are weapons there."- Ari Fleischer, Press Secretary, Press Briefing, 1/9/2003
"We know where they are."- Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defense, ABC Interview, 3/30/2003
"No one ever said that we knew precisely where all of these agents were, where they were stored."- Condoleeza Rice, US National Security Adviser, Meet the Press, 6/8/2003
"I think the burden is on those people who think he didn't have weapons of mass destruction to tell the world where they are."- Ari Fleischer, Press Secretary, Press Briefing, 7/9/2003
It's true if you believe R&D only happens because of the government. It's true if you believe the government is the creative force behind all its funded projects. It's true if you believe research is not possible without the government.
Nuts. I don't believe any of those things, yet I can see that Gore was telling the truth. You don't have to believe that all cars are made in Detroit to recognize that some particular car was. And you don't have to believe that government drives all R&D to recognize that the internet (the backbone, not the content) was a an outgrowth of research and development by the US government.
It was quotes like that that truly drove people (like me) away from Gore. He was (and still is, I think) of the single mind that the government is the sole driving force of the country and in this case, technological innovation.
Nuts again.
While Gore may have worked in government, he has certainly done a great deal in the private sector as well. Since the 2000 election, he has started his own TV network, made a movie, appeared on several TV shows (Futerama, Saturday Night Live, etc.), chartered planes to evacuate Katrina victims, taught a college journalism class, served on the boards of Apple and Google, and all sorts of other things.
So far as I know, he didn't look to the government to help with any of these projects, even in cases where it was arguably the government's job to be doing what he did.
During those same years, the advocates of "smaller government" ran up a huge national debt, dramatically increased the intrusion of government into our lives (including, to keep this post sort of on topic, aiding their corporate owners in trying to squeeze out Open Source software), and engaged in the largest corporate welfare program in history.
The headline asks the question if he is the leader, its not a statement but since you brought it up, whom would you declare the OSS leader? Al Gore?
Maybe, but only if he picks Feingold as his running mate.
But seriously, it would have to be RMS. Linus pointedly isn't trying to lead a movement (at a conference he reportedly said "I really don't like the idea of thousands of people following me. (pause) But I'd appreciate it if someone could tell me where the men's room is.").
RMS, on the otherhand, has been pointently "leading" for going on three decades now.
--MarkusQ
P.S. And what Gore actually said was: "During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet. I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives that have proven to be important to our country's economic growth and environmental protection, improvements in our educational system." Which was true.
As Vincent Cerf, said "The Internet would not be where it is in the United States without the strong support given to it and related research areas by the Vice President [Gore] in his current role and in his earlier role as Senator."
And Dave Ferber said without Gore the Internet "would not be where it is today."
And Marc Andreesen said "Gore made [Mosaic] possible with the High Performance Computing Act."
And Joseph E. Traub said "[Gore] was perhaps the first political leader to grasp the importance of networking the country. Could we perhaps see an end to cheap shots from politicians and pundits about inventing the Internet?"
Whistleblowers go to the authorities (police, management, congress, etc).
Leakers go to the media.
Uh right. So, if you're a cop and you discover that the police chief and a bunch of your fellow officers are in cahoots with drug smugglers, you just go tell...who?
If you find out damning information about people who have the ability to have you killed (even if you don't think they'd do it) you have three basic choices:
Tell the media, anonymously, or otherwise spread the information (with whatever proof you have) far and wide as fast as you can
Be an idiot and tell someone "in authority" who may well be in on it
Be a greedy idiot, and try to blackmail them
Your distinction isn't between "wistleblower" and "leaker" it's between "dead sap" and "live whistleblower."
--MarkusQ
P.S. In any case, even if you do get it out in time that they don't gain anything by shutting you up, you can expect to get fired so they can dismiss you as a "disgruntled former employee," and, if you've really got the dirt on them, you may also get your very own swiftboating.
Besides, sure, today its just intelligence on terrorists.
Ah, but it's not. They're already monitoring reporters calls to find their sources for stories that might embarrass the administration.
Combine that with the fact that they already get news outlets to bury many of the stories that do get out, it looks like they're already stomping on the first amendment.
As it turns out, you are wrong. The HTML spec says:
In HTML, there are two types of hyphens: the plain hyphen and the soft hyphen. The plain hyphen should be interpreted by a user agent as just another character. The soft hyphen tells the user agent where a line break can occur.
Those browsers that interpret soft hyphens must observe the following semantics: If a line is broken at a soft hyphen, a hyphen character must be displayed at the end of the first line. If a line is not broken at a soft hyphen, the user agent must not display a hyphen character. For operations such as searching and sorting, the soft hyphen should always be ignored.
In HTML, the plain hyphen is represented by the "-" character (- or -). The soft hyphen is represented by the character entity reference ­ (­ or ­)
­ indicates and optional line break; browsers are not required to break at ­, but if they do they need to display a hyphen.
Mozilla follows the semantics as specified. In fact, despite the fact that you may prefer MSIE's implementation, it is arguably incorrect given the ambiguous/conflicting specifications for the character and its semantics.
No you're missing (or attempting to dodge) the point:
Complaining that a browser released in 2001 - and that's had almost no standards-related bug fixes since then - is much worse than a browser that's been through constant maintenance since then is not exactly surprising, irrelevant of the fact that it's from Microsoft.
So rather than just acknowledge the unsurprising truth, you choose to judge browsers by their release date instead of by the actual date now, in the real world. That's like saying:
<parody>
Complaining that a patent medicine sold in 1901 - and that's had almost no health-care-related changes since then - is much worse than a medicine that's the product of constant clinical trials and laboratory studies since then is not exactly surprising, irrelevant of the fact that it's from Microsoft.
</parody>
All you've done is moved the amazement from "MSIE 6 is amazingly buggy" to "it's amazing that a multi billion dollar company can't keep up with a bunch of volunteers."
As far as anyone actually developing cross browser web sites is concerned, the effect is exactly the same.
Soft-hyphen support doesn't seem like a big deal if you're working in English, but to Germans it's a very big deal indeed. This bug has gone unfixed for five years, And the weird thing is that much much harder problems related to CSS rendering have been flattened with ease.
I dispute this, on the grounds that it hasn't been fixed. The code is, after all, open source, and there are a large number of talented programmers who speak Germanic languages. If it were as big of a deal as you suggest, and as much easier than the "much harder problems that have been flattened with ease," why hasn't anyone stepped up and fixed it?
The whole point of open source is that people focus their efforts on the bugs that matter to them. If no one addresses a bug, that means that there wasn't anyone who found it important enough to fix.
Nuts. This is as bad as counting "security patches" as if all bug were equally important.
You link to the fact that Mozilla renders one character incorrectly, while ignoring things like the fact that MSIE fails to render large chunks of standard compliant pages at all. They just vanish, poof. If these were the only two bugs, I suspect you'd say that they were "equally standards compliant" wouldn't you? After all, they only have one bug each, right?
Yes, obviously there are multiple people within the company involved, but by that reasoning every action by every company is a conspiracy. And only the most vehemently anti-corporate person would argue that:-)
If I understand what you're saying, that's circular reasoning. The point being argued (despite what "everyone knows" conspiracies aren't all that rare) can't be rebutted by saying only extremists would argue that a clear example of them not being rare actually is what it looks like, presumably because "everyone knows" that conspiracies are rare.
A conspiracy is simply a group of people working in secret to do something, usually (but by no means always) something bad (e.g. "I suspect people of conspiring to make me happy."). A typical large corporation generally has several thousand conspiracies going on at once. You don't have to be "vehemently anti-corporate" to see this, but you do have to loose the "conspiracies are impossible" dogma.
It should in any case have already died in this debate long ago, since the official story is also a conspiracy theory. It isn't a matter of conspiracy theory vs. non-conspiracy theory, it's a matter of which conspiracy theory you like better.
That "debunking" PDF you posted is...odd. It reads more like a bad parody of Mystery Science Theater 3000 than a serious rebuttal. At first I was a little put off by the author insisting on staying anonymous, but after reading it I can see why he/she/they went that route.
While I have not seen "Loose Change", nor had the time to read your PDF. Here is another reference guide that pretty much shoots down the idea that a missle was used at the Pentagon:
I would agree that you haven't seen Loose Change, or read the PDF. The link that you provide disputes points that were not raised in Loose Change, and does not address the majority of the points it does raise.
For the record, I'm not endorsing either point of view, but I am against throwing straw men around.
Thank you. Somehow I'd managed to miss that paragraph. That moves it from the realm of "Now wait a minute!" to "How odd!"
I still have questions about the details/accuracy of their estimation, but that means I'm far better off than before your post, when it hadn't even occurred to me think about the issue.
4) We went through the long, painful public process of amending the constitution before the IRS in its present form was created. In effect, We The People agreed, beforehand, to the IRS.
If the IRS was a secret program that was created by the president without the approval of congress or the people, and we only found out about it because someone leaked, you can bet there'd be a stink about it.
5) The IRS applies to everyone equally.
One of the big objections to this program is that it is being used to target people who might gather and report information damaging to this administration. Imagine if your tax rate depended on how loyal you were to the government. Wouldn't that be a teensy violation of the first amendment?
There are at several fundamental flaws with this argument (note, by the way, that I am not endorsing either theory here, just looking at the logic of your critique).
Both of the proposed explanations of what happened that day are "conspiracy theories" and both require a large number of people to cooperate in order for the plan to work. The difference isn't in the number of people, but in their ethnic background. The official conspiracy theory would have required a large number of people to keep the secret as well, but more of them would have been foreigners, which you find easier to accept.
The number of people who would have had to "know the big picture" wouldn't have been as large as you think. Many people could just be doing their job, and not need (or be given) the big picture. This is commonly accepted as a necessary part of the official conspiracy theory (that's why we talk about terrorists "cells" instead of, say, terrorist "joint task forces").
Whistle blowers do come forward, after the fact, to report (or accuse, or confess) but there is a selection bias. For example, the people who come forward to talk about how the pilots behaved at their flight school are considered witnesses, if their stories match the official version, crackpots if they don't. Ditto with the building workers, FBI leakers, etc. Overall, the FBI leakers point more towards a government conspiracy (e.g. claiming things like being ordered off investigation that could have stopped it) than to the official story.
Large numbers of ordinary Americans have successfully kept organized efforts to kill large numbers of people secret in the past; the Manhattan project and the KKK are two obvious examples. I'm not saying that it's common, but it certainly not as implausable as you seem to think.
The disgusting part of this conspiracy theory for me is that IF flight 77 did NOT hit the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, the implication is then that the government was complicit in the "attack" - which leaves in doubt the disposition of flight 77 itself. Most conspiracy theorists don't talk about this, because it will make them look wacko: if flight 77 didn't hit the Pentagon, then where is it? Well, if our own government hit the Pentagon with a missile, then it must have destroyed flight 77, possibly over the ocean, murdering all of the passengers. Or, perhaps it landed somewhere, and all of the passengers were executed or "disappeared".
That takes it into the realm of bookkeeping. We know that they are holding some people, we just don't know who. We know that they got airplanes from somewhere, we just don't know where. So some people propose that the people and aircraft missing from column A might be found among the people and airplanes that inexplicably show up in column B. This isn't proof, of course, but it certainly adds to the plausibility.
And if the government was responsible for the Pentagon attack, that automatically means it was responsible for all of 9/11, meaning that 9/11 was merely a US government plot to murder 3000 people as an excuse for warmongering in the mideast. It also requires that you believe a lot of other technical and logistical details about all of the events of 9/11 that are diametrically opposed to all of the evidence. Now, our government may have done a lot of questionable, and even terrible, things in its history, but give me a break.
Well, we know for a fact that they've killed a lot more than 3000 since the war started, and that they had no problem testing germ warfare prototypes on US civilians. From FOIA documents we know that they planned things like it in the past (e.g. Northwood), and the history books tell us that other nations have done worse things in their day. This sort of thing is apparently considered "strategy" once you start thinking in the "we're at war" mindset. About that many US citizens were "expended" to take Normandy, and our government was actually quite proud of killing 50 times that number of civilians (heck, even the number of preschoolers was higher than 3000) when we nuked Japan. So, while the idea is unpleasant to us, that certainly doesn't mean that there aren't people in the military right this minute who would do it without hesitation if they were ordered to. And, for that matter, when Bush won't rule out nuking Iran (which, incidentally, has a lot of young kids living in it) we can reasonably suppose that there are people around who would order such a thing.
It even extends beyond the military. Look at how many people die because corporate/government collusion in hiding a danger to prevent liability. Tobacco is an obvious one, but drugs, tires, and even beauty products have killed people because some official decided that their goal for the quarter was worth a few dozen, or even hundred strangers dying.
--MarkusQ
P.S. For several of your other points, I'd suggested seeing "Loose Change"--while I don't endorse all of their claims, they do address several of the points that you brought up in much more detail than I can.
The conspiracy theory requires some relatively ridiculous assumptions. If the pancaking effect was not possible without explosives, then the government would have had to place shaped charges on every support column on every single floor of the WTC. In both buildings. Without any of the 50,000 employees noticing. Why would the government even bother with such a risky operation when it's well known that a fire can collapse a building?
The assumptions may seem ridiculous in isolation, but they do dovetail in interesting ways with other independently verified (published in MSM, or visible in broadcast footage of the event) facts that we know of:
Many portions of the destroyed buildings had been closed at various times in the proceeding week "for security reasons", with technicians going in and out. While the whole buildings were never closed, the portions covered most of the building.
The scans by bomb sniffing dogs that had been in routine use were canceled.
The company that ran the security and did these things had close ties with the Bush family (e.g. his brother Marvin)
Puffs of smoke were seen (and "popping" sounds reported) from floors bellow the wave of collapse, leading it all the way down.
See the movie "Loose Change" for more, and follow up if you wish by going the the newspaper archives of your local library.
The point is, your assumptions are flawed. Many of the WTC employees did notice unusual activity, and reported it at the time. Further, if it's so well known that fire can collapse this type of steel frame building, just post one example of it happening elsewhere. If it hasn't happened, that it doesn't matter how "well known" it is.
Where did you see anything relating to a phrase "best that we can hope for without massive shielding"?
The linked article (and specifically the portion which you excerpted), were discussing the lower bound we could expect for neutron flux. When something is "bad" then the lower bound is, by definition, "the best that we can hope for".
However, the article did so (rather disingenuously, I thought) in terms of a person standing near such a reactor without any shielding. This is clearly nuts. Anything thats generating 100Mw in a confined space is going to need rather hefty shielding of some form or another.
But all that aside, the arguments in the wikipedia article seem suspect to me, simply because the sun seems to do much better (producing more energy per released neutron) than the article indicates as possible. This is just a back of the envelope (but without an envelope) calculation, so I'm not making a counter claim, I'm just voicing skepticism.
--MarkusQ
P.S. Overall, I think we're pretty much in agreement. And in general, I find wikipedia pretty reliable. But I take everything with a grain of salt.
If the article were correct, and the "best that we can hope for without massive shielding" scales as stated, why don't astronauts all quickly die? Neutron flux should scale the same as anything else (1/r2), and they sure don't have massive shielding on the ISS. So if we were to build a "little sun", someone standing at a point from which the energy per square meter was the same as that from the sun in LEO, they should need no more protection than someone on the ISS, which should be cheap and easy to provide since we don't have to hoist it up there. Yet this "little sun" would be providing a considerable amount of energy.
Let's do some order-of-magnitude estimates. If we call the solar equivalent distance r, we should get 10 Watts/meter * 4*Pi*r2 watts out of it, or about 100*r2 watts; for the 100 MW reactor, this means r is about 1km. If our containment wall is at 100m, we'll only need one thousand times the shielding of the ISS; in other words, in the worst case we should be fine if we bury it about 20 meters down.
Also, for comparison, how close could you stand to the furnace of a 100Mw coal fired plant if there were no shielding? I think 110m would be rather...uncomfortable, and your life expectancy wouldn't be much better than that cited in the article.
Before you go, you should know a few things about the place:
The food is generally wonderful, though not as spicy/salty as in the US
They have a higher literacy rate than the US
Honking your horn at random while you drive basically means "Hello, nice day, isn't it?"
The beaches are what you'd expect in the tropics, but the capital is about 70-75 degrees year round.
Petty crimes in some areas are more common than others (don't walk around downtown at midnight with your wallet hanging out of your pocket).
Violent crimes over all are less common than in the states
They have no army, but a large fraction of the citizens carry guns.
The people are generally extremely nice, and very polite
They have a better sense of humor than we do
Even so, being a jerk is not recommended
The national saying translates to "life is good"; unlike "have a nice day" they actually mean it.
Other than that, it's basically a great place for a vacation. I know some people who went down there on vacation in the mid 1980s, and still plan on going back home to the states someday.
Australia is nice, but it's far from being the "last place left." To pick just one example a tad closer to home, three of the last presidents of Costa Rica are in prison at this very moment.
"Why?" you might ask. "Do they have particularly crooked politicians down there?"
No, not really. Their politicians aren't much different that politicians anywhere. The difference is, they have a rather odd custom regarding the laws. When their politicians break the law they investigate, arrest, try, and eventually convict the ones who do it. In other words, they treat their elected officials just like anybody else.
From what I can tell, as a side benefit, it seems to have a salubrious effect on the rest of the politicians.
Slashdot Mirror
What are you working on, a roll of masking tape? Or one of those old egyptian reed scrolls?
We've got random access paper now. It comes in sheets of various sizes and you can hop around all you want.
--MarkusQ
No one is saying Gore invented electrons (though, I wouldn't be surprised if there weren't some wingnuts claiming that he claimed it--after all, there were little pockets of the Japanese army still holed up and fighting on islands in the South Pacific for a long time after WWII was over, and no doubt Election 2000 has its share).
No one is saying that he invented transistors either. In fact, there are a whole slew of steps to creating "the Internet" (ASCII, anyone?), and no one person could possibly have contributed to more than a small fraction of them. And, consequently, no one expects that anyone seriously believes this.
So, expecting you to be intellectually honest, I wrote the sentence which you quote:
"[Gore] started working towards a goal before others joined in, and that is obviously true in this case."
But given how hard you were working to twist Gore's words, I was foolish to expect that you'd leave mine untwisted. Your response:
Gore start working toward what? Creating the internet? Before others joined in? And this is "Obviously true"? Your sources?
I know you'd like Gore to have said that he created the internet. But he didn't say that because it isn't true. I know you'd like me to have said that taking the initiative means "doing something before anyone else" but I didn't say that because it doesn't mean that. You can take the initiative in getting your friends to "go watch the game in person instead of on TV" even if there are thousands of people in the stands already. Taking initiative isn't about being first, it's about moving forward when the people around you aren't.
Re: your reference to Bush & Co -- "oh, look over there!"
Yes, exactly. At least here you claim to have understood my point. Why are you waisting your time beating this horse? Look over there! A bunch of madmen have taken over your country and are bankrupting it, building a monstrous police state, and killing tens of thousands of innocent people, all based on transparent lies. And you're still trying to malign somebody who had the effrontery to try (but fail) to stop them.
Teach them without computers.
No, seriously.
If you really want to teach programming (instead of teaching "using a computer"), start them out on paper and make them actually think about what they're trying to do instead of getting caught up in using the interface. Then have them work in groups using a whiteboard, and don't let them test their code until they've all agreed that it's correct. Teach them to look out for their own mistakes, and the mistakes of others, rather than counting on the computer to do their thinking for them.
There was a definite advantage to the old submit-a-deck-of-cards system, in that mistakes were annoying and you worked hard to avoid them. To do this, you had to really think about what you were trying to accomplish, how you planed to do it, and what might go wrong. In other words, you were really learning to program.
On the other hand, with highly interactive environments (which are extremely useful once you know what you are doing) beginners are all to tempted to fall into a trial and error loop until they get something that "works"--which is to say, it happens to produce reasonable results for whatever limited test case they are using--without ever really thinking about the program.
Suppose you were teaching flying. Would you start your students out in an advanced aircraft with an autopilot that could take off and land unassisted, and all sorts of doodads to make flying easy--or would you sit them down with a pad of paper and make them work out things like stall speed and fuel requirement problems until they really understood the issues?
-- MarkusQ
Nuts. Saying you took the initiative in doing something does not mean that you accomplished it single handedly, or even that you cause it to happen. It means that you got off your butt and started working towards a goal before others joined in, and that is obviously true in this case.
RMS, for example, clearly took the initiative in creating the free software movement, even though Linux got done long before the Hurd.
-- MarkusQ
P.S. If a statement like Gore's, that can be misread to imply something that is (harmlessly) false sets your blood boiling, I'll bet you are fuming mad when you hear politicians say more outrageous stuff, like:
It's true if you believe R&D only happens because of the government. It's true if you believe the government is the creative force behind all its funded projects. It's true if you believe research is not possible without the government.
Nuts. I don't believe any of those things, yet I can see that Gore was telling the truth. You don't have to believe that all cars are made in Detroit to recognize that some particular car was. And you don't have to believe that government drives all R&D to recognize that the internet (the backbone, not the content) was a an outgrowth of research and development by the US government.
It was quotes like that that truly drove people (like me) away from Gore. He was (and still is, I think) of the single mind that the government is the sole driving force of the country and in this case, technological innovation.
Nuts again.
While Gore may have worked in government, he has certainly done a great deal in the private sector as well. Since the 2000 election, he has started his own TV network, made a movie, appeared on several TV shows (Futerama, Saturday Night Live, etc.), chartered planes to evacuate Katrina victims, taught a college journalism class, served on the boards of Apple and Google, and all sorts of other things.
So far as I know, he didn't look to the government to help with any of these projects, even in cases where it was arguably the government's job to be doing what he did.
During those same years, the advocates of "smaller government" ran up a huge national debt, dramatically increased the intrusion of government into our lives (including, to keep this post sort of on topic, aiding their corporate owners in trying to squeeze out Open Source software), and engaged in the largest corporate welfare program in history.
--MarkusQ
The headline asks the question if he is the leader, its not a statement but since you brought it up, whom would you declare the OSS leader? Al Gore?
Maybe, but only if he picks Feingold as his running mate.
But seriously, it would have to be RMS. Linus pointedly isn't trying to lead a movement (at a conference he reportedly said "I really don't like the idea of thousands of people following me. (pause) But I'd appreciate it if someone could tell me where the men's room is.").
RMS, on the otherhand, has been pointently "leading" for going on three decades now.
--MarkusQ
P.S. And what Gore actually said was: "During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet. I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives that have proven to be important to our country's economic growth and environmental protection, improvements in our educational system." Which was true.
As Vincent Cerf, said "The Internet would not be where it is in the United States without the strong support given to it and related research areas by the Vice President [Gore] in his current role and in his earlier role as Senator."
And Dave Ferber said without Gore the Internet "would not be where it is today."
And Marc Andreesen said "Gore made [Mosaic] possible with the High Performance Computing Act."
And Joseph E. Traub said "[Gore] was perhaps the first political leader to grasp the importance of networking the country. Could we perhaps see an end to cheap shots from politicians and pundits about inventing the Internet?"
See Seth's page.
I don't use free/libre software, and have similar stability. (Yep, I've got a Mac.)
Interesting. What OS are you running on it?
--MarkusQ
Whistleblowers go to the authorities (police, management, congress, etc).
Leakers go to the media.
Uh right. So, if you're a cop and you discover that the police chief and a bunch of your fellow officers are in cahoots with drug smugglers, you just go tell...who?
If you find out damning information about people who have the ability to have you killed (even if you don't think they'd do it) you have three basic choices:
Your distinction isn't between "wistleblower" and "leaker" it's between "dead sap" and "live whistleblower."
--MarkusQ
P.S. In any case, even if you do get it out in time that they don't gain anything by shutting you up, you can expect to get fired so they can dismiss you as a "disgruntled former employee," and, if you've really got the dirt on them, you may also get your very own swiftboating.
Besides, sure, today its just intelligence on terrorists.
Ah, but it's not. They're already monitoring reporters calls to find their sources for stories that might embarrass the administration.
Combine that with the fact that they already get news outlets to bury many of the stories that do get out, it looks like they're already stomping on the first amendment.
--MarkusQ
As it turns out, you are wrong. The HTML spec says: ­ indicates and optional line break; browsers are not required to break at ­, but if they do they need to display a hyphen.
Mozilla follows the semantics as specified. In fact, despite the fact that you may prefer MSIE's implementation, it is arguably incorrect given the ambiguous/conflicting specifications for the character and its semantics.
--MarkusQ
No you're missing (or attempting to dodge) the point:
Complaining that a browser released in 2001 - and that's had almost no standards-related bug fixes since then - is much worse than a browser that's been through constant maintenance since then is not exactly surprising, irrelevant of the fact that it's from Microsoft.
So rather than just acknowledge the unsurprising truth, you choose to judge browsers by their release date instead of by the actual date now, in the real world. That's like saying:
All you've done is moved the amazement from "MSIE 6 is amazingly buggy" to "it's amazing that a multi billion dollar company can't keep up with a bunch of volunteers."As far as anyone actually developing cross browser web sites is concerned, the effect is exactly the same.
Soft-hyphen support doesn't seem like a big deal if you're working in English, but to Germans it's a very big deal indeed. This bug has gone unfixed for five years, And the weird thing is that much much harder problems related to CSS rendering have been flattened with ease.
I dispute this, on the grounds that it hasn't been fixed. The code is, after all, open source, and there are a large number of talented programmers who speak Germanic languages. If it were as big of a deal as you suggest, and as much easier than the "much harder problems that have been flattened with ease," why hasn't anyone stepped up and fixed it?
The whole point of open source is that people focus their efforts on the bugs that matter to them. If no one addresses a bug, that means that there wasn't anyone who found it important enough to fix.
--MarkusQ
You sir, are unlikely to ever be elected to public office.
But if, by some chance, you are, would you please invite me to your poker parties?
--MarkusQ
Nuts. This is as bad as counting "security patches" as if all bug were equally important.
You link to the fact that Mozilla renders one character incorrectly, while ignoring things like the fact that MSIE fails to render large chunks of standard compliant pages at all. They just vanish, poof. If these were the only two bugs, I suspect you'd say that they were "equally standards compliant" wouldn't you? After all, they only have one bug each, right?
Bah I say.
--MarkusQ
Yes, obviously there are multiple people within the company involved, but by that reasoning every action by every company is a conspiracy. And only the most vehemently anti-corporate person would argue that
If I understand what you're saying, that's circular reasoning. The point being argued (despite what "everyone knows" conspiracies aren't all that rare) can't be rebutted by saying only extremists would argue that a clear example of them not being rare actually is what it looks like, presumably because "everyone knows" that conspiracies are rare.
A conspiracy is simply a group of people working in secret to do something, usually (but by no means always) something bad (e.g. "I suspect people of conspiring to make me happy."). A typical large corporation generally has several thousand conspiracies going on at once. You don't have to be "vehemently anti-corporate" to see this, but you do have to loose the "conspiracies are impossible" dogma.
It should in any case have already died in this debate long ago, since the official story is also a conspiracy theory. It isn't a matter of conspiracy theory vs. non-conspiracy theory, it's a matter of which conspiracy theory you like better.
--MarkusQ
That "debunking" PDF you posted is...odd. It reads more like a bad parody of Mystery Science Theater 3000 than a serious rebuttal. At first I was a little put off by the author insisting on staying anonymous, but after reading it I can see why he/she/they went that route.
--MarkusQ
While I have not seen "Loose Change", nor had the time to read your PDF. Here is another reference guide that pretty much shoots down the idea that a missle was used at the Pentagon:
I would agree that you haven't seen Loose Change, or read the PDF. The link that you provide disputes points that were not raised in Loose Change, and does not address the majority of the points it does raise.
For the record, I'm not endorsing either point of view, but I am against throwing straw men around.
--MarkusQ
Thank you. Somehow I'd managed to miss that paragraph. That moves it from the realm of "Now wait a minute!" to "How odd!"
I still have questions about the details/accuracy of their estimation, but that means I'm far better off than before your post, when it hadn't even occurred to me think about the issue.
--MarkusQ
4) We went through the long, painful public process of amending the constitution before the IRS in its present form was created. In effect, We The People agreed, beforehand, to the IRS. 5) The IRS applies to everyone equally. -- MarkusQ
There are at several fundamental flaws with this argument (note, by the way, that I am not endorsing either theory here, just looking at the logic of your critique).
-- MarkusQ
The disgusting part of this conspiracy theory for me is that IF flight 77 did NOT hit the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, the implication is then that the government was complicit in the "attack" - which leaves in doubt the disposition of flight 77 itself. Most conspiracy theorists don't talk about this, because it will make them look wacko: if flight 77 didn't hit the Pentagon, then where is it? Well, if our own government hit the Pentagon with a missile, then it must have destroyed flight 77, possibly over the ocean, murdering all of the passengers. Or, perhaps it landed somewhere, and all of the passengers were executed or "disappeared".
This point used to bother me, too, until I learned that they have a worldwide network of secret prisons, and that they use the same models of planes as are used by commercial airlines to fly people in and out of them.
That takes it into the realm of bookkeeping. We know that they are holding some people, we just don't know who. We know that they got airplanes from somewhere, we just don't know where. So some people propose that the people and aircraft missing from column A might be found among the people and airplanes that inexplicably show up in column B. This isn't proof, of course, but it certainly adds to the plausibility.
And if the government was responsible for the Pentagon attack, that automatically means it was responsible for all of 9/11, meaning that 9/11 was merely a US government plot to murder 3000 people as an excuse for warmongering in the mideast. It also requires that you believe a lot of other technical and logistical details about all of the events of 9/11 that are diametrically opposed to all of the evidence. Now, our government may have done a lot of questionable, and even terrible, things in its history, but give me a break.
Well, we know for a fact that they've killed a lot more than 3000 since the war started, and that they had no problem testing germ warfare prototypes on US civilians. From FOIA documents we know that they planned things like it in the past (e.g. Northwood), and the history books tell us that other nations have done worse things in their day. This sort of thing is apparently considered "strategy" once you start thinking in the "we're at war" mindset. About that many US citizens were "expended" to take Normandy, and our government was actually quite proud of killing 50 times that number of civilians (heck, even the number of preschoolers was higher than 3000) when we nuked Japan. So, while the idea is unpleasant to us, that certainly doesn't mean that there aren't people in the military right this minute who would do it without hesitation if they were ordered to. And, for that matter, when Bush won't rule out nuking Iran (which, incidentally, has a lot of young kids living in it) we can reasonably suppose that there are people around who would order such a thing.
It even extends beyond the military. Look at how many people die because corporate/government collusion in hiding a danger to prevent liability. Tobacco is an obvious one, but drugs, tires, and even beauty products have killed people because some official decided that their goal for the quarter was worth a few dozen, or even hundred strangers dying.
--MarkusQ
P.S. For several of your other points, I'd suggested seeing "Loose Change"--while I don't endorse all of their claims, they do address several of the points that you brought up in much more detail than I can.
The conspiracy theory requires some relatively ridiculous assumptions. If the pancaking effect was not possible without explosives, then the government would have had to place shaped charges on every support column on every single floor of the WTC. In both buildings. Without any of the 50,000 employees noticing. Why would the government even bother with such a risky operation when it's well known that a fire can collapse a building?
The assumptions may seem ridiculous in isolation, but they do dovetail in interesting ways with other independently verified (published in MSM, or visible in broadcast footage of the event) facts that we know of:
See the movie "Loose Change" for more, and follow up if you wish by going the the newspaper archives of your local library.
The point is, your assumptions are flawed. Many of the WTC employees did notice unusual activity, and reported it at the time. Further, if it's so well known that fire can collapse this type of steel frame building, just post one example of it happening elsewhere. If it hasn't happened, that it doesn't matter how "well known" it is.
--MarkusQ
Where did you see anything relating to a phrase "best that we can hope for without massive shielding"?
The linked article (and specifically the portion which you excerpted), were discussing the lower bound we could expect for neutron flux. When something is "bad" then the lower bound is, by definition, "the best that we can hope for".
However, the article did so (rather disingenuously, I thought) in terms of a person standing near such a reactor without any shielding. This is clearly nuts. Anything thats generating 100Mw in a confined space is going to need rather hefty shielding of some form or another.
But all that aside, the arguments in the wikipedia article seem suspect to me, simply because the sun seems to do much better (producing more energy per released neutron) than the article indicates as possible. This is just a back of the envelope (but without an envelope) calculation, so I'm not making a counter claim, I'm just voicing skepticism.
--MarkusQ
P.S. Overall, I think we're pretty much in agreement. And in general, I find wikipedia pretty reliable. But I take everything with a grain of salt.
If the article were correct, and the "best that we can hope for without massive shielding" scales as stated, why don't astronauts all quickly die? Neutron flux should scale the same as anything else (1/r2), and they sure don't have massive shielding on the ISS. So if we were to build a "little sun", someone standing at a point from which the energy per square meter was the same as that from the sun in LEO, they should need no more protection than someone on the ISS, which should be cheap and easy to provide since we don't have to hoist it up there. Yet this "little sun" would be providing a considerable amount of energy.
Let's do some order-of-magnitude estimates. If we call the solar equivalent distance r, we should get 10 Watts/meter * 4*Pi*r2 watts out of it, or about 100*r2 watts; for the 100 MW reactor, this means r is about 1km. If our containment wall is at 100m, we'll only need one thousand times the shielding of the ISS; in other words, in the worst case we should be fine if we bury it about 20 meters down.
Also, for comparison, how close could you stand to the furnace of a 100Mw coal fired plant if there were no shielding? I think 110m would be rather...uncomfortable, and your life expectancy wouldn't be much better than that cited in the article.
--MarkusQ
Before you go, you should know a few things about the place:
Other than that, it's basically a great place for a vacation. I know some people who went down there on vacation in the mid 1980s, and still plan on going back home to the states someday.
--MarkusQ
Australia is nice, but it's far from being the "last place left." To pick just one example a tad closer to home, three of the last presidents of Costa Rica are in prison at this very moment.
"Why?" you might ask. "Do they have particularly crooked politicians down there?"
No, not really. Their politicians aren't much different that politicians anywhere. The difference is, they have a rather odd custom regarding the laws. When their politicians break the law they investigate, arrest, try, and eventually convict the ones who do it. In other words, they treat their elected officials just like anybody else.
From what I can tell, as a side benefit, it seems to have a salubrious effect on the rest of the politicians.
--MarkusQ