Back at the beginning of Clinton's first term, lobbyists from Western Electric alerted him that the White House switchboard was a product of Northern Telecom. NorTel is nominally a Canadian company but this particular switch was made by its Raleigh, N.C. plant that employed 20,000 American workers and was installed by an American company.
Clinton had the system ripped out and replaced by a good ole Western Electric product. Lucent is the successor company to Western Electric. Unless the something has changed in the intervening years, the French now control the White House telecom system.
The Securities and Exchange Commission, which regulates publicly traded companies in the U.S., requires companies to release information that would affect their stock price as soon as they become aware of it. If Microsoft deliberately delayed releasing information about Vista, it could be in violation of those rules.
It's somewhat of a fact of life that companies and even people do try to mix good news with bad
Publicly traded companies, like elected officials, are necessarily held to a higher standard than private companies or private individuals. Investors have a right to expect that the companies they invest in aren't playing games with corporate announcements. As the SEC puts it: "Only through the steady flow of timely, comprehensive, and accurate information can people make sound investment decisions."
The Wall Street Journal reported that before the stock market opened today
Microsoft broke the bullish news that it planned to significantly boost the distribution of its Xbox 360 videogame consoles. Xbox and Vista are handled by two different divisions of Microsoft, but did the Redmond brain trust really not know about the Vista news until this afternoon? Microsoft representatives weren't immediately available for comment.
Microsoft shares were down as much as 3% in after-hours trading.
You'd think that Microsoft's investor relations department would try to co-ordinate two announcements that might affect the stock price. If they deliberately staggered the announcements to reduce the effect of the second one, Microsoft might be in violation of securities regulations.
In any case, investors should view Microsoft's future positive announcements with suspicion since they could simply be a precursor to a negative one.
Re:The Next Big Thing Is... Already Here...
on
No More Next Big Thing?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
no one noticed until the web browser and general access became available in 1995
The widespread use of the Internet required 3 things that all had to be present at once: a browser with a graphic user interface, a computer that was powerful enough to manage a GUI and a modem that were fast enough to download enough data to supply the GUI. If any one of those were missing, the Web was not practical.
The Next Big Thing is probably waiting for some new confluence of independent technologies. In fact, the Web may be such a component itself.
This is just one more example of how this world is tainted with the stench of uncouth bloodsacks. Enjoy what you laughingly call literature, for you are but cattle, soon to be culled on the cusp of my whetted fangs. I wait only to be converted by a dark master, and then your fates shall be sealed with my bite.
Dark Mother goddess
The love between the Divine Mother and her human children is a unique relationship. Kali, the Dark Mother is one such deity with whom devotees have a very loving and intimate bond, in spite of her fearful appearance. In this relationship, the worshipper becomes a child and Kali assumes the form of the ever-caring mother.
The White Plague is also a science fiction novel by Frank Herbert, about a molecular biologist, John Roe O'Neill, whose wife and children are killed when a bomb planted by the IRA goes off. Driven insane by loss, he plans a genocidal revenge, creating a plague that kills only women, and releases it in Ireland (for supporting the terrorists), England (for oppressing the Irish and giving them a cause), and Libya (for training said terrorists); he then demands that the governments of the world quarantine those countries and let the plague run its course, so they will lose what he has lost; if they don't, he has more plagues to release.
Sits down with end users (secretaries, etc.) for a while, every day...
I think anyone who has taken this approach is always surprised at how different the workflow and UI requirements are from what he imagined they would be by simply knowing the input and the output.
It makes one think that theory and experience count for very little compared to what can be learned from observation.
so if you are actually using most of your 20GB drive (which isnt very difficult to achieve), then you will wear out one section a lot faster.
Wear-leveling algorithms can take this problem into account. According to this article on Solid State Disks (SSD):
When a given block has been written above a certain percentage threshold, the SSD will (in the background, avoiding performance decreases) swap the data in that block with the data in a block that has exhibited a "read-only-like" characteristic.
"Mormon" is ambiguous since it can refer to various schismatic sects. According to an official press release of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints,
While the term "Mormon Church" has long been publicly applied to the Church as a nickname, it is not an authorized title, and the Church discourages its use.
When referring to Church members, the term "Latter-day Saints" is preferred, though "Mormons" is acceptable
He appears to be well within preferred and accepted usage to use "LDS". Wikipedia has an interesting item on what "Mormon" refers to.
In the case of the Bible, the license (from the Man Himself) allows anyone to publish or distribute the work...
The right to publish and distribute the Word of God, at least in translation, is one area where the laws of man supercede the laws of God.
The King James Version is still under copyright in England and in those areas of the Commonwealth that still respect the laws of Great Britian. In those countries the Bible can only be printed under license from Oxford and Cambridge, which administer the Crown's copyright.
The text may be quoted in any form (written, visual, electronic or audio), up to and inclusive of five hundred (500) verses without the express written permission of the publisher, providing the verses quoted do not amount to a complete book of the Bible nor do the verses quoted account for 25 percent (25%) or more of the total text of the work in which they are quoted.
Considering there are so many unrighteous people who would steal the intellectual labour of Biblical scholars and try to undercut their cover price, the arguments in favour of copyright might apply as much to the Bible as any other published work.
Re:part 3 (working around lameness filter)
on
Pro Perl Debugging
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· Score: 1
armed conflict involving at least 1000 armed persons...
That definition is useful as far as it goes but it probably could not be stretched to include the longest, most expensive war since the Hundred Years War, which was the Cold War.
France was an active participant on the side of NATO during the Cold War and can rightly claim some of the glory in the defeat of the Soviet Union. If so, a victory of that scale certainly dwarfs France's record of defeat in lesser conflicts.
As Sun Tzu observed, "For to win one hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the acme of skill. To subdue the enemy without fighting is the supreme excellence."
Your assumption, by the way, that harsher sentencing is a direct contributor is likely erroneous.
I don't know why the crime rate is falling and there doesn't appear to be any consensus. It appears to correlate with harsher sentencing and lower unemployment and those are both plausible explanations but it could be something else or some kind of cyclical pattern.
However, the crime rate fell without making the punishment fit the crime, teaching people to evaluate whether laws are just, or applying laws equally, which were your requirements. I can't see any reason to think those will be much help aside the devout hope that people will respond positively to well-intentioned measures. Some views of human nature suggest that criminals will simply treat those measures as a show of weakness.
Take Finland's admirably low crime rates...
Shoplifting, which is the crime specifically under discussion here, is still a big problem in Finland:
Finland's shrinkage is among the highest in Europe, or 1.44 percent of turnover. However, Finland's figure did fall by three percent from the previous survey.
According to the barometer, 48 percent of the shrinkage is a result of shoplifting. Dishonest employees create one third of the losses, and seven percent can be blamed on suppliers. The rest is caused by mistakes in pricing and breakage.
In Finland, shoplifting costs the retail sector some 448 million euros annually. Combined with the anti-theft investments of 118 million, the annual total rises to 566 million euros.
In any case, I doubt if Finland has any lessons to teach the U.S. about crime fighting without first reorganizing the whole society around a huge social support structure, the way Finland has done, with the accompanying high taxes and big government that Americans traditionally resist.
There are also plenty of cases where breaking the law is not "wrong", so we cannot treat this as an absolute either.
Actually, there are very few. I suspect most people go through their entire lives without encountering a situation where their conscience compels them to break the law. For most people the task is to follow their conscience and not break the law.
However, I think we as a society need to do a few things (which come to mind) if we are to have any success in reducing crime.
We as a society have just had a fair amount of success in reducing crime and it didn't involve any of things you suggested. Longer sentencing and a lower unemployment rate seem to have been the answer. A lot of people only obey the law out of fear of getting caught and punished.
In any case, if you want to reduce crime, the very first thing to do is obey the law yourself. You get no points for not embezzelling millions of dollars from your company unless you are a CEO.
According the article, the FBI let its system stagnate and then tried to catch up all at once. The problem with this approach is that the legacy system continues to stagnate while the new one is under development. If there were any deficiencies in the new system or the new system fails altogether, the FBI is still stuck with the old system.
One lesson is, don't let your system stagnate. It must be in a state of continual and regular upgrade. The side effect of this approach might be the main benefit: you will have up-to-date internal knowledge of how your system works. You don't have to hire outside consultants that have to learn how your system works before they can begin to improve it.
For instance, making a "professional" version of the Flash tool - I'm sure pretty much everyone who buys Flash is a professional, the "professional" version is just an excuse to charge extra for things that should be in the main product.
"Professional" usually means that that you make money from your activities. If you use a program to earn a living, then then it is reasonable for the software manufacturer to share in your success.
There's virtually no software product where you don't make back 5 or 10 times its cost the first time you bill someone for using it. The problem for software professionals is being able to charge enough to justify the months or years it takes to become proficient in the program.
As long as a software vendor continues to upgrade a product I don't see any reason to complain about the cost.
If you'll re-read my post you'll see that my point was that the decline in public morality as evidenced by the crime rate, high divorce rate, etc., indicates the churches aren't getting their message across.
Second, if you check the CBS poll referenced at the top of this thread you'll see that the number of people who believe the creation story has declined since Nov, 2004 and the number of people who believe God merely guided evolution has increased. However, with "the error due to sampling" of 4 percentage points, it's hard to say for sure whether the number is really down or even if it is really still above 50%
Another recent poll shows 42% of the respondents support the creationist position on evolution. Although even the latter number is amazingly high, it may just as easily indicate that the churches have reached the limit of their influence on this particular issue.
There's some evidence that church attendance is declining and has been overstated in the past, which would account for the effort by some churches to push their message into public schools. If church attendance was strong and rising, there would be no need to get into a constitutional fight over public education.
In any case, regardless of the success of the churches in fighting evolution and supporting certain politicians, their moral influence, which is their primary mandate, is clearly in decline. If they think that watering down science education is going to reverse that trend, they're probably mistaken.
To a scientist, a "theory" is a hypothesis that has survivied experimental tests sufficiently to be adopted, employed and taught by the scientific community.
A very common misconception. This discussion makes the following interesting points:
Laws are generalizations about what has happened, from which we can generalize about what we expect to happen. They pertain to observational data. The ability of the ancients to predict eclipses had nothing to do with whether they knew just how they happened; they had a law but not a theory.
Theories are explanations of observations (or of laws). The fact that we have a pretty good understanding of how stars explode doesn't necessarily mean we could predict the next supernova; we have a theory but not a law.
Gravity, it says, is an example of a well-established law for which no really satisfying theory is available.
This issue is also dealt with in William McComus' Ten Myths of Science, Myth #1 being "Hypotheses Become Theories Which Become Laws".
Of course there is a relationship between laws and theories, but one simply does not become the other--no matter how much empirical evidence is amassed. Laws are generalizations, principles or patterns in nature and theories are the explanations of those generalizations.
In the evolution debate, evolution (species evolve over time) would be the law and natural selection would be theory that explains how it works.
This is a massive, historic failure by American intellectuals and American education.
Judging by the high crime rate, divorce rate and the content of prime time television, there's been a massive failure, perhaps an even bigger one, by the churches and religious leaders. What religion there is in the U.S. is largely superstition devoid of a moral imperative.
The effort to slip creationism/ID into the public school curriculum is a tacit admission that the churches have failed to make their case through their own channels. Some segment of that movement may be out to destroy science just as some segment of the scientific community is out to destroy religion. However, it is possible that many are well-intentioned. They're watching the country go downhill morally and are hoping somehow to get their message into the public schools where it might do some good.
They probably won't have any more success than the scientists did.
I'm sure Alexander Hamilton said the same Of Ben Franklin's newspaper.http://www.pbs.org/benfranklin/pop_apolo gy.html>
Indeed. Should blogger feel the need to respond, they might do no better than Franklin's response to criticism of his Pennsylvania Gazette, May 27, 1731.
He begins:
Being frequently censur'd and condemn'd by different Persons for printing Things which they say ought not to be printed, I have sometimes thought it might be necessary to make a standing Apology for my self, and publish it once a Year...
He then gives 10 things for his critics to consider, among them:
4. That it is as unreasonable in any one Man or Set of Men to expect to be pleas'd with every thing that is printed, as to think that nobody ought to be pleas'd but themselves.
8. That if all Printers were determin'd not to print any thing till they were sure it would offend no body, there would be very little printed.
Slashdot Mirror
Back at the beginning of Clinton's first term, lobbyists from Western Electric alerted him that the White House switchboard was a product of Northern Telecom. NorTel is nominally a Canadian company but this particular switch was made by its Raleigh, N.C. plant that employed 20,000 American workers and was installed by an American company.
Clinton had the system ripped out and replaced by a good ole Western Electric product. Lucent is the successor company to Western Electric. Unless the something has changed in the intervening years, the French now control the White House telecom system.
What exactly would the violation be?
The Securities and Exchange Commission, which regulates publicly traded companies in the U.S., requires companies to release information that would affect their stock price as soon as they become aware of it. If Microsoft deliberately delayed releasing information about Vista, it could be in violation of those rules.
It's somewhat of a fact of life that companies and even people do try to mix good news with bad
Publicly traded companies, like elected officials, are necessarily held to a higher standard than private companies or private individuals. Investors have a right to expect that the companies they invest in aren't playing games with corporate announcements. As the SEC puts it: "Only through the steady flow of timely, comprehensive, and accurate information can people make sound investment decisions."
The Wall Street Journal reported that before the stock market opened today
Microsoft shares were down as much as 3% in after-hours trading.
You'd think that Microsoft's investor relations department would try to co-ordinate two announcements that might affect the stock price. If they deliberately staggered the announcements to reduce the effect of the second one, Microsoft might be in violation of securities regulations.
In any case, investors should view Microsoft's future positive announcements with suspicion since they could simply be a precursor to a negative one.
no one noticed until the web browser and general access became available in 1995
The widespread use of the Internet required 3 things that all had to be present at once: a browser with a graphic user interface, a computer that was powerful enough to manage a GUI and a modem that were fast enough to download enough data to supply the GUI. If any one of those were missing, the Web was not practical.
The Next Big Thing is probably waiting for some new confluence of independent technologies. In fact, the Web may be such a component itself.
dark watery brood
--Wagner, Der Ring des Nibelungenflabby bloodsacks
Vampire lingo, compare
Dark Mother goddess
--Hinduismairy realm
--Heinrich Heine, Deutschland, ein WintermärchenWhy, out of interest did he want to kill only women?
Google is your friend:
The rest has a spoiler warning.
Sits down with end users (secretaries, etc.) for a while, every day...
I think anyone who has taken this approach is always surprised at how different the workflow and UI requirements are from what he imagined they would be by simply knowing the input and the output.
It makes one think that theory and experience count for very little compared to what can be learned from observation.
I am sure there is that .01% that makes the whole group look bad
Or possibly, .01% make the whole group look good.
so if you are actually using most of your 20GB drive (which isnt very difficult to achieve), then you will wear out one section a lot faster.
Wear-leveling algorithms can take this problem into account. According to this article on Solid State Disks (SSD):
Why don't you just say: "Being a mormon...".
"Mormon" is ambiguous since it can refer to various schismatic sects. According to an official press release of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints,
He appears to be well within preferred and accepted usage to use "LDS". Wikipedia has an interesting item on what "Mormon" refers to.
In the case of the Bible, the license (from the Man Himself) allows anyone to publish or distribute the work...
The right to publish and distribute the Word of God, at least in translation, is one area where the laws of man supercede the laws of God.
The King James Version is still under copyright in England and in those areas of the Commonwealth that still respect the laws of Great Britian. In those countries the Bible can only be printed under license from Oxford and Cambridge, which administer the Crown's copyright.
The New International Version, published in 1973, specifies as follows:
Considering there are so many unrighteous people who would steal the intellectual labour of Biblical scholars and try to undercut their cover price, the arguments in favour of copyright might apply as much to the Bible as any other published work.
Phroggy, I gotta say it. You the man.
Shylock was a money lender, not a lawyer. A shylock usually means a userer, someone who lends money at an excessive rate interest rate.
armed conflict involving at least 1000 armed persons ...
That definition is useful as far as it goes but it probably could not be stretched to include the longest, most expensive war since the Hundred Years War, which was the Cold War.
France was an active participant on the side of NATO during the Cold War and can rightly claim some of the glory in the defeat of the Soviet Union. If so, a victory of that scale certainly dwarfs France's record of defeat in lesser conflicts.
As Sun Tzu observed, "For to win one hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the acme of skill. To subdue the enemy without fighting is the supreme excellence."
Your assumption, by the way, that harsher sentencing is a direct contributor is likely erroneous.
I don't know why the crime rate is falling and there doesn't appear to be any consensus. It appears to correlate with harsher sentencing and lower unemployment and those are both plausible explanations but it could be something else or some kind of cyclical pattern.
However, the crime rate fell without making the punishment fit the crime, teaching people to evaluate whether laws are just, or applying laws equally, which were your requirements. I can't see any reason to think those will be much help aside the devout hope that people will respond positively to well-intentioned measures. Some views of human nature suggest that criminals will simply treat those measures as a show of weakness.
Take Finland's admirably low crime rates...
Shoplifting, which is the crime specifically under discussion here, is still a big problem in Finland:
In any case, I doubt if Finland has any lessons to teach the U.S. about crime fighting without first reorganizing the whole society around a huge social support structure, the way Finland has done, with the accompanying high taxes and big government that Americans traditionally resist.
There are also plenty of cases where breaking the law is not "wrong", so we cannot treat this as an absolute either.
Actually, there are very few. I suspect most people go through their entire lives without encountering a situation where their conscience compels them to break the law. For most people the task is to follow their conscience and not break the law.
However, I think we as a society need to do a few things (which come to mind) if we are to have any success in reducing crime.
We as a society have just had a fair amount of success in reducing crime and it didn't involve any of things you suggested. Longer sentencing and a lower unemployment rate seem to have been the answer. A lot of people only obey the law out of fear of getting caught and punished.
In any case, if you want to reduce crime, the very first thing to do is obey the law yourself. You get no points for not embezzelling millions of dollars from your company unless you are a CEO.
According the article, the FBI let its system stagnate and then tried to catch up all at once. The problem with this approach is that the legacy system continues to stagnate while the new one is under development. If there were any deficiencies in the new system or the new system fails altogether, the FBI is still stuck with the old system.
One lesson is, don't let your system stagnate. It must be in a state of continual and regular upgrade. The side effect of this approach might be the main benefit: you will have up-to-date internal knowledge of how your system works. You don't have to hire outside consultants that have to learn how your system works before they can begin to improve it.
For instance, making a "professional" version of the Flash tool - I'm sure pretty much everyone who buys Flash is a professional, the "professional" version is just an excuse to charge extra for things that should be in the main product.
"Professional" usually means that that you make money from your activities. If you use a program to earn a living, then then it is reasonable for the software manufacturer to share in your success.
There's virtually no software product where you don't make back 5 or 10 times its cost the first time you bill someone for using it. The problem for software professionals is being able to charge enough to justify the months or years it takes to become proficient in the program.
As long as a software vendor continues to upgrade a product I don't see any reason to complain about the cost.
And some morons seem to think that this constitutes good software engineering...
The "moron" in question here is Nicholas Lesiecki, author of Java Tools for Extreme Programming: Mastering Open Source Tools Including Ant, JUnit, and Cactus. This review in Dr. Dobb's Journal calls it "original and useful".
He is also a contributor to Cactus, "a simple test framework for unit testing server-side java code", part of the Apache Jakarta project.
He is currently a software engineer and programming instructor with Google.
If we wait until the first reports of infection, it may already be too late!
Pittsburgh, for one, shares your concern.
You're joking, right?
If you'll re-read my post you'll see that my point was that the decline in public morality as evidenced by the crime rate, high divorce rate, etc., indicates the churches aren't getting their message across.
Second, if you check the CBS poll referenced at the top of this thread you'll see that the number of people who believe the creation story has declined since Nov, 2004 and the number of people who believe God merely guided evolution has increased. However, with "the error due to sampling" of 4 percentage points, it's hard to say for sure whether the number is really down or even if it is really still above 50%
Another recent poll shows 42% of the respondents support the creationist position on evolution. Although even the latter number is amazingly high, it may just as easily indicate that the churches have reached the limit of their influence on this particular issue.
There's some evidence that church attendance is declining and has been overstated in the past, which would account for the effort by some churches to push their message into public schools. If church attendance was strong and rising, there would be no need to get into a constitutional fight over public education.
In any case, regardless of the success of the churches in fighting evolution and supporting certain politicians, their moral influence, which is their primary mandate, is clearly in decline. If they think that watering down science education is going to reverse that trend, they're probably mistaken.
To a scientist, a "theory" is a hypothesis that has survivied experimental tests sufficiently to be adopted, employed and taught by the scientific community.
A very common misconception. This discussion makes the following interesting points:
Gravity, it says, is an example of a well-established law for which no really satisfying theory is available.
This issue is also dealt with in William McComus' Ten Myths of Science, Myth #1 being "Hypotheses Become Theories Which Become Laws".
In the evolution debate, evolution (species evolve over time) would be the law and natural selection would be theory that explains how it works.
This is a massive, historic failure by American intellectuals and American education.
Judging by the high crime rate, divorce rate and the content of prime time television, there's been a massive failure, perhaps an even bigger one, by the churches and religious leaders. What religion there is in the U.S. is largely superstition devoid of a moral imperative.
The effort to slip creationism/ID into the public school curriculum is a tacit admission that the churches have failed to make their case through their own channels. Some segment of that movement may be out to destroy science just as some segment of the scientific community is out to destroy religion. However, it is possible that many are well-intentioned. They're watching the country go downhill morally and are hoping somehow to get their message into the public schools where it might do some good.
They probably won't have any more success than the scientists did.
What's a sea hen?
A sea hen is nautical slang for a woman who goes to sea. She would often be the wife of a captain but in this context, a prostitute.
Pairing "sea hen" with "Black Gown", i.e. a clergyman , would be a slur on the clergy.
Franklin's detailed apology for his mistake is a peerless example of his subtle humour, which was often mistaken for gravitas.
I'm sure Alexander Hamilton said the same Of Ben Franklin's newspaper.http://www.pbs.org/benfranklin/pop_apolo gy.html>
Indeed. Should blogger feel the need to respond, they might do no better than Franklin's response to criticism of his Pennsylvania Gazette, May 27, 1731.
He begins:
He then gives 10 things for his critics to consider, among them: