Because they were so incredibly effective at preventing 9/11 in the US, and so effective at stopping the London, UK subway bombings, and so effective at preventing the train bombing in Madrid, Spain, right? I'm feeling less imperiled already.
As I understand it, the surveillance was started some time after the 9/11 attacks, so it couldn't have stopped that.
I have to stop you right there. ECHELON has been gathering SIGINT for Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States since the 1960's: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON so the SIGINT existed. Add to that Kenneth Williams July 2001 "Phoenix Memo", which was buried by the FBI until Coleen Rowley took advantage of a whistle-blowing law to bring it to light: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_Memo
There was also a Chinese wall between intelligence agencies, the FBI, and the DIA, which was de jure in one direction, but de facto in both directions due to interagency pissing contests about the information flow only going one way, with no tit-for-tat http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Able_Danger#The_wall
You cripple the security services at your peril. Unlike the IRA, al Qaida doesn't tend to phone in warnings before a blast.
Because they were so incredibly effective at preventing 9/11 in the US, and so effective at stopping the London, UK subway bombings, and so effective at preventing the train bombing in Madrid, Spain, right? I'm feeling less imperiled already.
Perhaps if instead of complaining about information disclosures, they disclosed the plots they had been able to foil, and had rather public trials, we'd trust them more, but at this point, they act more like a police agency. Police agencies catch bad guys after the fact, after you are already dead from being blown up or shot or stabbed or raped. You know, after the crime.
I'd prefer not to live in a police state: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_state since their track record at preventing criminal activity from occurring in the first place is generally piss-poor.
There were Credit Card Skimmers installed in the checkout lines in 21 Bay Area Lucky Stores, followed by rampant buying sprees on the card of the people stupid enough to use the self-checkout lines, which are not very well policed. I definitely won't use the things.
It would help greatly if there was any standards for product data whatsoever. Only very recently has there been any efforts to standardize the metadata on products in a format that vendors and retailers can interchange, and if you think that a large grocer can just swap out all their merchandising systems overnight, the you don't know what it's like to work for a low-margin retailer. The average stat is that $100 of saved expense is equal to an additional $10k in sales. The slightest amount of shrink can be the difference between a profitable store, and a money siphon.
Frankly there are, and have been for years, UPC code databases, but you have to license them, unless you are willing to go for the vastly more incomplete consumer assembled EAN/UCC-13 code sites. My first experience with a licensed UPC database was in 1995, but I was aware of NCR systems where you could get them in 1985 or so. They used to come on QIC-20 tapes for loading into the NCR Tower XP and Tower 32 systems that they used to use to run all the cash registers in the supermarket. Now you can get them on DVD.
There are also food ingredient databases, but they tend to be more sketchy, particularly for store brands, which generally come off the assembly line that's currently cheapest. There is also a push for cost reduction on store brands, so they will tend to initially go with a higher end supplier when they bring out a new store brand something, and several moths after it's out, you'll read the label and find they've substituted corn syrup for the cane sugar and similar cost reduction tricks.
It's a real bitch if you have, for example, a corn allergy, or Crohn's disease, and they've bait-and switched things on you. You also have to watch the fried foods, such as prepackaged dinners, when they decide to use peanut oil instead of some other more expensive oil, because it was cheapest on the commodity food oil market for the plant that week.
They don't data mine this stuff from your frequency marketing card because there would be some legal liability both from a HIPPA information standpoint, and if they changed a formulation, and hadn't updated their database recently enough to flag an allergen at the checkout.
Sorry but power won't generate itself and NIMBYs have made damned sure we ain't building any nuclear power plants so what else can you do?
I can't speak for anyone else, but I do not support current nuclear power systems anywhere on the planet, but I will support nuclear power anywhere on the planet if we start reprocessing waste. As long as the waste is a problem we're just deferring to our descendants, it is unacceptable. So what can we do? Start reprocessing waste. It's the only rational way to handle our nuclear waste, and it's the only kind of reactor that will see any green support. How "odd" that it's the one kind of reactor we won't build.
"On April 7, 1977, President Jimmy Carter announced that the United States would defer indefinitely the reprocessing of spent nuclear reactor fuel. He stated that after extensive examination of the issues, he had reached the conclusion that this action was necessary to reduce the serious threat of nuclear weapons proliferation, and that by setting this example, the U. S. would encourage other nations to follow its lead."
Technically, this policy was push by the environmental lobby:
"Environmental groups saw the breeder as a danger. An unlimited source of energy, they feared, would mean more energy use and waste, leading to more global environmental degradation and also opening new risks for proliferation of nuclear weapons."
Yep. I mean, why Iraq? Have you noticed how the justification for that "war" kept changing over the years? It started out with Saddam and his WMD (anybody else remember "UN inspectors"...)
We more or less knew he had them because he used them at Halabja, and as recently as 1991:
Then perhaps what we need is to find better ways of curing mental illness—ways that don't depend on potentially very dangerous pharmaceuticals, discovered almost purely through trial and error, that have serious, unpleasant, well-known side effects, and require you to pay the pharmaceutical industry for the privilege of continuing to live a normal life, for the rest of your life.
Dan Aris
It's more or less in the best interests of the pharmacology industry to offer treatments, rather than cures. The diabetes model gives an ongoing revenue stream, compared to a cure, which immediately stops revenue.
If, for example, someone was to actually come out with a cure for AIDS, it would piss a lot of companies off.
To be fair, this is out of context... the Berlin Left Part member Hakan Tas is not even Turkish, participated in the protest, and wasn't arrested. How many countries allow foreign nationals to protest against the government of a country for which they are not a citizen?
In addition, the thing that's pissing most people off there is not that they are removing trees, it's that they plan to build a mosque in the area.
You are, of course, aware that the region was allied with the confederacy.
You are, of course, aware, that you are talking about persons living in that area of the indian territories which was to later become OK, and that the derogatory term for the Confederacy was not "Yankees", per the GP's use of the word?
It looks like you now have a new company idea. Assuming the market for one of these is anything other than minuscule for whatever price point you are able to hit while building them in China or Japan, assuming you can drive something of that resolution from USB power in the first place. Personally, given the proce differential between "retina: and "non-retina" devices, all other things being equal, I think that these would be of limited use for everyone except professional video editors or the idle rich.
If you are actually serious about needing the external display space for something other than field video editing, then you have picked the wrong coworking space, since plenty of them have pluggable displays available, and some of them even have cable vending machines, in case you are lacking the necessary cable to hook up to your laptop.
For the Austin area, I know of at least Conjunctured is one company that has so-called "community monitors", but they are first come, first serve, so if you wanted one there, you'd need to get there pretty early to claim one before they were all spoken for already.
It's not exactly what I'd call "high resolution" (it's 1366x768 horizontal, 768x1366 vertical), but it is USB-powered and portable (15.6" diagonal, 3.4 pounds):
"Never Mind the Epidemic, Who Gets Patent Rights For the Cure?"
I imagine that since the cure is, by definition, a derivative work of the disease, that some of the royalties will have to go to the labs that created the original disease.
Obviously, if it's an "Act of God" rather than a lab that created the disease, the money should go in tithing to your local church.
Correspondingly, you should be able to sue your local church, as God's representative on Earth, for compensation for any loss of life, pain and suffering, property damage, and so on, where Acts of God are involved unless, you know, they were to disclaim any association.
it never ceases to amaze me that legislators are paranoid over even the slightest form of nudity while it took a massive public outcry to get a facebook movie removed in which a woman was decapitated with a kitchen knife.
I rather have my kids accidentally stumble upon some extreme acts of intercourse than extreme acts of violence.
Personally what I find amazing is that we don't have rampant comedy on the streets because of the sitcoms on TV, rampant reality on the streets because of reality TV, and humorous cats everywhere like some pre-warp civilization equivalent of tribbles.
The biggest problem in OK is not wind... it's all the crap that got picked up by the wind, and is being slammed into your specially designed structure at 300MPH.
Just like the biggest problem for structures in hurricanes is not actually the wind, it's the water and debris that's getting slammed into them by the hurricane.
At last you yankees finally got the tale of the three little pigs right.
You are, of course, aware that Oklahoma was not a state during the US Civil War, it was "Indian Territory", and that it was therefore neither Confederate ("Rebs") nor Union ("Yankee"), right?
*OR* you could change your fucked-up society so that the lower classes aren't creepy discontented uneducated idiots.
How are creepy discontented educated idiots any better, other than they know how to make bombs using pressure cookers and set them off at marathons?
Like providing better education and environments during the critical formative years.
How are creepy discontented educated idiots, who had parental involvement in their early lives, any better, other than they come from homes where they can afford to obtain restricted materials from illegal sources and injuring 21 people and killing 15 others, including themselves, at Columbine High School?
More statist socialism means less corpses littering the streets, metaphorically and literally. Seriously, here in Sweden the only "class division" that exists is between immigrants and non-immigrants. In a psychosocial sense at least.
And what, precisely, are you doing to remedy that social injustice which you have just identified?
1. Many homeless people in the USA are homeless because of mental problems. Treating said problems is necessary because otherwise they can't take care of themselves, fancy rolling shelter or not. Many will DESTROY said shelter in days, if not hours.
It's not very brilliant, but it's a matter of law that both drug abusers and the mentally ill have a right to refuse treatment, and unless you can pin a sufficient criminal act on the former, or demonstrate a danger to society of the latter, then there's no way to force treatment.
It's also one thing to take a mentally ill person and medicate them to the point that they are stable enough that you are required to release them, and entirely another to implant them with a Norplant-type device to continue to administer corrective drugs after they've been released from protective custody. The second one is illegal enforcement of treatment after termination of medical power of attorney.
How many psychologists does it take to change a lightbulb? One. But the lightbulb has to want to change.
It takes absolutely no talent to waste power like this. Well, perhaps it does, to use so much power while getting so little useful result.
Think about carefully next time you're driving down the road in a vehicle that gets around 12% effeciency from the gasoline it burns.
I'll think about that, and I'll think about the fact it could probably be 30% more efficient than that, if it wasn't for all the crap additives like ethanol and MTBE they are stuffing into it to keep cars manufactured prior to 1981 (prior years did not have oxygen sensors to control fuel mixture) from polluting.
Then I'll wonder exactly how many pre-1981 cars are actually still on the road, and I'll wonder about the percentage of total fuel usage by all cars which is accounted for by pre-1981 cars.
Then I'll start in again with my sneaking suspicion that the reformulation lobbying by Chevron in California is less about a concern for pollution, and more about a concern for Chevron to have their markets there protected from imports from out of state refineries unable to keep up with California's frequently changing reformulation requirements. You know, for the children, not so that they can have a higher profit margin due to sole-sourcing or anything.
Here are some observations about why the problem isn't as difficult as you are making it out to be.
First and foremost, for older PLC hardware, the PLC hardware was considered to be the valuable part, and the software/drivers were considered to be overhead that they had to have to sell the hardware. So most of the serial protocols for these things were well documented in order to reduce support costs. In general there was either reluctant free support for their software/drivers, or you paid a fee per incident. If support contracts were an option... you are unlikely to have kept the payments up this long. So you will likely be writing some code, but you will likely have documentation with which to do it.
Second, the FTDI drivers are crap. They leak kernel memory in Linux when you unplug them while the device associated with them is open. They also do this in the Windows Drivers, and because Mac OS X is religious about its encapsulation model in IOKit, unplugging them in Mac OS X while the device is open generally leads to a kernel panic. Almost all the USB-to-RS232C/RS422 adapters use chips sourced from FTDI, or use clones of the FTDI chips so they don't have to actually write their own drivers. Rampant code copying between vendors is my suspected reason that most of these vendors refuse to document their hardware well enough that an Open Source driver without the bugs could be written. You are unlikely to be happy with USB fobs.
Third, 9 pin RS232C is frequently not enough for a lot of older devices. The RS232C specification allows external clocking of the signal, but these pins are not present on the 9 pin connectors, only on the 25 pin. Additionally, there is out of band signaling that is sometimes used on other RS232C pins that aren't as frequently used that can be necessary. As you are with a printing firm, if what we are talking about here is an old Linotype or similar machine, you are likely to be SOL without full 25 pin RS232C. You should be happy that it isn't an 8 pin DIN cable from an old Mac, since at least you get the RI pin on the 9 pin connector.
Fourth, terminal servers often have these issues, in spades. There are a number of terminal servers where, if you have a blocking outstanding read on the serial port, outgoing writes are blocked until the read completes or times out. They basically expect that you will poll, or that all your communications over the serial port will be synchronous (i.e. you will not end up with output to your Wyse-50 until after you have input something). I can name a number of vendors with 8-port serial cards that have this issue. On the plus side, it's a driver design bug, so if you are swilling to use your own driver, or are willing to go Open Source OS, this is typically not a problem, but you will end up screwed by Windows and Mac OS X -- but a Mac OS X subclass of the broken driver is easier than an entirely new driver written in windows. Computone 8 port cards used to have this problem a lot.
Fifth, and finally, with USB dongles, it's frequent that the modem control signals are borked up. What I mean by this is that until the pseudo tty USB driver on the host side of things is opened, then the pins on the RS232C side of the adapter are floating in an indeterminate state which depends on the USB fob firmware, and is frequently not where you would want e.g. DTR or CTS/RTS or other signals hanging out for an idle serial port. This can make older equipment Do Things(tm), and the oly real remedy is to get the port open, set the signals right, and THEN plug in the serial cable. Generally, this means that you get to have two sets of signal state for setup, in addition, since the line buffers in some of the older devices are not optoisolated, and on those which are, the optoisolation can blow if you immediately apply voltage before ground, etc.. If you think talking to an old PLC is hard, try replacing an ancient Zilog UART on the damn thing.
Apparently, at your university, the contract you have with the CS department for your degree program has it as a required class, so it's of paramount importance to you getting your CS degree from the program in which you are enrolled.
Should it be important? That's an entirely different question, and not one you have asked here. I will answer it anyway.
If you plan on getting a job at a site which uses social networking, then an understanding of graph theory is a necessity. Given that the entire Internet 2.0 bubble is based on social networking being important to monetization, if you plan to get a job doing CS things, then you plan to get a job at a company which uses social networking.
A lot of advanced math is useful to solving graph problems, not just Warshall's for computing transitive closures. For example, Differential Geometry http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_geometry tends to be incredibly useful for reducing resource requirements related to Computability http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computability_theory . Reducing data center costs for something that has scaled, or is intended to scale, as large as Facebook or Google, or even Yahoo, Twitter, LinkedIn, and so on, is the primary gate on your income vs. expense ratio = profitability.
It's useful for other things as well, which will likely become obvious to you after you learn it well enough to apply it as a tool when faced with new problems.
And the idea of yours invading other countries to "liberte" them is hilarious to the rest of the world.
The US is going around the world installing democracy. If it can be proven that democracy can work in places where there were previously repressive regimes, then they will try it in North America.
"...forces guiding our day-to-day software design decisions are social..."
Joke that's not quite funny: Quit hiring "brogrammers" and hire more "aspies" who totally don't get social at all, and this effect goes away. Have I used enough of this weeks Slashdot article buzzwords?
Frankly, from reading the article, it seems that there is a poor understanding of component interface contracts. This is like thinking you comply with POSIX because you have a stat(2) system call, but all the structure members are missing the "st_" prefix and/or there are missing structure memebrs which are mandated to be there by the standard. If you don't implement the interface to the interface contract, you've botched the code.
You can see this in Linux by running the VSU and VSX test suites, rather than the cut-down version that The Open Group has released for free. When you do that, you see all sorts of promiscuity in the type definitions in system header files - they typically fail negative assertion tests for things like definitions of size_t being in scope when they aren't supposed to be, as a side effect of including some other (putatively) POSIX header. BTW: negative assertion tests like this are done by using '#define size_t "size_t"' when you need size_t to NOT be in scope.
If your relationships between modules resemble team interpersonal relationships, then you are doing it wrong: (1) interfaces are either defined by an architect and handed down as if from God, or they are negotiated between producer and consumer instead, if you have a lot of time on your hands for that sort of thing; (2) bringing interpersonal relationships into code design is unprofessional, and you should only hire professionals.
I don't think it should ever get so easy as to to allow machines making the kill decision without a human in the loop.
What if it were limited to enforcement of a "no fly zone"? It gives "land or exit" warnings, and if they are not obeyed, shoots down the aircraft? This is exactly what NATO aircraft with human pilots did in Operation Deny Flight in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1993, under authority of United Nations Security Council Resolution 816.
I think by setting the rules of engagement, a human was in the loop.
Slashdot Mirror
Because they were so incredibly effective at preventing 9/11 in the US, and so effective at stopping the London, UK subway bombings, and so effective at preventing the train bombing in Madrid, Spain, right? I'm feeling less imperiled already.
As I understand it, the surveillance was started some time after the 9/11 attacks, so it couldn't have stopped that.
I have to stop you right there. ECHELON has been gathering SIGINT for Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States since the 1960's: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON so the SIGINT existed. Add to that Kenneth Williams July 2001 "Phoenix Memo", which was buried by the FBI until Coleen Rowley took advantage of a whistle-blowing law to bring it to light: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_Memo
There was also a Chinese wall between intelligence agencies, the FBI, and the DIA, which was de jure in one direction, but de facto in both directions due to interagency pissing contests about the information flow only going one way, with no tit-for-tat http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Able_Danger#The_wall
You cripple the security services at your peril. Unlike the IRA, al Qaida doesn't tend to phone in warnings before a blast.
Because they were so incredibly effective at preventing 9/11 in the US, and so effective at stopping the London, UK subway bombings, and so effective at preventing the train bombing in Madrid, Spain, right? I'm feeling less imperiled already.
Perhaps if instead of complaining about information disclosures, they disclosed the plots they had been able to foil, and had rather public trials, we'd trust them more, but at this point, they act more like a police agency. Police agencies catch bad guys after the fact, after you are already dead from being blown up or shot or stabbed or raped. You know, after the crime.
I'd prefer not to live in a police state: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_state since their track record at preventing criminal activity from occurring in the first place is generally piss-poor.
There were Credit Card Skimmers installed in the checkout lines in 21 Bay Area Lucky Stores, followed by rampant buying sprees on the card of the people stupid enough to use the self-checkout lines, which are not very well policed. I definitely won't use the things.
http://millbrae.patch.com/groups/editors-picks/p/credit-card-skimming-reported-in-21-bay-area-lucky-stores
It would help greatly if there was any standards for product data whatsoever. Only very recently has there been any efforts to standardize the metadata on products in a format that vendors and retailers can interchange, and if you think that a large grocer can just swap out all their merchandising systems overnight, the you don't know what it's like to work for a low-margin retailer. The average stat is that $100 of saved expense is equal to an additional $10k in sales. The slightest amount of shrink can be the difference between a profitable store, and a money siphon.
Frankly there are, and have been for years, UPC code databases, but you have to license them, unless you are willing to go for the vastly more incomplete consumer assembled EAN/UCC-13 code sites. My first experience with a licensed UPC database was in 1995, but I was aware of NCR systems where you could get them in 1985 or so. They used to come on QIC-20 tapes for loading into the NCR Tower XP and Tower 32 systems that they used to use to run all the cash registers in the supermarket. Now you can get them on DVD.
There are also food ingredient databases, but they tend to be more sketchy, particularly for store brands, which generally come off the assembly line that's currently cheapest. There is also a push for cost reduction on store brands, so they will tend to initially go with a higher end supplier when they bring out a new store brand something, and several moths after it's out, you'll read the label and find they've substituted corn syrup for the cane sugar and similar cost reduction tricks.
It's a real bitch if you have, for example, a corn allergy, or Crohn's disease, and they've bait-and switched things on you. You also have to watch the fried foods, such as prepackaged dinners, when they decide to use peanut oil instead of some other more expensive oil, because it was cheapest on the commodity food oil market for the plant that week.
They don't data mine this stuff from your frequency marketing card because there would be some legal liability both from a HIPPA information standpoint, and if they changed a formulation, and hadn't updated their database recently enough to flag an allergen at the checkout.
There are ways of creating totally unique identification markers.
We'll just implant an RFID chip. 665 was just implanted, and you're in luck! No waiting in this line!
Sorry but power won't generate itself and NIMBYs have made damned sure we ain't building any nuclear power plants so what else can you do?
I can't speak for anyone else, but I do not support current nuclear power systems anywhere on the planet, but I will support nuclear power anywhere on the planet if we start reprocessing waste. As long as the waste is a problem we're just deferring to our descendants, it is unacceptable. So what can we do? Start reprocessing waste. It's the only rational way to handle our nuclear waste, and it's the only kind of reactor that will see any green support. How "odd" that it's the one kind of reactor we won't build.
"On April 7, 1977, President Jimmy Carter announced that the United States would defer indefinitely the reprocessing of spent nuclear reactor fuel. He stated that after extensive examination of the issues, he had reached the conclusion that this action was necessary to reduce the serious threat of nuclear weapons proliferation, and that by setting this example, the U. S. would encourage other nations to follow its lead."
Technically, this policy was push by the environmental lobby:
"Environmental groups saw the breeder as a danger. An unlimited source of energy, they feared, would mean more energy use and waste, leading to more global environmental degradation and also opening new risks for proliferation of nuclear weapons."
See the whole story here: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/reaction/readings/rossin.html
Yep. I mean, why Iraq? Have you noticed how the justification for that "war" kept changing over the years? It started out with Saddam and his WMD (anybody else remember "UN inspectors"...)
We more or less knew he had them because he used them at Halabja, and as recently as 1991:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_and_weapons_of_mass_destruction#Chemical_weapon_attacks
See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frans_van_Anraat
Then perhaps what we need is to find better ways of curing mental illness—ways that don't depend on potentially very dangerous pharmaceuticals, discovered almost purely through trial and error, that have serious, unpleasant, well-known side effects, and require you to pay the pharmaceutical industry for the privilege of continuing to live a normal life, for the rest of your life.
Dan Aris
It's more or less in the best interests of the pharmacology industry to offer treatments, rather than cures. The diabetes model gives an ongoing revenue stream, compared to a cure, which immediately stops revenue.
If, for example, someone was to actually come out with a cure for AIDS, it would piss a lot of companies off.
It means "...either conservative (Catholic, etc.) and/or supporting neoliberalism."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Right-wing_parties_in_France
Not quite the same as the US right wing.
To be fair, this is out of context... the Berlin Left Part member Hakan Tas is not even Turkish, participated in the protest, and wasn't arrested. How many countries allow foreign nationals to protest against the government of a country for which they are not a citizen?
In addition, the thing that's pissing most people off there is not that they are removing trees, it's that they plan to build a mosque in the area.
You are, of course, aware that the region was allied with the confederacy.
You are, of course, aware, that you are talking about persons living in that area of the indian territories which was to later become OK, and that the derogatory term for the Confederacy was not "Yankees", per the GP's use of the word?
It looks like you now have a new company idea. Assuming the market for one of these is anything other than minuscule for whatever price point you are able to hit while building them in China or Japan, assuming you can drive something of that resolution from USB power in the first place. Personally, given the proce differential between "retina: and "non-retina" devices, all other things being equal, I think that these would be of limited use for everyone except professional video editors or the idle rich.
If you are actually serious about needing the external display space for something other than field video editing, then you have picked the wrong coworking space, since plenty of them have pluggable displays available, and some of them even have cable vending machines, in case you are lacking the necessary cable to hook up to your laptop.
For the Austin area, I know of at least Conjunctured is one company that has so-called "community monitors", but they are first come, first serve, so if you wanted one there, you'd need to get there pretty early to claim one before they were all spoken for already.
It's not exactly what I'd call "high resolution" (it's 1366x768 horizontal, 768x1366 vertical), but it is USB-powered and portable (15.6" diagonal, 3.4 pounds):
http://www.engadget.com/2013/01/07/hp-u160-usb-monitor/
Isn't this the one the OP was complaining about?
"I've looked at a few of the USB powered external displays, but the resolution seems to only hit 1366 X 768."
Sounds like they want more than that resolution. They must have implanted microscope lenses...
"Never Mind the Epidemic, Who Gets Patent Rights For the Cure?"
I imagine that since the cure is, by definition, a derivative work of the disease, that some of the royalties will have to go to the labs that created the original disease.
Obviously, if it's an "Act of God" rather than a lab that created the disease, the money should go in tithing to your local church.
Correspondingly, you should be able to sue your local church, as God's representative on Earth, for compensation for any loss of life, pain and suffering, property damage, and so on, where Acts of God are involved unless, you know, they were to disclaim any association.
it never ceases to amaze me that legislators are paranoid over even the slightest form of nudity while it took a massive public outcry to get a facebook movie removed in which a woman was decapitated with a kitchen knife.
I rather have my kids accidentally stumble upon some extreme acts of intercourse than extreme acts of violence.
Personally what I find amazing is that we don't have rampant comedy on the streets because of the sitcoms on TV, rampant reality on the streets because of reality TV, and humorous cats everywhere like some pre-warp civilization equivalent of tribbles.
The biggest problem in OK is not wind... it's all the crap that got picked up by the wind, and is being slammed into your specially designed structure at 300MPH.
Just like the biggest problem for structures in hurricanes is not actually the wind, it's the water and debris that's getting slammed into them by the hurricane.
At last you yankees finally got the tale of the three little pigs right.
You are, of course, aware that Oklahoma was not a state during the US Civil War, it was "Indian Territory", and that it was therefore neither Confederate ("Rebs") nor Union ("Yankee"), right?
*OR* you could change your fucked-up society so that the lower classes aren't creepy discontented uneducated idiots.
How are creepy discontented educated idiots any better, other than they know how to make bombs using pressure cookers and set them off at marathons?
Like providing better education and environments during the critical formative years.
How are creepy discontented educated idiots, who had parental involvement in their early lives, any better, other than they come from homes where they can afford to obtain restricted materials from illegal sources and injuring 21 people and killing 15 others, including themselves, at Columbine High School?
More statist socialism means less corpses littering the streets, metaphorically and literally. Seriously, here in Sweden the only "class division" that exists is between immigrants and non-immigrants. In a psychosocial sense at least.
And what, precisely, are you doing to remedy that social injustice which you have just identified?
1. Many homeless people in the USA are homeless because of mental problems. Treating said problems is necessary because otherwise they can't take care of themselves, fancy rolling shelter or not. Many will DESTROY said shelter in days, if not hours.
It's not very brilliant, but it's a matter of law that both drug abusers and the mentally ill have a right to refuse treatment, and unless you can pin a sufficient criminal act on the former, or demonstrate a danger to society of the latter, then there's no way to force treatment.
It's also one thing to take a mentally ill person and medicate them to the point that they are stable enough that you are required to release them, and entirely another to implant them with a Norplant-type device to continue to administer corrective drugs after they've been released from protective custody. The second one is illegal enforcement of treatment after termination of medical power of attorney.
How many psychologists does it take to change a lightbulb? One. But the lightbulb has to want to change.
It takes absolutely no talent to waste power like this. Well, perhaps it does, to use so much power while getting so little useful result.
Think about carefully next time you're driving down the road in a vehicle that gets around 12% effeciency from the gasoline it burns.
I'll think about that, and I'll think about the fact it could probably be 30% more efficient than that, if it wasn't for all the crap additives like ethanol and MTBE they are stuffing into it to keep cars manufactured prior to 1981 (prior years did not have oxygen sensors to control fuel mixture) from polluting.
Then I'll wonder exactly how many pre-1981 cars are actually still on the road, and I'll wonder about the percentage of total fuel usage by all cars which is accounted for by pre-1981 cars.
Then I'll start in again with my sneaking suspicion that the reformulation lobbying by Chevron in California is less about a concern for pollution, and more about a concern for Chevron to have their markets there protected from imports from out of state refineries unable to keep up with California's frequently changing reformulation requirements. You know, for the children, not so that they can have a higher profit margin due to sole-sourcing or anything.
Here are some observations about why the problem isn't as difficult as you are making it out to be.
First and foremost, for older PLC hardware, the PLC hardware was considered to be the valuable part, and the software/drivers were considered to be overhead that they had to have to sell the hardware. So most of the serial protocols for these things were well documented in order to reduce support costs. In general there was either reluctant free support for their software/drivers, or you paid a fee per incident. If support contracts were an option ... you are unlikely to have kept the payments up this long. So you will likely be writing some code, but you will likely have documentation with which to do it.
Second, the FTDI drivers are crap. They leak kernel memory in Linux when you unplug them while the device associated with them is open. They also do this in the Windows Drivers, and because Mac OS X is religious about its encapsulation model in IOKit, unplugging them in Mac OS X while the device is open generally leads to a kernel panic. Almost all the USB-to-RS232C/RS422 adapters use chips sourced from FTDI, or use clones of the FTDI chips so they don't have to actually write their own drivers. Rampant code copying between vendors is my suspected reason that most of these vendors refuse to document their hardware well enough that an Open Source driver without the bugs could be written. You are unlikely to be happy with USB fobs.
Third, 9 pin RS232C is frequently not enough for a lot of older devices. The RS232C specification allows external clocking of the signal, but these pins are not present on the 9 pin connectors, only on the 25 pin. Additionally, there is out of band signaling that is sometimes used on other RS232C pins that aren't as frequently used that can be necessary. As you are with a printing firm, if what we are talking about here is an old Linotype or similar machine, you are likely to be SOL without full 25 pin RS232C. You should be happy that it isn't an 8 pin DIN cable from an old Mac, since at least you get the RI pin on the 9 pin connector.
Fourth, terminal servers often have these issues, in spades. There are a number of terminal servers where, if you have a blocking outstanding read on the serial port, outgoing writes are blocked until the read completes or times out. They basically expect that you will poll, or that all your communications over the serial port will be synchronous (i.e. you will not end up with output to your Wyse-50 until after you have input something). I can name a number of vendors with 8-port serial cards that have this issue. On the plus side, it's a driver design bug, so if you are swilling to use your own driver, or are willing to go Open Source OS, this is typically not a problem, but you will end up screwed by Windows and Mac OS X -- but a Mac OS X subclass of the broken driver is easier than an entirely new driver written in windows. Computone 8 port cards used to have this problem a lot.
Fifth, and finally, with USB dongles, it's frequent that the modem control signals are borked up. What I mean by this is that until the pseudo tty USB driver on the host side of things is opened, then the pins on the RS232C side of the adapter are floating in an indeterminate state which depends on the USB fob firmware, and is frequently not where you would want e.g. DTR or CTS/RTS or other signals hanging out for an idle serial port. This can make older equipment Do Things(tm), and the oly real remedy is to get the port open, set the signals right, and THEN plug in the serial cable. Generally, this means that you get to have two sets of signal state for setup, in addition, since the line buffers in some of the older devices are not optoisolated, and on those which are, the optoisolation can blow if you immediately apply voltage before ground, etc.. If you think talking to an old PLC is hard, try replacing an ancient Zilog UART on the damn thing.
"How Important Is Advanced Math In a CS Degree?"
Apparently, at your university, the contract you have with the CS department for your degree program has it as a required class, so it's of paramount importance to you getting your CS degree from the program in which you are enrolled.
Should it be important? That's an entirely different question, and not one you have asked here. I will answer it anyway.
If you plan on getting a job at a site which uses social networking, then an understanding of graph theory is a necessity. Given that the entire Internet 2.0 bubble is based on social networking being important to monetization, if you plan to get a job doing CS things, then you plan to get a job at a company which uses social networking.
A lot of advanced math is useful to solving graph problems, not just Warshall's for computing transitive closures. For example, Differential Geometry http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_geometry tends to be incredibly useful for reducing resource requirements related to Computability http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computability_theory . Reducing data center costs for something that has scaled, or is intended to scale, as large as Facebook or Google, or even Yahoo, Twitter, LinkedIn, and so on, is the primary gate on your income vs. expense ratio = profitability.
It's useful for other things as well, which will likely become obvious to you after you learn it well enough to apply it as a tool when faced with new problems.
And the idea of yours invading other countries to "liberte" them is hilarious to the rest of the world.
The US is going around the world installing democracy. If it can be proven that democracy can work in places where there were previously repressive regimes, then they will try it in North America.
"...forces guiding our day-to-day software design decisions are social..."
Joke that's not quite funny: Quit hiring "brogrammers" and hire more "aspies" who totally don't get social at all, and this effect goes away. Have I used enough of this weeks Slashdot article buzzwords?
Frankly, from reading the article, it seems that there is a poor understanding of component interface contracts. This is like thinking you comply with POSIX because you have a stat(2) system call, but all the structure members are missing the "st_" prefix and/or there are missing structure memebrs which are mandated to be there by the standard. If you don't implement the interface to the interface contract, you've botched the code.
You can see this in Linux by running the VSU and VSX test suites, rather than the cut-down version that The Open Group has released for free. When you do that, you see all sorts of promiscuity in the type definitions in system header files - they typically fail negative assertion tests for things like definitions of size_t being in scope when they aren't supposed to be, as a side effect of including some other (putatively) POSIX header. BTW: negative assertion tests like this are done by using '#define size_t "size_t"' when you need size_t to NOT be in scope.
If your relationships between modules resemble team interpersonal relationships, then you are doing it wrong: (1) interfaces are either defined by an architect and handed down as if from God, or they are negotiated between producer and consumer instead, if you have a lot of time on your hands for that sort of thing; (2) bringing interpersonal relationships into code design is unprofessional, and you should only hire professionals.
For once I agree with the UN.
I don't think it should ever get so easy as to to allow machines making the kill decision
without a human in the loop.
What if it were limited to enforcement of a "no fly zone"? It gives "land or exit" warnings, and if they are not obeyed, shoots down the aircraft? This is exactly what NATO aircraft with human pilots did in Operation Deny Flight in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1993, under authority of United Nations Security Council Resolution 816.
I think by setting the rules of engagement, a human was in the loop.