You may or may not agree with the wisdom of any particular law, but the executive branch and the President have an obligation to see that the laws are faithfully executed until such time the law is repealed, even when they disagree personally (or politically) . Under the Constitution, it is not the place of President or his advisers to second-guess a duly passed law. If they think the law is unwise, they should go through the democratic process of petitioning Congress to repeal it. Just unilaterally deciding to ignore the law undermines the rule of law and the democratic process.
Here are some laws that the administration has famously ignored, instead of pursuing a repeal through the democratic process. There are probably more.
The Defense of Marriage Act
Mandatory Sentencing
Yucca Mountain
Again, I'm not saying any one of these laws is a wise law, but they are (or were in the case of DOMA until overturned) duly legislated, therefore the executive had a constitutional duty to enforce them until such time the laws are repealed by the legislature or overturned by the courts. Where is the Republic going when the executive branch no longer feels constrained by the law or the democracy?
Something similar actually is a traditional Arabian festival dish. I read about it in the "Seven Pillars of Wisdom" (Lawrence of Arabia's book). They do rice and chickens/peahens inside of sheep, and then the sheep inside the camel.
The Haj is coming soon (i believe it will be October). If MERS escapes into the pilgrim population, it will be a global disaster. Packing millions of people into the track around the Kaaba or the Plain of Arafat will be a perfect place for MERS to spread. Then they will all get on airplanes and scatter around the world. MERS has a very high mortality rate WITH modern medicine intervention. If pilgrims start taking it home to villages in Africa, Pakistan, Indonesia, etc where there effectively is no medical care, lots of people are going to die.
Back in the day (circa 2001, so RH 7 thru 7.3) before RH adopted YUM and the entire distrubtion fit on 1 CD, I was constantly frustrated by the unexplainable need of RH to make packages depend on completely unrelated stuff. I swear you couldn't install a 10kB console text editor without installing 50MB of dependencies. What possible reason could a console editor require libjpg? Things like that were common. IIRC, before YUM you had to type in every single package name x 20 or so packages (with exact versions like libjpg-rh7.1.2.3.0-i386.rpm); this was a serious hassle.
When it became time to move to another system, I went with Debian (woody I think) because the implementation was cleaner to begin with and APT was a godsend for dependency resolution. I say the implementation was cleaner, because even when reduced to using dpkg instead of APT, I usually only had to type in two or three dependencies, whereas I remember many more installing the same on RH.
So, yes. If I was still using RH/Fedora, I would love a clean and elegant (agile if you like buzzwords) implementation without all the extraneous crap.
Already done, sorta. There is the "Server Core" mode for windows server where all config is through the command line. I've never seen one in the wild. It looks like the cmd.exe shell/interface actually runs in a window. However, most of the windows-shell is stripped out. Wikipedia has a discription and picture. To me, the picture looks like your desktop in safe-mode text mode only . http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_server_2008#Server_Core.
I don't know. You tell me. I don't know what the orbital period for this planet is or the distance it orbits at. Orbital speeds are pretty fast though. Google tells me that the earth moves about 107,000 km/hr around the sun. If their instruments are sensitive enough, they might see the difference. I would also guess there is a possible gravitational redshift and lensing depending on the mass of the star and the orbital distance.
To isolate the light contribution of the planet, Evans and his colleagues waited for the planet to move behind the star during its orbit, so that its light would be blocked, and looked for changes in light colour.
A spectrograph on board the Hubble monitored light coming from the source, in wavelengths ranging from yellow to ultraviolet. During the eclipse, the amount of observed blue light decreased, whereas other colours remained unaffected. This indicated that the light reflected by the planet's atmosphere, blocked by the star in the eclipse, is blue.
So, they are observing the change in light when the planet moves farther away (behind its star) and seeing less blue, thereby conjecturing the planet is blue. But wouldn't the planet's light also redshift as it moves away and blueshift as it moves toward us? How much of the color change is accounted for by doppler?
One of the lessons learned by the military in Iraq was that investigation and interrogation sometimes trumps raw muscle. So the intelligence teams started studying police procedures and thinking like police investigators to establish who was linked to who (in Iraq its usually cousins/tribesmen or people from the same village). They also studied how the French conducted the Battle of Algiers (which the French won despite losing the overall war in Algeria). The French had discovered that figuring out who specifically was running an operation and kicking down his one door was far more effective than randomly kicking down 100 doors . So the French started extensively interrogating (unfortunately with torture) prisoners to figure out who were members of different cells. The French started keeping books of rap-sheets, family trees, organization charts, and mug shots of all suspected insurgents in the city. Once they had a good grasp on a cell's organization, then they merely had to pick them up. The US military learned some of these lessons. For example, if they found finger prints on IED fragments, and the prints matched a guy from the town of Ramadi, then the first place to look for him would be the local house of his cousin who was also originally from Ramadi.
I am a Hulu Plus subscriber. Hulu is a joint venture of NBC, Fox, and Disney-ABC. Hulu only survives on the good graces of its owners who provide the content, and even then they only provide it grudgingly, because they perpetually fear it will undercut their broadcast business. Some of the basic cable guys (TNT, USA, SyFy, etc) also provide content, but mostly because they are also owned by NBC, Fox, or Disney. A few of the smaller cable networks or owners of shows no longer on TV at all also made deals with Hulu, but that's only because they a desperate to monetize otherwise worthless old stuff. Notice that CBS is not a partner, so you generally don't get a bunch of CBS shows available on Hulu. In fact, the CBS CEO recently bragged about this because he said valuable shows are worth more in syndication (i.e. reruns on TV) than online distribution. Even the owners sometimes withhold content. Fox, a Hulu part-owner, only allows the last few episodes of the current season, even to paying subscribers.
You can bet your bottom dollar that as soon as the TV networks are no longer owners, the good content will disappear from Hulu, even to paying members on Hulu Plus.
Please don't consume bugs directly. Use ground-up bugmeal for animal feed instead of fishmeal. I've actually thought about this for some time. Tons & Tons of anchovies and sardines are caught every day to the point that the overfishing is stressing the food chain in the oceans because there are fewer prey fish for the bigger fish (like tuna) to eat(especially off the coast of Peru which is the biggest achovy fishery) . Almost all of the anchovies (like high 90s%) and a significant amount of the sardines are ground into fishmeal for use as animal/aquaculture feed. Why not replace that with bugs for similiar protein content in the feed? This would allow the fisheries to recover which in turn will bring up the population of the fish we actually consume directly (tuna, mackerel, etc).
I don't see your point. We don't kill every person in a Keffiyeh (analogous to your reference of a southern drawl), just those associating with Al-Qeda (analoguous to shooting northwards). Pretty sure we also take prisoners; there is a prison full of them at Gitmo and there are some US Citizen Al-Qeda prisoners in various Federal Penitentiaries. But in any case, prisoners are taken after they surrender. Are you saying we must go to extreme non-leathal lengths to compel them to surrender before we kill them? How many of our soldiers must die trying to compel them to surrender? What war in history has been fought under those terms?
This is all nonsense. By most people's reckoning and the US Government's own declaration, every Confederate killed at Antietem or Gettysburg was a US Citizen. By what legal authority did the Federal Government kill them? Shall the ACLU and their decendents sue the Government for killing them without due process?
Oh wait.. they were in open rebellion and waging war against the Republic. Citizens who join Al-Qeda are in open rebellion and are waging war against the Republic. The simple fact is, when you join the enemy and wage war, you can be killed. War is War. No convoluted legal reasoning is needed to kill the enemy in war. If you think otherwise, your mind is clouded with nonsense and you are lost in non-reality.
Yes, Iran was suspected of printing Superdollars because the previous regime had the exact same physical machinery as the US Treasury. Perhaps they couldn't buy or fabricate spare parts to keep those presses running.
Every year, hardware gets cheaper. They may be thinking that if the comsumer price point for the device is $400 and the hardware cost just dropped by $50, they can still charge that extra $50 to the consumer (via the OEM) and pocket the the profit. The price is still what the consumer was expecting, but MS just got richer.
This particular group of environmentalist are uninformed. The miles-wide safety-easement that surrounds these types of activities actually protect wildlife because no inhabited structure (not related to the activity) are allowed inside the easement. Kennedy Space Center & Cape Canaveral Air Station are actually surrounded by Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge (as another poster noted). Another example would be the Sunnypoint Military (Ammunition) Ocean Terminal and next-door Brunswick Nuclear Powerplant in North Carolina. These are surrounded by a huge easement buffer zone and they are now one of the few places in NC where the red cockaded woodpecker, bald eagle, native venus-fly traps, and pitcher-plants now flourish in the wild. They also have hundreds of acres of long-leaf pine (threatened elsewhere in the region) Same with the training ranges at Ft. Bragg, which is famous for its protection of the long-leaf pines and woodpeckers.
Maybe... remember that Boeing only delievers between 300-500 craft per year with order lead times of several years. I suspect that Airbus is similiar. With that much lead time and low numbers, its possible they forged those specific parts ahead and Boeing/Airbus held them in inventory. In fact, that would make sense given the tooling and setup on a machine like this, because it would be cheaper to do a large production run of a certain quantity than to forge each item 'just in time' and have to re-tool for each peice or seperate run. So, its very possible, and I would think likely, that every one really does use parts produced on this machine.
The alternative to TSA is not more reasonable security procedures, the alternative to TSA is privatization and even less consistency and reason. If you remember why the TSA was created, its because the private security at every airport had different standards in training, policy, and actual implementations of security procedures. The rent-a-guards at some airports were basically not much more than the ones doing night watch at your office. TSA was supposed to bring consistent training and professionalism by vetted and reasonably well-paid and sworn government personnel
If you're for abolishing the TSA, then you are for privatization and even LESS public control over the security inspectors at the airports, LESS professionalism, and LESS training and vetting of guards/inspectors. Be careful what you wish for.
I'd be interested in who is receiving campagin contributions from private security guard companies like Wackenhut (who were displaced by TSA).
They only turn on the hazards when they slow to a crawl (like 30 mph on the interstate) because visibility is extremely low or the water on the pavement is so thick as to be hydroplane hazard (which is common in FL because tropical torrential thunderstorms in summer drop more water than the pavement can drain off). Its a "please notice I'm going slow and don't rear-end my car" measure. However, they would normally only do that when in the far right lane and typically wouldn't be changing lanes at that speed.
As the parent notes, there is a lot of Canadian and other Anglophone nationals and productions on "American" TV. Let's examine two "American" shows: Fringe (Fox) and Revenge (ABC).
Fringe stars Canadian Joshua Jackson, and Australians John Noble and Anna Torv. Fringe is shot on location in that great American city Vancouver, BC for the last 3 seasons. The pilot was shot in Toronto and the first season in New York.
Revenge stars Canadians Emily VanCamp and Henry Czerny, It also stars Englishman Joshua Bowman and Englishwoman Ashley Madekwe.
The two biggest American films ever: Titanic and Avatar were made by Canadian James Cameron and stared, respectively Englishwoman Kate Winslet and Australian Sam Worthington.
So, what's that about Canadian culture? It would be no less ridiculous for US Americans to talk about pernicious Canadian or Australian dilution of US culture. Canadians may just have to reconcile themselves that there really is an international Anglophone culture that we all share and stop trying to define their existence by showing they are not American. Embrace the fact that Canada is part of a cosmopolitan Anglophone international super-culture. I'm sorry if reality upsets your inner Quebecois.
BTW, you have nothing to fear; according to the French, the US doesn't have a culture:). In a sense, they may have a point; we may all just be regionalisms of the global Anglo-sphere.
(2) The Contractor shall have, to the extent permission is granted in accordance with paragraph (c)(1) of this clause, the right to assert claim to copyright subsisting in data first produced in the performance of this contract.
Its not unusual for the Government to allow a contractor to assert copyright, as long as the Government itself has unlimited rights. It really depends on whether the the Government, in the form of the contracting officer, gave permission to the contractor. The Government only keeps contract records for about 6 years 6 months (except in special cases), so depending on how old the particualar work is, the only conclusive record (i.e. a permission letter from the Gov't) may be in the hands of the contractor. Other contemporaneous proof would likely be if the work was registered with the Copyright office when produced, which would lead one to beleive that permission was granted at that time. If no registration was made contemporanously, then likely (but not conclusively) no permission was given and there would be more credence to the idea that they are claiming copyright without permission.
While COBOL supposedly got OO capability in 2002 acoording to wikipedia, I would bet most COBOL is rather straight forward procedural code that is easy to follow and understand. The 'java way' on the other hand is to encourage over-abstration to the point of absurdity. There is a joke hello world at http://foreigndispatches.typepad.com/dispatches/2008/09/hello-world-in-java.html that really isn't far from the truth about how java programs are actually implemented by some coders. I seems some java coders think: Why just print a string when you could instead instantiate a new string-writer class implementing an abstract string writer factory with a text-writer interface? And instead of hardcoding a constant value, use an xml configuration file, even if you will never actually change the value.
Slashdot Mirror
Here are some laws that the administration has famously ignored, instead of pursuing a repeal through the democratic process. There are probably more.
Again, I'm not saying any one of these laws is a wise law, but they are (or were in the case of DOMA until overturned) duly legislated, therefore the executive had a constitutional duty to enforce them until such time the laws are repealed by the legislature or overturned by the courts. Where is the Republic going when the executive branch no longer feels constrained by the law or the democracy?
Something similar actually is a traditional Arabian festival dish. I read about it in the "Seven Pillars of Wisdom" (Lawrence of Arabia's book). They do rice and chickens/peahens inside of sheep, and then the sheep inside the camel.
The Haj is coming soon (i believe it will be October). If MERS escapes into the pilgrim population, it will be a global disaster. Packing millions of people into the track around the Kaaba or the Plain of Arafat will be a perfect place for MERS to spread. Then they will all get on airplanes and scatter around the world. MERS has a very high mortality rate WITH modern medicine intervention. If pilgrims start taking it home to villages in Africa, Pakistan, Indonesia, etc where there effectively is no medical care, lots of people are going to die.
Back in the day (circa 2001, so RH 7 thru 7.3) before RH adopted YUM and the entire distrubtion fit on 1 CD, I was constantly frustrated by the unexplainable need of RH to make packages depend on completely unrelated stuff. I swear you couldn't install a 10kB console text editor without installing 50MB of dependencies. What possible reason could a console editor require libjpg? Things like that were common. IIRC, before YUM you had to type in every single package name x 20 or so packages (with exact versions like libjpg-rh7.1.2.3.0-i386.rpm); this was a serious hassle.
When it became time to move to another system, I went with Debian (woody I think) because the implementation was cleaner to begin with and APT was a godsend for dependency resolution. I say the implementation was cleaner, because even when reduced to using dpkg instead of APT, I usually only had to type in two or three dependencies, whereas I remember many more installing the same on RH.
So, yes. If I was still using RH/Fedora, I would love a clean and elegant (agile if you like buzzwords) implementation without all the extraneous crap.
Already done, sorta. There is the "Server Core" mode for windows server where all config is through the command line. I've never seen one in the wild. It looks like the cmd.exe shell/interface actually runs in a window. However, most of the windows-shell is stripped out. Wikipedia has a discription and picture. To me, the picture looks like your desktop in safe-mode text mode only . http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_server_2008#Server_Core.
Thanks for clearing that up.
I don't know. You tell me. I don't know what the orbital period for this planet is or the distance it orbits at. Orbital speeds are pretty fast though. Google tells me that the earth moves about 107,000 km/hr around the sun. If their instruments are sensitive enough, they might see the difference. I would also guess there is a possible gravitational redshift and lensing depending on the mass of the star and the orbital distance.
So, they are observing the change in light when the planet moves farther away (behind its star) and seeing less blue, thereby conjecturing the planet is blue. But wouldn't the planet's light also redshift as it moves away and blueshift as it moves toward us? How much of the color change is accounted for by doppler?
One of the lessons learned by the military in Iraq was that investigation and interrogation sometimes trumps raw muscle. So the intelligence teams started studying police procedures and thinking like police investigators to establish who was linked to who (in Iraq its usually cousins/tribesmen or people from the same village). They also studied how the French conducted the Battle of Algiers (which the French won despite losing the overall war in Algeria). The French had discovered that figuring out who specifically was running an operation and kicking down his one door was far more effective than randomly kicking down 100 doors . So the French started extensively interrogating (unfortunately with torture) prisoners to figure out who were members of different cells. The French started keeping books of rap-sheets, family trees, organization charts, and mug shots of all suspected insurgents in the city. Once they had a good grasp on a cell's organization, then they merely had to pick them up. The US military learned some of these lessons. For example, if they found finger prints on IED fragments, and the prints matched a guy from the town of Ramadi, then the first place to look for him would be the local house of his cousin who was also originally from Ramadi.
I am a Hulu Plus subscriber. Hulu is a joint venture of NBC, Fox, and Disney-ABC. Hulu only survives on the good graces of its owners who provide the content, and even then they only provide it grudgingly, because they perpetually fear it will undercut their broadcast business. Some of the basic cable guys (TNT, USA, SyFy, etc) also provide content, but mostly because they are also owned by NBC, Fox, or Disney. A few of the smaller cable networks or owners of shows no longer on TV at all also made deals with Hulu, but that's only because they a desperate to monetize otherwise worthless old stuff. Notice that CBS is not a partner, so you generally don't get a bunch of CBS shows available on Hulu. In fact, the CBS CEO recently bragged about this because he said valuable shows are worth more in syndication (i.e. reruns on TV) than online distribution. Even the owners sometimes withhold content. Fox, a Hulu part-owner, only allows the last few episodes of the current season, even to paying subscribers.
You can bet your bottom dollar that as soon as the TV networks are no longer owners, the good content will disappear from Hulu, even to paying members on Hulu Plus.
Please don't consume bugs directly. Use ground-up bugmeal for animal feed instead of fishmeal. I've actually thought about this for some time. Tons & Tons of anchovies and sardines are caught every day to the point that the overfishing is stressing the food chain in the oceans because there are fewer prey fish for the bigger fish (like tuna) to eat(especially off the coast of Peru which is the biggest achovy fishery) . Almost all of the anchovies (like high 90s%) and a significant amount of the sardines are ground into fishmeal for use as animal/aquaculture feed. Why not replace that with bugs for similiar protein content in the feed? This would allow the fisheries to recover which in turn will bring up the population of the fish we actually consume directly (tuna, mackerel, etc).
Sounds like to perfect opportunity to be the BOFH vs the PFY. Enjoy! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bastard_Operator_From_Hell && ofcourse http://www.theregister.co.uk/data_centre/bofh/
I don't see your point. We don't kill every person in a Keffiyeh (analogous to your reference of a southern drawl), just those associating with Al-Qeda (analoguous to shooting northwards). Pretty sure we also take prisoners; there is a prison full of them at Gitmo and there are some US Citizen Al-Qeda prisoners in various Federal Penitentiaries. But in any case, prisoners are taken after they surrender. Are you saying we must go to extreme non-leathal lengths to compel them to surrender before we kill them? How many of our soldiers must die trying to compel them to surrender? What war in history has been fought under those terms?
This is all nonsense. By most people's reckoning and the US Government's own declaration, every Confederate killed at Antietem or Gettysburg was a US Citizen. By what legal authority did the Federal Government kill them? Shall the ACLU and their decendents sue the Government for killing them without due process?
Oh wait.. they were in open rebellion and waging war against the Republic. Citizens who join Al-Qeda are in open rebellion and are waging war against the Republic. The simple fact is, when you join the enemy and wage war, you can be killed. War is War. No convoluted legal reasoning is needed to kill the enemy in war. If you think otherwise, your mind is clouded with nonsense and you are lost in non-reality.
Yes, Iran was suspected of printing Superdollars because the previous regime had the exact same physical machinery as the US Treasury. Perhaps they couldn't buy or fabricate spare parts to keep those presses running.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screamers_(1995_film)
Soil burrowing robotic weapons... and it didn't end well for the humans
Every year, hardware gets cheaper. They may be thinking that if the comsumer price point for the device is $400 and the hardware cost just dropped by $50, they can still charge that extra $50 to the consumer (via the OEM) and pocket the the profit. The price is still what the consumer was expecting, but MS just got richer.
This particular group of environmentalist are uninformed. The miles-wide safety-easement that surrounds these types of activities actually protect wildlife because no inhabited structure (not related to the activity) are allowed inside the easement. Kennedy Space Center & Cape Canaveral Air Station are actually surrounded by Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge (as another poster noted). Another example would be the Sunnypoint Military (Ammunition) Ocean Terminal and next-door Brunswick Nuclear Powerplant in North Carolina. These are surrounded by a huge easement buffer zone and they are now one of the few places in NC where the red cockaded woodpecker, bald eagle, native venus-fly traps, and pitcher-plants now flourish in the wild. They also have hundreds of acres of long-leaf pine (threatened elsewhere in the region) Same with the training ranges at Ft. Bragg, which is famous for its protection of the long-leaf pines and woodpeckers.
Maybe... remember that Boeing only delievers between 300-500 craft per year with order lead times of several years. I suspect that Airbus is similiar. With that much lead time and low numbers, its possible they forged those specific parts ahead and Boeing/Airbus held them in inventory. In fact, that would make sense given the tooling and setup on a machine like this, because it would be cheaper to do a large production run of a certain quantity than to forge each item 'just in time' and have to re-tool for each peice or seperate run. So, its very possible, and I would think likely, that every one really does use parts produced on this machine.
The alternative to TSA is not more reasonable security procedures, the alternative to TSA is privatization and even less consistency and reason. If you remember why the TSA was created, its because the private security at every airport had different standards in training, policy, and actual implementations of security procedures. The rent-a-guards at some airports were basically not much more than the ones doing night watch at your office. TSA was supposed to bring consistent training and professionalism by vetted and reasonably well-paid and sworn government personnel
If you're for abolishing the TSA, then you are for privatization and even LESS public control over the security inspectors at the airports, LESS professionalism, and LESS training and vetting of guards/inspectors. Be careful what you wish for.
I'd be interested in who is receiving campagin contributions from private security guard companies like Wackenhut (who were displaced by TSA).
They only turn on the hazards when they slow to a crawl (like 30 mph on the interstate) because visibility is extremely low or the water on the pavement is so thick as to be hydroplane hazard (which is common in FL because tropical torrential thunderstorms in summer drop more water than the pavement can drain off). Its a "please notice I'm going slow and don't rear-end my car" measure. However, they would normally only do that when in the far right lane and typically wouldn't be changing lanes at that speed.
As the parent notes, there is a lot of Canadian and other Anglophone nationals and productions on "American" TV. Let's examine two "American" shows: Fringe (Fox) and Revenge (ABC).
:). In a sense, they may have a point; we may all just be regionalisms of the global Anglo-sphere.
Fringe stars Canadian Joshua Jackson, and Australians John Noble and Anna Torv. Fringe is shot on location in that great American city Vancouver, BC for the last 3 seasons. The pilot was shot in Toronto and the first season in New York.
Revenge stars Canadians Emily VanCamp and Henry Czerny, It also stars Englishman Joshua Bowman and Englishwoman Ashley Madekwe.
The two biggest American films ever: Titanic and Avatar were made by Canadian James Cameron and stared, respectively Englishwoman Kate Winslet and Australian Sam Worthington.
So, what's that about Canadian culture? It would be no less ridiculous for US Americans to talk about pernicious Canadian or Australian dilution of US culture. Canadians may just have to reconcile themselves that there really is an international Anglophone culture that we all share and stop trying to define their existence by showing they are not American. Embrace the fact that Canada is part of a cosmopolitan Anglophone international super-culture. I'm sorry if reality upsets your inner Quebecois.
BTW, you have nothing to fear; according to the French, the US doesn't have a culture
Its not unusual for the Government to allow a contractor to assert copyright, as long as the Government itself has unlimited rights. It really depends on whether the the Government, in the form of the contracting officer, gave permission to the contractor. The Government only keeps contract records for about 6 years 6 months (except in special cases), so depending on how old the particualar work is, the only conclusive record (i.e. a permission letter from the Gov't) may be in the hands of the contractor. Other contemporaneous proof would likely be if the work was registered with the Copyright office when produced, which would lead one to beleive that permission was granted at that time. If no registration was made contemporanously, then likely (but not conclusively) no permission was given and there would be more credence to the idea that they are claiming copyright without permission.
While COBOL supposedly got OO capability in 2002 acoording to wikipedia, I would bet most COBOL is rather straight forward procedural code that is easy to follow and understand. The 'java way' on the other hand is to encourage over-abstration to the point of absurdity. There is a joke hello world at http://foreigndispatches.typepad.com/dispatches/2008/09/hello-world-in-java.html that really isn't far from the truth about how java programs are actually implemented by some coders. I seems some java coders think: Why just print a string when you could instead instantiate a new string-writer class implementing an abstract string writer factory with a text-writer interface? And instead of hardcoding a constant value, use an xml configuration file, even if you will never actually change the value.
Now if only they could get the software development unstuck from an infinite loop of project management, powerpoint slides, and TPS reports.