Thank you, thank you, thank you, for spelling "voila" correctly.
You're probably right about the method, though; the post someone made about OCR ignores that it is brutally computationally- and bandwidth-intensive to do that for every single message they want to be received. (Imagine having to C/R every single spam.)
I'm sure that this is old enough that no mods will wander through it, but this comment should have been modded waaaaaaay up.
It is an accurate reflection of fairly mainstream American thought - September 11 permanently changed things. It was not a blip. People are still angry about it, deep down, and the decent people of the world should hope that nothing like it happens again. As the parent noted, the government's behavior up to this point is only a tiny fraction of what would happen if the US were attacked again. "Blind murderous rage" would be wholly inadequate to describe the American public's reaction if that were to happen. Mike Hawash's story would be one of many.
That said, it's nice to see that the government has gotten around to charging him.
So you'd put all the power of who gets airtime and how the candidates are presented in the hands of media corporations?
You know that money is speech. Try getting your message out without it - you need posters, ads, airtime, bumper stickers, and everything else. Putting this in the hands of media conglomerates would only encourage more extremism as media paper over the wacky ideas of their personal favorites.
By the way, if the Democrats can't raise money, it's not the Republicans' fault.
I was talking about the parent post's approach - that we shouldn't do things because they might turn out later to be broken in an important but useful way (where later isn't necessarily during the child's lifetime).
My point was that if we can help someone right now with an identifiable problem, and the downside is purely theoretical (there are no extant diseases, and we're just returning the sufferer to the wildtype gene), we ought to fix it as soon as we have the chance.
All healthcare is by choice at some point; sickle cell anemia is a dangerous disease, so it's something that we should be willing to take some risks to fix.
Go watch a child wracked by a sickle cell crisis and tell him he's just taking one for the team.
I know that's not what you meant, but it's the way it will be played out. Worrying about future diseases that we can't possibly anticipate, and on those grounds preventing help to people right here, right now, is frankly disturbing.
For malaria, there's DDT and chloroquine. (Yes, evil evil DDT. If you don't use it in the kinds of saturation bombing we did in the 50's, the damage to other life is minor. And it remains the ultimate mosquito killer - after all, how do you think the US and Mediterranean nations wiped out malaria?)
You're assuming that everybody in marketing and sales will always remember to make that distinction. They won't.
You're right about the name, but why is it any use to Mozilla either? Brands don't have to be original or descriptive, just sufficiently distinctive to help you sell your product.
You know, the easiest way to do the gas station one is "Call all fifty states' Departments of Commerce and ask them how many gas stations there are." They'll be the ones who put up those little stickers that say "Yes, this pump is accurate."
Oh, and do it for DC and any possessions you want to include.
Not to mention that they're both open-source applications; imagine the possible confusion if you mentioned that your database product with a standardized browser interface "uses open-source Firebird technology to provide a powerful, responsive interface to your data."
There's a real possibility of confusion there, and the Moz folks probably ought to get moving if they want to be good neighbors.
For those who insist on using the car analogy: do you think GM would sit by if Ford introduced the all-new 4WD Ford Firebird SUV?
Well, assuming they're going to exist as a news-gathering corporation, the stable of reporters, bureaus, editors, columnists, and the like is really a sunk cost. It wouldn't be fair to the online operation to say "you have to pay for the content"; a better question is "Seeing as we've already paid for its content, how much did we pump into online operations, how much did we get back, and would the money we invested in it have been better off sitting in a bank account earning 2%?"
He was laughing at your typo, dude. "a land free people" instead of "a land of free people". I must say, though I think he's dead wrong, it is pretty funny.
(Kinda like Tom Tomorrow or Boondocks, that way; can't stand the politics, but they're funny as hell.)
YOU'RE RIGHT!!!! GOVERNMENT CAN FIX ECONOMY PERFECT IF JUST GIVE THEM POWER!!!
If corporations are so blindingly powerful (and seemingly bent on wrecking the lives of the consumers that buy their products), then how powerful would government have to be to stop them?
I think he means the nightclub bombings in Bali, which were as squarely aimed at Australians as a nightclub bombing in Tijuana or Cancun would be at Americans.
BTW, for those in this thread, don't forget Khobar Towers.
Poindexter is, in fact, a criminal. He's not a convicted one, because Congress gave him immunity for testimony, but he did in fact do them. "Poindexter was convicted of five felonies in 1990: conspiring to obstruct official inquiries and proceedings, obstructing Congress (two counts) and false statements (two counts). The convictions were overturned by an appellate court on the grounds Poindexter had been granted immunity in his testimony on the matter before Congress." (from here).
I've never really understood the whole anti-Cheney, anti-Rumsfeld, or even the anti-Ashcroft thing. Anti-Bush, I get; people think he's stupid. I don't; I think he's inarticulate and is willing to play dumb to get what he wants; but I do understand why they don't like him. Ashcroft is an Atty General, and they're notoriously anti-freedom (gads, just look at Reno). I think the subordinates are playing their parts in the government; for example, if you trust the AG to be a good little boy and not try to expand police powers of the government, you're a moron. The holder of that office should be hounded day and night by Congress, regardless of the party in power. They didn't do it under Clinton, though, and they aren't doing it under Bush.
A six-year-old that does not refer to adults as "Sir" or "Ma'am" is considered to be severely lacking in respect in some parts of the country. I wouldn't train a child that way in Los Angeles, but you'd find a child that didn't use those terms reprimanded at school in the Nashville suburbs. It's not authoritarian, if by that you mean inflexible family governance by fiat; I spent plenty of time becoming acquainted with authoritarian, and "sir" and "ma'am" are just good manners, as much as they bother you.
I don't know the exact reasons why GSM wasn't chosen in the US. I can tell you that it STILL has a fairly small footprint in the US (with lots of uncovered areas; take a look at the coverage maps at T-mobile's website, and notice the spots where coverage just ends - the road usually keeps going).
If I had to guess, I'd say that the huge uninhabited areas worked against GSM as a standard. Systems that work wonderfully in the NY-Washington corridor (the only place in the US with a consistent population density approaching that of Europe) work like crap in the prairie.
Just about every weirdness of the American mobile market can be attributed to our billing system - we pay flat rates for local calls. Mobile companies had to adapt to this, so you pay for incoming as well as outgoing minutes. Still, from looking at some of the UK rate plans I've seen, we've got a much better deal in most cases. I have the much-maligned Sprint PCS (which does have spotty coverage, but damn it's cheap), and for $35 a month (after taxes!) I get 300 anytime minutes and unlimited nights and weekends from anywhere on their national network to anywhere in the US. Imagine being able to use a Lisbon-based mobile in Moscow without paying any charges, and you get the idea.
And perhaps more of them would. So what? The decision has been made, and the safety of the armed forces is a hell of a lot more important than everybody getting a news fix. I have no doubt that there will be extensive investigations - after the war - of practically everything that has gone on. I trust journalists to do their jobs then. In the meantime, we have no pressing need to know precisely where our troops are, and we sure as hell don't need someone broadcasting from the middle of Iraq saying that a cruise missile just went over his head and giving Saddam five minutes to bug out of wherever he is.
The different selection process for leaders in the US and UK probably has a great deal to do with the different leadership styles (i.e., the PM is elected by the MP's, while the President is elected by the voters - very different audiences). For example, the last really good orator of a president was Ronald Reagan (whose speeches tended to simple rhetoric, but with fabulous delivery). Clinton had two forms of speech: sound bites, and three-hour rambles. The latter were frankly painful to listen to.
Before that, you really have to go back to JFK for someone who could give a great speech. Despite the generally high quality of White House speechwriters, the delivery of so many presidents was often limp.
I often wonder how much Bush affects his various forms of speech, and how much is simply that he's a poor orator. "Nukular" is the most obvious example of the former; it's not as though he has never heard it said properly, or that he couldn't say it properly if he chose to. His malapropisms are probably the latter, but they are entertaining.
Not to mention that the Pentagon probably has a way of convincing satellite companies that it would be in their best interests to sell to them, rather than to anyone else. You know, it would be terrible for a satellite to experience complete electrical failure and become a multi-million-dollar piece of space junk.
If you want unbiased information, join the U.S. armed forces, the CIA, or the NSA. You won't necessarily get much from outside your unit, but you'll know quite well what's going on in at least one area.
More realistically, you're not going to get it. The military is going to censor everything that is said for a while (and that's perfectly OK with me; I want as few people to die as possible). Unless you're on the inside, you don't really need to know - and they'd be crazy to jeopardize operational security to satisfy my desire to know.
After the fact, it will be a different matter. For now, though, we just have to wait.
Oh, one last thing - you might want to check out #news and #war-news on efnet; they have bots that scan just about every major English-speaking news service in the world.
The great thing about M.U.L.E. wasn't just the multiplayer aspects (which were fairly limited on the Commodore 64, the only version I played). It was that, like all the other really great building-up games (such as SimCity or Civilization), it had very simple rules that built a completely addictive game.
I probably played it against the computer far more than against human opponents, and it was still always a thrill.
(BTW: for those too young to have played it, the stated example of becoming Energy Czar was almost always an appallingly bad strategy, as energy doesn't keep from turn to turn; whenever possible, I always went for a balanced smithore-crystite portfolio, with some food production thrown in. I generally speculated on crystite as well.)
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You're probably right about the method, though; the post someone made about OCR ignores that it is brutally computationally- and bandwidth-intensive to do that for every single message they want to be received. (Imagine having to C/R every single spam.)
It is an accurate reflection of fairly mainstream American thought - September 11 permanently changed things. It was not a blip. People are still angry about it, deep down, and the decent people of the world should hope that nothing like it happens again. As the parent noted, the government's behavior up to this point is only a tiny fraction of what would happen if the US were attacked again. "Blind murderous rage" would be wholly inadequate to describe the American public's reaction if that were to happen. Mike Hawash's story would be one of many.
That said, it's nice to see that the government has gotten around to charging him.
You know that money is speech. Try getting your message out without it - you need posters, ads, airtime, bumper stickers, and everything else. Putting this in the hands of media conglomerates would only encourage more extremism as media paper over the wacky ideas of their personal favorites.
By the way, if the Democrats can't raise money, it's not the Republicans' fault.
My point was that if we can help someone right now with an identifiable problem, and the downside is purely theoretical (there are no extant diseases, and we're just returning the sufferer to the wildtype gene), we ought to fix it as soon as we have the chance.
All healthcare is by choice at some point; sickle cell anemia is a dangerous disease, so it's something that we should be willing to take some risks to fix.
I know that's not what you meant, but it's the way it will be played out. Worrying about future diseases that we can't possibly anticipate, and on those grounds preventing help to people right here, right now, is frankly disturbing.
For malaria, there's DDT and chloroquine. (Yes, evil evil DDT. If you don't use it in the kinds of saturation bombing we did in the 50's, the damage to other life is minor. And it remains the ultimate mosquito killer - after all, how do you think the US and Mediterranean nations wiped out malaria?)
You're right about the name, but why is it any use to Mozilla either? Brands don't have to be original or descriptive, just sufficiently distinctive to help you sell your product.
You know, the easiest way to do the gas station one is "Call all fifty states' Departments of Commerce and ask them how many gas stations there are." They'll be the ones who put up those little stickers that say "Yes, this pump is accurate." Oh, and do it for DC and any possessions you want to include.
There's a real possibility of confusion there, and the Moz folks probably ought to get moving if they want to be good neighbors.
For those who insist on using the car analogy: do you think GM would sit by if Ford introduced the all-new 4WD Ford Firebird SUV?
but I distinctly recall running Mosaic on Ultrix (and those were some slooooow boxes, little more than glorified Xterms).
Well, assuming they're going to exist as a news-gathering corporation, the stable of reporters, bureaus, editors, columnists, and the like is really a sunk cost. It wouldn't be fair to the online operation to say "you have to pay for the content"; a better question is "Seeing as we've already paid for its content, how much did we pump into online operations, how much did we get back, and would the money we invested in it have been better off sitting in a bank account earning 2%?"
Welcome to the new, improved /. - where even the editors make jokes about turning your webserver into a pile of slag!
(Kinda like Tom Tomorrow or Boondocks, that way; can't stand the politics, but they're funny as hell.)
If corporations are so blindingly powerful (and seemingly bent on wrecking the lives of the consumers that buy their products), then how powerful would government have to be to stop them?
BTW, for those in this thread, don't forget Khobar Towers.
I've never really understood the whole anti-Cheney, anti-Rumsfeld, or even the anti-Ashcroft thing. Anti-Bush, I get; people think he's stupid. I don't; I think he's inarticulate and is willing to play dumb to get what he wants; but I do understand why they don't like him. Ashcroft is an Atty General, and they're notoriously anti-freedom (gads, just look at Reno). I think the subordinates are playing their parts in the government; for example, if you trust the AG to be a good little boy and not try to expand police powers of the government, you're a moron. The holder of that office should be hounded day and night by Congress, regardless of the party in power. They didn't do it under Clinton, though, and they aren't doing it under Bush.
You have no idea how much I appreciate that.
A six-year-old that does not refer to adults as "Sir" or "Ma'am" is considered to be severely lacking in respect in some parts of the country. I wouldn't train a child that way in Los Angeles, but you'd find a child that didn't use those terms reprimanded at school in the Nashville suburbs. It's not authoritarian, if by that you mean inflexible family governance by fiat; I spent plenty of time becoming acquainted with authoritarian, and "sir" and "ma'am" are just good manners, as much as they bother you.
I don't know the exact reasons why GSM wasn't chosen in the US. I can tell you that it STILL has a fairly small footprint in the US (with lots of uncovered areas; take a look at the coverage maps at T-mobile's website, and notice the spots where coverage just ends - the road usually keeps going).
If I had to guess, I'd say that the huge uninhabited areas worked against GSM as a standard. Systems that work wonderfully in the NY-Washington corridor (the only place in the US with a consistent population density approaching that of Europe) work like crap in the prairie.
Just about every weirdness of the American mobile market can be attributed to our billing system - we pay flat rates for local calls. Mobile companies had to adapt to this, so you pay for incoming as well as outgoing minutes. Still, from looking at some of the UK rate plans I've seen, we've got a much better deal in most cases. I have the much-maligned Sprint PCS (which does have spotty coverage, but damn it's cheap), and for $35 a month (after taxes!) I get 300 anytime minutes and unlimited nights and weekends from anywhere on their national network to anywhere in the US. Imagine being able to use a Lisbon-based mobile in Moscow without paying any charges, and you get the idea.
The carrier is irrelevant; Americans (in almost every location) pay flat rates for local calls and fixed rates for long-distance ones.
And perhaps more of them would. So what? The decision has been made, and the safety of the armed forces is a hell of a lot more important than everybody getting a news fix. I have no doubt that there will be extensive investigations - after the war - of practically everything that has gone on. I trust journalists to do their jobs then. In the meantime, we have no pressing need to know precisely where our troops are, and we sure as hell don't need someone broadcasting from the middle of Iraq saying that a cruise missile just went over his head and giving Saddam five minutes to bug out of wherever he is.
Actually, I have no idea what the Pentagon would use to do such a job. I was just making a joke.
Before that, you really have to go back to JFK for someone who could give a great speech. Despite the generally high quality of White House speechwriters, the delivery of so many presidents was often limp.
I often wonder how much Bush affects his various forms of speech, and how much is simply that he's a poor orator. "Nukular" is the most obvious example of the former; it's not as though he has never heard it said properly, or that he couldn't say it properly if he chose to. His malapropisms are probably the latter, but they are entertaining.
Terrible, really.
More realistically, you're not going to get it. The military is going to censor everything that is said for a while (and that's perfectly OK with me; I want as few people to die as possible). Unless you're on the inside, you don't really need to know - and they'd be crazy to jeopardize operational security to satisfy my desire to know.
After the fact, it will be a different matter. For now, though, we just have to wait.
Oh, one last thing - you might want to check out #news and #war-news on efnet; they have bots that scan just about every major English-speaking news service in the world.
I probably played it against the computer far more than against human opponents, and it was still always a thrill.
(BTW: for those too young to have played it, the stated example of becoming Energy Czar was almost always an appallingly bad strategy, as energy doesn't keep from turn to turn; whenever possible, I always went for a balanced smithore-crystite portfolio, with some food production thrown in. I generally speculated on crystite as well.)