Except that Apple is in business to make a profit. If users find problems using Apple's products with Google maps or Gmail (both of which happened, and have been fixed by Apple, and are not fixed in KHTML), they will be less likely to continue using Apple's products, or to recommend them to others. This hurts Apple's future profits.
In other words, to avoid being perceived as being as aloof and careless as Microsoft, Apple must respond to user needs. This is a different dynamic from open source teams, which must respond to developer needs.
Apple is right in how they've decided to develop the features and clean the code later. The KDE guys may very well be right in not simply incorporating those features wholesale.
This is nothing more than a continuation of the Democrat talking point (see Joe Lockhart's comments) that Allawi is a puppet of the US. Blatant partisanship is fine, I guess, as entertainment, but it's hardly a reasonable way to make political decisions.
I'm hardly a Venezuela expert, so I'll be more general than maybe you're hoping for. The coup was, as far as I can tell, really badly done. For one thing, the plotters had not bothered to make a case before ousting Chavez. For another thing, they didn't kill him (understandable, but unfortunate for them, since many of them are now quite dead; Chavez didn't see things quite their way). In the end, the biggest problem was that the landed interests and businessmen simply didn't like Chavez, but at the time didn't have a good reason to oust him.
That said, it's since become quite clear that Chavez is indeed the "one man, one vote, one kind" style of dictator, who will engineer the constitution, courts, legislature and whatever else he has to do in order to stay in power. Given that Chavez is also apparently supporting jihadis, drug runners and Colombian rebels, and that Venezuela is a major oil producer, it's likely that Chavez will eventually end up getting our attention.
Let's see, after his interesting call on the Venezuelan elections (it is legit, said Carter before all of the votes were even certified, and well before all of the interesting information about electronic voting machines programmed by a company owned by Chavez's brother were out in the open), he now wants to call the Florida elections before they happen?
Not a word about the estimated 15000-20000 voters in the FL panhandle (generally a Republican area) who didn't vote after the networks called the election for Gore before the polls closed in the panhandle.
Not a word about the 4.4% error rate (mostly overvotes) in Palm Beach County (controlled by Democrat election officials) vice the 0.4% statewide error rate. Or about the interesting fact that Bush got fewer votes in Palm Beach County than all four Republican congressional candidates combined.
No word about the tens of thousands of New Yorkers (generally Democrat-leaning) also registered in Florida.
Not a word about motor voter issues, or the illegality of even asking for an ID at the polling place in most states.
Not a word about electronic voting machines that don't produce a paper record. Not a word about problems with absentee ballot fraud. Not a word about the interesting character of elections in Chicago.
I think that there are problems with the integrity of votes in the US. But I only see the Democrats getting exercised about it when the issue might play against them. Then, they are vitriolic. But never when the problems help them.
There is room for a dispassionate look at the issue. This is just partisan grandstanding.
True. Not mentioned in your post: Fox always identified it as a fake, as well as showing an actual picture with both Kerry and Fonda in the same frame, but much further apart and obviously not at the rally together.
First, I think that today's poll likely overstates Bush's gain, but I think that there is a definite gain. And I think that it can be explained thus: the two polls from last week that show a virtual tie ended on Monday and Tuesday respectively. Today's poll ended after the forged memos broke open.
It should be noted that people under 25 are disproportionately conservative, though not disproportionately Republican - there have been several surveys exploring this.
It should be noted that Republicans disproportionately refuse to answer polls in general for a variety of reasons, and that polls taken over the weekends in particular favor Democrats. Not sure why this is; the speculation seems to be that Republicans tend to be out more on weekends.
It should most emphatically be kept in mind that all polls are wrong. Each method for correcting (likely voters/registered voters, bias weighting and so forth) has some problem and/or some amount of guesswork. Polls are also point-in-time snapshots of opinion. This makes them useful primarily in a trend-mapping mode rather than taking any given poll on its face.
The worst characteristic of polls related to forecasting public opinion is that they are a lagging measure. They cannot predict changes based on events. For example, if John Kerry were to make a convincing speech that unites his various past opinions into a logical whole, and presenting a reasonable plan for how to win the war and manage the future, that could swing the polls quite dramatically. On the other hand, so could a terrorist attack in the US (could push things in either direction). Leadership and events matter, and neither of them are predicted by polls, only reflected after the fact. (This is also why dirty campaigning works very close to the election, such as the DWI attack on Bush in 2000, which cost Bush about 4% support within a few days of the election.)
My guess from looking at the trends and comparisons to past voting patterns and their relationship with polls at that time is that Bush has an overall 4-6% lead, and it's growing. If it moves towards an actual 10-12% lead, this could be the most lopsided electoral vote talley since 1984. I would be stunned if either candidate could get even 60% of the vote in today's political climate. I would not be surprised if Bush gets 55-57%, unless the course of the election changes dramatically in the next 6 weeks.
Most sadly of all, the inept Kerry campaign has made it virtually certain that the Democrats will not be able to change the situation in the House or Senate, either one of which would act as a curb on any tendency to overexuberant behavior by the Republicans.
Nope. It's really not worth my time. Try this for a start, and this for a bit more depth. I could go on, but won't, because it's really not worth my time. I would add, though, that it will be interesting to see how much of Said's influence survives with so many of his disciples being arrested for aiding terrorist organizations.
Ape with no Brain, I *have* read "Orientalism" - it was rubbish through and through. I would go through a thorough debunking, but frankly it's not worth the time. Let's just face facts: some people will go to any lengths to push their agenda, which is why you criticized Mr. Wolfowitz and Mr. Perle as if they were somehow the personification of your concept of evil. Grow up, eh?
1. start with several well-known blogs - InstaPundit, USS Clueless, The Daily Dish, The Volokh Conspiracy - put in as many as you feel necessary. This is your initial list of "known" blogs. 2. extract links to other sites from the page you are looking at. these are your potential blogs and sources 3. repeat infinitely
Now, you define a member of the blogosphere as any site which has at least two other "known" blogs linking to it, and which also links to at least two other known blogs. You define a "source" as any site which fulfills the first half of the test, but not the second half. So, for example, lots of people link to FoxNews, but it doesn't link back, so it's a source. On the other hand, lots of people link to DailyPundit, and it links back, so it's a blog.
The problem is that this is a lousy definition, even though it might work once the list of links gets large.
Using blogging software references as the metric would catch a large number of sites, but miss a large number of sites as well, and would gather, I think, a lot of false positives.
If I could automate the discovery of blogrolls on web pages, I could follow blogrolls out from the initial list of known blogs, and read their blogrolls and so forth. Still not likely to be comprehensive, though, and also difficult technically (how do you identify a blogroll?).
The data source was NZ Bear's blogosphere analyses from a year or so ago. There is lots of good info collected by a few bloggers about such things as the average age of bloggers (34 and a couple of months) and how various blogs rank in google searches on certain terms.
I've been trying to come up with a definition for "weblog" which is mechanical enough to be understood by a web crawler and which doesn't fall victim to the power law itself. (Which means that "linked from Instapundit" can't be used, obviously.) In essence, I'd like to set up a webcrawler to identify blogs and sources, and determine how "influential" or at least "used" are various blogs and sources. If I can get a good mechanical definition going, I'll get right on that.:-)
The NYTimes editorial characterizes public domain as an experiment, and criticizes the decision for making it likely to end. The reality is the opposite: property rights to ideas and expressions were an experiment. The natural law is that you can only take property if by "taking" property, you deprive the owner of the use of the property. For example, if I steal your car, or your money, they are not available to you to use. Except in the most colloquial sense, I can't "steal" an idea, or a tune, or a movie plot, because doing so does not remove it from the use of its originator. It is a shame that we Americans on the whole appear to have basically come to believe that our best interest is served by simply giving up any hope of having individual Rights and Liberties in favor of having the government infantilize us - sorry, care for us. Bleah!
1. Lobby Congress to pass a sane copyright law. 2. Lobby the States to invoke their article V powers, preferably with limitations as to the amendments to be considered. 3. Create a non-profit vault to preserve copyrighted material and keep translating it to current media until it runs out of copyright (or, well, forever). You will have to fund it (a massive undertaking given the amount of material to be collected - in many cases purchased - and the time over which the collection must be maintained). You will also have to be careful, because even if you are not letting anyone who is not actively engaged in archiving the material see the material until it's out of copyright, you might still be criminally liable under DMCA. You will also have to be careful, because some works which fall out of copyright are then taken back under copyright by acts like the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension here being discussed (it was a retroactive extension).
Could it be that biology is a notable exception because biotech pays well? Frankly, people who are smart enough and interested in science and engineering are also smart enough to figure out where the money is. Since we have turned away from independent research at universities, and instead have chosen to commercialize virtually all research, it comes as no surprise that students are looking at science as just another career field. The market will take care of this, though. When people are willing to pay more to get the scientific talent, there will be more incentive for new students to pursue the sciences which are in demand.
That is probably just a consequence of doing space exploration as a government activity. After all, there are people out there right now calling for the US to stop fighting the war on terror and focus on "the real problem" (prescription drugs, unemployment, fatty foods at McDonald's or whatever). Until the US stops discouraging private enterprise in space, and we get a private-sector example to go by, this situation will likely continue.
If NASA had invested billions in refurbishing the Space Shuttle, rather than squandering billions on a "Space Plane" that does the same thing as the shuttle, we'd probaly have a cheaper, more effective and more efficient space shuttle today.
True, but you have to go back further. If NASA had developed out the Saturn series further, and had worked on getting truly low-cost access to space (like this, perhaps), we would have a good heavy-lift booster (and the capability to use it to get to and supply the Moon and Mars) and cheap manned access to space. The Shuttle is a disaster in every way except as a technology demonstrator.
That would be really bad. Leaving aside the practical implications of attempting an interactive encrypted session with the kind of lag that comes from the physical distance, there is the simple matter of mistakes. You don't want someone to make a mistake typing an interactive command, which could leave the satellite useless and nonresponsive. Instead, you create and test the heck out of your control files, and once they are perfect, just transfer them.
What actually surprises me is that they are using TCP/IP, rather than UUCP, which seems more appropriate to this kind of latency and simple file transfer need.
If it is true that the jury's "prerogative of lenity," Dougherty, 473 F.2d at 1133, introduces "a slack into the enforcement of law, tempering its rigor by the mollifying influence of current ethical conventions," Adams, 126 F.2d at 776, then, as part and parcel of the system of checks and balances embedded in the very structure of the American criminal trial, there is a countervailing duty and authority of the judge to assure that jurors follow the law.
I fully agree with this statement, and answer the "if" clause in the affirmative. The juror has a duty to ensure that the law is appropriate as applied to the actions of the defendant (that is, the defendent is not being overcharged), that the law is Constitutional, and that the punishments allowed by the law are appropriate to the facts of the case. The judge has a duty to ensure that the law is upheld, and is acting within his duty to dismiss jurors during voire dire (sp?) if the judge suspects that the juror will not uphold the law. These are checks and balances which are wholly appropriate.
It should also be noted that the scope of a decision is very important. A law is not rendered moot by jury nullification - such nullification affects only a single case. Nor is a law rendered moot by the decision of a judge to overturn the law. That only applies to his court or district. Even if the Supreme Court declares a law unconstitutional, the prosecution may continue to bring cases under that law (though as a practical matter, such cases would be dismissed in every court in the land, and an overzealous prosecutor might find himself subject to a wrongful prosecution suit) as long as the law is on the books.
I have to wonder, who made the decision to depend upon the russians for financial support.
Largely, that would be Al Gore. Basically, the commission he headed, filled with experts who made their living from NASA, reported to NASA's administrator with Gore leading the meetings and such. Unsurprisingly, they came up with the notion that NASA was perfect, and if they only had more money, all problems would disappear...
On top of this, for purely political reasons, it was decided to redesign the ISS (Freedom, at the time?) to depend upon Russian components for its construction and operation (makes the Russians happy), to maximize use of the Shuttle fleet (makes NASA happy), and to forego cheaper and more capable alternatives, like building a big rocket and launching a station as a single piece (no established constituency), which would have the bonus effect of giving you a heavy-lift booster to use for other stuff, like going to the Moon or Mars.
somebody oughta get fired for this one....
I guess you could say that, though more for general incompetence than for this specific issue, he did.
Clearly, you missed the point. I was in the second paragraph giving a more reasonable password policy than most companies use (and certainly more reasonable than having *no* passwords) and then followed that up by giving a counter-example; well, two counter-examples.
First, if you are behind properly-maintained firewalls, and the Win2K boxes are properly configured (running no externally-accessible services unless they are a server, etc), then it's likely that you could get away with this without getting hacked externally. However, disgruntled employees are going to be a problem.
A better response is to force the user to use a password including a capital letter, a lower case letter, a digit and a non-letter character; to be at least 8 characters long; to never expire and have no history. Then the user is forced to pick a (relatively) good password, and won't forget it.
My company forces a password reset every 90 days, and won't let you reuse the last 8 passwords. I have my normal 2 strong passwords, then I go into a cycle of fairly weak (but easy to remember) passwords. At least it's not like when I was at IBM, where everyone had their RETAIN passwords written on the whiteboards (5 characters, randomly assigned by the computer every 30 days!).
angry, subversive, geeks must be at least as dangerous as Iraq's rag-tag army
Iraqi Geek 1: By the beard of the Prophet, I hate those Americans. Hamid, let's hack into their computers and destroy them.
Iraqi Geek 2: OK, you hack into lifttheburqa.com, I'll hack into sexwithbarnyardanimals_butnotpigsbecausehtheyareun cleanafterall.com. We'll destroy their subversive pr0n!
(Six hours later) Hamid, what were we going to do again?
The Total Information Awareness program will not, in fact, gather any information. Nor will it change who gets to see the information that the government already collects nor how long that information is maintained. All that this program is, is a way to gather together the information that the government already collects, in a form where data can be mined between elements which are currently not linkable. The press is getting it wrong, as usual, and the rash posters on slashdot are taking the press, oddly, at their words, then putting on the tinfoil hats and heading off into conspiracy theory heaven.
The article was unclear on a point...
on
We Are Not Related
·
· Score: 5, Funny
So, are we then descended from cyborgs, or was that an untenable offshoot of the main branch of human evolution?
Slashdot Mirror
Except that Apple is in business to make a profit. If users find problems using Apple's products with Google maps or Gmail (both of which happened, and have been fixed by Apple, and are not fixed in KHTML), they will be less likely to continue using Apple's products, or to recommend them to others. This hurts Apple's future profits.
In other words, to avoid being perceived as being as aloof and careless as Microsoft, Apple must respond to user needs. This is a different dynamic from open source teams, which must respond to developer needs.
Apple is right in how they've decided to develop the features and clean the code later. The KDE guys may very well be right in not simply incorporating those features wholesale.
This is nothing more than a continuation of the Democrat talking point (see Joe Lockhart's comments) that Allawi is a puppet of the US. Blatant partisanship is fine, I guess, as entertainment, but it's hardly a reasonable way to make political decisions.
I'm hardly a Venezuela expert, so I'll be more general than maybe you're hoping for. The coup was, as far as I can tell, really badly done. For one thing, the plotters had not bothered to make a case before ousting Chavez. For another thing, they didn't kill him (understandable, but unfortunate for them, since many of them are now quite dead; Chavez didn't see things quite their way). In the end, the biggest problem was that the landed interests and businessmen simply didn't like Chavez, but at the time didn't have a good reason to oust him.
That said, it's since become quite clear that Chavez is indeed the "one man, one vote, one kind" style of dictator, who will engineer the constitution, courts, legislature and whatever else he has to do in order to stay in power. Given that Chavez is also apparently supporting jihadis, drug runners and Colombian rebels, and that Venezuela is a major oil producer, it's likely that Chavez will eventually end up getting our attention.
Let's see, after his interesting call on the Venezuelan elections (it is legit, said Carter before all of the votes were even certified, and well before all of the interesting information about electronic voting machines programmed by a company owned by Chavez's brother were out in the open), he now wants to call the Florida elections before they happen?
Not a word about the estimated 15000-20000 voters in the FL panhandle (generally a Republican area) who didn't vote after the networks called the election for Gore before the polls closed in the panhandle.
Not a word about the 4.4% error rate (mostly overvotes) in Palm Beach County (controlled by Democrat election officials) vice the 0.4% statewide error rate. Or about the interesting fact that Bush got fewer votes in Palm Beach County than all four Republican congressional candidates combined.
No word about the tens of thousands of New Yorkers (generally Democrat-leaning) also registered in Florida.
Not a word about motor voter issues, or the illegality of even asking for an ID at the polling place in most states.
Not a word about electronic voting machines that don't produce a paper record. Not a word about problems with absentee ballot fraud. Not a word about the interesting character of elections in Chicago.
I think that there are problems with the integrity of votes in the US. But I only see the Democrats getting exercised about it when the issue might play against them. Then, they are vitriolic. But never when the problems help them.
There is room for a dispassionate look at the issue. This is just partisan grandstanding.
True. Not mentioned in your post: Fox always identified it as a fake, as well as showing an actual picture with both Kerry and Fonda in the same frame, but much further apart and obviously not at the rally together.
First, I think that today's poll likely overstates Bush's gain, but I think that there is a definite gain. And I think that it can be explained thus: the two polls from last week that show a virtual tie ended on Monday and Tuesday respectively. Today's poll ended after the forged memos broke open.
It should be noted that people under 25 are disproportionately conservative, though not disproportionately Republican - there have been several surveys exploring this.
It should be noted that Republicans disproportionately refuse to answer polls in general for a variety of reasons, and that polls taken over the weekends in particular favor Democrats. Not sure why this is; the speculation seems to be that Republicans tend to be out more on weekends.
It should most emphatically be kept in mind that all polls are wrong. Each method for correcting (likely voters/registered voters, bias weighting and so forth) has some problem and/or some amount of guesswork. Polls are also point-in-time snapshots of opinion. This makes them useful primarily in a trend-mapping mode rather than taking any given poll on its face.
The worst characteristic of polls related to forecasting public opinion is that they are a lagging measure. They cannot predict changes based on events. For example, if John Kerry were to make a convincing speech that unites his various past opinions into a logical whole, and presenting a reasonable plan for how to win the war and manage the future, that could swing the polls quite dramatically. On the other hand, so could a terrorist attack in the US (could push things in either direction). Leadership and events matter, and neither of them are predicted by polls, only reflected after the fact. (This is also why dirty campaigning works very close to the election, such as the DWI attack on Bush in 2000, which cost Bush about 4% support within a few days of the election.)
My guess from looking at the trends and comparisons to past voting patterns and their relationship with polls at that time is that Bush has an overall 4-6% lead, and it's growing. If it moves towards an actual 10-12% lead, this could be the most lopsided electoral vote talley since 1984. I would be stunned if either candidate could get even 60% of the vote in today's political climate. I would not be surprised if Bush gets 55-57%, unless the course of the election changes dramatically in the next 6 weeks.
Most sadly of all, the inept Kerry campaign has made it virtually certain that the Democrats will not be able to change the situation in the House or Senate, either one of which would act as a curb on any tendency to overexuberant behavior by the Republicans.
Serve your "no-knock" warrant now!
Nope. It's really not worth my time. Try this for a start, and this for a bit more depth. I could go on, but won't, because it's really not worth my time. I would add, though, that it will be interesting to see how much of Said's influence survives with so many of his disciples being arrested for aiding terrorist organizations.
Ape with no Brain, I *have* read "Orientalism" - it was rubbish through and through. I would go through a thorough debunking, but frankly it's not worth the time. Let's just face facts: some people will go to any lengths to push their agenda, which is why you criticized Mr. Wolfowitz and Mr. Perle as if they were somehow the personification of your concept of evil. Grow up, eh?
I was thinking more along the lines of this:
1. start with several well-known blogs - InstaPundit, USS Clueless, The Daily Dish, The Volokh Conspiracy - put in as many as you feel necessary. This is your initial list of "known" blogs.
2. extract links to other sites from the page you are looking at. these are your potential blogs and sources
3. repeat infinitely
Now, you define a member of the blogosphere as any site which has at least two other "known" blogs linking to it, and which also links to at least two other known blogs. You define a "source" as any site which fulfills the first half of the test, but not the second half. So, for example, lots of people link to FoxNews, but it doesn't link back, so it's a source. On the other hand, lots of people link to DailyPundit, and it links back, so it's a blog.
The problem is that this is a lousy definition, even though it might work once the list of links gets large.
Using blogging software references as the metric would catch a large number of sites, but miss a large number of sites as well, and would gather, I think, a lot of false positives.
If I could automate the discovery of blogrolls on web pages, I could follow blogrolls out from the initial list of known blogs, and read their blogrolls and so forth. Still not likely to be comprehensive, though, and also difficult technically (how do you identify a blogroll?).
-jeff
The data source was NZ Bear's blogosphere analyses from a year or so ago. There is lots of good info collected by a few bloggers about such things as the average age of bloggers (34 and a couple of months) and how various blogs rank in google searches on certain terms.
:-)
I've been trying to come up with a definition for "weblog" which is mechanical enough to be understood by a web crawler and which doesn't fall victim to the power law itself. (Which means that "linked from Instapundit" can't be used, obviously.) In essence, I'd like to set up a webcrawler to identify blogs and sources, and determine how "influential" or at least "used" are various blogs and sources. If I can get a good mechanical definition going, I'll get right on that.
He shoots. He scores!
The NYTimes editorial characterizes public domain as an experiment, and criticizes the decision for making it likely to end. The reality is the opposite: property rights to ideas and expressions were an experiment. The natural law is that you can only take property if by "taking" property, you deprive the owner of the use of the property. For example, if I steal your car, or your money, they are not available to you to use. Except in the most colloquial sense, I can't "steal" an idea, or a tune, or a movie plot, because doing so does not remove it from the use of its originator. It is a shame that we Americans on the whole appear to have basically come to believe that our best interest is served by simply giving up any hope of having individual Rights and Liberties in favor of having the government infantilize us - sorry, care for us. Bleah!
1. Lobby Congress to pass a sane copyright law.
2. Lobby the States to invoke their article V powers, preferably with limitations as to the amendments to be considered.
3. Create a non-profit vault to preserve copyrighted material and keep translating it to current media until it runs out of copyright (or, well, forever). You will have to fund it (a massive undertaking given the amount of material to be collected - in many cases purchased - and the time over which the collection must be maintained). You will also have to be careful, because even if you are not letting anyone who is not actively engaged in archiving the material see the material until it's out of copyright, you might still be criminally liable under DMCA. You will also have to be careful, because some works which fall out of copyright are then taken back under copyright by acts like the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension here being discussed (it was a retroactive extension).
Could it be that biology is a notable exception because biotech pays well? Frankly, people who are smart enough and interested in science and engineering are also smart enough to figure out where the money is. Since we have turned away from independent research at universities, and instead have chosen to commercialize virtually all research, it comes as no surprise that students are looking at science as just another career field. The market will take care of this, though. When people are willing to pay more to get the scientific talent, there will be more incentive for new students to pursue the sciences which are in demand.
That is probably just a consequence of doing space exploration as a government activity. After all, there are people out there right now calling for the US to stop fighting the war on terror and focus on "the real problem" (prescription drugs, unemployment, fatty foods at McDonald's or whatever). Until the US stops discouraging private enterprise in space, and we get a private-sector example to go by, this situation will likely continue.
True, but you have to go back further. If NASA had developed out the Saturn series further, and had worked on getting truly low-cost access to space (like this, perhaps), we would have a good heavy-lift booster (and the capability to use it to get to and supply the Moon and Mars) and cheap manned access to space. The Shuttle is a disaster in every way except as a technology demonstrator.
That would be really bad. Leaving aside the practical implications of attempting an interactive encrypted session with the kind of lag that comes from the physical distance, there is the simple matter of mistakes. You don't want someone to make a mistake typing an interactive command, which could leave the satellite useless and nonresponsive. Instead, you create and test the heck out of your control files, and once they are perfect, just transfer them.
What actually surprises me is that they are using TCP/IP, rather than UUCP, which seems more appropriate to this kind of latency and simple file transfer need.
I fully agree with this statement, and answer the "if" clause in the affirmative. The juror has a duty to ensure that the law is appropriate as applied to the actions of the defendant (that is, the defendent is not being overcharged), that the law is Constitutional, and that the punishments allowed by the law are appropriate to the facts of the case. The judge has a duty to ensure that the law is upheld, and is acting within his duty to dismiss jurors during voire dire (sp?) if the judge suspects that the juror will not uphold the law. These are checks and balances which are wholly appropriate.
It should also be noted that the scope of a decision is very important. A law is not rendered moot by jury nullification - such nullification affects only a single case. Nor is a law rendered moot by the decision of a judge to overturn the law. That only applies to his court or district. Even if the Supreme Court declares a law unconstitutional, the prosecution may continue to bring cases under that law (though as a practical matter, such cases would be dismissed in every court in the land, and an overzealous prosecutor might find himself subject to a wrongful prosecution suit) as long as the law is on the books.
Largely, that would be Al Gore. Basically, the commission he headed, filled with experts who made their living from NASA, reported to NASA's administrator with Gore leading the meetings and such. Unsurprisingly, they came up with the notion that NASA was perfect, and if they only had more money, all problems would disappear...
On top of this, for purely political reasons, it was decided to redesign the ISS (Freedom, at the time?) to depend upon Russian components for its construction and operation (makes the Russians happy), to maximize use of the Shuttle fleet (makes NASA happy), and to forego cheaper and more capable alternatives, like building a big rocket and launching a station as a single piece (no established constituency), which would have the bonus effect of giving you a heavy-lift booster to use for other stuff, like going to the Moon or Mars.
I guess you could say that, though more for general incompetence than for this specific issue, he did.
Clearly, you missed the point. I was in the second paragraph giving a more reasonable password policy than most companies use (and certainly more reasonable than having *no* passwords) and then followed that up by giving a counter-example; well, two counter-examples.
First, if you are behind properly-maintained firewalls, and the Win2K boxes are properly configured (running no externally-accessible services unless they are a server, etc), then it's likely that you could get away with this without getting hacked externally. However, disgruntled employees are going to be a problem.
A better response is to force the user to use a password including a capital letter, a lower case letter, a digit and a non-letter character; to be at least 8 characters long; to never expire and have no history. Then the user is forced to pick a (relatively) good password, and won't forget it.
My company forces a password reset every 90 days, and won't let you reuse the last 8 passwords. I have my normal 2 strong passwords, then I go into a cycle of fairly weak (but easy to remember) passwords. At least it's not like when I was at IBM, where everyone had their RETAIN passwords written on the whiteboards (5 characters, randomly assigned by the computer every 30 days!).
The Total Information Awareness program will not, in fact, gather any information. Nor will it change who gets to see the information that the government already collects nor how long that information is maintained. All that this program is, is a way to gather together the information that the government already collects, in a form where data can be mined between elements which are currently not linkable. The press is getting it wrong, as usual, and the rash posters on slashdot are taking the press, oddly, at their words, then putting on the tinfoil hats and heading off into conspiracy theory heaven.
So, are we then descended from cyborgs, or was that an untenable offshoot of the main branch of human evolution?