Let me tell you a story about a little one-shot pistol called the "Liberator."
Manufactured during WWII for less than 2 dollars US by the Guide Lamp Division of General Motors, this little stamped-metal pistol was air-dropped over France to the Resistance. Those freedom-loving French used these little guns to kill Germans and steal more powerful weapons from them. Eventually, they proved invaluable in the liberation of France. The Resistance was able to hamper and even cripple German supply lines, tying up resources well in advance of the British/American advancement.
What can a magnum or a shotgun do? In the hands of a determined populace, plenty.
Tanks, missiles and planes do not win wars all by themselves. You *have* to have infantry. Infantry takes and holds ground. Infantry, in the words of Robert Heinlein, makes war as personal as a punch in the face. Infantry still uses rifles and various other small arms to take and hold ground.
NRA hasn't forgotten, but it's obvious that either you have, or never learned to begin with.
The only thing more dangerous than an idiot is an idiot with a gun.
I am so glad you don't have a gun, then. [grin]
1. Obvious. Your point?
2. Preferred. Unfortunately, the current wave of hoplophobia running around disguised as "concern over gun violence" has diluted a well-trained populace and turned many would-be sheepdogs into sheep.
3. The statement saying that you're "more likely to get shot by someone you know" blah-blah-blah is useless without the context of the study. The underlying context is that you are more likely to get shot by someone you know if you live with someone who is an illegal drug user or a convicted felon. Don't know any of those? Then you're probably safe. Also, the majority of those crimes are committed with illegally obtained weapons.
I don't mind if any of my neighbors owns a gun. I don't hate any of them. Why should I? Why should I care one whit about them as long as they mind their business and I mind mine? I may, upon occasion, disagree with them. However, I am adult enough to be able to disagree with them without descending into violent behavior. Are you afraid that you might shoot your neighbor? If so, then you shouldn't own a gun. I'm not likely to shoot mine, nor am I afraid that my neighbor will shoot me. It's called being civilized. It's where you act in a civilized manner, even if you have the means to be uncivilized.
I must respectfully submit that we *are* holding constant, permanent and without end discussions on the subject.
Do not think, for a moment, that those who hold the position that the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were justified feel any less pain remembering the deaths of thousands of human beings as a result. However, we look at the costs of not doing something and cringe at the inescapable conclusions.
Hindsight is all well and good, but the American decision-makers were human beings, mere mortals. They were not gifted with perfect foresight or wisdom, but with all our human frailties and shortcomings. They were good men, men of honor and decency, who saw a world ravaged by war and conflict and desired to put a stop to it. They had seen evidence of the wholesale slaughter of civilians in Europe and Asia. They had seen truly power-hungry men commit their populations to war to feed their egos. They had seen their own populations go to war and many of them come back shattered by the experience.
Can I regret what they did? Yes, they let the nuclear genie out of the bottle. Can I blame them for what they did? No. They faced a tough decision and made the best one they could given what they knew and what their goals were. Was it a perfect decision? No. Could a better decision have been made? Maybe. But who's to know? Bombing Mount Fuji, as one author wrote, might have had the desired effect, but then again, it might not have. Hitting Fuji may have, instead, filled the Japanese population with a terrible resolve, much as 9/11 galvanized the U.S. What we *do* know is this: The two bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended a war that had been filled with some of the most evil, despicable actions against fellow humans that had ever been seen. Whatever evil that the bombs themselves may represent, they at least had the saving grace of ending a long, bloody war.
I worked for over 7 years at the VA Medical Center in Atlanta, as sysadmin and lead programmer for their DHCP/VISTA installation.
MUMPS has a lot of strengths, as well as weaknesses. Try programming in a language with less than 26 commands. That's why you can abbreviate them all down to a single letter, for the most part. Once you get used to a very regular syntax, it becomes second nature to be able to read it and understand what's going on in a program without having to remember what some dangling pointer or other nonsense from the "modern" languages introduce.
I've never had a MUMPS routine experience a memory leak. I've never had a MUMPS routine crash a system because some idjit used setuid because he couldn't figure out how to do it any other way.
It's not an OS language, it's an apps language. Specifically, it's a database language that lets you code fast database code in a fast, interactive manner.
Yeah, it's pretty old. It's not "modern" and doesn't have all the cachet of a "glamorous" language like one of the new object-oriented languages. But I could write usable code very quickly and have it ready for production in almost no time at all. And it allowed the VA to run large databases using cheap, low-end hardware.
MUMPS takes a very simple route to applications programming. It's not perfect, but it has the wonderful advantage of working, when used properly. It excels at string handling. It was using what perl calls "hashes" long before Larry Wall started writing perl. Unlike perl, it even gives you a way to walk through the binary trees that are a result of the "sparse arrays" that MUMPS uses. File I/O? What file I/O? Just SET a Global Variable and it's stored on disk. Need to recall it? Just reference the Global Variable. It never went away, unless you KILLed it. Need temporary storage because you need to work with more data than there is physical memory? Just use those Globals again. Just remember to KILL them when you're done.
It's kind of neat when you can create a database structure where the data *is* the index:
As an old MUG (MUMPS Users Group) T-shirt used to say:
"MUMPS means never having to say you're sorting."
Re:The mother of throughput for trans-continential
on
Snails Edge Out ADSL
·
· Score: 1
Simple. Limit the MTU to 500GB. No fragmented packets.
I started working with VAXen in 1989. The hospital that I worked for had a LAVc (Local Area VAXcluster) running on a 6230, two MicroVAX 3600s and three 3500s.
The two 3600s were connected to a packet-switched network for rudimentary TCP/IP connectivity to other hospitals in the network. (Government: I worked for the VA.) The contract had changed and we had to pull out one vendor's connection and install a different vendor's connection.
The vendor we were dropping came by to deinstall the equipment and was working behind the servers. I was in the machine room at my desk when I heard all of the consoles start beeping and printing at once. I went over to them and asked the tech what happened. He sheepishly looked up with the power-cable for one of the 3600s in his hand, saying "Oops!"
I told him to plug it back in and I waited for the cluster to finish its transition before rebooting the downed node. Took about 20 minutes to boot and it was back online.
No user calls. We were down for about 30 minutes on that node. The users barely noticed. The worst that happened was that those users on the downed node simply logged back into the cluster and picked up where they left off. No lost data. Very little lost time.
Nowadays, I administer UNIX servers. Why? Not because I feel they're more reliable than VMS. Mainly because I can make more money that way. Nobody wants to pay me as much to administer VMSclusters.
My Nostromo N52 is inactivated when I play Lineage2. Why? Because NCSoft, in their infinite wisdom, has determined that this game controller constitutes a "third party bot program" and is, therefore, BAD to use when playing a game.
A friend's USB keyboard was completely deactivated when he tried to play the game. Seems it's a "programmable" keyboard and that means you can BOT with the keyboard!
Funny thing is, NCSoft went through quite a bit of trouble to post a poll on the official L2 forums asking the North American audience how they felt about GameGuard. It was 2:1 or more against GG.
To make things even worse, if you update your Lineage2 (as you must, in order to play) with GG, you have no offical way to REMOVE GG even if you subsequently decide to get rid of L2. Persistent spyware, isn't that neat?
Bugtraq and SecurityFocus have both reported exploits based upon nProtect's GameGuard. NCSoft ignored those. It takes the inherent protection that XP Pro provided against particular types of attacks and throws it away.
The crowning glory of all this is that NCSoft began banning people on the public forums when they complained about GameGuard. Threads were deleted, and discussion was suppressed. While a good number of those banned were guilty of stating that they were leaving the game (a no-no on the official forums) because of GG, it still left an overall impression of supressing information, a distinctly distasteful concept to most North Americans and Europeans.
Anybody interested in a Level 50 Paladin on the Erica server?
I'm going to ask you to engage in a simple thought-experiment.
The parameters:
* You are a burglar. * You have a sense of self-preservation. * You are not a complete idiot. * Your potential targets consist of houses that may or may not have guns. * You can see some houses with NRA stickers and gun racks in the back of the vehicles. * You can see some houses with "War is Not the Answer" signs in the front yard. * Some of the houses with "War is Not the Answer" signs also have NRA stickers. * Some of the houses have neither "War is Not the Answer" signs or NRA stickers. * All of the houses appear to have someone home. * You have a limited amount of time to burgle a house. * You are armed with a 9mm semi-auto that you purchased off the street with a 15-round clip.
Explain what criteria you would use to choose a house to burgle. Does that criteria include self-preservation considerations? Would the probable presence of a firearm in a potential target influence your decision? In what way?
The majority of times that a gun is used to prevent a crime, it is not fired. However, this does not make good news, therefore we do not read about it nor watch it on the evening news.
On a slightly different note, I find it interesting when someone uses the "If it saves the life of one child, it's worth it!" arguments *for* gun-control, but dismisses the same argument when it can be shown that a child's life would have been saved if a gun had been available to defend the child's life.
Vaporware might have been coined to make it simpler to talk about Microsoft, but FUD existed well before Microsoft existed.
Dr. Amdahl (inventor of the IBM 360 series mainframe, for all you "computing-was-invented-in-the-80s" types) coined FUD to describe IBM when he decided he'd had enough of their monopolistic marketing practices and broke off to form his own company. He used it in "The Mythical Man-Month"
So, you see, Microsoft didn't even invent FUD. They had to steal even *that* idea from someone else!
References: http://www.cavcomp.demon.co.uk/hall oween/fuddef.ht ml http://www.isham-research.com/emulation_1st_fu d.ht ml (I like this one, it introduces a new way of saying the same thing with a neat double-entendre!) http://encyclopedia.thefreedict ionary.com/FUD http://members.hellug.gr/vyruss/co mputing/FUD_essa y.html
How very interesting that concepts of God and Gospel have been replaced by Science.
These "Nobel Laureates" have blasted the Bush administration with their "scientific" article.
Does anyone really believe that any science is purely devoid of politics? Go talk to professors trying to reach tenure. Go talk to researchers fighting for funding. Ask them if politics plays a part in their everyday lives. They're as political as any politician. These days you can't do science without money and you don't get money if you don't play the game.
Since the advent of the "Environmental Awareness" movement (my description for it, good or bad), it has been profitable for many scientists to find ways that the human race has damaged the environment. Any challenge to that dogma is met with violent opposition, as it threatens sources of funding.
This is not to say that the human race hasn't harmfully altered the environment. It does, however, point out a definite bias that these scientists might be subject to. They're not God, after all, they're human beings with normal human frailties, including prejudices and political agendas.
My esteemed/. colleagues that keep supporting these scientists as High Priests of Scientific Truth are as guilty of fanaticism and fundamentalism as the most radical Bible-thumpin' Baptist or Islamic Jihadist.
These scientists may be right. Then again, they may be biased. What is the extent of their bias? What could their motivations be? Can they truly be objective when the Bush administration's policies seem to be heading down a path of withdrawing funding from their projects or projects of friends?
Remember this: Jimmy Carter was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize for engineering a "peace" that isn't. One of the original terrorists, Yassar Arafat, was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize for that same "peace." (After the event which garnered both of these men their Nobel Prizes, Arafat declared an "Intifada" that has taken the lives of over 900 Israeli civilians.)
Nothing exists in a pure vacuum. These scientists don't. Politics, like it or not, plays a part in everything. Including science.
It's the same with Gun Control or the Patriot Act or any other invasion of fundamental rights.
It's not that I mistrust any particular administration or governmental entity (although there are some that I do NOT trust). It's that I'm not sure I can always trust the government. It's that the system can be abused, not that I think that it will be abused immediately.
Think about this: Let's say you trust a particular president and Congress combination. Doesn't matter which party either group belongs to, just matters that you trust that combination. They ask to restrict "hate speech." You think, "Well, that makes sense! Keep the nasty racists from spreading their venom!" Everything goes along fine for awhile. But, things change. After a few more years, a different administration comes into power. Not too radically different from the previous administration in policy, but less tolerant of criticism. "Hate speech" laws start getting used against anyone who speaks against the government.
Privacy issues are similar. At first, we trust those who ask for the information. They use it responsibly. Over time, however, more and more excuses are found to use the information in ways you didn't expect. Eventually, the information is used outright unethically. How do we keep that from happening? The best way is to not allow the use of the information in the first place. Do you really need to have all the convenience that everyone wants to sell you? I don't. I think that there's quite a bit I should be able to do for myself and should put up with certain amounts of inconvenience in my life.
Working for a major (second only to IBM) services company, I get to see a lot of the Corporate mindset.
If something breaks, Corporate Suits want someone to blame. They want to point a finger at someone and say "Fix it! NOW!" They don't want someone they can't control MAYBE coming up with a fix for it IF it interests them enough to work on their problem. While you and I may love Linux and the multitude of solutions it provides and the joys of doing The Right Thing with it, Corporate Suits want the comfort of working with someone that they can pin liability on and recover lost revenue from if something breaks.
You know all those licenses that say "No warranty of merchantability or fitness of purpose either express or implied?" Big Corporations regularly negotiate tougher licenses all the time with software and hardware companies. We "partner" with our biggest clients. They write big contracts that force us to pay damages when specified uptimes are not met. A handful of applications on the account I work on are designated as "special" apps, which force us to pay big monetary penalties when outages occur. They pay for this privilege, of course. They pay big bucks.
Unless a RedHat or Mandrake or SuSE or other Linux company is prepared to step up to the plate and provide the same level of support that IBM, Sun, HP, etc. provide, Linux will be forever relegated to the "not-for-mission-critical" category. That level of support includes being ready to take it on the chin when the customer beats up on you when your product fails. (and it WILL fail at some point)
Linux may someday scale. When it happens, it will be because a big company like IBM or Sun or HP has stepped up to the plate and MADE it scale. How many E15K servers does the Linux Kernel team have at their disposal? How many Superdomes? How many Regattas? If they don't have those tools, how can they write a version that outperforms the native OS on those platforms? (My personal bet is that IBM eventually replaces AIX with Linux or slowly rewrites AIX to look like Linux to the SA/programmer community. The kernel, however, will be optimized to run on the proprietary hardware.)
Slashdot Mirror
Manufactured during WWII for less than 2 dollars US by the Guide Lamp Division of General Motors, this little stamped-metal pistol was air-dropped over France to the Resistance. Those freedom-loving French used these little guns to kill Germans and steal more powerful weapons from them. Eventually, they proved invaluable in the liberation of France. The Resistance was able to hamper and even cripple German supply lines, tying up resources well in advance of the British/American advancement.
What can a magnum or a shotgun do? In the hands of a determined populace, plenty.
Tanks, missiles and planes do not win wars all by themselves. You *have* to have infantry. Infantry takes and holds ground. Infantry, in the words of Robert Heinlein, makes war as personal as a punch in the face. Infantry still uses rifles and various other small arms to take and hold ground.
NRA hasn't forgotten, but it's obvious that either you have, or never learned to begin with.
I am so glad you don't have a gun, then. [grin]
1. Obvious. Your point?
2. Preferred. Unfortunately, the current wave of hoplophobia running around disguised as "concern over gun violence" has diluted a well-trained populace and turned many would-be sheepdogs into sheep.
3. The statement saying that you're "more likely to get shot by someone you know" blah-blah-blah is useless without the context of the study. The underlying context is that you are more likely to get shot by someone you know if you live with someone who is an illegal drug user or a convicted felon. Don't know any of those? Then you're probably safe. Also, the majority of those crimes are committed with illegally obtained weapons.
I don't mind if any of my neighbors owns a gun. I don't hate any of them. Why should I? Why should I care one whit about them as long as they mind their business and I mind mine? I may, upon occasion, disagree with them. However, I am adult enough to be able to disagree with them without descending into violent behavior. Are you afraid that you might shoot your neighbor? If so, then you shouldn't own a gun. I'm not likely to shoot mine, nor am I afraid that my neighbor will shoot me. It's called being civilized. It's where you act in a civilized manner, even if you have the means to be uncivilized.
So, in other words, this guy has invented a device to replicate what the Freemasons have used in their secret rituals for hundreds of years.
Novel.
--
From West to East and back again.
It's called "introspection."
I must respectfully submit that we *are* holding constant, permanent and without end discussions on the subject.
Do not think, for a moment, that those who hold the position that the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were justified feel any less pain remembering the deaths of thousands of human beings as a result. However, we look at the costs of not doing something and cringe at the inescapable conclusions.
Hindsight is all well and good, but the American decision-makers were human beings, mere mortals. They were not gifted with perfect foresight or wisdom, but with all our human frailties and shortcomings. They were good men, men of honor and decency, who saw a world ravaged by war and conflict and desired to put a stop to it. They had seen evidence of the wholesale slaughter of civilians in Europe and Asia. They had seen truly power-hungry men commit their populations to war to feed their egos. They had seen their own populations go to war and many of them come back shattered by the experience.
Can I regret what they did? Yes, they let the nuclear genie out of the bottle. Can I blame them for what they did? No. They faced a tough decision and made the best one they could given what they knew and what their goals were. Was it a perfect decision? No. Could a better decision have been made? Maybe. But who's to know? Bombing Mount Fuji, as one author wrote, might have had the desired effect, but then again, it might not have. Hitting Fuji may have, instead, filled the Japanese population with a terrible resolve, much as 9/11 galvanized the U.S. What we *do* know is this: The two bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended a war that had been filled with some of the most evil, despicable actions against fellow humans that had ever been seen. Whatever evil that the bombs themselves may represent, they at least had the saving grace of ending a long, bloody war.
I worked for over 7 years at the VA Medical Center in Atlanta, as sysadmin and lead programmer for their DHCP/VISTA installation.
MUMPS has a lot of strengths, as well as weaknesses. Try programming in a language with less than 26 commands. That's why you can abbreviate them all down to a single letter, for the most part. Once you get used to a very regular syntax, it becomes second nature to be able to read it and understand what's going on in a program without having to remember what some dangling pointer or other nonsense from the "modern" languages introduce.
I've never had a MUMPS routine experience a memory leak. I've never had a MUMPS routine crash a system because some idjit used setuid because he couldn't figure out how to do it any other way.
It's not an OS language, it's an apps language. Specifically, it's a database language that lets you code fast database code in a fast, interactive manner.
Yeah, it's pretty old. It's not "modern" and doesn't have all the cachet of a "glamorous" language like one of the new object-oriented languages. But I could write usable code very quickly and have it ready for production in almost no time at all. And it allowed the VA to run large databases using cheap, low-end hardware.
MUMPS takes a very simple route to applications programming. It's not perfect, but it has the wonderful advantage of working, when used properly. It excels at string handling. It was using what perl calls "hashes" long before Larry Wall started writing perl. Unlike perl, it even gives you a way to walk through the binary trees that are a result of the "sparse arrays" that MUMPS uses. File I/O? What file I/O? Just SET a Global Variable and it's stored on disk. Need to recall it? Just reference the Global Variable. It never went away, unless you KILLed it. Need temporary storage because you need to work with more data than there is physical memory? Just use those Globals again. Just remember to KILL them when you're done.
It's kind of neat when you can create a database structure where the data *is* the index:
As an old MUG (MUMPS Users Group) T-shirt used to say:
"MUMPS means never having to say you're sorting."
Simple. Limit the MTU to 500GB. No fragmented packets.
I started working with VAXen in 1989. The hospital that I worked for had a LAVc (Local Area VAXcluster) running on a 6230, two MicroVAX 3600s and three 3500s.
The two 3600s were connected to a packet-switched network for rudimentary TCP/IP connectivity to other hospitals in the network. (Government: I worked for the VA.) The contract had changed and we had to pull out one vendor's connection and install a different vendor's connection.
The vendor we were dropping came by to deinstall the equipment and was working behind the servers. I was in the machine room at my desk when I heard all of the consoles start beeping and printing at once. I went over to them and asked the tech what happened. He sheepishly looked up with the power-cable for one of the 3600s in his hand, saying "Oops!"
I told him to plug it back in and I waited for the cluster to finish its transition before rebooting the downed node. Took about 20 minutes to boot and it was back online.
No user calls. We were down for about 30 minutes on that node. The users barely noticed. The worst that happened was that those users on the downed node simply logged back into the cluster and picked up where they left off. No lost data. Very little lost time.
Nowadays, I administer UNIX servers. Why? Not because I feel they're more reliable than VMS. Mainly because I can make more money that way. Nobody wants to pay me as much to administer VMSclusters.
And with it, many, many bugs^H^H^H^H"features."
My Nostromo N52 is inactivated when I play Lineage2. Why? Because NCSoft, in their infinite wisdom, has determined that this game controller constitutes a "third party bot program" and is, therefore, BAD to use when playing a game.
A friend's USB keyboard was completely deactivated when he tried to play the game. Seems it's a "programmable" keyboard and that means you can BOT with the keyboard!
Funny thing is, NCSoft went through quite a bit of trouble to post a poll on the official L2 forums asking the North American audience how they felt about GameGuard. It was 2:1 or more against GG.
To make things even worse, if you update your Lineage2 (as you must, in order to play) with GG, you have no offical way to REMOVE GG even if you subsequently decide to get rid of L2. Persistent spyware, isn't that neat?
Bugtraq and SecurityFocus have both reported exploits based upon nProtect's GameGuard. NCSoft ignored those. It takes the inherent protection that XP Pro provided against particular types of attacks and throws it away.
The crowning glory of all this is that NCSoft began banning people on the public forums when they complained about GameGuard. Threads were deleted, and discussion was suppressed. While a good number of those banned were guilty of stating that they were leaving the game (a no-no on the official forums) because of GG, it still left an overall impression of supressing information, a distinctly distasteful concept to most North Americans and Europeans.
Anybody interested in a Level 50 Paladin on the Erica server?
I'm going to ask you to engage in a simple thought-experiment.
The parameters:
* You are a burglar.
* You have a sense of self-preservation.
* You are not a complete idiot.
* Your potential targets consist of houses that may or may not have guns.
* You can see some houses with NRA stickers and gun racks in the back of the vehicles.
* You can see some houses with "War is Not the Answer" signs in the front yard.
* Some of the houses with "War is Not the Answer" signs also have NRA stickers.
* Some of the houses have neither "War is Not the Answer" signs or NRA stickers.
* All of the houses appear to have someone home.
* You have a limited amount of time to burgle a house.
* You are armed with a 9mm semi-auto that you purchased off the street with a 15-round clip.
Explain what criteria you would use to choose a house to burgle. Does that criteria include self-preservation considerations? Would the probable presence of a firearm in a potential target influence your decision? In what way?
The majority of times that a gun is used to prevent a crime, it is not fired. However, this does not make good news, therefore we do not read about it nor watch it on the evening news.
On a slightly different note, I find it interesting when someone uses the "If it saves the life of one child, it's worth it!" arguments *for* gun-control, but dismisses the same argument when it can be shown that a child's life would have been saved if a gun had been available to defend the child's life.
Vaporware might have been coined to make it simpler to talk about Microsoft, but FUD existed well before Microsoft existed.
l oween/fuddef.ht mlu d.ht ml (I like this one, it introduces a new way of saying the same thing with a neat double-entendre!)t ionary.com/FUDo mputing/FUD_essa y.html
Dr. Amdahl (inventor of the IBM 360 series mainframe, for all you "computing-was-invented-in-the-80s" types) coined FUD to describe IBM when he decided he'd had enough of their monopolistic marketing practices and broke off to form his own company. He used it in "The Mythical Man-Month"
So, you see, Microsoft didn't even invent FUD. They had to steal even *that* idea from someone else!
References:
http://www.cavcomp.demon.co.uk/hal
http://www.isham-research.com/emulation_1st_f
http://encyclopedia.thefreedic
http://members.hellug.gr/vyruss/c
F I=1:1 W "Cache is really MUMPS",!
How very interesting that concepts of God and Gospel have been replaced by Science.
/. colleagues that keep supporting these scientists as High Priests of Scientific Truth are as guilty of fanaticism and fundamentalism as the most radical Bible-thumpin' Baptist or Islamic Jihadist.
These "Nobel Laureates" have blasted the Bush administration with their "scientific" article.
Does anyone really believe that any science is purely devoid of politics? Go talk to professors trying to reach tenure. Go talk to researchers fighting for funding. Ask them if politics plays a part in their everyday lives. They're as political as any politician. These days you can't do science without money and you don't get money if you don't play the game.
Since the advent of the "Environmental Awareness" movement (my description for it, good or bad), it has been profitable for many scientists to find ways that the human race has damaged the environment. Any challenge to that dogma is met with violent opposition, as it threatens sources of funding.
This is not to say that the human race hasn't harmfully altered the environment. It does, however, point out a definite bias that these scientists might be subject to. They're not God, after all, they're human beings with normal human frailties, including prejudices and political agendas.
My esteemed
These scientists may be right. Then again, they may be biased. What is the extent of their bias? What could their motivations be? Can they truly be objective when the Bush administration's policies seem to be heading down a path of withdrawing funding from their projects or projects of friends?
Remember this: Jimmy Carter was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize for engineering a "peace" that isn't. One of the original terrorists, Yassar Arafat, was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize for that same "peace." (After the event which garnered both of these men their Nobel Prizes, Arafat declared an "Intifada" that has taken the lives of over 900 Israeli civilians.)
Nothing exists in a pure vacuum. These scientists don't. Politics, like it or not, plays a part in everything. Including science.
It's the same with Gun Control or the Patriot Act or any other invasion of fundamental rights.
It's not that I mistrust any particular administration or governmental entity (although there are some that I do NOT trust). It's that I'm not sure I can always trust the government. It's that the system can be abused, not that I think that it will be abused immediately.
Think about this: Let's say you trust a particular president and Congress combination. Doesn't matter which party either group belongs to, just matters that you trust that combination. They ask to restrict "hate speech." You think, "Well, that makes sense! Keep the nasty racists from spreading their venom!" Everything goes along fine for awhile. But, things change. After a few more years, a different administration comes into power. Not too radically different from the previous administration in policy, but less tolerant of criticism. "Hate speech" laws start getting used against anyone who speaks against the government.
Privacy issues are similar. At first, we trust those who ask for the information. They use it responsibly. Over time, however, more and more excuses are found to use the information in ways you didn't expect. Eventually, the information is used outright unethically. How do we keep that from happening? The best way is to not allow the use of the information in the first place. Do you really need to have all the convenience that everyone wants to sell you? I don't. I think that there's quite a bit I should be able to do for myself and should put up with certain amounts of inconvenience in my life.
So, when the US tries to oust a brutal dictator (2 MILLION people killed by Saddam Hussein), we're to be "reviled" by the world?
Okay. Sure. I follow your thinking.
Also, when the US gathers a larger coalition of allies than has ever been seen in the history of the world, that's "unilateral" action?
Well, there you go again.
Amen.
Working for a major (second only to IBM) services company, I get to see a lot of the Corporate mindset.
If something breaks, Corporate Suits want someone to blame. They want to point a finger at someone and say "Fix it! NOW!" They don't want someone they can't control MAYBE coming up with a fix for it IF it interests them enough to work on their problem. While you and I may love Linux and the multitude of solutions it provides and the joys of doing The Right Thing with it, Corporate Suits want the comfort of working with someone that they can pin liability on and recover lost revenue from if something breaks.
You know all those licenses that say "No warranty of merchantability or fitness of purpose either express or implied?" Big Corporations regularly negotiate tougher licenses all the time with software and hardware companies. We "partner" with our biggest clients. They write big contracts that force us to pay damages when specified uptimes are not met. A handful of applications on the account I work on are designated as "special" apps, which force us to pay big monetary penalties when outages occur. They pay for this privilege, of course. They pay big bucks.
Unless a RedHat or Mandrake or SuSE or other Linux company is prepared to step up to the plate and provide the same level of support that IBM, Sun, HP, etc. provide, Linux will be forever relegated to the "not-for-mission-critical" category. That level of support includes being ready to take it on the chin when the customer beats up on you when your product fails. (and it WILL fail at some point)
Linux may someday scale. When it happens, it will be because a big company like IBM or Sun or HP has stepped up to the plate and MADE it scale. How many E15K servers does the Linux Kernel team have at their disposal? How many Superdomes? How many Regattas? If they don't have those tools, how can they write a version that outperforms the native OS on those platforms? (My personal bet is that IBM eventually replaces AIX with Linux or slowly rewrites AIX to look like Linux to the SA/programmer community. The kernel, however, will be optimized to run on the proprietary hardware.)