"I'm a recall coordinator. My job was to apply the formula. It's simple arithmetic. It's a story problem. A new car built by my company leaves Boston traveling at 60 mph. The rear differential locks up. The car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside. Now: Do we initiate a recall? You take the number of vehicles in the field (A) and multiply it by the probable rate of failure (B), multiply the result by the average out-of-court settlement (C). A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one."
There are special coatings and materials that can block intense light while passing regular light unattenuated. I'm not sure if these are ready for commercial deployment though.
They are in commercial applications like welding masks. Of course a pilot wouldn't want to lose his whole window from a laser hitting (which would still effectively blind the pilot except for his instruments).
Best approach might be to have a bunch of sections of these shields that kick in when high power hits them. Somewhere above sunlight, but below eye damage if that's feasible.
Another clue might be a large difference between a particular section of the window and every section surrounging it, also a good time to black out that one small section.
As long as the sections were small enough that the pilots could negotiate loss of a small section of the window (though there's probably no way around removing the problem altogether) the pilot could hopefully get the plane down safely, and the jerk shooting the laser in couldn't do anything but say "Aww shucks" and try to get home before he's found. It'd also help against accidental cases (e.g. light shows)
This could perhaps use some rewording from the community, but this is the "long" form that really covers the whole question:
Mr. Badnarik,
I have studied the
Libertarian platform and, although I don't agree with everything, I see an
over all consistent Constitutional foundation to the sections that I can
live with. My only area of concern is in how they will deal with terrorist
groups and protect the U.S. from future attacks by people whose fundamental
beliefs include setting up Islamic law on earth. Libertarians take a
non-aggression policy that "The United States should not inject itself into
the internal matters of other nations, unless they have declared war upon or
attacked the United States, or the U.S. is already in a constitutionally
declared war with them.", but that does not seem to enable us to protect
ourselves from ideologues that are not part of a particular geographical
nation, but still an enemy willing to attack us using non-conventional
warfare. I believe it is in our best interest to target them and act in a
pre-emptive manner, if possible. Are the Libertarians prepared to do this and how?
Reminds me of the first thing I was taught about politics in schooling...
That is, third parties never win, but they always get their way.
We mainly hear extreme opinions in the media, but that's not where the bulk of the people are. That's why the candidates fight so hard over the swing states, the number of which seems to be growing.
What happens is as a third party gets enough support (read: your vote) the dominant two parties will fight for that support by adopting part of their platform (or at least campaigning it). Bush's visit to VA this week (weekend? I forget the exact date) is proof that nothing is truly in the ballot box until after the election. Maybe there's only one (or even zero) parties with real campaigning in Utah this year. Do you want it to be that way for the rest of your life? Your childrens' lives? Don't confuse "the election" with "this election," lest you want to perpetuate the feeling of being a voiceless citizen.
I always hate getting into a space debate, but I've got to ask...
astrobiology...
So when someone asks why we send people to space, you give an example of research in a field that is dedicated to sending more people to space? Somehow, I don't understand the answer here. Why are we astronauts again?
microgravity...
...soo this research sounds important for making equipment to construct structures in space, which will be very useful for sending astronauts. Why are we sending the astronauts? I missed it again. I guess I'm feeling a little obtuse.
Maybe someone down the line will discover something that can only be made in space, and we'll have space factories where we launch raw materials and then bring them back to Earth where the consumers are.
Sorry to sound like a troll. Seriously, am I missing something other than astronaut ice cream and velcro? Why am I always seeing projects with billion dollar price tags on them and never any results? Am I being short-sighted? Have there been no discoveries by astro-research teams in the last couple decades? Is the space-age moniker so cliche that I use something from this research but nobody wants to come off as cheesy?
Having worked in a hospital while we deployed a paperless charting system, I can give you a few reasons.
For one thing, remember you're talking about degrees of separation - even our CEO's machine didn't have a public IP, doesn't mean that couldn't get to the outside world for email, web journals, medical news, medical procedures, research, the list goes on... and as we all know, if someone can get out, someone else can get in given the right security problems. A cardiologist may need/want to use a web reference when asked about or confronted with test results, but also has to be able to get the test results off the machine.
These things are firewalled to hell, but if embedded medical devices are running Windows, chances are the hospital trusts them enough to use them for their firewalls too. Even though MS didn't write our firewalls, a hospital who has machines running any firewall on a breached MS OS is vulnerable.
Because the stakes are so high in these settings, it was always a fear of what might be more than what is. The security breaches at the hospital for the 4 years I was there were all internal - a nurse pulling up a chart for a patient that wasn't hers because she knew them for example, something like that. However, even an internal breach sparks a big what-if scenario because all the sudden people are screaming down your throat about a guy walking in with a wireless laptop and hacking from a janitorial closet. It doesn't have to pass an IT personnel laugh-test, medical personnel (even biomedical personnel) don't necessarily know anything about the underlying IT they are demanding answers about, and frequently know only enough to be dangerous (if that much). They know if it's possible, it must be prevented. The thing is, they're right too (not that you'd catch them giving up their internet access to prevent it).
Wireless is a whole other monkey-wrench leading to more scenarios that must be addressed (e.g. the janitorial closet laptop cracker). Especially when the most crucial elements - the devices themselves - are accessible via wireless. I feel bad for the vendors, can you imagine trying to convince a justifiable paranoid crowd that the devices are safe when they just read an article about hijacking bluetooth wireless phones?
A famous heart surgeon was holding a symposium. In the crowd was an auto-mechanic who commented he didn't see what the big deal with heart surgery was. He replaced valves in engines all the time, no big deal, his profession had more infamy than prestige.
Apparantly, the heart surgeon heard the comment and/or it was eventually directly pointed out to him. His response was simple:
"Have you ever tried to fix an engine while it's running?"
Which brings up the point that these turbines are going to have to be variable speed if they're going to accommodate humans' varying oxygen needs.
Turbo-prop engines run at a constant speed, whether the plane is slowing down for a landing or gaining altitude.
It's a fairly simple solution - the angle (of attack) of the props is changed. So it can be running full speed, but with the props not moving air in either direction (just spinning flat) or dug into the airflow to get some more kinetic energy the flow is still controlled.
My knowledge/training is limited to propellors, rather than impellors, but I imagine there's an analogous solution. If the unit tested for saturated oxygen, and sped up when that dropped, problem solved (at least for exercising). That's probably over-simplified, as AFAIK saturated oxygen is lower/higher for other reasons, some of which raising/lowering blood flow may actually work against them.
The medical details are unknown to me, if anyone wants to fill in the gaps here I'm curious as to how over-simplified simply monitoring saturated oxygen in the blood to regulate the pump speed solution is.
Many users are not aware that there are good alternatives to IE. What firefox needs is publicity. Sure we all know about firefox but many home users havent heard about it yet.
For the time being, that's just as well. My corp runs Mozilla exclusively. They're so hooked they won't touch IE with a ten foot pole. That being said...
What Firefox needs is a web that is mostly compliant with W3 standards, not MS standards. Until IE loses about 10% more user-base to Mozilla, Firefox, etc web developers will continue to make sites that not only favor IE, but if push comes to shove will only work with IE.
In the meantime, Firefox will wait in the wings for the common man when the web is ready for it.
Parent has been modded funny, but I think a lot of us do.
I've walked into work before with the owners complaining of not being able to get to half the web sites they like to peruse and hit slashdot to see what's up. Half the time I'm back in 20 seconds with an satisfactory explanation about a recent or in-progress attack.
Of course, I have to (for the umpteenth time) explain to my boss/CEO that I can't fix other peoples' servers, only ours. Wish I could at least get that guy to remember how a sort works in Excel.
As long as everybody is throwing in their informative facts and figures, let me tell you an amusing anecdote about myself.
As a fairly small child, my parents took me with them while they played racquetball. The back of the court was translucent, so they could essentially keep an eye on me and save their baby-sitting money to keep feeding me.
However, this was boring for me. As most of you geeks probably did as children, I played little fantasy games with myself (think Tolkien, not Jenna Jameson gutter-minds). In one of my fantasies I had to unlock a special door that needed two keys. To play it out, I used an electrical outlet slots as the keyholes and my parents' locker keys as the magical keys.
Long story short, they come running out as I'm welding their keys together with my bare hands in the socket. They had to get me to stop crying (apparently from the heat), but even as a little tike the voltage (US 120, for the record) didn't make it through my trunk or cause any medical repercussions.
Of course, they did had some 'slaining to do to the staff.;)
I'm sure you have some pet government projects that you think are absolutely justified, but that I think are pure bullshit and a waste of my tax dollars. I don't see you offering to return my money to me, though.
'Cuz, like, what *you* want is reasonable, right?
If all you've got is a blank stare, then use that time to think about your position rather than troll. If you have a point, speak up an prove me wrong!
You're right about one thing... what I want I see as reasonable, though I do consider the point as self-evident and applicable to anyone. If you want to take a shot at something I want that you see as unreasonable and would like to argue that point, read the Constitution and get back to me. Or feel free to answer the question I posed - what role of government is manned space flight related to?
Our all-in-one HP went down. We need the fax capabilities. My company lives and dies by faxes. So we call them, I get someone promptly who is friendly, helpful, and sends another unit.
Plug it in, doesn't work. Now I'm thinking there's virtually no chance that the unit has a problem, and the old unit probably didn't either. So I swap out the power supply with another unit we have, works like a charm. I bang myself for not doing this first, and call back to request a replacement power supply.
Again, I get a real person promptly. They are friendly, but I am having a very hard time communicating what I need to them. Transformer, AC/DC computer, "the thing you plug into the printer that plugs into the power cord." Finally, I thought I got through to them.
Another week goes by, and a power cord shows up in the mail. Not what I need. To boot, it was a UK power cord, so even if I needed a power cord it wouldn't have done me any good anyway (Why the hell would they send a plug we only use for 220 to Michigan for their own equipment??). Call them back. Again, someone is on the phone right away, very friendly, and again, completely clueless.
Another week goes by, and another power cord shows up in the mail. At least this time it had an end that I could actually plug into a standard US outlet. Called again, extremely frustrated with their fast, friendly, and clueless service.
Another week goes by, and I finally get a freakin' power supply.
Took almost 6 weeks to get one freakin part from HP (AFTER I figured out what was actually wrong and didn't go with their misdiagnosis).
There is lot more money to be made from the taxpayer from pursuing human space flights. Robots are much cheaper and not nearly as lucrative to NASA.
I would personally prefer the "Screw-you" tax from the government. If they want $100 from me, don't charge me $150 and waste $50 on something that I don't need. Charge me $100.37 and include a postage-paid envelope to pay my "Screw-you" tax.
If I recall, many good things have come out of research for space flight, including velcro and lightning prediction, etc. I say we keep playing and invent more cool stuff.
If that's really a cost-effective solution to discovery through research, businesses would do it specifically for that purpose. Last I checked, Nabisco wasn't sponsoring a shuttle for the purpose of running into an unbeatable cracker, or even the rights to any snack food coming from research for space flight...particularly manned space flight, just to stay on topic here.
Somebody elighten me with a single reason manned space flight should have anything to do with me. Does it help our nation? Does it have anything to do with the roles of the government defined by our constitution? If so, please somebody tell me what that might be. Why all the blank stares now? Don't you assholes have a halfway legitimate reason for jacking up my taxes to put people in space?
However, for the romantics, a private sector space industry doesn't bother me one bit. More power to 'em. If enough people are crapping money and don't know what to do with it and would like to watch some guy on the moon on TV, fine with me. Go nuts guys, put your money where your mouth is. Just don't touch my piece of the pie. Hell, put it on Pay-Per-View to help offset the cost. If in a few years my boy is dying to see it, maybe I'll end up chipping in money to the cause so he can see it. If he'd rather have a bicycle, I'd like to be able to afford one.
As for those who want to buy the tickets, here's a news flash: Buy your own ticket. If you can't find a ticket, why don't you contribute to your cause. I'd like a roller-coaster theme park in my home town, but instead I've got Dutch Village. I'm not asking the city to raise taxes to fund a government-run theme park so I can afford roller-coaster rides even though half the people in the city can't ride them (or have no interest). I'm not complaining. It's not as if I'm working toward building a theme park here with my own time/money. Why is manned space flight any different? Let the people who want adventure pay for their own damn adventure, don't drag me into it.
And for the record, I'm in my mid 20's and well trained as an astronautical engineer, now working in technology. So don't cry to me about the jobs. Instead of taking home your tax money for a new car and spending my days producing nothing for you except brief periods of entertainment every once in a while, I work in a company that is productive for my nation and makes it a better place on daily basis instead of a cooler place where we strap rockets on people and send 'em real high.
Gvernments should not use ANY software without a proper security audit. Case closed.
I think asserting that open source software is more dangerous is as laughable as asserting our fighter jets should be running MS Windows. Talk about a crash and forget the blue screen, just death.
I can picture it now, "Alert to all North Korean pilots: We have determined that the US F-16's forgot to close their bluetooth port with a buffer overrun vulnerability. Fly within 30 yards of any fighter to disable its flight control systems."
If 3000 lines of dense mathematically rich C were checked in and a dozen lines acted in concert to create a miscalculation, how much expertise would be needed to catch that?
A lot. But how do you propose a dense 3000 line submission would make its way into a stable release without anybody else testing the library saying "Hey, this isn't as accurate anymore, we can't release this as stable."
I think that having experts able to review each line of code checked in and put into production defeats the whole idea of using Open Source: at that point, you might as well just hire the experts to write the code in the first place and eliminate the vector all together.
Why do you think so? Code is checked. Libraries are used, programs are beta'd in massive numbers. And for the record, I'd like to know if you really think that people maintaining the Linux kernel, or even Mozilla mail, aren't experts.
If I were going to try to get an exploitable bug into a government defense system, I'd prefer closed source. That way I could make an offer to a project manager he couldn't refuse, he could insert the code and compile it himself, delete the code from the source and CVS, give the binary to the DoD, and nobody would be the wiser. He wouldn't have to worry about repercussions - he'd be living in a palace in my country and I wouldn't allow him to be extradited. Meanwhile, the new project manager is being deemed incompetent because he can't find the bug or even reproduce the inaccuracies. Nobody's the wiser until the US has a few fleets of million dollar fighters shot down because they couldn't get their damn guns to hit the piddly third-world fighters.
By the time they go to press that there was subterfuge, the US already has its pride tainted, and moves on to having its security tainted.
OTOH, if they are public OSS libraries, the chem and physics labs (not to mention the guys who do stuff like make web pages with pi to a google digits) will see a problem before they're ever loaded into a DoD system, which I imagine would be about as paranoid of new releases as Debian.
Either way, there's no immunity from sabotage. The question is whether you're looking at damage control in a(n inter)national disaster or the bugs OSS developers search high and low for every day. Do you really think that maintainers for these types of libraries get a 3000 densely coded submission, decide it's too complicated to review, throw it in and release it just 'cause it's easier?
Buddy, not trying to troll here, but open your eyes.
The whole point of my post was that the PATRIOT act was designed to be PASSED in the political climate. I even said that's why they slapped that name on it (thanks for spelling out the acronym, though I'm not sure whose point it proves).
Using it to fight other things is not beyond its scope. It's beyond the spirit it was passed with.
Don't confuse tool with intention. If I had bears on my property, I'd go to the store and say I needed a rifle with a scope for hunting. Hell, if I were lucky maybe I'd even kill some bears with it. But when I wanted someone hurt and didn't want to be tied up with legitimate means or waiting for them to break a law, do you think I'd just leave my rifle in the closet?
Of course that's not a very good analogy. It would be more appropriate had I bought rifles to loan to everybody in my neighborhood and told them they were unaccountable for what they did with them so they could get those bears out (won't somebody please think of the children??), but then decided they should be able to just keep the rifles even after there were no more bears in case they come back some day.
Now, had there not been bears around, I wouldn't have been justified to arm my neighbors and take away accountability, but seeing as those bears needed to be killed regardless of the noise or possibility of stray bullets hitting cars/houses, won't someone PLEASE think of the children?
Of course, whenever one of my neighbors borrows a tool from another and doesn't return it, I've got a warzone in my neighborhood. Who's thinking of the children now?
Can Microsoft stop blu-ray working on Longhorn completely? More lawsuits to follow if they do, I'm thinking...
Maybe you're a little rusty on MS business practices. Let me enlighten you with a little story about a company called "Corel" that made a program called "WordPerfect." It was a nice company that made a great little product. So great, in fact, that many people preferred over Word. So many people, in fact, that it threatened to become the dominant word processing software/suite.
So MS says, "We'll just make Windows crash more often when WordPerfect is running. That way people will think WordPerfect is buggy, and use Word instead."
It worked. Lawsuits did ensue, but by the time the battle was won the war was over. It's history now, but recent history. How many people out of the IT world can tell you today about WordPerfect? Some of those who used it... but of those, how many can tell you why their companies don't use it anymore?
... particularly when they come from a set of tools designed to protect the nation from terrorism
The PATRIOT Act was not designed to protect the nation from terrorism. It was passed to allow various law enforcement to act without going through the court system or being tethered by the bill of rights. It allows them to walk into your home and take you to an undiclosed location and hold you indefinitely and deprive you of the ability to have a judge decide on the legitimacy until they're done with you.
This is a very powerful tool to fight terrorism, which is why they slapped the name PATRIOT on it and got people to vote on it, many before they knew what they had done as they didn't even have the time to read it before a vote was called. It was a McCarthy-like move.
So was it designed to fight terrorism? Only in the sense that it's easy to fight terrorists. However, it's also easy to strongarm anyone an agency doesn't particularly care for without consequence. The link between the PATRIOT Act and terrorism is more the environment in which it could be passed and less the actual usage.
Slashdot Mirror
"I'm a recall coordinator. My job was to apply the formula. It's simple arithmetic. It's a story problem. A new car built by my company leaves Boston traveling at 60 mph. The rear differential locks up. The car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside. Now: Do we initiate a recall? You take the number of vehicles in the field (A) and multiply it by the probable rate of failure (B), multiply the result by the average out-of-court settlement (C). A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one."
They are in commercial applications like welding masks. Of course a pilot wouldn't want to lose his whole window from a laser hitting (which would still effectively blind the pilot except for his instruments).
Best approach might be to have a bunch of sections of these shields that kick in when high power hits them. Somewhere above sunlight, but below eye damage if that's feasible.
Another clue might be a large difference between a particular section of the window and every section surrounging it, also a good time to black out that one small section.
As long as the sections were small enough that the pilots could negotiate loss of a small section of the window (though there's probably no way around removing the problem altogether) the pilot could hopefully get the plane down safely, and the jerk shooting the laser in couldn't do anything but say "Aww shucks" and try to get home before he's found. It'd also help against accidental cases (e.g. light shows)
Mr. Badnarik,
I have studied the Libertarian platform and, although I don't agree with everything, I see an over all consistent Constitutional foundation to the sections that I can live with. My only area of concern is in how they will deal with terrorist groups and protect the U.S. from future attacks by people whose fundamental beliefs include setting up Islamic law on earth. Libertarians take a non-aggression policy that "The United States should not inject itself into the internal matters of other nations, unless they have declared war upon or attacked the United States, or the U.S. is already in a constitutionally declared war with them.", but that does not seem to enable us to protect ourselves from ideologues that are not part of a particular geographical nation, but still an enemy willing to attack us using non-conventional warfare. I believe it is in our best interest to target them and act in a pre-emptive manner, if possible. Are the Libertarians prepared to do this and how?
-----
That is, third parties never win, but they always get their way.
We mainly hear extreme opinions in the media, but that's not where the bulk of the people are. That's why the candidates fight so hard over the swing states, the number of which seems to be growing.
What happens is as a third party gets enough support (read: your vote) the dominant two parties will fight for that support by adopting part of their platform (or at least campaigning it). Bush's visit to VA this week (weekend? I forget the exact date) is proof that nothing is truly in the ballot box until after the election. Maybe there's only one (or even zero) parties with real campaigning in Utah this year. Do you want it to be that way for the rest of your life? Your childrens' lives? Don't confuse "the election" with "this election," lest you want to perpetuate the feeling of being a voiceless citizen.
astrobiology...
So when someone asks why we send people to space, you give an example of research in a field that is dedicated to sending more people to space? Somehow, I don't understand the answer here. Why are we astronauts again?
microgravity...
Maybe someone down the line will discover something that can only be made in space, and we'll have space factories where we launch raw materials and then bring them back to Earth where the consumers are.
Sorry to sound like a troll. Seriously, am I missing something other than astronaut ice cream and velcro? Why am I always seeing projects with billion dollar price tags on them and never any results? Am I being short-sighted? Have there been no discoveries by astro-research teams in the last couple decades? Is the space-age moniker so cliche that I use something from this research but nobody wants to come off as cheesy?
For one thing, remember you're talking about degrees of separation - even our CEO's machine didn't have a public IP, doesn't mean that couldn't get to the outside world for email, web journals, medical news, medical procedures, research, the list goes on... and as we all know, if someone can get out, someone else can get in given the right security problems. A cardiologist may need/want to use a web reference when asked about or confronted with test results, but also has to be able to get the test results off the machine.
These things are firewalled to hell, but if embedded medical devices are running Windows, chances are the hospital trusts them enough to use them for their firewalls too. Even though MS didn't write our firewalls, a hospital who has machines running any firewall on a breached MS OS is vulnerable.
Because the stakes are so high in these settings, it was always a fear of what might be more than what is. The security breaches at the hospital for the 4 years I was there were all internal - a nurse pulling up a chart for a patient that wasn't hers because she knew them for example, something like that. However, even an internal breach sparks a big what-if scenario because all the sudden people are screaming down your throat about a guy walking in with a wireless laptop and hacking from a janitorial closet. It doesn't have to pass an IT personnel laugh-test, medical personnel (even biomedical personnel) don't necessarily know anything about the underlying IT they are demanding answers about, and frequently know only enough to be dangerous (if that much). They know if it's possible, it must be prevented. The thing is, they're right too (not that you'd catch them giving up their internet access to prevent it).
Wireless is a whole other monkey-wrench leading to more scenarios that must be addressed (e.g. the janitorial closet laptop cracker). Especially when the most crucial elements - the devices themselves - are accessible via wireless. I feel bad for the vendors, can you imagine trying to convince a justifiable paranoid crowd that the devices are safe when they just read an article about hijacking bluetooth wireless phones?
Manufacturing is another ballgame, but it's not as if humans are manufacturing chips anyway.
In terms of self-improvement, it seems this would require some AI, especially to do anything innovative (i.e. more than a load balancing maneuver).
Apparantly, the heart surgeon heard the comment and/or it was eventually directly pointed out to him. His response was simple:
"Have you ever tried to fix an engine while it's running?"
I'm narcoleptic, you insensitive clod!
Turbo-prop engines run at a constant speed, whether the plane is slowing down for a landing or gaining altitude.
It's a fairly simple solution - the angle (of attack) of the props is changed. So it can be running full speed, but with the props not moving air in either direction (just spinning flat) or dug into the airflow to get some more kinetic energy the flow is still controlled.
My knowledge/training is limited to propellors, rather than impellors, but I imagine there's an analogous solution. If the unit tested for saturated oxygen, and sped up when that dropped, problem solved (at least for exercising). That's probably over-simplified, as AFAIK saturated oxygen is lower/higher for other reasons, some of which raising/lowering blood flow may actually work against them.
The medical details are unknown to me, if anyone wants to fill in the gaps here I'm curious as to how over-simplified simply monitoring saturated oxygen in the blood to regulate the pump speed solution is.
For the time being, that's just as well. My corp runs Mozilla exclusively. They're so hooked they won't touch IE with a ten foot pole. That being said...
What Firefox needs is a web that is mostly compliant with W3 standards, not MS standards. Until IE loses about 10% more user-base to Mozilla, Firefox, etc web developers will continue to make sites that not only favor IE, but if push comes to shove will only work with IE.
In the meantime, Firefox will wait in the wings for the common man when the web is ready for it.
I've walked into work before with the owners complaining of not being able to get to half the web sites they like to peruse and hit slashdot to see what's up. Half the time I'm back in 20 seconds with an satisfactory explanation about a recent or in-progress attack.
Of course, I have to (for the umpteenth time) explain to my boss/CEO that I can't fix other peoples' servers, only ours. Wish I could at least get that guy to remember how a sort works in Excel.
And while I continue to abuse my hardware, it still works just fine.
As a fairly small child, my parents took me with them while they played racquetball. The back of the court was translucent, so they could essentially keep an eye on me and save their baby-sitting money to keep feeding me.
However, this was boring for me. As most of you geeks probably did as children, I played little fantasy games with myself (think Tolkien, not Jenna Jameson gutter-minds). In one of my fantasies I had to unlock a special door that needed two keys. To play it out, I used an electrical outlet slots as the keyholes and my parents' locker keys as the magical keys.
Long story short, they come running out as I'm welding their keys together with my bare hands in the socket. They had to get me to stop crying (apparently from the heat), but even as a little tike the voltage (US 120, for the record) didn't make it through my trunk or cause any medical repercussions.
Of course, they did had some 'slaining to do to the staff. ;)
'Cuz, like, what *you* want is reasonable, right?
If all you've got is a blank stare, then use that time to think about your position rather than troll. If you have a point, speak up an prove me wrong!
You're right about one thing... what I want I see as reasonable, though I do consider the point as self-evident and applicable to anyone. If you want to take a shot at something I want that you see as unreasonable and would like to argue that point, read the Constitution and get back to me. Or feel free to answer the question I posed - what role of government is manned space flight related to?
Plug it in, doesn't work. Now I'm thinking there's virtually no chance that the unit has a problem, and the old unit probably didn't either. So I swap out the power supply with another unit we have, works like a charm. I bang myself for not doing this first, and call back to request a replacement power supply.
Again, I get a real person promptly. They are friendly, but I am having a very hard time communicating what I need to them. Transformer, AC/DC computer, "the thing you plug into the printer that plugs into the power cord." Finally, I thought I got through to them.
Another week goes by, and a power cord shows up in the mail. Not what I need. To boot, it was a UK power cord, so even if I needed a power cord it wouldn't have done me any good anyway (Why the hell would they send a plug we only use for 220 to Michigan for their own equipment??). Call them back. Again, someone is on the phone right away, very friendly, and again, completely clueless.
Another week goes by, and another power cord shows up in the mail. At least this time it had an end that I could actually plug into a standard US outlet. Called again, extremely frustrated with their fast, friendly, and clueless service.
Another week goes by, and I finally get a freakin' power supply.
Took almost 6 weeks to get one freakin part from HP (AFTER I figured out what was actually wrong and didn't go with their misdiagnosis).
Separation of Church and State
I would personally prefer the "Screw-you" tax from the government. If they want $100 from me, don't charge me $150 and waste $50 on something that I don't need. Charge me $100.37 and include a postage-paid envelope to pay my "Screw-you" tax.
Hey, at least it'd be honest.
If that's really a cost-effective solution to discovery through research, businesses would do it specifically for that purpose. Last I checked, Nabisco wasn't sponsoring a shuttle for the purpose of running into an unbeatable cracker, or even the rights to any snack food coming from research for space flight...particularly manned space flight, just to stay on topic here.
Somebody elighten me with a single reason manned space flight should have anything to do with me. Does it help our nation? Does it have anything to do with the roles of the government defined by our constitution? If so, please somebody tell me what that might be. Why all the blank stares now? Don't you assholes have a halfway legitimate reason for jacking up my taxes to put people in space?
However, for the romantics, a private sector space industry doesn't bother me one bit. More power to 'em. If enough people are crapping money and don't know what to do with it and would like to watch some guy on the moon on TV, fine with me. Go nuts guys, put your money where your mouth is. Just don't touch my piece of the pie. Hell, put it on Pay-Per-View to help offset the cost. If in a few years my boy is dying to see it, maybe I'll end up chipping in money to the cause so he can see it. If he'd rather have a bicycle, I'd like to be able to afford one.
As for those who want to buy the tickets, here's a news flash: Buy your own ticket. If you can't find a ticket, why don't you contribute to your cause. I'd like a roller-coaster theme park in my home town, but instead I've got Dutch Village. I'm not asking the city to raise taxes to fund a government-run theme park so I can afford roller-coaster rides even though half the people in the city can't ride them (or have no interest). I'm not complaining. It's not as if I'm working toward building a theme park here with my own time/money. Why is manned space flight any different? Let the people who want adventure pay for their own damn adventure, don't drag me into it.
And for the record, I'm in my mid 20's and well trained as an astronautical engineer, now working in technology. So don't cry to me about the jobs. Instead of taking home your tax money for a new car and spending my days producing nothing for you except brief periods of entertainment every once in a while, I work in a company that is productive for my nation and makes it a better place on daily basis instead of a cooler place where we strap rockets on people and send 'em real high.
Gvernments should not use ANY software without a proper security audit. Case closed.
I think asserting that open source software is more dangerous is as laughable as asserting our fighter jets should be running MS Windows. Talk about a crash and forget the blue screen, just death.
I can picture it now, "Alert to all North Korean pilots: We have determined that the US F-16's forgot to close their bluetooth port with a buffer overrun vulnerability. Fly within 30 yards of any fighter to disable its flight control systems."
A lot. But how do you propose a dense 3000 line submission would make its way into a stable release without anybody else testing the library saying "Hey, this isn't as accurate anymore, we can't release this as stable."
I think that having experts able to review each line of code checked in and put into production defeats the whole idea of using Open Source: at that point, you might as well just hire the experts to write the code in the first place and eliminate the vector all together.
Why do you think so? Code is checked. Libraries are used, programs are beta'd in massive numbers. And for the record, I'd like to know if you really think that people maintaining the Linux kernel, or even Mozilla mail, aren't experts.
If I were going to try to get an exploitable bug into a government defense system, I'd prefer closed source. That way I could make an offer to a project manager he couldn't refuse, he could insert the code and compile it himself, delete the code from the source and CVS, give the binary to the DoD, and nobody would be the wiser. He wouldn't have to worry about repercussions - he'd be living in a palace in my country and I wouldn't allow him to be extradited. Meanwhile, the new project manager is being deemed incompetent because he can't find the bug or even reproduce the inaccuracies. Nobody's the wiser until the US has a few fleets of million dollar fighters shot down because they couldn't get their damn guns to hit the piddly third-world fighters.
By the time they go to press that there was subterfuge, the US already has its pride tainted, and moves on to having its security tainted.
OTOH, if they are public OSS libraries, the chem and physics labs (not to mention the guys who do stuff like make web pages with pi to a google digits) will see a problem before they're ever loaded into a DoD system, which I imagine would be about as paranoid of new releases as Debian.
Either way, there's no immunity from sabotage. The question is whether you're looking at damage control in a(n inter)national disaster or the bugs OSS developers search high and low for every day. Do you really think that maintainers for these types of libraries get a 3000 densely coded submission, decide it's too complicated to review, throw it in and release it just 'cause it's easier?
The whole point of my post was that the PATRIOT act was designed to be PASSED in the political climate. I even said that's why they slapped that name on it (thanks for spelling out the acronym, though I'm not sure whose point it proves).
Using it to fight other things is not beyond its scope. It's beyond the spirit it was passed with.
Don't confuse tool with intention. If I had bears on my property, I'd go to the store and say I needed a rifle with a scope for hunting. Hell, if I were lucky maybe I'd even kill some bears with it. But when I wanted someone hurt and didn't want to be tied up with legitimate means or waiting for them to break a law, do you think I'd just leave my rifle in the closet?
Of course that's not a very good analogy. It would be more appropriate had I bought rifles to loan to everybody in my neighborhood and told them they were unaccountable for what they did with them so they could get those bears out (won't somebody please think of the children??), but then decided they should be able to just keep the rifles even after there were no more bears in case they come back some day.
Now, had there not been bears around, I wouldn't have been justified to arm my neighbors and take away accountability, but seeing as those bears needed to be killed regardless of the noise or possibility of stray bullets hitting cars/houses, won't someone PLEASE think of the children?
Of course, whenever one of my neighbors borrows a tool from another and doesn't return it, I've got a warzone in my neighborhood. Who's thinking of the children now?
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
Maybe you're a little rusty on MS business practices. Let me enlighten you with a little story about a company called "Corel" that made a program called "WordPerfect." It was a nice company that made a great little product. So great, in fact, that many people preferred over Word. So many people, in fact, that it threatened to become the dominant word processing software/suite.
So MS says, "We'll just make Windows crash more often when WordPerfect is running. That way people will think WordPerfect is buggy, and use Word instead."
It worked. Lawsuits did ensue, but by the time the battle was won the war was over. It's history now, but recent history. How many people out of the IT world can tell you today about WordPerfect? Some of those who used it... but of those, how many can tell you why their companies don't use it anymore?
The PATRIOT Act was not designed to protect the nation from terrorism. It was passed to allow various law enforcement to act without going through the court system or being tethered by the bill of rights. It allows them to walk into your home and take you to an undiclosed location and hold you indefinitely and deprive you of the ability to have a judge decide on the legitimacy until they're done with you.
This is a very powerful tool to fight terrorism, which is why they slapped the name PATRIOT on it and got people to vote on it, many before they knew what they had done as they didn't even have the time to read it before a vote was called. It was a McCarthy-like move.
So was it designed to fight terrorism? Only in the sense that it's easy to fight terrorists. However, it's also easy to strongarm anyone an agency doesn't particularly care for without consequence. The link between the PATRIOT Act and terrorism is more the environment in which it could be passed and less the actual usage.