Re:I don't know if I fully agree with that
on
Fire Your IT Boss
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
A manager is someone who is experienced, has detailed understanding + knowledge, and is able to make good decisions.
I agree. but key to management, especially of a department in which creativity is part of the job, as IT, is that he/she must be able to gain the respect of the people he/she is managing. I've worked in fund management for all my life, and the difficulties are broadly similar. good managers fall broadly in two categories:
1. "good secretaries": they basically cohordinate the people involved, act as a go-between in funding/resources allocation within the company, but they have no pretense of technical knowledge; they actually do MORE than that,some people are so good that you do not feel they exist even when they are very effective;
2."Peter's disciples"; they've risen through the rank and file on merit, and while they may not be current anymore on the leading edge, they know the challenges involved, and they know how to play on the respect they deserve; they're less unobstrusive than type 1, but in the end they're on a par, because they usually are not at the same level of political ability.
both these types gain a measure of respect out of their rank and file, the first in their sheer usefulness, and the second because they've been there and done that.
In my experience, all people are usually open minded when a new boss comes along, unless they're saddled with someone who has a "reputation", either as an inconsistent meddler of just a dumb fool. in too many cases, managers think of themselves as the "higher up"'s secretaries, which is the worst situation of all: there's no line of responsibility and passing the buck becomes a national sport. So what little clout the company has in regards of Creative thinkers goes down the drain for good, because in the end trust in the higher levels is challenged as well.
I'd like to see them visit a family with a nerdy kid who uses a MythTV box.
"Yeah, I used to use Windows, but it wouldn't record all the shows I told it to -- something about a "broadcast flag content protection error". Ever since I replaced it with Myth, I've had no more problems.".
that's too geeky. how about:" yes, this computer is old, but everythin on it works, XP, office 2003, the whole shooting match. If I replaced it, it would have to have twice the specs to do the same things." Or "Yes, i still use my old box. A friend of mine installed Linux and configured it as a file server. Vista would not run on it"
That's a common mistake geeks make : ads (along with most political speeches) are not made for people who actually parse sentences. They are for people who just listen to them and let their "gut feelings" influence their actions. The goal is to make an instinctive neural pathway for ideas : Microsoft BillGates FriendlyGuy makes people feel more comfortable about Microsoft and directly confront the image that we convey here that Microsoft MonopolisticMonster. We are less efficient because we base our arguments on facts, not formulas.
Basics of marketing : if the product name and the quality you want to associate it with are more than 3 words away, your sentence fails, whatever its point is. Why do you think that you here so much the "McSame" and "Obama Ben Laden" neologism ? They are far more efficient at negative image association than any well weighted argument.
Don't get me wrong, I absolutely hate it when I am confronted to this kind of argument. But I have to admit that as much as I would like Microsoft to listen to geeks when it comes to fact, geeks should take a lesson from Microsoft when it comes to marketing.
well, from what I've seen and heard from Ballmer, to get to associate "Microsoft" and "Friendly" goes beyond spending money on ads, unless they get so selfdeprecatory to induce a change both in public opinion and inside the company. I don't want to post links to the usual youtube sillies, but seeing him ranting about "I love this company"
really put me off as a customer.how about loving me for a change, pal?
all establishments work at a sense of pride out of his constituents, military units shine as examples in this; but the successful ones share a mechanism by which the goals of the organizations dominate the individuals regardless of rank, and try to reject those people who do not cut the mustard ond the goals and values of the unit. a major publicity coup could be for example to get hold of somebody within MS that fought a battle against Vista on something as easy as its footprint and got slaughtered and ostentatiously promote him over the heads of those who silenced him.
You'd think a species advanced enough to master interstellar travel would have invented the geiger counter.
You're right. there can only be three kind of civilizations:
1. advanced enough to detect (a.k.a "steal") the radionuclides in the repository;
2.same as us: smart enough to detect, not enough to use, the radioactive remains;
3.primitive enough to not know radioactivity, but smart enough to detect, given time, what's obnoxious and what's useful, which pretty much covers all the rest, excluding the "clueless"; those would probably be eaten by pack wolves anyway.
on a more serious note, I have my doubts that any radioactive source could pose a significant threat to an ancient civilization. not so long ago, more than half the working force was used in agriculture, i.e. dispersed over vast territories, so it defies comprehension that a number significant enough to threaten the species could congregate in the Yucca caves and get poisoned.
the simple existence of the predator drone has the effect of denying the enemy or potential enemy freedom of movement, irrespective of the ability/willingness to harm. [. ..] unless some careless politician had subscribed to a "no first use" policy.
You just made the same mistake as the careless politician. There must be at least a perceived ability/willingness to do harm. And let's face it, you give the other guy the idea that you're willing to harm him by harming his buddies first.
-Peter
actually, no. the point about the predator is that it denies the free use of space and time, and tactical and strategic surprise. in a asymmetrical conflict in which the good guys have the regular army plus political institutions, THOSE are the ONLY weapons that the terrorists have. try imagining the Viet Nam war with predators roaming in the air equipped with that thermal camera. Have you read the book " we were soldiers then and young?" try seeing the situation with a predator add on. it would be the Marianas turkey shoot all over again.
I thought its primary function was to gather intelligence, which hopefully has the effect of saving American, allied, and non-combatant's lives. But it does that by letting us kill enemy combatants better, which seems different on its face from what this article talks about.
-Peter
There's a misconception here. the simple existence of the predator drone has the effect of denying the enemy or potential enemy freedom of movement, irrespective of the ability/willingness to harm.
In this particular sense, it forces the conflict down to platoon level , because it is nearly impossible for the opfor to concentrate force effectively; I expect that nothing would suit the allied forces in Afghanistan better than a replay of the Tet offensive, with all the problems of supply and concentration of force that this would entail for the al qaida/ insurgent force.
For all practical purposes, the predator drone has the same function that tactical nuclear weapons had for NATO in the cold war: their function was simply to force the enemy to keep its forces widely spread to minimise the probability of sustaining defeating losses in one go, therefore the vast superiority in numbers of the soviet bloc could not turn into a vast superiority at the front line, unless some careless politician had subscribed to a "no first use" policy. I can tell you that living in Europe in the Carter years, for a guy like me rather knowledgeable in military things, was "interesting".
I live in Korea, where every computer runs Windows, no matter how minimal the need. POS terminal in large supermarkets, airport arrival/departure information screens, ATMs, monitors which loop the same video in full-screen all day, every day.
Korea spends a lot of its time being nationalistic (just look at the anti-U.S. mad cow demonstrations happening now), yet they send I-don't-know-how-many-billions of dollars to the U.S. for Windows XP every year. My Samsung hard drives even used to come with an OEM version of XP.
...it's a clever way to saturate the market with XP, lest windows vista takes root before Ubuntu is fully localised;)
Obviously, you should run a wire from your tinfoil hat to a conductive grounding strip attached to the heel of your shoe.
Actually, the devices I've used connect to the toe of your shoe, not the heel - Both heels are often lifted while walking. And you need to be sure that you run wires to both feet instead of just one. Also, unless you have a conductive floor (we did when we were using these, but for a very different purpose), spikes are more effective than strips. But you need to plan for the terrain. 1/4" spikes are fine for walking (and very effective for grounding) in damp vegetation or earth but may impede your progress on asphalt. In that case, you'll need very shallow spikes and will just have to accept limited grounding unless you're willing to run a very long cable to a copper rod.
I am ready to sue my golf course. they had me replace my metal spikes with rubber ones, and now I know why!!!
1) Subliminal messages don't work. It's a sham that a psychologist made with fake data that scared the crap out of politicians so that a law was implemented quickly and people fear it to this day (though I still do fear spammers using this, as they have no morals).
So... Why exactly do you fear it if it doesn't work?
Because audible spam in my head would be even worse than the e-mailed spam in my in-box or the visible spam on billboards (and bus stops, sides of buildings/cars, etc.)
I do not know why, but reading all this makes me want to buy some cheap Viagra.
"The pulses create a shockwave inside the skull that's detected by the ears, and basically makes you think you're going balls-to-the-wall batshit insane."
I still do not see how my wife would detect a difference.
So the US has a right to possess nuclear weapons because they've been lucky in who they've elected so far?
The police have external checks and balances to prevent the abuse of their power. The US does not.
1.short answer: Yes, having a costitution written By John Adams and Thomas Jefferson helps a bit. In my country, I am subjected by the media to a cult worship of the Italian constitution. So far, from the end of WWII, the average government has lasted a year and a half vs. the Five years written in said constitution, and debt is 105% of gdp. Hooray. By the way,do you imply that Soviet Russia had been unlucky in their elections? maybe we should have encouraged more candidate diversity, but kamikazes were a bit thin on the ground those days.
Be advised that technology cannot be set back. I would not deny the possession of nukes to Russia, for example. It was no democracy when it acquired it, but it had a certain logic of interest that made it predictable, even in a regime change. Saddam paid a sum to every family of palestinian Kamikazes, and he boasted of it. "honey, what's in your backpack?"
2. It so happens that I've spent my military service in the police. What you said is true, there's a system of controls. as the previous Hashemite ruler of Iraq could tell you, having a police force under civilian control is necessary but not sufficient to continue a normal life.
another sad word of advice. "prevention" of violence by the authorities (police, military) is a misnomer, even in the case of police. "sanctioning" is nearer the mark. My beretta M12 submachine gun would have worked as well pointed in the direction of a criminal as in the direction of a nunnery, with equally deadly consequences. the different treatment would only have applied to me (jail sentence)
Had concern about WMD been the real motivation, then Hans Blix of the UN would have been allowed to finish his inspection. The Iraqis were co-operating after all.
The question of why the US has the right to possess the world's largest arsenal yet tell other people they must remain unarmed, is a separate issue, of course. But as there were no WMD (stupid term), it doesn't arise except as a means of highlighting hypocracy.
mmmmmm....I am an opinionated redneck from Italy, so everyone should take my words with a pinch of salt, but I remember Saddam cooperating little, or not at all; to quote Blix himself, "Resolution 687 (1991), like the subsequent resolutions I shall refer to, required cooperation by Iraq but such was often withheld or given grudgingly."
P.S.: as to the "separate issue", the US has been the ONLY nuclear power for about four years, , but as far as I recall no US president talked liberally about "pushing an entire population into the sea", as many arab leaders have done, and Saddam in particular. I do have to remind you that you sleep at night in a house without a moat because the policemen in your country carry submachine guns. do they scare you? are you clamoring against their insistence to control the amount and type of similar weapons on sale? If so, My apologies.
[...] Which is either solar (cutting into your available area for a sail and becoming increasingly infeasible when you get away from the sun) or nuclear (which means enormously heavy: RTGs are many kg per Watt and a full-blown reactor weighs tons before you've generated the first Watt).
.... unless, of course, you are using a bussard reactor. not all kids get science from movies, i got mine from sci fi books. they can be imprecise to the point of criminal, or incredibly visionary. bussard reactors are beyond our technical capability now, but try reading up Jules Vernes remembering when he wrote his books. describing a moon landing when all the population used horse drawn carts is no different from what sci fi does now.
P.S.: bussard reactors were described, in different configurations, by Larry Niven in his book Protector.
Thanks for including a citation for that. Making allegations of phone calls is one thing, proving what was talked about is another.
In any case, like it or not, Word documents, PowerPoint presentations are already industry standards. Whats ironic is that products such as openoffice are riding on the success of microsoft's own office formats. Can you realistically imagine anyone using openoffice if it only worked with OSS formats? Sure some people would, but the vast majority would ignore it.
...the funny thing is, MS doc formats continue to change in matters obscure to me ( I am not a geek, I am in finance) ; seen from the outside, MS is frantically keeping his format incompatible with the others, because (give or take) the last two consumer products that worked "AS PRODUCTS" are Excel 4.0 and Winword 2.0. I know that to imply that Bill himself called a swathe of national authorities to bully them in the open doc format charade is too much, but to imply that a boatload of developers decided on their own to push a native new doc format with every new version of Excel and Word is ludicrous. Unless he personally used only open office, of course!!
If anything saves Microsoft - aside from its stockpiles of cash - it will be Bill's advice imparted on his one-day-a-week-on-Microsoft-business.
I am certainly not enamored with Gates by any means, but I do recognize that (in my view) he was the brains behind the outfit: [...]
Yes, Gates was the brain behind the outfit. But the real Father of Microsoft will remain hidden in an obscure paper file at IBM: " Nah, Dr-dos costs too much, the guy wants 50 bucks per copy. Let's give the contract to the boy with the funny glasses."
NO, I don't want to punch him in the face. I want to watch it again and again. My favorite part is:
"How does a human beein stand that at six times the speed of sound?"
I believe the right answer to that question would've been: "Well it is bearable but you need to speak veeeery slooooowly or people sitting next to you can not understand what you say."
No, they're dumb. Fox News was unable to find people who could act dumb, so now they just hire people who really, (really, really) are dumb.
From my extensive corporate background, I can tell you that if somebody that has been hired acts dumb, he's usually dumber than he seems; all a matter of cost efficiency, a smart guy acting dumb would cost between twice and three times as much, and you'd risk him saying clever things once in a while anyway.
However, the greatest untapped energy source is, and always will be the sun. Things like using solar panels at your house and being more energy efficient will be our greatest step towards solving our energy problems. People themselves need to start taking their energy use into their own hands. Their are entire neighborhoods in the US who are self sufficient and actually give energy back. There is no reason why this idea cannot spread to more of the US. So rather than relying on 3rd party for all your needs, start thinking of how you can help at home.
mmmmmm....let's see. if the US is like my country (Italy), solar energy is subsidised to a fare-thee-well. the price of the panels is subsidised. financing is subsidised. the price at which you sell to the energy utility is artificially inflated. [Be advised: the opinion of the higher ups, as noted above, is that no technological advance will put solar in the same ballpark cost than other sources, otherwise they'd be subsidising RESEARCH, not buildout: why put into place panels at 20% efficiency if you can push through and then have 40 % efficiency?]
let me quote:
"Around 59% of world solar product sales installed the last five years were in applications that are tied to the electricity grid. Solar Energy prices in these applications are 5-20 times more expensive than the cheapest source of conventional electricity generation, although they may only be 3-5 times the electricity tariff that utility customers pay. By contrast, PV can be fully cost competitive on economic grounds in remote (off-grid) industrial and habitational applications. source:Solarbuzz
So, in my view, the powers that be are doing this: instead of studying way to improve the ordinary power generation + trasmission system, for example by building gas fired cogeneration - and/or nuclear plants, high efficiency redundant trasmission lines and switching to more efficient use of energy, they are encouraging "believers" into investing [our] money at -80% interest. Why? because if the politician decide otherwise and push through plant constructions, they inevitably have to sow discontent in the voters. You know, NYMBY effect and so on. One more disconcerting effect: since an initial investment is required ( meaning that you are rich enough to put up the money), and the subsidy comes out of general taxation, basically solar is a regressive tax, i.e. it robs the poor to give the rich. interesting, ah?
there's another way to convince him... "I know for a fact that people in the know send false emails like this , filled to the brim with e-mail addresses of litigation lawyers. Your call."
"After that, all we needed to do was coat the mirror blank with a small amount of aluminum, and voilÃ, we had a highly reflective telescope mirror," says Rabin.
.....I DO hope that they'll use their tinfoil hat instead of mine!!!!!!
Slashdot Mirror
Guess what, I might have found the answer!!!
A manager is someone who is experienced, has detailed understanding + knowledge, and is able to make good decisions.
I agree. but key to management, especially of a department in which creativity is part of the job, as IT, is that he/she must be able to gain the respect of the people he/she is managing.
I've worked in fund management for all my life, and the difficulties are broadly similar. good managers fall broadly in two categories:
1. "good secretaries": they basically cohordinate the people involved, act as a go-between in funding/resources allocation within the company, but they have no pretense of technical knowledge; they actually do MORE than that,some people are so good that you do not feel they exist even when they are very effective;
2."Peter's disciples"; they've risen through the rank and file on merit, and while they may not be current anymore on the leading edge, they know the challenges involved, and they know how to play on the respect they deserve; they're less unobstrusive than type 1, but in the end they're on a par, because they usually are not at the same level of political ability.
both these types gain a measure of respect out of their rank and file, the first in their sheer usefulness, and the second because they've been there and done that.
In my experience, all people are usually open minded when a new boss comes along, unless they're saddled with someone who has a "reputation", either as an inconsistent meddler of just a dumb fool. in too many cases, managers think of themselves as the "higher up"'s secretaries, which is the worst situation of all: there's no line of responsibility and passing the buck becomes a national sport. So what little clout the company has in regards of Creative thinkers goes down the drain for good, because in the end trust in the higher levels is challenged as well.
I'd like to see them visit a family with a nerdy kid who uses a MythTV box.
"Yeah, I used to use Windows, but it wouldn't record all the shows I told it to -- something about a "broadcast flag content protection error". Ever since I replaced it with Myth, I've had no more problems.".
that's too geeky. how about:" yes, this computer is old, but everythin on it works, XP, office 2003, the whole shooting match. If I replaced it, it would have to have twice the specs to do the same things." Or "Yes, i still use my old box. A friend of mine installed Linux and configured it as a file server. Vista would not run on it"
That's a common mistake geeks make : ads (along with most political speeches) are not made for people who actually parse sentences. They are for people who just listen to them and let their "gut feelings" influence their actions. The goal is to make an instinctive neural pathway for ideas : Microsoft BillGates FriendlyGuy makes people feel more comfortable about Microsoft and directly confront the image that we convey here that Microsoft MonopolisticMonster. We are less efficient because we base our arguments on facts, not formulas. Basics of marketing : if the product name and the quality you want to associate it with are more than 3 words away, your sentence fails, whatever its point is. Why do you think that you here so much the "McSame" and "Obama Ben Laden" neologism ? They are far more efficient at negative image association than any well weighted argument. Don't get me wrong, I absolutely hate it when I am confronted to this kind of argument. But I have to admit that as much as I would like Microsoft to listen to geeks when it comes to fact, geeks should take a lesson from Microsoft when it comes to marketing.
well, from what I've seen and heard from Ballmer, to get to associate "Microsoft" and "Friendly" goes beyond spending money on ads, unless they get so selfdeprecatory to induce a change both in public opinion and inside the company. I don't want to post links to the usual youtube sillies, but seeing him ranting about "I love this company" really put me off as a customer.how about loving me for a change, pal?
all establishments work at a sense of pride out of his constituents, military units shine as examples in this; but the successful ones share a mechanism by which the goals of the organizations dominate the individuals regardless of rank, and try to reject those people who do not cut the mustard ond the goals and values of the unit. a major publicity coup could be for example to get hold of somebody within MS that fought a battle against Vista on something as easy as its footprint and got slaughtered and ostentatiously promote him over the heads of those who silenced him.
Watch this like a 5 minute Seinfeld episode and not like a commercial and I think it's hilarious.
you mean, Billy here got his own Seinfeld miniepisode series and his company is paying?
I just saw it for myself today. I was convinced it was an add for the shoe store until the very end when the windows logo flashed...
that was before the BSOD, right?
SMS in China is upscaling massively, and is incredibly cheap currently â" even 'premium' SMS info services cost 1 Yuan (that's just £0.081 GBP).
it might be that there's no revenue sharing pact between local phone companies and the foreign mobile companies regarding text messages.
You'd think a species advanced enough to master interstellar travel would have invented the geiger counter.
You're right. there can only be three kind of civilizations:
1. advanced enough to detect (a.k.a "steal") the radionuclides in the repository;
2.same as us: smart enough to detect, not enough to use, the radioactive remains;
3.primitive enough to not know radioactivity, but smart enough to detect, given time, what's obnoxious and what's useful, which pretty much covers all the rest, excluding the "clueless"; those would probably be eaten by pack wolves anyway.
on a more serious note, I have my doubts that any radioactive source could pose a significant threat to an ancient civilization. not so long ago, more than half the working force was used in agriculture, i.e. dispersed over vast territories, so it defies comprehension that a number significant enough to threaten the species could congregate in the Yucca caves and get poisoned.
You just made the same mistake as the careless politician. There must be at least a perceived ability/willingness to do harm. And let's face it, you give the other guy the idea that you're willing to harm him by harming his buddies first.
-Peter
actually, no. the point about the predator is that it denies the free use of space and time, and tactical and strategic surprise. in a asymmetrical conflict in which the good guys have the regular army plus political institutions, THOSE are the ONLY weapons that the terrorists have. try imagining the Viet Nam war with predators roaming in the air equipped with that thermal camera. Have you read the book " we were soldiers then and young?" try seeing the situation with a predator add on. it would be the Marianas turkey shoot all over again.
I thought its primary function was to gather intelligence, which hopefully has the effect of saving American, allied, and non-combatant's lives. But it does that by letting us kill enemy combatants better, which seems different on its face from what this article talks about.
-Peter
There's a misconception here. the simple existence of the predator drone has the effect of denying the enemy or potential enemy freedom of movement, irrespective of the ability/willingness to harm.
In this particular sense, it forces the conflict down to platoon level , because it is nearly impossible for the opfor to concentrate force effectively; I expect that nothing would suit the allied forces in Afghanistan better than a replay of the Tet offensive, with all the problems of supply and concentration of force that this would entail for the al qaida/ insurgent force.
For all practical purposes, the predator drone has the same function that tactical nuclear weapons had for NATO in the cold war: their function was simply to force the enemy to keep its forces widely spread to minimise the probability of sustaining defeating losses in one go, therefore the vast superiority in numbers of the soviet bloc could not turn into a vast superiority at the front line, unless some careless politician had subscribed to a "no first use" policy. I can tell you that living in Europe in the Carter years, for a guy like me rather knowledgeable in military things, was "interesting".
I live in Korea, where every computer runs Windows, no matter how minimal the need. POS terminal in large supermarkets, airport arrival/departure information screens, ATMs, monitors which loop the same video in full-screen all day, every day. Korea spends a lot of its time being nationalistic (just look at the anti-U.S. mad cow demonstrations happening now), yet they send I-don't-know-how-many-billions of dollars to the U.S. for Windows XP every year. My Samsung hard drives even used to come with an OEM version of XP.
Obviously, you should run a wire from your tinfoil hat to a conductive grounding strip attached to the heel of your shoe.
Actually, the devices I've used connect to the toe of your shoe, not the heel - Both heels are often lifted while walking. And you need to be sure that you run wires to both feet instead of just one. Also, unless you have a conductive floor (we did when we were using these, but for a very different purpose), spikes are more effective than strips. But you need to plan for the terrain. 1/4" spikes are fine for walking (and very effective for grounding) in damp vegetation or earth but may impede your progress on asphalt. In that case, you'll need very shallow spikes and will just have to accept limited grounding unless you're willing to run a very long cable to a copper rod.
I am ready to sue my golf course. they had me replace my metal spikes with rubber ones, and now I know why!!!
1) Subliminal messages don't work. It's a sham that a psychologist made with fake data that scared the crap out of politicians so that a law was implemented quickly and people fear it to this day (though I still do fear spammers using this, as they have no morals).
So... Why exactly do you fear it if it doesn't work?
Because audible spam in my head would be even worse than the e-mailed spam in my in-box or the visible spam on billboards (and bus stops, sides of buildings/cars, etc.)
I do not know why, but reading all this makes me want to buy some cheap Viagra.
"The pulses create a shockwave inside the skull that's detected by the ears, and basically makes you think you're going balls-to-the-wall batshit insane."
I still do not see how my wife would detect a difference.
So the US has a right to possess nuclear weapons because they've been lucky in who they've elected so far?
The police have external checks and balances to prevent the abuse of their power. The US does not.
1.short answer: Yes, having a costitution written By John Adams and Thomas Jefferson helps a bit. In my country, I am subjected by the media to a cult worship of the Italian constitution. So far, from the end of WWII, the average government has lasted a year and a half vs. the Five years written in said constitution, and debt is 105% of gdp. Hooray. By the way,do you imply that Soviet Russia had been unlucky in their elections? maybe we should have encouraged more candidate diversity, but kamikazes were a bit thin on the ground those days.
Be advised that technology cannot be set back. I would not deny the possession of nukes to Russia, for example. It was no democracy when it acquired it, but it had a certain logic of interest that made it predictable, even in a regime change. Saddam paid a sum to every family of palestinian Kamikazes, and he boasted of it. "honey, what's in your backpack?"
2. It so happens that I've spent my military service in the police. What you said is true, there's a system of controls. as the previous Hashemite ruler of Iraq could tell you, having a police force under civilian control is necessary but not sufficient to continue a normal life.
another sad word of advice. "prevention" of violence by the authorities (police, military) is a misnomer, even in the case of police. "sanctioning" is nearer the mark. My beretta M12 submachine gun would have worked as well pointed in the direction of a criminal as in the direction of a nunnery, with equally deadly consequences. the different treatment would only have applied to me (jail sentence)
Had concern about WMD been the real motivation, then Hans Blix of the UN would have been allowed to finish his inspection. The Iraqis were co-operating after all. The question of why the US has the right to possess the world's largest arsenal yet tell other people they must remain unarmed, is a separate issue, of course. But as there were no WMD (stupid term), it doesn't arise except as a means of highlighting hypocracy.
mmmmmm....I am an opinionated redneck from Italy, so everyone should take my words with a pinch of salt, but I remember Saddam cooperating little, or not at all; to quote Blix himself, "Resolution 687 (1991), like the subsequent resolutions I shall refer to, required cooperation by Iraq but such was often withheld or given grudgingly."
P.S.: as to the "separate issue", the US has been the ONLY nuclear power for about four years, , but as far as I recall no US president talked liberally about "pushing an entire population into the sea", as many arab leaders have done, and Saddam in particular. I do have to remind you that you sleep at night in a house without a moat because the policemen in your country carry submachine guns. do they scare you? are you clamoring against their insistence to control the amount and type of similar weapons on sale? If so, My apologies.
[...] Which is either solar (cutting into your available area for a sail and becoming increasingly infeasible when you get away from the sun) or nuclear (which means enormously heavy: RTGs are many kg per Watt and a full-blown reactor weighs tons before you've generated the first Watt).
.... unless, of course, you are using a bussard reactor. not all kids get science from movies, i got mine from sci fi books. they can be imprecise to the point of criminal, or incredibly visionary. bussard reactors are beyond our technical capability now, but try reading up Jules Vernes remembering when he wrote his books. describing a moon landing when all the population used horse drawn carts is no different from what sci fi does now.
P.S.: bussard reactors were described, in different configurations, by Larry Niven in his book Protector.
Thanks for including a citation for that. Making allegations of phone calls is one thing, proving what was talked about is another.
In any case, like it or not, Word documents, PowerPoint presentations are already industry standards. Whats ironic is that products such as openoffice are riding on the success of microsoft's own office formats. Can you realistically imagine anyone using openoffice if it only worked with OSS formats? Sure some people would, but the vast majority would ignore it.
I know that to imply that Bill himself called a swathe of national authorities to bully them in the open doc format charade is too much, but to imply that a boatload of developers decided on their own to push a native new doc format with every new version of Excel and Word is ludicrous. Unless he personally used only open office, of course!!
[...]
If anything saves Microsoft - aside from its stockpiles of cash - it will be Bill's advice imparted on his one-day-a-week-on-Microsoft-business.
I am certainly not enamored with Gates by any means, but I do recognize that (in my view) he was the brains behind the outfit: [...]
Yes, Gates was the brain behind the outfit. But the real Father of Microsoft will remain hidden in an obscure paper file at IBM: " Nah, Dr-dos costs too much, the guy wants 50 bucks per copy. Let's give the contract to the boy with the funny glasses."
NO, I don't want to punch him in the face. I want to watch it again and again. My favorite part is: "How does a human beein stand that at six times the speed of sound?" I believe the right answer to that question would've been: "Well it is bearable but you need to speak veeeery slooooowly or people sitting next to you can not understand what you say."
you forgot to say that if you are facing backwards, it's the other way around!!
No, they're dumb. Fox News was unable to find people who could act dumb, so now they just hire people who really, (really, really) are dumb.
From my extensive corporate background, I can tell you that if somebody that has been hired acts dumb, he's usually dumber than he seems; all a matter of cost efficiency, a smart guy acting dumb would cost between twice and three times as much, and you'd risk him saying clever things once in a while anyway.
I, for one, welcome our new department of Justice Overlords!!!!!
However, the greatest untapped energy source is, and always will be the sun. Things like using solar panels at your house and being more energy efficient will be our greatest step towards solving our energy problems. People themselves need to start taking their energy use into their own hands. Their are entire neighborhoods in the US who are self sufficient and actually give energy back. There is no reason why this idea cannot spread to more of the US. So rather than relying on 3rd party for all your needs, start thinking of how you can help at home.
mmmmmm....let's see. if the US is like my country (Italy), solar energy is subsidised to a fare-thee-well. the price of the panels is subsidised. financing is subsidised. the price at which you sell to the energy utility is artificially inflated.
[Be advised: the opinion of the higher ups, as noted above, is that no technological advance will put solar in the same ballpark cost than other sources, otherwise they'd be subsidising RESEARCH, not buildout: why put into place panels at 20% efficiency if you can push through and then have 40 % efficiency?]
let me quote: "Around 59% of world solar product sales installed the last five years were in applications that are tied to the electricity grid. Solar Energy prices in these applications are 5-20 times more expensive than the cheapest source of conventional electricity generation, although they may only be 3-5 times the electricity tariff that utility customers pay. By contrast, PV can be fully cost competitive on economic grounds in remote (off-grid) industrial and habitational applications.
source:Solarbuzz
So, in my view, the powers that be are doing this: instead of studying way to improve the ordinary power generation + trasmission system, for example by building gas fired cogeneration - and/or nuclear plants, high efficiency redundant trasmission lines and switching to more efficient use of energy, they are encouraging "believers" into investing [our] money at -80% interest. Why? because if the politician decide otherwise and push through plant constructions, they inevitably have to sow discontent in the voters. You know, NYMBY effect and so on.
One more disconcerting effect: since an initial investment is required ( meaning that you are rich enough to put up the money), and the subsidy comes out of general taxation, basically solar is a regressive tax, i.e. it robs the poor to give the rich. interesting, ah?
there's another way to convince him... "I know for a fact that people in the know send false emails like this , filled to the brim with e-mail addresses of litigation lawyers. Your call."
"After that, all we needed to do was coat the mirror blank with a small amount of aluminum, and voilÃ, we had a highly reflective telescope mirror," says Rabin.