Every time we have an article on Slashdot about some backups-gone-bad horror story, someone always asks "hey, how come we never hear about the times when things go right and the sysadmin saves the company?"
Well, here you go.
Somebody owes someone a beer.
Re:Social hack - use "bullfight" for "speed trap".
on
Is Your GPS Naive?
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55mph seems a perfectly reasonable limit to protect such drivers from themselves.
And therein lies your fallacy -- I do not need nor want laws that protect people from themselves.
Yeah I originally thought it was a compatibility layer that would let you run x86/Linux apps on POWER/AIX, but I don't think it's quite that.
From TFA:
IBM expects ISVs that don't already have a native Linux on POWER product to be able to expand their addressable market to System p servers at minimal cost by allowing them to run their existing x86 Linux applications on these servers without having to recompile, release new media or documentation, or maintain a unique product offering for POWER technology.
So basically it's a way of taking x86/Linux binaries and running them on POWER/Linux without a recompile. (And, one assumes, if you're an end-user, without going back to the software's manufacturer and paying through the nose for a new POWER version; you can move from x86 to POWER and still use all your same apps, without buying new versions.)
Personally, I'd rather pay more for goods, and create a perhaps-unnecessary domestic industry, than buy cheap imported goods and have high taxes in order to support all the unemployed people on the dole.
(Actually the first version was grammatically correct but the meaning was different if parsed literally.) Shame on me.
I think Power (according to IBM, anyway) offers a lot better performance/watt and scales better up to supercomputer-ish sizes.
And I think you can even integrate x86 blades into some of IBM's high-end systems for running Linux x86 binaries; the idea is with this new virtual environment, you wouldn't need to purchase the additional hardware.
I see this whole thing as basically a bullet point that they can use when selling POWER to a prospective client -- they can put it out there as one architecture that will run most anything. (Well, except Windows stuff.)
It's a shame, a short-sited policy, but benefits a few (I think two) wealthy families that own the US sugar production and benefit from high prices.
Well, them, and the fairly large swath of the U.S. involved in corn production. It's not like they could very easily switch over to growing sugar cane...
I'm not normally a fan of protectionism, but I think you have to consider what exactly we're going to do in this country if we start importing everything. Right now, with corn syrup, U.S. consumers are effectively subsidizing corn growers through their purchases of HFCS-containing beverages and foods. If we dropped the trade barriers, imported sugar from the Caribbean or South America instead, and eviscerated the corn industry, those same consumers (now called "taxpayers") would probably just end up subsidizing the same corn growers again, only it would be via welfare, unemployment, and various government bailouts of the corporations that would fail.
Personally, I'd rather pay more for goods, and create a perhaps-unnecessary domestic industry, then buy cheap imported goods and have high taxes in order to support all the unemployed people on the dole. As a taxpayer/consumer, I get screwed either way, but at least this way I don't have the double indignity of knowing that my money is being taken at gunpoint and given to people who aren't working, which I find fundamentally offensive.
I admit I haven't really been paying attention to SPARC recently.
Can anyone fill me in on what its performance is like compared to x86 these days, when running Linux or Unix (Solaris)? (I don't think MS even supports Windows on non-x86 anymore, except perhaps Itanium and it's probably near-EOL anyway.)
There seemed to be a lot of buzz about the Niagara stuff a while back, and how amazing the performance/watt was going to be, and then it seemed to evaporate. Did something happen, or was that just the fanboys moving on to something else shiny? (And is Niagara open-source/open-architecture like the more basic SPARC processors?)
I've always been a big fan of RISC, since back in the early 90s; I think it's sad that we're fast approaching a monoculture, although there's some solace, I suppose, in the fact that with decreasing process sizes, you can now tack the x86 instruction set onto almost any real processor you want. But it certainly seemed like there were more avenues for performance being investigated back when you had IBM with Power, DEC with Alpha, Sun with SPARC, SGI with MIPS, HP with PA-RISC, and probably a bunch more that I've forgotten.
Where do you get this information from? Surely you can see that there is an agenda going on here.
Well, if all they wanted was a nice light-water power reactor, and they didn't have bomb-making aspirations, they could just stop all the saber-rattling and have one set up next month. I'm sure GE, Westinghouse, ABB, and a half-dozen other companies would be falling over themselves to be the prime contractor on that.
They'd get a reactor, and all the knowledge on how it works, plus all the training to run it, and probably all the MOX or low-enriched fuel they could shake a stick at. All they'd have to do is play by the rules that they already signed up to follow.
But I think it's pretty obvious that they don't really care about power generation -- first of all, they're sitting on a huge load of petroleum, which by the time they run out of it, any reactor they build today will be woefully obsolete -- and there's a lot to be gained, politically, if they have bombs. They protect themselves from invasion, they can threaten Israel, they can threaten the more moderate Arab states, heck they can probably threaten parts of Eastern Europe. They'd be able to have the ultimate carrot and stick: the carrot is the petroleum they're sitting on, which everyone wants, and the stick would be their nuclear arsenal, coupled with the theatre ballistic missiles they already have.
The goal of having a peaceful nuclear power industry just doesn't mesh with any of their actions, and I don't think -- given Ahmadinejad's fiery rhetoric -- that anyone really trusts what their real intentions are.
unlike Iraq, which seems to have tried to develop a program, failed, but left just enough detritus around to give the chicken hawks material for their misinformation campaign
Well, they did have one, but the Israelis blew it up.
The French -- in some sort of a fit of Gaullish pique -- sold the Iraqis a breeder reactor (technically it was a "materials testing reactor," but without an established nuclear program and any 'materials' to 'test,' it was pretty clear what they wanted with a high-neutron-flux design). The Israelis decided that was a no-go, and so they did some serious damage to it via an airstrike, before the fuel was loaded.
Then the Iran-Iraq war broke out, and -- at least in hindsight -- it's not clear whether Saddam ever really put that much serious effort into restarting the project. There's a lot of speculation in both directions; that the attack caused Saddam to pour a lot more resources into uranium enrichment (via gas separation), which would ultimately have produced more bombs than the single Pu breeder (see the quote on the WP page), or alternately that the Iran-Iraq war was such a drain on Iraq's resources that they never had the capability again, and/or put their resources into chem/bio stuff from then on.
The rest of the reactor complex was destroyed (pretty much pounded into rubble) in 1991, so it's probably not going to answer any questions now.
Well, the larger ships can't go through Suez anyway, that's why they want to enlarge it considerably now. Still, the only country you have to deal with is Egypt. Though I dunno if some other country holds the rights to the canal.
Intercontinental transport is mainly done through ships today. Simply because of cost efficiency. You certainly do NOT want to do a land transport through the middle east, not only because of the political situation. It's not really comfy to run your goods through deserts and mountains. So you would essentially bypass pretty much all of the middle east, safe those countries that border the red sea. And how much influence they have on travel through the canal can easily be seen at the example of Sudan, Eritrea, Djibouti and the other countries that border it on the African side.
The only country you have to deal with regarding the Suez canal now, is Egypt. That wasn't always the case, and it might not be the case in the future. Cf. 1956 "Suez Crisis", and the Six-Day War; it's not inconceivable that were Egypt or the Arab states and Israel to get into another land war, that the canal's ownership might change again. Stranger things have happened in the past.
Furthermore, although sea transport is currently much preferable to land, this isn't necessarily the case for all goods. Particularly liquids like oil, water, or LPG, would be much better in pipelines over land, than in tankers over the water. If the political situation were to become more stable, to the point where an oil pipeline could be built overland (say from the oil-producing regions of the Persian Gulf to Eastern Europe; particularly if it were natural gas), it would be a huge benefit.
Also, I think that in terms of sheer efficiency, rail transport is comparable if not advantageous to sea transport for bulk carriage of physical goods, and intermodal rail that bypassed the Suez might be an attractive alternative to widening the canal, since most freight today is containerized already.
Israel doesn't actually exist without US or other foreign involvement.
Erm, no. The U.S. basically hung Israel out to dry on several occasions, and time and time again whenever Israel and the Arab countries got into a spat, if Israel started to win, the Arabs would go back to the Soviets and the Soviets would get the U.N. to declare a cease-fire, and the U.S. would never object. The Arab armies would use the cease-fires to rearm and resupply (illegally), and drag the war out longer.
The only time Israel made major territorial gains was in 1956, and that was only because the U.S. thought they would get and keep the Suez, which would have been a big bonus, and in return for this they let the Soviets crush Budapest in return for their non-interference. (The government in Budapest, which had practically won the revolution already, was counting on U.S. help -- when it didn't happen, the Soviets rolled over them. Though for future reference, don't ever count on U.S. help for your democratic revolution if they can do better by selling you all to people who'll put you in front of a wall -- welcome to realpolitik.)
There were long periods of time when Israel had very little in the way of a relationship with the U.S., at least not the U.S. government. There have always been fairly strong ties between the people of Israel and the people, particularly the Jewish population, in the U.S., but official relations have ebbed and flowed depending on convenience. There were periods when Israel's best allies were South Africa and Taiwan -- talk about the black sheep of the world stage.
Israel shouldn't count anyone, least of all the U.S., as a "true" ally; we'd sell them up the river in a millisecond and leave them on their own in a millisecond if it was temporarily expedient to do so, just like we've done to other groups when they were no longer useful (anyone talked to the Kurds lately? how's that country we promised them working out?).
I'm with you on pretty much everything you said. Only thing I'd point out is that India didn't use the NPT in quite the way I think you're suggesting -- they were never a signatory to it in the first place, and thus opted out from any assistance from the west, in return for never promising not to make weapons.
That was sort of the deal behind the NPT: sign it, agree to no bombs, and we'll help you build a peaceful programme -- just sign on the dotted line and Westinghouse will be there on Monday, basically; the alternative is to not sign, get left out of the nuke-power club, and do what you can on your own, locked out from the rest of the world.
India basically chose the second path, although because they're good allies with the West, they did end up getting a certain amount of assistance in various indirect forms (and I think in the near future they'll probably be buying Uranium from NPT countries like Australia, even though that ought to be against the rules). So they were never under any formal obligation not to build weapons, and no U.S. or other NPT-country firms can build reactors there as a result.
I think the era of the NPT is almost to an end. What India showed is that it's possible for a country to develop nukes entirely on its own, without Western assistance. Now that it's happened, the NPT countries are going to be the ones breaking the rules, because with the cat out of the bag, they're just losing money by not being in on the plant-building in non-NPT countries. You can bet that GE and Westinghouse would really like to get in on India's new plants, and they're going to be lobbying pretty hard to do it.
You have to separate rhetoric from hard-nosed pragmatic reality. American foreign policy in recent years (particularly, I hate to say it, since the present administration began replacing knowledgeable experts in Middle Eastern policy with morons with little understanding of regional nuance, culture, or even language) seems to mistake the populist bluster of Islamist politicians for real intent to obliterate Israel. This is rubbish. Iran is not suicidal. Its leadership is not composed of fools with death wishes.
You mean, how they listen to what people say in public and take them at their word? And insist that they not say one thing to the U.N., and then turn around and say something completely different to the people in the street, who are actually the ones that need to get the message? What a ridiculous concept!
In terms of "hard-nosed pragmatic" assessments, I think what some Arab leader is saying to the hoi polloi carries a lot more weight than what he says to a bunch of diplomats over hors d'oeuvres at a summit meeting.
Talk when only a few people are listening is cheap. Talk when you are speaking to your nation is expensive; that's what counts.
The current Arab leadership seems to be trying to play both sides against the middle, and it's not going to happen.
Playing the devil advocate - I would rather have them manage their nuclear stations safely correctly and being properly trained then having yet another Chernobyl. So if their nuclear espionage stays within the limit of nicking our safety training software for a nuclear plant I would say: Spy more please. And do it more successfully. Please. Pretty please...
True, but if the reactor in question is a Pu breeder, like the Iraqi one the Israelis blew up at Osirak, then I'd much rather they didn't learn how to operate it safely. (That's kinda like saying "gee, I hope those guys know how to operate that gas chamber safely, I sure wouldn't want them to accidentally inhale some by mistake.")
If all they're doing is building light-water power reactors to keep the lights on, by all means I wish them, and the workers there, well. But I really don't think that's what they're up to. Anyone with half a brain can tell that they desperately want a bomb -- and probably if I were in their shoes, I'd want a bomb too. But that doesn't mean that as a Westerner and an American, that I want them to have one, because frankly I think there's too great a chance it might end up going off in my front yard.
All things considered, I'd much rather they melt it into a (radioactive) smoking hole in the desert.
Well, that's really not too hard to believe -- up until 1978, when the current bunch of crackpots took over, Iran was a fairly strong U.S. ally in the region. Which isn't to say that the Shah was exactly a nice fellow that you'd want to invite over for dinner, but that GE and Westinghouse were working to sell nuclear-power stuff there isn't as untoward as it might sound. It's just like U.S. corporations doing business in China right now. Sure, they may be a bunch of despicable despots, but they're despicable despots allied with us.
The Iranian Revolution is a little before my time, so I'm not sure exactly what the zeitgeist in the U.S. was when it happened, but it certainly seems like we got caught with our pants down -- I mean, we had all those people in the embassy that got caught, because we didn't pull them out before the shit hit the fan; I don't know if that was just the Carter administration being typically asleep at the switch, or if nobody suspected things were deteriorating that quickly, but in either case, it explains why, a few years previously, nobody was really thinking too hard about selling them crap (particularly not when it would have brought a few billion bucks to the U.S, which at the time was seriously rusting). Plus, anything to keep them on our side instead of going over to the Soviets for their nuclear needs -- it's not as though they would have had (or have had, since) much compunction about selling reactors to anyone with the hard currency to buy them.
When viewed in the context of the period, the U.S. actions may have been a little shortsighted, but they're not as bald-facedly hypocritical as some people today like to make them seem.
Ultimately, the critical mistake of U.S. policy during the latter part of the 20th century was to think that the enemy of our Enemy (and that's how we really seemed to think about it; Enemy with a capital 'E,' that's E that rhymes with C and that stands for Communism) was our friend. In time, I think we're going to look back on the halcyon days of the Cold War with nostalgia, when we had an enemy who was basically rational and we could sit down over a negotiating table and talk to, or pull out a map and point at.
QuickTime could be doing something bad like consuming and not releasing inordinate amounts of graphics resources. Not that I'm going to bother benchmarking it. Look at the way the app looks and behaves - the devs obviously have no clue how to develop for Windows.
That doesn't make a whole lot of sense under the circumstances. If Quicktime is at fault, why is the problem only happening on this one particular hardware/software configuration? If it's that seriously flawed, it ought to be causing BSODs everywhere -- and that's setting aside the debate of whether it's indicative of a serious flaw in an OS's security model when a userland app can cause a kernel panic or its equivalent.
It sounds like the problem is in the custom Toshiba drivers for the hardware embedded in the tablet PC. That would make sense: they're working at a low-enough level so that a problem there would bluescreen the system, and since the drivers are specific to the Tablet PC, it explains why this issue hasn't been more widely reported.
An easy test, if the user hasn't already done it, would be to hose the system, reinstall Vista from a regular Install CD (not the OEM disc which may have drivers already slipstreamed in), and try the problem scenario again. Then install the drivers and see what changes.
So seriously -- take a step back from your apparent hatred for Quicktime and try to look at the situation; you're just trying too hard to pin this one on Apple, and it doesn't seem like the facts are in your favor.
Back in the early/mid 90s I was pretty obsessed with data compression because I was always short on hard drive space (and short on money to buy new hard drives with); as a result I tended to compress things using whatever the format du jour was if it could get me an extra percentage point or two. Man, was that a mistake.
Getting stuff out of some of those formats now is a real irritation. I haven't run into a case yet that's been totally impossible, but sometimes it's taken a while, or turned out to be a total waste of time once I've gotten the archive open.
Now, I try to always put a copy of the decompressor for whatever format I use (generally just tar + gzip) onto the archive media, in source form. The entire source for gzip is under 1MB, trivial by today's standards, and if you really wanted to cut size and only put the source for deflate on there, it's only 32KB.
It may sound tinfoil-hat, but you can't guarantee what the computer field is going to look like in a few decades. I had self-expanding archives, made using Compact Pro on a 68k Mac, thinking they'd make the files easy to recover later, which didn't help me at all now -- a modern (Intel) Mac won't touch it (although to be fair a PPC Mac will run OS 9 which will, and allegedly there's a Linux utility that will unpack CPP archives, although maybe not self-expanding ones).
Given the rate at which bandwidth and storage space are expanding, I think the market for closed-source, proprietary data compression schemes should be very limited; there's really no good reason to use them for anything that you're storing for an unknown amount of time. You don't have to be a believer in the "infocalypse" to realize that operating systems and entire computing-machine architectures change over time, and what's ubiquitous today may be unheard of in a decade or more.
I'm no lawyer either, but I'd say you're 100% wrong. In order for something to be considered libel, it has to be false.
This is only true in the U.S. In Canada, and other places with more strictly-derived British systems of jurisprudence, it is not.
It's one of the many reasons that any time I get fed up with the 'States and start looking around at other places, I always give up. I don't know how other countries can claim to have 'free speech' with such overbroad definitions of libel and slander; the idea of something being both true and libelous at the same time makes my head want to explode.
Funny it's called OSX, it ought to be called OSomeone else made this shit.
Well, I always assumed that part of the reason for calling it "OS X" (instead of MacOS 10) was because the 'X' references the 'X' in NeXT, who did a lot of the work on what we now call Darwin. So they were the "someone."
I'm not exactly sure what the default settings are like, because honestly it's been years since I've used a Mac that was in its out-of-the-box, default state, but the way I have it right now, the only warning I get is when I'm about to open an application that's never been run before.
This, IMO, is a Good Thing. It's only a half a second delay when I really do want it to launch a new application, and it's a nice heads-up that the computer is doing something that I've never done with it before. More than once I've hit "Cancel" and decided to take a second look at exactly what's going on, which in my mind means that the dialog is useful.
If a dialog pops up, and you never, ever click anything but 'yes,' then it's a stupid warning, and you're right to say that it's just ass-covering on the part of the OS manufacturer. However, if you find yourself using both options, then it's probably a good thing to have it there.
The argument that people lie during exit polls is unfounded FUD.
Erm, no, it's not, it's pretty basic sociology. It's why we have secret ballots for the real election in the first place.
Imagine I'm some guy, and as I walk out of the polls, some cute 20-something, female reporter asks me who I voted for. I'm probably going to give whatever candidate I think is most likely to get me in her pants -- even if it's only a very, very long chance. People do stuff like this all the time, and it's completely irrational behavior. It works the same way in more subtle ways, too; if the pollster is black, you're probably going to claim you voted for the candidate who isn't a flaming racist, even if that's the lever you pulled a minute prior. If it's an old person, you're probably not going to admit voting for the guy who wants to axe Social Security.
People who get pulled aside for exit polls are undeniably being put "on the spot," but they're also being put into a position where they know they can say whatever they want with relative impunity, even if it isn't the truth. They're going to say whatever they think makes them look best to the people asking the question. (Unless, of course, they don't like or have a strong bias against the person asking the question, in which case they might say the opposite just to be antagonistic.)
There's a good section on this sort of behavior in Freakonomics, and it's probably covered in any political science textbook. Bottom line is that people lie if they think it'll be advantageous to do so, and the perceived advantage often isn't exactly logical or rational.
He can't run again, so he might as well do whatever he wants. It's not like he has anything to lose.
This is sort of a mutually contradictory statement. If he really was an autocrat who could do anything, he wouldn't be a lame duck -- he'd just dissolve Congress and install himself as President-for-Life. That he is going to walk out of the White House in a few short months, and in the meantime is basically restricted to whining and doing what he can to make Congress miserable, shows that he is in fact not very powerful at all -- it shows in fact, our system working pretty well.
There are a lot of valid criticisms of our government; heck I'm generally the first to haul off with them. But I don't think that you can use the fact that Bush is both a lame duck and somehow all-powerful at the same time.
In Soviet Russia, rich oligarchs that are hiding in Britain are not allowed to use their money to overthrow the government by sowing and supporting dissent?
I didn't know that Vladimir Putin had an account on Slashdot...
Let me be the first to welcome you, and also, advise you that here, we settle our disputes by bragging about our technical prowess, and not by injecting each other with radioactive isotopes. It'll take some getting used to, I'm sure.
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A: When a court of law has decided MS has.
.... November 5, 1999?
So
Every time we have an article on Slashdot about some backups-gone-bad horror story, someone always asks "hey, how come we never hear about the times when things go right and the sysadmin saves the company?"
Well, here you go.
Somebody owes someone a beer.
55mph seems a perfectly reasonable limit to protect such drivers from themselves.
And therein lies your fallacy -- I do not need nor want laws that protect people from themselves.
From TFA:So basically it's a way of taking x86/Linux binaries and running them on POWER/Linux without a recompile. (And, one assumes, if you're an end-user, without going back to the software's manufacturer and paying through the nose for a new POWER version; you can move from x86 to POWER and still use all your same apps, without buying new versions.)
Missed one in preview:
Personally, I'd rather pay more for goods, and create a perhaps-unnecessary domestic industry, than buy cheap imported goods and have high taxes in order to support all the unemployed people on the dole.
(Actually the first version was grammatically correct but the meaning was different if parsed literally.) Shame on me.
I think Power (according to IBM, anyway) offers a lot better performance/watt and scales better up to supercomputer-ish sizes.
And I think you can even integrate x86 blades into some of IBM's high-end systems for running Linux x86 binaries; the idea is with this new virtual environment, you wouldn't need to purchase the additional hardware.
I see this whole thing as basically a bullet point that they can use when selling POWER to a prospective client -- they can put it out there as one architecture that will run most anything. (Well, except Windows stuff.)
It's a shame, a short-sited policy, but benefits a few (I think two) wealthy families that own the US sugar production and benefit from high prices.
Well, them, and the fairly large swath of the U.S. involved in corn production. It's not like they could very easily switch over to growing sugar cane...
I'm not normally a fan of protectionism, but I think you have to consider what exactly we're going to do in this country if we start importing everything. Right now, with corn syrup, U.S. consumers are effectively subsidizing corn growers through their purchases of HFCS-containing beverages and foods. If we dropped the trade barriers, imported sugar from the Caribbean or South America instead, and eviscerated the corn industry, those same consumers (now called "taxpayers") would probably just end up subsidizing the same corn growers again, only it would be via welfare, unemployment, and various government bailouts of the corporations that would fail.
Personally, I'd rather pay more for goods, and create a perhaps-unnecessary domestic industry, then buy cheap imported goods and have high taxes in order to support all the unemployed people on the dole. As a taxpayer/consumer, I get screwed either way, but at least this way I don't have the double indignity of knowing that my money is being taken at gunpoint and given to people who aren't working, which I find fundamentally offensive.
I admit I haven't really been paying attention to SPARC recently.
Can anyone fill me in on what its performance is like compared to x86 these days, when running Linux or Unix (Solaris)? (I don't think MS even supports Windows on non-x86 anymore, except perhaps Itanium and it's probably near-EOL anyway.)
There seemed to be a lot of buzz about the Niagara stuff a while back, and how amazing the performance/watt was going to be, and then it seemed to evaporate. Did something happen, or was that just the fanboys moving on to something else shiny? (And is Niagara open-source/open-architecture like the more basic SPARC processors?)
I've always been a big fan of RISC, since back in the early 90s; I think it's sad that we're fast approaching a monoculture, although there's some solace, I suppose, in the fact that with decreasing process sizes, you can now tack the x86 instruction set onto almost any real processor you want. But it certainly seemed like there were more avenues for performance being investigated back when you had IBM with Power, DEC with Alpha, Sun with SPARC, SGI with MIPS, HP with PA-RISC, and probably a bunch more that I've forgotten.
Where do you get this information from? Surely you can see that there is an agenda going on here.
Well, if all they wanted was a nice light-water power reactor, and they didn't have bomb-making aspirations, they could just stop all the saber-rattling and have one set up next month. I'm sure GE, Westinghouse, ABB, and a half-dozen other companies would be falling over themselves to be the prime contractor on that.
They'd get a reactor, and all the knowledge on how it works, plus all the training to run it, and probably all the MOX or low-enriched fuel they could shake a stick at. All they'd have to do is play by the rules that they already signed up to follow.
But I think it's pretty obvious that they don't really care about power generation -- first of all, they're sitting on a huge load of petroleum, which by the time they run out of it, any reactor they build today will be woefully obsolete -- and there's a lot to be gained, politically, if they have bombs. They protect themselves from invasion, they can threaten Israel, they can threaten the more moderate Arab states, heck they can probably threaten parts of Eastern Europe. They'd be able to have the ultimate carrot and stick: the carrot is the petroleum they're sitting on, which everyone wants, and the stick would be their nuclear arsenal, coupled with the theatre ballistic missiles they already have.
The goal of having a peaceful nuclear power industry just doesn't mesh with any of their actions, and I don't think -- given Ahmadinejad's fiery rhetoric -- that anyone really trusts what their real intentions are.
unlike Iraq, which seems to have tried to develop a program, failed, but left just enough detritus around to give the chicken hawks material for their misinformation campaign
Well, they did have one, but the Israelis blew it up.
The French -- in some sort of a fit of Gaullish pique -- sold the Iraqis a breeder reactor (technically it was a "materials testing reactor," but without an established nuclear program and any 'materials' to 'test,' it was pretty clear what they wanted with a high-neutron-flux design). The Israelis decided that was a no-go, and so they did some serious damage to it via an airstrike, before the fuel was loaded.
Then the Iran-Iraq war broke out, and -- at least in hindsight -- it's not clear whether Saddam ever really put that much serious effort into restarting the project. There's a lot of speculation in both directions; that the attack caused Saddam to pour a lot more resources into uranium enrichment (via gas separation), which would ultimately have produced more bombs than the single Pu breeder (see the quote on the WP page), or alternately that the Iran-Iraq war was such a drain on Iraq's resources that they never had the capability again, and/or put their resources into chem/bio stuff from then on.
The rest of the reactor complex was destroyed (pretty much pounded into rubble) in 1991, so it's probably not going to answer any questions now.
Well, the larger ships can't go through Suez anyway, that's why they want to enlarge it considerably now. Still, the only country you have to deal with is Egypt. Though I dunno if some other country holds the rights to the canal.
Intercontinental transport is mainly done through ships today. Simply because of cost efficiency. You certainly do NOT want to do a land transport through the middle east, not only because of the political situation. It's not really comfy to run your goods through deserts and mountains. So you would essentially bypass pretty much all of the middle east, safe those countries that border the red sea. And how much influence they have on travel through the canal can easily be seen at the example of Sudan, Eritrea, Djibouti and the other countries that border it on the African side.
The only country you have to deal with regarding the Suez canal now, is Egypt. That wasn't always the case, and it might not be the case in the future. Cf. 1956 "Suez Crisis", and the Six-Day War; it's not inconceivable that were Egypt or the Arab states and Israel to get into another land war, that the canal's ownership might change again. Stranger things have happened in the past.
Furthermore, although sea transport is currently much preferable to land, this isn't necessarily the case for all goods. Particularly liquids like oil, water, or LPG, would be much better in pipelines over land, than in tankers over the water. If the political situation were to become more stable, to the point where an oil pipeline could be built overland (say from the oil-producing regions of the Persian Gulf to Eastern Europe; particularly if it were natural gas), it would be a huge benefit.
Also, I think that in terms of sheer efficiency, rail transport is comparable if not advantageous to sea transport for bulk carriage of physical goods, and intermodal rail that bypassed the Suez might be an attractive alternative to widening the canal, since most freight today is containerized already.
Israel doesn't actually exist without US or other foreign involvement.
Erm, no. The U.S. basically hung Israel out to dry on several occasions, and time and time again whenever Israel and the Arab countries got into a spat, if Israel started to win, the Arabs would go back to the Soviets and the Soviets would get the U.N. to declare a cease-fire, and the U.S. would never object. The Arab armies would use the cease-fires to rearm and resupply (illegally), and drag the war out longer.
The only time Israel made major territorial gains was in 1956, and that was only because the U.S. thought they would get and keep the Suez, which would have been a big bonus, and in return for this they let the Soviets crush Budapest in return for their non-interference. (The government in Budapest, which had practically won the revolution already, was counting on U.S. help -- when it didn't happen, the Soviets rolled over them. Though for future reference, don't ever count on U.S. help for your democratic revolution if they can do better by selling you all to people who'll put you in front of a wall -- welcome to realpolitik.)
There were long periods of time when Israel had very little in the way of a relationship with the U.S., at least not the U.S. government. There have always been fairly strong ties between the people of Israel and the people, particularly the Jewish population, in the U.S., but official relations have ebbed and flowed depending on convenience. There were periods when Israel's best allies were South Africa and Taiwan -- talk about the black sheep of the world stage.
Israel shouldn't count anyone, least of all the U.S., as a "true" ally; we'd sell them up the river in a millisecond and leave them on their own in a millisecond if it was temporarily expedient to do so, just like we've done to other groups when they were no longer useful (anyone talked to the Kurds lately? how's that country we promised them working out?).
I'm with you on pretty much everything you said. Only thing I'd point out is that India didn't use the NPT in quite the way I think you're suggesting -- they were never a signatory to it in the first place, and thus opted out from any assistance from the west, in return for never promising not to make weapons.
That was sort of the deal behind the NPT: sign it, agree to no bombs, and we'll help you build a peaceful programme -- just sign on the dotted line and Westinghouse will be there on Monday, basically; the alternative is to not sign, get left out of the nuke-power club, and do what you can on your own, locked out from the rest of the world.
India basically chose the second path, although because they're good allies with the West, they did end up getting a certain amount of assistance in various indirect forms (and I think in the near future they'll probably be buying Uranium from NPT countries like Australia, even though that ought to be against the rules). So they were never under any formal obligation not to build weapons, and no U.S. or other NPT-country firms can build reactors there as a result.
I think the era of the NPT is almost to an end. What India showed is that it's possible for a country to develop nukes entirely on its own, without Western assistance. Now that it's happened, the NPT countries are going to be the ones breaking the rules, because with the cat out of the bag, they're just losing money by not being in on the plant-building in non-NPT countries. You can bet that GE and Westinghouse would really like to get in on India's new plants, and they're going to be lobbying pretty hard to do it.
You have to separate rhetoric from hard-nosed pragmatic reality. American foreign policy in recent years (particularly, I hate to say it, since the present administration began replacing knowledgeable experts in Middle Eastern policy with morons with little understanding of regional nuance, culture, or even language) seems to mistake the populist bluster of Islamist politicians for real intent to obliterate Israel. This is rubbish. Iran is not suicidal. Its leadership is not composed of fools with death wishes.
You mean, how they listen to what people say in public and take them at their word? And insist that they not say one thing to the U.N., and then turn around and say something completely different to the people in the street, who are actually the ones that need to get the message? What a ridiculous concept!
In terms of "hard-nosed pragmatic" assessments, I think what some Arab leader is saying to the hoi polloi carries a lot more weight than what he says to a bunch of diplomats over hors d'oeuvres at a summit meeting.
Talk when only a few people are listening is cheap. Talk when you are speaking to your nation is expensive; that's what counts.
The current Arab leadership seems to be trying to play both sides against the middle, and it's not going to happen.
Playing the devil advocate - I would rather have them manage their nuclear stations safely correctly and being properly trained then having yet another Chernobyl. So if their nuclear espionage stays within the limit of nicking our safety training software for a nuclear plant I would say: Spy more please. And do it more successfully. Please. Pretty please...
True, but if the reactor in question is a Pu breeder, like the Iraqi one the Israelis blew up at Osirak, then I'd much rather they didn't learn how to operate it safely. (That's kinda like saying "gee, I hope those guys know how to operate that gas chamber safely, I sure wouldn't want them to accidentally inhale some by mistake.")
If all they're doing is building light-water power reactors to keep the lights on, by all means I wish them, and the workers there, well. But I really don't think that's what they're up to. Anyone with half a brain can tell that they desperately want a bomb -- and probably if I were in their shoes, I'd want a bomb too. But that doesn't mean that as a Westerner and an American, that I want them to have one, because frankly I think there's too great a chance it might end up going off in my front yard.
All things considered, I'd much rather they melt it into a (radioactive) smoking hole in the desert.
Well, that's really not too hard to believe -- up until 1978, when the current bunch of crackpots took over, Iran was a fairly strong U.S. ally in the region. Which isn't to say that the Shah was exactly a nice fellow that you'd want to invite over for dinner, but that GE and Westinghouse were working to sell nuclear-power stuff there isn't as untoward as it might sound. It's just like U.S. corporations doing business in China right now. Sure, they may be a bunch of despicable despots, but they're despicable despots allied with us.
The Iranian Revolution is a little before my time, so I'm not sure exactly what the zeitgeist in the U.S. was when it happened, but it certainly seems like we got caught with our pants down -- I mean, we had all those people in the embassy that got caught, because we didn't pull them out before the shit hit the fan; I don't know if that was just the Carter administration being typically asleep at the switch, or if nobody suspected things were deteriorating that quickly, but in either case, it explains why, a few years previously, nobody was really thinking too hard about selling them crap (particularly not when it would have brought a few billion bucks to the U.S, which at the time was seriously rusting). Plus, anything to keep them on our side instead of going over to the Soviets for their nuclear needs -- it's not as though they would have had (or have had, since) much compunction about selling reactors to anyone with the hard currency to buy them.
When viewed in the context of the period, the U.S. actions may have been a little shortsighted, but they're not as bald-facedly hypocritical as some people today like to make them seem.
Ultimately, the critical mistake of U.S. policy during the latter part of the 20th century was to think that the enemy of our Enemy (and that's how we really seemed to think about it; Enemy with a capital 'E,' that's E that rhymes with C and that stands for Communism) was our friend. In time, I think we're going to look back on the halcyon days of the Cold War with nostalgia, when we had an enemy who was basically rational and we could sit down over a negotiating table and talk to, or pull out a map and point at.
QuickTime could be doing something bad like consuming and not releasing inordinate amounts of graphics resources. Not that I'm going to bother benchmarking it. Look at the way the app looks and behaves - the devs obviously have no clue how to develop for Windows.
That doesn't make a whole lot of sense under the circumstances. If Quicktime is at fault, why is the problem only happening on this one particular hardware/software configuration? If it's that seriously flawed, it ought to be causing BSODs everywhere -- and that's setting aside the debate of whether it's indicative of a serious flaw in an OS's security model when a userland app can cause a kernel panic or its equivalent.
It sounds like the problem is in the custom Toshiba drivers for the hardware embedded in the tablet PC. That would make sense: they're working at a low-enough level so that a problem there would bluescreen the system, and since the drivers are specific to the Tablet PC, it explains why this issue hasn't been more widely reported.
An easy test, if the user hasn't already done it, would be to hose the system, reinstall Vista from a regular Install CD (not the OEM disc which may have drivers already slipstreamed in), and try the problem scenario again. Then install the drivers and see what changes.
So seriously -- take a step back from your apparent hatred for Quicktime and try to look at the situation; you're just trying too hard to pin this one on Apple, and it doesn't seem like the facts are in your favor.
Back in the early/mid 90s I was pretty obsessed with data compression because I was always short on hard drive space (and short on money to buy new hard drives with); as a result I tended to compress things using whatever the format du jour was if it could get me an extra percentage point or two. Man, was that a mistake.
Getting stuff out of some of those formats now is a real irritation. I haven't run into a case yet that's been totally impossible, but sometimes it's taken a while, or turned out to be a total waste of time once I've gotten the archive open.
Now, I try to always put a copy of the decompressor for whatever format I use (generally just tar + gzip) onto the archive media, in source form. The entire source for gzip is under 1MB, trivial by today's standards, and if you really wanted to cut size and only put the source for deflate on there, it's only 32KB.
It may sound tinfoil-hat, but you can't guarantee what the computer field is going to look like in a few decades. I had self-expanding archives, made using Compact Pro on a 68k Mac, thinking they'd make the files easy to recover later, which didn't help me at all now -- a modern (Intel) Mac won't touch it (although to be fair a PPC Mac will run OS 9 which will, and allegedly there's a Linux utility that will unpack CPP archives, although maybe not self-expanding ones).
Given the rate at which bandwidth and storage space are expanding, I think the market for closed-source, proprietary data compression schemes should be very limited; there's really no good reason to use them for anything that you're storing for an unknown amount of time. You don't have to be a believer in the "infocalypse" to realize that operating systems and entire computing-machine architectures change over time, and what's ubiquitous today may be unheard of in a decade or more.
I'm no lawyer either, but I'd say you're 100% wrong. In order for something to be considered libel, it has to be false.
This is only true in the U.S. In Canada, and other places with more strictly-derived British systems of jurisprudence, it is not.
It's one of the many reasons that any time I get fed up with the 'States and start looking around at other places, I always give up. I don't know how other countries can claim to have 'free speech' with such overbroad definitions of libel and slander; the idea of something being both true and libelous at the same time makes my head want to explode.
Funny it's called OSX, it ought to be called OSomeone else made this shit.
Well, I always assumed that part of the reason for calling it "OS X" (instead of MacOS 10) was because the 'X' references the 'X' in NeXT, who did a lot of the work on what we now call Darwin. So they were the "someone."
I'm not exactly sure what the default settings are like, because honestly it's been years since I've used a Mac that was in its out-of-the-box, default state, but the way I have it right now, the only warning I get is when I'm about to open an application that's never been run before.
This, IMO, is a Good Thing. It's only a half a second delay when I really do want it to launch a new application, and it's a nice heads-up that the computer is doing something that I've never done with it before. More than once I've hit "Cancel" and decided to take a second look at exactly what's going on, which in my mind means that the dialog is useful.
If a dialog pops up, and you never, ever click anything but 'yes,' then it's a stupid warning, and you're right to say that it's just ass-covering on the part of the OS manufacturer. However, if you find yourself using both options, then it's probably a good thing to have it there.
How bout the all positive network on TV. Wheres that?
It's called the Disney Channel.
The argument that people lie during exit polls is unfounded FUD.
Erm, no, it's not, it's pretty basic sociology. It's why we have secret ballots for the real election in the first place.
Imagine I'm some guy, and as I walk out of the polls, some cute 20-something, female reporter asks me who I voted for. I'm probably going to give whatever candidate I think is most likely to get me in her pants -- even if it's only a very, very long chance. People do stuff like this all the time, and it's completely irrational behavior. It works the same way in more subtle ways, too; if the pollster is black, you're probably going to claim you voted for the candidate who isn't a flaming racist, even if that's the lever you pulled a minute prior. If it's an old person, you're probably not going to admit voting for the guy who wants to axe Social Security.
People who get pulled aside for exit polls are undeniably being put "on the spot," but they're also being put into a position where they know they can say whatever they want with relative impunity, even if it isn't the truth. They're going to say whatever they think makes them look best to the people asking the question. (Unless, of course, they don't like or have a strong bias against the person asking the question, in which case they might say the opposite just to be antagonistic.)
There's a good section on this sort of behavior in Freakonomics, and it's probably covered in any political science textbook. Bottom line is that people lie if they think it'll be advantageous to do so, and the perceived advantage often isn't exactly logical or rational.
He can't run again, so he might as well do whatever he wants. It's not like he has anything to lose.
This is sort of a mutually contradictory statement. If he really was an autocrat who could do anything, he wouldn't be a lame duck -- he'd just dissolve Congress and install himself as President-for-Life. That he is going to walk out of the White House in a few short months, and in the meantime is basically restricted to whining and doing what he can to make Congress miserable, shows that he is in fact not very powerful at all -- it shows in fact, our system working pretty well.
There are a lot of valid criticisms of our government; heck I'm generally the first to haul off with them. But I don't think that you can use the fact that Bush is both a lame duck and somehow all-powerful at the same time.
In Soviet Russia, rich oligarchs that are hiding in Britain are not allowed to use their money to overthrow the government by sowing and supporting dissent?
I didn't know that Vladimir Putin had an account on Slashdot...
Let me be the first to welcome you, and also, advise you that here, we settle our disputes by bragging about our technical prowess, and not by injecting each other with radioactive isotopes. It'll take some getting used to, I'm sure.