Thank you for some references to back up my argument that things are not peachy in Saudi Arabia.
One thing to consider: Is it so unusual that many of the publicly recognized terrorists would come from middle class backgrounds? One only has to look inward (I'm in the US) to see that many of those who are politically active, and dare I say, adopting more extreme views are young college students. Many of the protests of the Viet Nam engagement happened there. More recently we can look at the WTO protests in Seattle - while many of the protesters looked rather impoverished, I would say quite a few of them were college students.
So, maybe it isn't so unusual that this would take place elsewhere and in different conditions. Possibly, it makes more sense that someone with a little more affluence would be more politically active and more engaged in a cause - they've met their basic needs (Maslov) of food, shelter, and safety. As they become more aware of the world, they begin to satisfy the needs of belonging, esteem, and even self-actualization through their political activity.
I'm not so sure about this. It is true that Saudi Arabia has a vast oil wealth and generates a great deal of income. But this money is hoarded by the royal family and their close associates. The common man, on the other hand, lives a rather poor and meager existence.
It doesn't help when all these poor, unhappy people see their rich princes and king associating so much with the West, and particularly the US. It isn't a hard case to make; "you're miserable because the royal family is hoarding the money - see, they have been corrupted by the contact with the West".
I realize that the Saudi hijackers from 9/11 were mostly well-off and not particluarly poor. But, I would imagine that most of the "foot soldiers" of groups like the Taliban and Al Qua'ida are coming from very poor situations, and they can easily (at least in their minds) trace the cause of their poverty to the US and the West.
Their poverty not a valid reason to kill people, and I'm not in any way justifying their acts of terrorism. But it's very important to try to understand what THEY see as a valid reason and justification.
Going back to Saudi Arabia and its wealth... That country (and much of the region) is only one tech-revolution away from being destitute. Once somebody figures out how to economically use hydrogen, or develops a workable fusion reactor, the need for oil as a a fuel source will quickly diminish, and much of the Middle East will lose its relevance in a geopolitical sense. Of course, we'll (probably) always need petroleum for lubrication, petro-chemicals, plastics and some fuel, but definitely not in the volumes it is produced and consumed now.
In that situation, you'll have even more destitute people who will have old hatreds of the West, which will only be fueled by its prosperity and affluence.
Was the community service trip with the Peace Corps or some other group?
I would love to do some community service work in Lebanon - it would be great for my Arabic. Sadly, I can't do the Peace Corps for some time because I did satellite coms for Army Intelligence.
I don't know about the Navy, but the Army does many (if not all) of its investigations through the Defense Invesitigative Service. They have moved away from Paper SF-86's and uses a nifty piece of software called EPSQ.
The person seeking a clearance uses the software to complete the form. It has all kinds of checks to help make sure you are doing it correctly. Once your responses are "validated", you can generate a file that can either be put on floppy and handed to your security officer, or you can e-mail it.
The great thing is that you can keep your data, and when you need to do a periodic update, you only have to add what has changed.
For the user, it's utterly brilliant because you don't have to retype the forms.
For the security officer it's even better because you don't have to key in data on the forms, and you have a decent assurance that the form was filled out somewhat correctly.
Check out: http://www.dss.mil/epsq/index.htm
Re:Are they seriously gonna use Win2k as the stand
on
Building The Navy Intranet
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
The scary thing is that they want everything standardized to one OS, and one type of software. If you build the whole Navy network on this, and it only takes one exploit to bring the whole thing down. (remember Melissa?) Should we make it so easy for our enemies to shut down our entire Navy, that they could possibly send an e-mail to stop the fleet?
Standardization is good (especially in protocols, standards, and file formats), but 100% homogeneity implementation is bad.
I study Arabic instead of Latin, but I can't help but think of this phrase that I once found:
"To many people's surprise, Arabic grammar in repspect of syntax, declension and declining is far less uncomplicated than what is found in most Western languages. Vocabulary is, however a challenge, due to its richness."
It's probably better to have the different parts of the government working at odds. Sure, it's not very efficient, but do you really want a government that has the IRS, the DMCA, and Ashcroft working really efficiently?
We'd have no rights in no time!
No - I'd rather pay for less efficient government.
Re:Adding programmers to a late project ...
on
Slack
·
· Score: 1
I think the point is that if you keep everyone about 70% busy, then when something unforseen comes up, each person has some resources to throw at the problem. I think he means to do that, more than have people move around.
It's a long term strategy for the whole organization and won't help with the project that's due next month. Your organization will be healthier and stronger in the long run if each part has some slack.
Think of driving your car down the freeway. It's bad if it takes everything your car has just to keep up. It's much better if there is some extra capacity. That way, when the semi starts to squeeze you into the guardrail, you can accelerate out of the way.
Humans are much more adaptable to climate change than most other plants and animals. But with 6 billion+ mouths to feed, its not quite clear how we'd adapt to a climatic problem of this kind of scale.
Yes starting a war to distract attention from affairs at home is what Hitler used to do.
But, what home affairs are so terrible right now that the administration would need to start a war to cover them up? Corporate accounting failures? That could have happened under any administration - the Dems are just as much into big business as the reps - the Reps just use it as a campaign stance - think about it - where does campaign money come from?
As for the impending invasion of Iraq and regime change there, I think there are greater (in priority, not value) motives than "cover-up and diversion", among them are:
1) getting control (influence) over one of the largest reserves of oil. The Saudi royal family is taking a lot of heat from its governed population for such strong support for the US. The US needs to find a better source of oil
2) in a strange contrast, the US needs a stable oil market to protect "allies" like the Saudis. A lot of money is going into finding and extracting oil from the Caspian and now from West-Africa. The US has less influence over these sources, so it's in the interest of the US to gain control/influence over other major sources to make sure prices stay stable (and low) - this provides less incentive for others to spend a lot of money on getting the oil out of the Caspian and West Africa. This is not just because Bush and Cheney are oil men; it's more that the US economy is so dependent upon stable supplies and prices of oil that it cannot afford to lose the influence it currently has. (it's possible that I'm overestimating the influence the US has on the major oil producers).
3) Of course there's the desire to finish a job that wasn't done 12 years ago. (for mostly good reasons - at least in US interest)
4) Oh yeah - the US is the bastion of freedom and democracy, so it has the duty to take out regimes that are undemocratic and repressive.
Finally, what does this have to do with HTDV and its own problems? Well, the only real connection I can think of is that we'll get a lot better war pictures if we all have HDTV's!
It seems (if my teacher way-back-when) was correct, your answer (or dart throws) would be accurate if the average of your attempts came averaged to the "correct" answer - some of the darts could hit the bullseye, but as long as the others were distributed in a pattern around the bullseye, you'd still be accurate.
Precision would be a measure of how close all your answers are to each other, regardless of their accuracy.
In both cases, the best case is to be both precise and accurate. If have a problem with one, it's better to be precise than accurate.
Consider 3 army marksmen, zeroing their weapons on the firing range.
Soldier One shoots his 3 rounds. All three not only hit the center of the bullseye, but they are in a tight group. His shooting was both precise and accurate. His weapon is zeroed, and he will shoot well.
Soldier Two shoots his 3 rounds. All three are high and to the left, but are still in a very tight group. He is precise, but not accurate. Fortunately, he knows he only has to adjust his sights and test again. He can become both precise and accurate simply by adjusting his rifle.
Soldier Three shoots. His rounds are all over the target. When you draw a triangle connecting them, it is centered over the bullseye. His shooting is accurate, but not precise. He has the biggest problem. His shooting is eratic and will take lots of work to gain precision. Simply adjusting his rifle might move the center of his shooting, but he'll still be all over the place.
In the lab, high precision with low accuracy indicates that you are following your procedure well each time. You can fix this by finding the flaw in your procedure that is ending in an inaccurate result.
On the other hand, if the average of your answers is correct, but you're all over the place, this indicates that your methodology or equipment are flawed. This is much harder to track down.
Actually, the duration of greater G forces probably has a more direct effect on the ability of the heart to get enough blood to the brain, rather than directly on the brain itself. Of course, the lack of oxygen-carrying blood does have an effect on the brain!
Don't many military pilots wear anti-G suits that constrict around their legs? I believe this is to preven the blood from pooling in the lower parts of the body, thus preventing enough blood from getting to the brain.
Of course, a rapid acceleration (or is it change in acceleration), can cause the brain to bounce hard against the inside of the skull, leading to a concussion.
Nobody has asked "how is it broken" - did it break off, as with the bricks in the experiment? Or did it sipmly stop retracting? Or maybe it doesn't come out any more (got stuck on going back in).
You can't assume that when the "dumb" user says "it's broken" that it really means anything specific.
As a sysadmin, I often hear "the network is down" or "e-mail doesn't work" (or get pages like this). This user-diagnosis is useless, and I always have to ask them what the heck they mean? How is it down, what doesn't work, etc. It's usually something silly like they typed in the wrong password.
So is it possible that this user's coffee cup broke the CD tray? Well, that depends on what you mean by broken. It's not probable that it broke clean off, but it may not function like it used to.
Now for the real question - how many of us tried putting a coffee cup on our CD trays for first time today after reading the article?
Don't you know? Humans are creatures that would much rather react to a crisis than plan for a better future. As long as oil is cheap and plentiful there's no "crisis" to push us into better mothods.
With that in mind, I say lets drill it all, suck it out and burn it as fast as possible so we can finally have a decent crisis that will force us to look at better energy systems!
I have several of his books and tried to look him up several years ago, and it seems he was an accountant and not really interested in doing BASIC stuff any more.
I just found a page:
http://people.whowhere.com/pages/DaveAhl@aol.com
where he states: "Yes, I am the founder of Creative Computing, the first personal computing magazine (in 1974) and, yes, I am the author of Basic Computer Games and 21 other books. No I can't solve your Basic games problems because today I am a financial planner. However, if you'd like help with planning your financial future or in making investments, especially international ones, then I'd be happy to speak with you (free the first time, $$ after that)."
Yes, but you can only be blackmailed about it if you think it's wrong and you don't want people to find out.
If you smoke a few joints and you're open about it, chances are it would not make good leverage for blackmail.
What works much better is to find someone who appears to be "goody-two-shoes" or boyscout and cares to maintain that image. It's when he has some kind of secret deviance that he wants to keep secret that makes him an excellent subject for blackmail.
I used to give SAEDA briefings in the Army - Subversion and Espionage Directed Against the US Army. This article is about the FBI, but it's the same game.
IANAL so I don't understand how they can really license how you use the data that you create with their encoder (streaming server)?
It seems to me that it would be like Compuserve not only controlling GIF encoders/decoders, but controlling the GIFs you have made.
If I create an mp3 of some kind and decide to stream it off my computer, can Fraunhofer really (legally) demand a cut of any profit I make from it? Microsoft doesn't (yet) get a cut of a novel that I author using Microsoft Word.
Maybe they want to get switched over to Linux before Win2k is no longer supported and they end up forced to make the next upgrade. If they move to Linux, they can still make the next upgrade, but it will cost them very little.
It would be great to find that they're switching to Linux due to long-term thinking!
This reminds me of a recent faculty meeting at the University I work for. I work in the Engineering school which recently picked up Computer Science from the Math department.
In the meeting, several of the Engineering profs thought it would be great if the CS profs would ride along with me (a systems administrator) and learn how to do my work, in case me and my boss disappeared somehow.
Fortunately, one of the CS profs pointed out that the Electrical Engineering profs could then take care of the electrical wiring in our building, and the Civils can fix the toilets when they back up.
Fortunately, this idea died a quick death in committee.
Actually, I'd rather see congress tied up on stuff that doesn't pass. That means they have less time to spend on things that could pass - which are the things that usually have a negative effect on the rest of us!
Why not just break open the tape and feed one end into a cross-cut shredder? The shredder pulls the tape off the spools and it comes out in little bitty bits. If you're really paranoid, you could bulk erase it before hand, and shred more than one tape at a time.
Slashdot Mirror
Thank you for some references to back up my argument that things are not peachy in Saudi Arabia.
One thing to consider: Is it so unusual that many of the publicly recognized terrorists would come from middle class backgrounds? One only has to look inward (I'm in the US) to see that many of those who are politically active, and dare I say, adopting more extreme views are young college students. Many of the protests of the Viet Nam engagement happened there. More recently we can look at the WTO protests in Seattle - while many of the protesters looked rather impoverished, I would say quite a few of them were college students.
So, maybe it isn't so unusual that this would take place elsewhere and in different conditions. Possibly, it makes more sense that someone with a little more affluence would be more politically active and more engaged in a cause - they've met their basic needs (Maslov) of food, shelter, and safety. As they become more aware of the world, they begin to satisfy the needs of belonging, esteem, and even self-actualization through their political activity.
I'm not so sure about this. It is true that Saudi Arabia has a vast oil wealth and generates a great deal of income. But this money is hoarded by the royal family and their close associates. The common man, on the other hand, lives a rather poor and meager existence.
It doesn't help when all these poor, unhappy people see their rich princes and king associating so much with the West, and particularly the US. It isn't a hard case to make; "you're miserable because the royal family is hoarding the money - see, they have been corrupted by the contact with the West".
I realize that the Saudi hijackers from 9/11 were mostly well-off and not particluarly poor. But, I would imagine that most of the "foot soldiers" of groups like the Taliban and Al Qua'ida are coming from very poor situations, and they can easily (at least in their minds) trace the cause of their poverty to the US and the West.
Their poverty not a valid reason to kill people, and I'm not in any way justifying their acts of terrorism. But it's very important to try to understand what THEY see as a valid reason and justification.
Going back to Saudi Arabia and its wealth... That country (and much of the region) is only one tech-revolution away from being destitute. Once somebody figures out how to economically use hydrogen, or develops a workable fusion reactor, the need for oil as a a fuel source will quickly diminish, and much of the Middle East will lose its relevance in a geopolitical sense. Of course, we'll (probably) always need petroleum for lubrication, petro-chemicals, plastics and some fuel, but definitely not in the volumes it is produced and consumed now.
In that situation, you'll have even more destitute people who will have old hatreds of the West, which will only be fueled by its prosperity and affluence.
Was the community service trip with the Peace Corps or some other group?
I would love to do some community service work in Lebanon - it would be great for my Arabic. Sadly, I can't do the Peace Corps for some time because I did satellite coms for Army Intelligence.
I suppose you could always contact their "customer support" at:
http://www.dss.mil/epsq/page99.htm, and suggest that they test their stuff under Wine.
Let them know what happened and ask them to consider testing the program under Wine.
I don't know about the Navy, but the Army does many (if not all) of its investigations through the Defense Invesitigative Service. They have moved away from Paper SF-86's and uses a nifty piece of software called EPSQ.
The person seeking a clearance uses the software to complete the form. It has all kinds of checks to help make sure you are doing it correctly. Once your responses are "validated", you can generate a file that can either be put on floppy and handed to your security officer, or you can e-mail it.
The great thing is that you can keep your data, and when you need to do a periodic update, you only have to add what has changed.
For the user, it's utterly brilliant because you don't have to retype the forms.
For the security officer it's even better because you don't have to key in data on the forms, and you have a decent assurance that the form was filled out somewhat correctly.
Check out: http://www.dss.mil/epsq/index.htm
The scary thing is that they want everything standardized to one OS, and one type of software. If you build the whole Navy network on this, and it only takes one exploit to bring the whole thing down. (remember Melissa?) Should we make it so easy for our enemies to shut down our entire Navy, that they could possibly send an e-mail to stop the fleet?
Standardization is good (especially in protocols, standards, and file formats), but 100% homogeneity implementation is bad.
I study Arabic instead of Latin, but I can't help but think of this phrase that I once found:
"To many people's surprise, Arabic grammar in repspect of syntax, declension and declining is far less uncomplicated than what is found in most Western languages. Vocabulary is, however a challenge, due to its richness."
Since that's an imperative, shouldn't it be:
"Everyone, open your books"?
It's probably better to have the different parts of the government working at odds. Sure, it's not very efficient, but do you really want a government that has the IRS, the DMCA, and Ashcroft working really efficiently?
We'd have no rights in no time!
No - I'd rather pay for less efficient government.
I think the point is that if you keep everyone about 70% busy, then when something unforseen comes up, each person has some resources to throw at the problem. I think he means to do that, more than have people move around.
It's a long term strategy for the whole organization and won't help with the project that's due next month. Your organization will be healthier and stronger in the long run if each part has some slack.
Think of driving your car down the freeway. It's bad if it takes everything your car has just to keep up. It's much better if there is some extra capacity. That way, when the semi starts to squeeze you into the guardrail, you can accelerate out of the way.
Humans are much more adaptable to climate change than most other plants and animals. But with 6 billion+ mouths to feed, its not quite clear how we'd adapt to a climatic problem of this kind of scale.
Can anyone say "soilent green"?
I also hear insects can be quite tasty..
Yes starting a war to distract attention from affairs at home is what Hitler used to do.
But, what home affairs are so terrible right now that the administration would need to start a war to cover them up? Corporate accounting failures? That could have happened under any administration - the Dems are just as much into big business as the reps - the Reps just use it as a campaign stance - think about it - where does campaign money come from?
As for the impending invasion of Iraq and regime change there, I think there are greater (in priority, not value) motives than "cover-up and diversion", among them are:
1) getting control (influence) over one of the largest reserves of oil. The Saudi royal family is taking a lot of heat from its governed population for such strong support for the US. The US needs to find a better source of oil
2) in a strange contrast, the US needs a stable oil market to protect "allies" like the Saudis. A lot of money is going into finding and extracting oil from the Caspian and now from West-Africa. The US has less influence over these sources, so it's in the interest of the US to gain control/influence over other major sources to make sure prices stay stable (and low) - this provides less incentive for others to spend a lot of money on getting the oil out of the Caspian and West Africa. This is not just because Bush and Cheney are oil men; it's more that the US economy is so dependent upon stable supplies and prices of oil that it cannot afford to lose the influence it currently has.
(it's possible that I'm overestimating the influence the US has on the major oil producers).
3) Of course there's the desire to finish a job that wasn't done 12 years ago. (for mostly good reasons - at least in US interest)
4) Oh yeah - the US is the bastion of freedom and democracy, so it has the duty to take out regimes that are undemocratic and repressive.
Finally, what does this have to do with HTDV and its own problems? Well, the only real connection I can think of is that we'll get a lot better war pictures if we all have HDTV's!
It seems (if my teacher way-back-when) was correct, your answer (or dart throws) would be accurate if the average of your attempts came averaged to the "correct" answer - some of the darts could hit the bullseye, but as long as the others were distributed in a pattern around the bullseye, you'd still be accurate.
Precision would be a measure of how close all your answers are to each other, regardless of their accuracy.
In both cases, the best case is to be both precise and accurate. If have a problem with one, it's better to be precise than accurate.
Consider 3 army marksmen, zeroing their weapons on the firing range.
Soldier One shoots his 3 rounds. All three not only hit the center of the bullseye, but they are in a tight group. His shooting was both precise and accurate. His weapon is zeroed, and he will shoot well.
Soldier Two shoots his 3 rounds. All three are high and to the left, but are still in a very tight group. He is precise, but not accurate. Fortunately, he knows he only has to adjust his sights and test again. He can become both precise and accurate simply by adjusting his rifle.
Soldier Three shoots. His rounds are all over the target. When you draw a triangle connecting them, it is centered over the bullseye. His shooting is accurate, but not precise. He has the biggest problem. His shooting is eratic and will take lots of work to gain precision. Simply adjusting his rifle might move the center of his shooting, but he'll still be all over the place.
In the lab, high precision with low accuracy indicates that you are following your procedure well each time. You can fix this by finding the flaw in your procedure that is ending in an inaccurate result.
On the other hand, if the average of your answers is correct, but you're all over the place, this indicates that your methodology or equipment are flawed. This is much harder to track down.
Actually, the duration of greater G forces probably has a more direct effect on the ability of the heart to get enough blood to the brain, rather than directly on the brain itself. Of course, the lack of oxygen-carrying blood does have an effect on the brain!
Don't many military pilots wear anti-G suits that constrict around their legs? I believe this is to preven the blood from pooling in the lower parts of the body, thus preventing enough blood from getting to the brain.
Of course, a rapid acceleration (or is it change in acceleration), can cause the brain to bounce hard against the inside of the skull, leading to a concussion.
Nobody has asked "how is it broken" - did it break off, as with the bricks in the experiment? Or did it sipmly stop retracting? Or maybe it doesn't come out any more (got stuck on going back in).
You can't assume that when the "dumb" user says "it's broken" that it really means anything specific.
As a sysadmin, I often hear "the network is down" or "e-mail doesn't work" (or get pages like this). This user-diagnosis is useless, and I always have to ask them what the heck they mean? How is it down, what doesn't work, etc. It's usually something silly like they typed in the wrong password.
So is it possible that this user's coffee cup broke the CD tray? Well, that depends on what you mean by broken. It's not probable that it broke clean off, but it may not function like it used to.
Now for the real question - how many of us tried putting a coffee cup on our CD trays for first time today after reading the article?
Don't you know? Humans are creatures that would much rather react to a crisis than plan for a better future. As long as oil is cheap and plentiful there's no "crisis" to push us into better mothods.
With that in mind, I say lets drill it all, suck it out and burn it as fast as possible so we can finally have a decent crisis that will force us to look at better energy systems!
I have several of his books and tried to look him up several years ago, and it seems he was an accountant and not really interested in doing BASIC stuff any more.
m
I just found a page:
http://people.whowhere.com/pages/DaveAhl@aol.co
where he states:
"Yes, I am the founder of Creative Computing, the first personal computing magazine (in 1974) and, yes, I am the author of Basic Computer Games and 21 other books. No I can't solve your Basic games problems because today I am a financial planner. However, if you'd like help with planning your financial future or in making investments, especially international ones, then I'd be happy to speak with you (free the first time, $$ after that)."
Yes, but you can only be blackmailed about it if you think it's wrong and you don't want people to find out.
If you smoke a few joints and you're open about it, chances are it would not make good leverage for blackmail.
What works much better is to find someone who appears to be "goody-two-shoes" or boyscout and cares to maintain that image. It's when he has some kind of secret deviance that he wants to keep secret that makes him an excellent subject for blackmail.
I used to give SAEDA briefings in the Army - Subversion and Espionage Directed Against the US Army. This article is about the FBI, but it's the same game.
IANAL so I don't understand how they can really license how you use the data that you create with their encoder (streaming server)?
It seems to me that it would be like Compuserve not only controlling GIF encoders/decoders, but controlling the GIFs you have made.
If I create an mp3 of some kind and decide to stream it off my computer, can Fraunhofer really (legally) demand a cut of any profit I make from it? Microsoft doesn't (yet) get a cut of a novel that I author using Microsoft Word.
What am I missing here?
Maybe they want to get switched over to Linux before Win2k is no longer supported and they end up forced to make the next upgrade. If they move to Linux, they can still make the next upgrade, but it will cost them very little.
It would be great to find that they're switching to Linux due to long-term thinking!
This reminds me of a recent faculty meeting at the University I work for. I work in the Engineering school which recently picked up Computer Science from the Math department.
In the meeting, several of the Engineering profs thought it would be great if the CS profs would ride along with me (a systems administrator) and learn how to do my work, in case me and my boss disappeared somehow.
Fortunately, one of the CS profs pointed out that the Electrical Engineering profs could then take care of the electrical wiring in our building, and the Civils can fix the toilets when they back up.
Fortunately, this idea died a quick death in committee.
You just fill out your preferences and then it provides easy-to-print form letters that you sign, fold, staple, stamp, and mail.
I did this a year ago and I get very very little junkmail, and I NEVER get telemarketing calls.
Who could have thought it would be so easy!
These people also have some great (GPL) software for blocking banner ads, cookies, or any other ad-serving site you like.
Actually, I'd rather see congress tied up on stuff that doesn't pass. That means they have less time to spend on things that could pass - which are the things that usually have a negative effect on the rest of us!
I was referring to a saying I've heard a few times - sadly can't site the source.
_I_ do understand plagiarism - this was a joke poking fun at academicians and their methods.
Why not just break open the tape and feed one end into a cross-cut shredder? The shredder pulls the tape off the spools and it comes out in little bitty bits. If you're really paranoid, you could bulk erase it before hand, and shred more than one tape at a time.
THEN burn it in an incinerator.