"I think we're already seeing the beginnings of a more deft and subtle foreign policy. I don't believe it's a coincidence that Obama abandoned the idea of European missile defence (which was a serious thorn in the side of the Russians), and we suddenly hear Russia talking about serious sanctions against Iran."
So, lets see what we have here.
An South Asian nation which is - Predominantly Muslim - oil rich - run by autocrats - recently out of a nasty war against one of its neighbors in which nobody really won - already under sanctions for messing around with WMD's - playing a cat and mouse game with UN inspectors regarding their WMD program
is being told by the UN Security council to straighten up, allow inspections, "or else". A number of those nations making those noises nonetheless have substantial above board and illegal investments in the nation in question.
Boy, that sounds familiar.
Some predictions: - Security Council rhetoric will heat up, and... - The overheated rhetoric will be ignored. - Severe sanctions will be proposed, and... - nations with interests in the country will see the impact on them, and... - those nations will start preaching temperance and further negotiations. - The major nation left with little investment in the subject country will be the lone standard bearer for tough action, and... - that major nation's leader will need to choose between acting alone or not acting at all.
So, if what you mean by "deft and subtle" means "doing the same thing and expecting a different result", I suggest you read a certain Big Book. Because race and political party don't mean shit when international oil money is involved.
"The same weapons the police use are available to anyone that wants to buy them (with some exceptions)."
Since the police have new full auto firearms, new AP ammunition, destructive devices (grenades, etc), which are all things civilians aren't allowed to have without going through insane hoops, I believe your statement is incorrect.
And that's just the federal limitations. Individual states prevent their citizens from owning weapons that even LOOK like the ones police can use, and limit ammunition carrying capacity to a fraction of what the police are allowed.
"I'm only guessing, but could the mayor of Berwyn, Maryland possibly be black?"
Nope - white as driven snow. Well, he's Italian, so maybe that counted against him, but I doubt it - the first person whose face they shoved into the floor was his 70 year old mother.
"Not since they started buying their competition in Microsoft fashion instead of competing with a better product. e.g. youtube vs video.google.com"
No, Microsoft fashion is to buy it and kill it so that it doesn't compete with MS's inferior product. Google bought YouTube and then effectively killed their OWN product. And they really haven't effed up YouTube. So why are they evil here?
I'm guessing it's like having a pickup game of softball at your local municipal field, and you get busted. Why? You need a permit. It's free and easy to get, but you still need to get it.
Google's saying "We ask everybody else to play by these rules, which aren't even onerous, so you need to as well."
He's referring to a case in Canada. Monsanto claimed he had gotten hold of some Roundup Ready rape seed, and used it to grow a seed crop of his own. Monsanto has the patent on that, and farmers are required to pay Monsanto a fee when they grow it. This, btw, is long established practice - the first patent was granted Burpee for the Red Delicious apple tree, and every single RD Apple tree in existence is a graft linking back to that tree - and if an orchard decides simply to graft from one they have already and establish 50 more trees, they still owe Burpee the license fee. Same with hybrid roses.
The farmer claimed that it was wind blown pollen from a neighbor's field that contaminated his seed crop. A couple of things that came out at the trial were that a) it wasn't a scattering, it was a whole field, and b) it occurred over multiple seasons, which negated his claim that he didn't know. c) Despite Monsanto's claims, contamination by windblown pollen can occur.
Best guess is that he DID have a small patch of seed corn contaminated with the RR variant, but instead of destroying it and claiming damages from his neighbor, he selectively harvested it and planted another seed crop with it. Which is illegal, and he knew it. But since the story had the words "Monsanto", "GMO", "contaminated", and "farmer" in it, we wound up with most people forming opinions like the GP. If it would have been one of Monsanto's other patented but NOT GMO strains, the story wouldn't have gone farther than the local grange newsletter.
Monsanto sucks for plenty of other reasons than using 50 year old precedent to enforce plant patent rights against someone who violated them.
Since public knowledge and resistance to GMO's if far more prevalent in European countries, pray tell what are their reasons? Surely not superstition and illogical thinking - only Amercians are subject to that.
"When "foolproof" systems make a lot of noise on prominent people, those systems are "put under review", which basically results in crippling them to the point of uselessness to the tune of millions of dollars (or GBP, in this case). "
You missed my point entirely. When prominent people get fingered by an automated system, they are not going to "put it under review" or cripple it - they simply get the maintainers of the system to slip in an exception list and a conditional that says "If one of these people's names show up, ignore it and flush associated data." The only way the system gets crippled is if the exception list becomes so big as to be meaningless.
Let's take the Soviet Union for example. At the start, if one was a member of the Party, one got special treatment. Certain restrictions, etc. didn't apply to you because you were a party member and had special status. Fast forward, and the populace clues in, so now almost EVERYONE joins the Party to get special treatment, which dwindles to very little. But the powerful members of the party certainly don't want to be included with the hoi polloi, so they create a list of party members who get EXTRA special treatment. The people on the list were called the nomenklatura, which means "list of names". And you couldn't just apply for a position - you had to be chosen. So when membership in the Communist Party stopped working for the powerful, they didn't change the system of rewards and privileges for Party members, they just carved an exception out for themselves.
So shortly after being flagged on the No Fly list, Kennedy's status was straightened out. But the unfairness and arbitrary nature of the procedures weren't changed - Abdul still gets flagged every single time - what changed is that Kennedy was allowed to travel outside of those rules and procedures. Why? Because he was Teddy Fucking Kennedy, for chrissake.
You've put your finger on a question that won't be answered until it's too late: has nuclear war been avoided because of the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction, or in spite of it?
Redundancy is a necessary condition for uptime, but not a sufficient condition. You can have N+a kagillion levels of redundancy, but is the equipment is neglected or procedures aren't followed, it means jack shit.
Added levels of redundancy can actually hurt overall reliability, if it encourages maintenance to delay repairs and ignore problems because "we have backups for that".
One facility I worked on had a half again more processing equipment than needed on the floor. Why? "Well, when one fails we just move production over to another one." Then they would leave the dead equipment on the floor until they found time to get it repaired, which could take months. You can guess where I'm going - they needed 20 machined, there were 30 on the floor, and 12 were down. And and now they had 12 to repair, not 1 or 2.
It's not just in IT. I work for an organization that uses a LOT of refrigeration in the form of walk-in refrigerators and freezers. Each one can hold product worth up to $1M and all can be lost in a temperature excursion. So we started designing in redundancy: 2 separate refrigeration systems per box, backup controller, redundant power feeds from different transfer switches over divers routing (Brown's Ferry lessons learned). Oh, and each facility had twice as many boxes as needed for the inventory.
After installation, we began getting calls and complaints about how our "wonder boxes" were pieces of crap, that they were failing left and right, etc. We freak out and do some analysis. Turns out that, in almost every instance, a trivial component had failed in 1 compressor and the system had failed over to the other system, ran for weeks-months, and then that failed too. When we asked why they never fixed the first failure, they said "What failure?" When we asked about the alarm the controller gave due to mechanical failure, we were told that it had gone off repeatedly but was ignored because the temperature readings were still good and that's all Operations cared about. In some instances the wires to the buzzer was cut, and in one instance, a "massive controller failure" was really a crash due to the system memory being filled by the alarm log.
Yes, we did some design changes, but we also added another base principle to our design criteria: "You can't engineer away stupid."
At some point, some government official will either be exposed to be pervert or some such, or will be wrongfully and horribly flagged as some sort of terrorist.
In fact, I'm willing to bet the European hacker community will take steps to ensure that such a thing happens. As soon as it does, there will be all sorts of running about to cripple the system to the point that it's inert, but oddly still very expensive.
You mean like when Teddy Kennedy, a US Senator, was put on the no-fly list in the US? The only thing that changed was the addition of a note under the entry that says "The fat drunk claiming to be a US Senator is good to go."
When politicians and "important" people run afoul of the law, they don't change the law - they just make sure that it doesn't apply to THEM.
"Not to mention this is the EU we're talking about: a place with 23 different official languages. With this kind of diversity, there's probably nothing that can be classified as "abnormal"."
I'd do an FTFY, but this is a serious question: don't you mean "With this kind of diversity, there's probably nothing that can't be classified as "abnormal"?
8? How about zero? Current technology can analyze a substance's composition to an extremely fine degree. When you consider the number of elements on the list (all the heavy metals, for example) find me anything that doesn't contain some trace element on that list.
It's not the jurisdiction I'm asking about, but application of the law. Treason is a crime against a nation - the US Government is the "victim". But could it be construed as the victim in this case? The DC government, while federally chartered, etc, etc, is not a "branch" of the federal government. Or is it.
BTW, I'm a longtime resident of the MD suburbs and both my wife and I have worked in the city, so I'm not entirely unknowledgeable.
Slashdot Mirror
So, lets see what we have here.
An South Asian nation which is
- Predominantly Muslim
- oil rich
- run by autocrats
- recently out of a nasty war against one of its neighbors in which nobody really won
- already under sanctions for messing around with WMD's
- playing a cat and mouse game with UN inspectors regarding their WMD program
is being told by the UN Security council to straighten up, allow inspections, "or else". A number of those nations making those noises nonetheless have substantial above board and illegal investments in the nation in question.
Boy, that sounds familiar.
Some predictions: ...
- Security Council rhetoric will heat up, and...
- The overheated rhetoric will be ignored.
- Severe sanctions will be proposed, and...
- nations with interests in the country will see the impact on them, and
- those nations will start preaching temperance and further negotiations.
- The major nation left with little investment in the subject country will be the lone standard bearer for tough action, and...
- that major nation's leader will need to choose between acting alone or not acting at all.
So, if what you mean by "deft and subtle" means "doing the same thing and expecting a different result", I suggest you read a certain Big Book. Because race and political party don't mean shit when international oil money is involved.
"The same weapons the police use are available to anyone that wants to buy them (with some exceptions)."
Since the police have new full auto firearms, new AP ammunition, destructive devices (grenades, etc), which are all things civilians aren't allowed to have without going through insane hoops, I believe your statement is incorrect.
And that's just the federal limitations. Individual states prevent their citizens from owning weapons that even LOOK like the ones police can use, and limit ammunition carrying capacity to a fraction of what the police are allowed.
"I'm only guessing, but could the mayor of Berwyn, Maryland possibly be black?"
Nope - white as driven snow. Well, he's Italian, so maybe that counted against him, but I doubt it - the first person whose face they shoved into the floor was his 70 year old mother.
"Not since they started buying their competition in Microsoft fashion instead of competing with a better product. e.g. youtube vs video.google.com"
No, Microsoft fashion is to buy it and kill it so that it doesn't compete with MS's inferior product. Google bought YouTube and then effectively killed their OWN product. And they really haven't effed up YouTube. So why are they evil here?
I'm guessing it's like having a pickup game of softball at your local municipal field, and you get busted. Why? You need a permit. It's free and easy to get, but you still need to get it.
Google's saying "We ask everybody else to play by these rules, which aren't even onerous, so you need to as well."
"Does anyone really believe that Google is the "do no evil" company that it used to be, pre-IPO?"
No, I don't believe that, because they never said that
Their motto is "Don't be evil." There's a subtle, but I believe important, difference.
Is there a different prankster day in England?
Whoops - the Red Delicious was Stark Nurseries, and the first plant patent was for a rose. Getting my plant trivia mixed up.
He's referring to a case in Canada. Monsanto claimed he had gotten hold of some Roundup Ready rape seed, and used it to grow a seed crop of his own. Monsanto has the patent on that, and farmers are required to pay Monsanto a fee when they grow it. This, btw, is long established practice - the first patent was granted Burpee for the Red Delicious apple tree, and every single RD Apple tree in existence is a graft linking back to that tree - and if an orchard decides simply to graft from one they have already and establish 50 more trees, they still owe Burpee the license fee. Same with hybrid roses.
The farmer claimed that it was wind blown pollen from a neighbor's field that contaminated his seed crop. A couple of things that came out at the trial were that
a) it wasn't a scattering, it was a whole field, and
b) it occurred over multiple seasons, which negated his claim that he didn't know.
c) Despite Monsanto's claims, contamination by windblown pollen can occur.
Best guess is that he DID have a small patch of seed corn contaminated with the RR variant, but instead of destroying it and claiming damages from his neighbor, he selectively harvested it and planted another seed crop with it. Which is illegal, and he knew it. But since the story had the words "Monsanto", "GMO", "contaminated", and "farmer" in it, we wound up with most people forming opinions like the GP. If it would have been one of Monsanto's other patented but NOT GMO strains, the story wouldn't have gone farther than the local grange newsletter.
Monsanto sucks for plenty of other reasons than using 50 year old precedent to enforce plant patent rights against someone who violated them.
Since public knowledge and resistance to GMO's if far more prevalent in European countries, pray tell what are their reasons? Surely not superstition and illogical thinking - only Amercians are subject to that.
Yeah, because half a solution is worse than none at all. Especially when someone isn't getting their place at the trough.
"And yet here in the US we still allow the Dixie Flag to be flown. Once you have lost the war you should not be able to continue using your flag."
Yep - and we can burn our official flag, too. Although nobody does it anymore - once it was declared legal the act lost all of its shock value.
"When "foolproof" systems make a lot of noise on prominent people, those systems are "put under review", which basically results in crippling them to the point of uselessness to the tune of millions of dollars (or GBP, in this case). "
You missed my point entirely. When prominent people get fingered by an automated system, they are not going to "put it under review" or cripple it - they simply get the maintainers of the system to slip in an exception list and a conditional that says "If one of these people's names show up, ignore it and flush associated data." The only way the system gets crippled is if the exception list becomes so big as to be meaningless.
Let's take the Soviet Union for example. At the start, if one was a member of the Party, one got special treatment. Certain restrictions, etc. didn't apply to you because you were a party member and had special status. Fast forward, and the populace clues in, so now almost EVERYONE joins the Party to get special treatment, which dwindles to very little. But the powerful members of the party certainly don't want to be included with the hoi polloi, so they create a list of party members who get EXTRA special treatment. The people on the list were called the nomenklatura, which means "list of names". And you couldn't just apply for a position - you had to be chosen. So when membership in the Communist Party stopped working for the powerful, they didn't change the system of rewards and privileges for Party members, they just carved an exception out for themselves.
So shortly after being flagged on the No Fly list, Kennedy's status was straightened out. But the unfairness and arbitrary nature of the procedures weren't changed - Abdul still gets flagged every single time - what changed is that Kennedy was allowed to travel outside of those rules and procedures. Why? Because he was Teddy Fucking Kennedy, for chrissake.
Hmmm, 2 "interesting read" comments.
Why do I have the feeling that the next "See me in my office!" email won't be spam?
"Beanut Putter"
Is that where baby batter comes from?
(I'm so going to Hell for that.)
I had a coworker use "bing" as a verb today on a concall. I "corrected" her.
Are you saying that I can't publish a document on the Web but limit who sees it?
That's an invasion of my privacy! Next thing you know you'll be saying I can't stop people watching me bang my wife in my front yard!
You've put your finger on a question that won't be answered until it's too late: has nuclear war been avoided because of the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction, or in spite of it?
So, when I said "find me anything that doesn't contain some trace element on that list" you reply with something that can't be found.
Thanks for proving my point for me.
Redundancy is a necessary condition for uptime, but not a sufficient condition. You can have N+a kagillion levels of redundancy, but is the equipment is neglected or procedures aren't followed, it means jack shit.
Added levels of redundancy can actually hurt overall reliability, if it encourages maintenance to delay repairs and ignore problems because "we have backups for that".
One facility I worked on had a half again more processing equipment than needed on the floor. Why? "Well, when one fails we just move production over to another one." Then they would leave the dead equipment on the floor until they found time to get it repaired, which could take months. You can guess where I'm going - they needed 20 machined, there were 30 on the floor, and 12 were down. And and now they had 12 to repair, not 1 or 2.
It's not just in IT. I work for an organization that uses a LOT of refrigeration in the form of walk-in refrigerators and freezers. Each one can hold product worth up to $1M and all can be lost in a temperature excursion. So we started designing in redundancy: 2 separate refrigeration systems per box, backup controller, redundant power feeds from different transfer switches over divers routing (Brown's Ferry lessons learned). Oh, and each facility had twice as many boxes as needed for the inventory.
After installation, we began getting calls and complaints about how our "wonder boxes" were pieces of crap, that they were failing left and right, etc. We freak out and do some analysis. Turns out that, in almost every instance, a trivial component had failed in 1 compressor and the system had failed over to the other system, ran for weeks-months, and then that failed too. When we asked why they never fixed the first failure, they said "What failure?" When we asked about the alarm the controller gave due to mechanical failure, we were told that it had gone off repeatedly but was ignored because the temperature readings were still good and that's all Operations cared about. In some instances the wires to the buzzer was cut, and in one instance, a "massive controller failure" was really a crash due to the system memory being filled by the alarm log.
Yes, we did some design changes, but we also added another base principle to our design criteria: "You can't engineer away stupid."
You mean like when Teddy Kennedy, a US Senator, was put on the no-fly list in the US? The only thing that changed was the addition of a note under the entry that says "The fat drunk claiming to be a US Senator is good to go."
When politicians and "important" people run afoul of the law, they don't change the law - they just make sure that it doesn't apply to THEM.
"Not to mention this is the EU we're talking about: a place with 23 different official languages. With this kind of diversity, there's probably nothing that can be classified as "abnormal"."
I'd do an FTFY, but this is a serious question: don't you mean "With this kind of diversity, there's probably nothing that can't be classified as "abnormal"?
8? How about zero? Current technology can analyze a substance's composition to an extremely fine degree. When you consider the number of elements on the list (all the heavy metals, for example) find me anything that doesn't contain some trace element on that list.
It's not the jurisdiction I'm asking about, but application of the law. Treason is a crime against a nation - the US Government is the "victim". But could it be construed as the victim in this case? The DC government, while federally chartered, etc, etc, is not a "branch" of the federal government. Or is it.
BTW, I'm a longtime resident of the MD suburbs and both my wife and I have worked in the city, so I'm not entirely unknowledgeable.