I had originally posted this 'way back during the Ask Donald Becker call for comments. AFAIK, we never got a Donald Becker Replies, but life goes on. I should note that my shop is loaded to the gunwales with IBM clusters, some of the nodes for which are 32 cpu SMPs.
[Donald's] work in making the "piles of PCs" approach to high performance computing a reality with Beowulf has been responsible for vastly expanding the construction and use of massively parallel systems. Now, viturally any high school - never mind college - can afford to construct a system on which students can learn and apply advanced numerical methods. In retrospect, however, it would seem that the obvious cost benefits of Beowulf very nearly killed the development and use of large SMP and vector processing systems in the US. My understanding of the situation is this:
* Before Beowulf, academics had a very hard time getting time on hideously expensive HPC systems.
* When Beowulf started to prove itself, particularly with embarrassingly parallel problems using MPI, those academics who happened to sit on DARPA review panels pushed hard to choke off funding for other HPC architectures, promising that they could make distributed memory parallel systems all singing, all dancing, and cheap(er).
* They couldn't really deliver, but in the meantime, Federal dollars for large shared memory and vector processing systems vanished, and the product lines and/or vendors with it.... at least in the US.
* Eight years later, only Fujitsu and NEC make truly advanced vector systems [top500.org], and Cray is only now crawling back out of the muck to deliver a new product. Evidently someone near the Beltway needs a better vector machine, and Congress ain't paying for anything made across the pond.
Cutting to the chase, did [Donald Becker] advance a "political" stand among [his] peers within the public-funded HPC community, or [was he] just trying to get some work done with the budget available at NASA?
In case ebrandsberg (75344)'s post gets lost in the noise due because of its 're:' title, it bears repeating:
They also comment that the Redhat update system is "unacceptible" because SAP may not support a particular patch, then comment that Microsoft's similar system (which does the same thing) is a key reason to change. HUH? If SAP hasn't stated they will support a MS update vs. a RH update, who is at fault when running a "certified" operating system with a standard means of performing updates as part of the OS.
Exactly. I smelled a rat the moment I read that (according to the article) SAP supports Windows autoupdating, but not RH autoupdate.
Personally, this feels like a "SAP supports Windows as a server OS better than they support Linux" statement vs. a Windows vs. Linux argument. In situations where you are buying servers just to support a single app, the golden rule is "call the support line, ask for a level 2 engineer, and ask them if THEY had to support an install, what OS would they use". That will give you the answer that in the long run will save you money.
For that matter, I'd be curious if the customer had even asked the SAP sales rep what RH and/or Windows server features they supported, or if they could supply any customer references. Sounds like someone (not the interviewee) made too many assumptions before cutting a P.O.
Hughes Aircraft Co was one of several oddities Howard left in his wake. An engineering company, run by engineers, "owned" by a medical foundation that took a few million in proceeds off the top. It was "socialism for engineers", and it was good while it lasted. Granted, any management has its foibles, but even if you had an idiot managing you, the idiot had at seen the acronym "fft" in class, not just Time magazine's science section. Most of the senior executives got their start designing radars and avionics.
Eventually, Howard's distant relatives beat the medical foundation's board in court, and sold HAC to GM. Thanks to corporate inertia, the new bosses weren't able to screw up the work environment immediately, but it went downhill from there, nevertheless.
I understand your reluctance to reduce the SNR in your rep's mail bin. On the other hand, I'm willing to cut the EFF some slack and assume the source of their rumor is pretty solid. It was what, six months ago for the last episode? That sounds about right for a media cartel to get its act together for another try on the Hill.
If I assume the rumor is close to the truth, I'm thinking now is the time to write in. If a proposal is still being mooted, it's easiler to kill than it is after someone's gone to the trouble to get it inserted into draft legislation.
Anyone who has a copy of their previous Broadcast Flag letter won't need more than about five minutes to edit it for reuse.
only one price point is not fair to our artists, and I dare say not appropriate to consumers.
Unfair to Edgar's artists? Perhaps he should slide his dick out from "his" artists' arses before telling Apple about fairness. And note that in regard to consumers, he says "appropriate" rather than "fair", because it's a given that one tries to screw the consumers to the wall as hard as the music industry has with CDs. Jesus, what a dick.
How did we ever get into this mess, where your company provides your health insurance?
In the US, blame WWII economic mobilization. The job market was tight, and employers had strict wage and price controls to deal with. Generous medical benefits were a payment in kind for employers to attract bodies. Postwar management/labor court cases reinforced the employment-based system. Tax benefits accrued. [1]
Individual insurance costs more, because the underwriter is pretty much stuck with assessing your individual risk. You may think you're a big, healthy buck, but they may not. With a group plan, the sort you often can't get your hands on without a big-ass employer, the underwriter can make the stats work such that he can charge less and still get a warm fuzzy.
Based only on reading the article, it seems at least one division of Lucent as a corporation had no intention of ever dealing honestly with the inventor and his partners. Unless the partners can get the case kicked upstairs, their only hope is to work the Congressional angle.
Talking points: 1) an offensive abuse of national security laws; 2) may stifle future offerings to the Federal Government; 3) the opsec angle. Frankly, I'd be shocked if the government program manager didn't bitch slap his/her counterparts at Lucent for pulling this stunt. Lucent may have underbid the orginal contract, or already run through their contract funding solving technical issues before discovering the "crater coupling". Regardless, by in essence pushing their costs down the vendor chain by cheating a small sub, they've brought undesirable attention to whatever the project is. If the UK/France/FRG/Russia/China et al weren't targeting it for more research before, they are now.
At the moment, Missouri counts as a "red" state in D.C., so if the plantiffs do a good job of selling their case politically on these points, they might get some traction.
From a lessons learned angle, this should warn other pontential Federal contractors and subs that business law is big on the Beltway for a reason. They can either sweat the contract details now, or sweat the litigation later.
Sure, you're right, we'll adapt to global warming. Rather, we'll react to it, rather than act on it. What's the difference?
When you act, you get to decide how you might deploy your resources to prevent (presumably) undesireable climate changes. When you react, you're performing triage while deciding when you're going to deploy resources to protect against the symptoms of climate change, and when you're going to tell it slide.
Ok, so here's where your wallet comes in: reacting is more expensive than acting, as a general rule.
To defend ourselves against the former USSR we spent massive amounts of money on arms, which we now know was unnecesary because the USSR was not nearly as strong as the CIA thought, and has resulted in the US becoming deeply indebted to the Saudis and the Chines.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems you assume that because the Soviet Union did break up that it was always going to be so. Within its limits, the SU was able to crank along adequately, even with the enormous burden of 20-25% GDP going to military spending. Western European historians, given the opening to poke around files and interview officials more or less at will during the Soviet withdrawal from eastern Europe, found that the forces, infrastructure, and written plans suggested an ability and will to roll over their opponents, whatever the trigger.
I'd suggest that the Soviet problem was much the same as many a usx large US corporation, that the leadership grew chrysler old and lazy, and their replacements' were att inept in their attempts to turn things around.
windowsSuccess and scofailure in any endevour is always obvious in retrospect.
How A Comet Holds Together: Gravity. All matter features it, and when enough dust and snow collect in one spot, their combined gravitation is great enough to keep the whole mess together. It doesn't matter if the comet is moving at 2 or 220000kph relative to the Sun, since the individual pieces all move together, just like the earth and its atmosphere. If - like comet Shoemaker - a loose comet gets close enough to a gravity sink like Jupiter to put some stress on it, then sure, it flies apart.
The solar 'wind' can be considered 'high powered' in the sense that individual particles have high kinetic energy, and that on the average of the 'wind' is denser and more energetic than the interstellar gas it blows up against. However, just on a common sense level, the solar wind constitutes a vacuum better than anything possible in a lab, and even less dense than our own ionosphere. It's enough to blow evaporating material away from a comet's coma (itself pretty low density, and hence the tail), but that's about it.
As for how long a comet can discharge gas before losing all of it's volatiles, yes, you can certainly come up with a good guess as to when Halley gives up the ghost, but it takes a lot of close up sunlight , and most comets don't spend a lot of time inside Jupiter's orbit. Those that do have much less noticeable comas and tails, and it's surmized it's because their nucleus has less material to give up, because they've been evaporating continuously for quite a while. From about Jupiter on out, there's not enough solar energy hitting comets to cause them to lose virtually any material.
Looks like the Electric Universe folks were a bit off.
Ya think?;-) Most proto- or pseudo-scientific theories don't get (or take) a lot of chances to test their theories in the field, so I've got to give the folks at thunderbolts.info credit for stating up front what they expected to see if their comet model held any water. The next test for electric universe proponents is if/how they go about tweaking their theories in response to experimental observation.
Granted, this one sample of cometary material doesn't totally shitcan their overall model of the universe, but it should force them out of that unnecessarily doctrinaire "comets aren't snowballs" stand.
For the love of God, can we give uncreditted The Onion links a rest until their appointed time? We already sort through enough dupes and weak stories during the rest of the year.
One of the things the Wehrmacht's V2 program manager periodically whined about was the tendency of Von Braun and the other engineers to spend their time daydreaming about spaceflight, rather than the practical matter of lofting a ton of high explosives.
After the war, while helping the US Army launch liberated V2s in New Mexico, Wernher continued to screw off, and eventually scribbled enough material for a small book, Das Marsprojekt. It was quickly offered in English translation as The Mars Project, and is still available in paperback. It's only 90 pages cover to cover, and covers all of the basic math, engineering concepts, and logistics of loading up the wagon for a trip.
In particular, the orbital calculations are laid out and illustrated in such a way that anyone with any faculty in math can come to grips with it. THEN, you can go apeshit with tomes such as Introduction To Space Dynamics.
The Bush Administration has made it abundantly clear that they don't care about global warming. It doesn't matter if they believe the evidence or not, because it's stated policy that they aren't going to do anything about it, except to band-aid what ever effects come down the pike, just like any other heavy weather. The only "action" they will be pursuing is to scuttle Kyoto-like treaties and suppress supporting research, so that ignoring the problem doesn't become too much of a political and PR pain in the ass.
The only exception to the blanket statement above is if a plurality of large US-based enterprises come to the corporate conclusion that their mid-term profitability (10 years) will get seriously screwed without some major action. Given the gradual nature of the climate change, the chances for this are about zero.
So, if you want to even attempt effective action against global warming, your major thrusts are: 1) try to wake up the other stockholders at firms your 401(k) invests in, and 2) contribute money and time to elect a candidate that supports action, and has half a chance of getting a GOP or Democratic nomination.
I've seen the server benchmark, and it helps explain the rotten Apache test results I've seen in the likes of PCMag. I immediately wondered if the open Darwin code has the same problem, or if the thread handling issue is limited to OSX.
In the meantime, someone's surplus B&W G3 has come my way, so I'm tempted to put a few lunch hours into a three way thread bench test between OSX, Darwin, and Debian. We'll see if temptation overcomes the anticipated boredom from sitting through three different hour long installation sessions.
Through the '90's, humans averaged 90 launches per year (less now). Let's err on the heavy side, and assume all of these were Delta 3's (300,000kg/ea). Assuming the whole thing ends up as crap in the troposphere, we end up with 27,000 metric tons of pollution per year.
Compare with the average US 500 megawatt coal fired electric plant, issuing 15,000 metric tons of non-CO2 crap, and 1,000,000 metric tons of CO2. Multiply by at least 500 for all US coal-fired electricity. Add the rest of the world.
Missing from the equation is the number of megawatts it takes to produce the 27,000 metric tons of missiles and their fuel... an exercise for the reader.
Ok, I know this is a case of the royal "we", but please, let's cut the bs. Eric Schmidt (and perhaps his wife, Wendy) was angered, and used his position as CEO to promulgate a company policy. I think another personal data point we can now tease out of Google (if it's still indexing C/NET) is that he's pretty thin skinned.
The Administration's real rationale was regional balannce of power among prime oil producers. Openly discussed and persuasive within the Beltway, but they all understood that would be a really hard to sell to the electorate. The trend was towards the UN sanctions being completely lifted, which would have opened huge business oportunities for French, and Russian interests, while the US was "stuck" maintaining a large force in the area to contain Iraq. The *stated* rationale(s) were pretty lame, made even vaguely plausable by the need of Hussein to lie through his teeth to survive among his fellows.
Since war was a given, it would have been nice if the Administration had a clue how to conduct one, or the occupation that would follow. The only saving grace was that the uniformed leadership did have a clue, and many a general staff career was snuffed as the services fought to educate the likes of Rummy and Wolfowitz as to what was needed to get their war on. Otherwise, the US would have gone in with 75k soldiers instead of 150K, and had their ass handed to them. Although at least 50.5% of the voters will vote for a retard, they won't vote for a retard who's a loser. Hence, the brass inadvertently saved the President's ass. But, they can't work miracles, leading to our current mess... the appearance of which ain't the "liberal" media's fault.
1) Scientific inquiry != Political reporting. Scientific reporting is carried out in the open because the cycles of publish and review has been shown a particularly effective means to zero in on the nature of nature. Research that is seen to result in the researchers and writers being blackballed, harrassed by government officials, or killed doesn't get pursued. Political reporting is usually an open process in the US, but because of the insiders advantages of acting without public scrutiny, the players are often willing to seriously screw anyone who shines a light where it isn't wanted. Ergo, there's sometimes a need to allow for anonymous sources to give the researched topic enough exposure that the players can't effectively retaliate.
2) Censorship & War: In WWII, the Federal Govt and DoW frequently hid or spun facts regarding the war effort, but there was a payoff that everyone saw. In Vietnam, the Feds and DoD played the same game. Unfortunately, and for a variety of reasons, they oversold their progress against the NVA and VC, which made everyone look like idiots when the Reds pulled off Tet. The US/RVN victory during Tet might have been capitalized after the Paris peace accords. But, since Nixon felt the need to play dirty during an election he could have won clean, he wasn't in a position to keep the North Vietnamese in line when he needed to.
Granted, the Vietnam War probably got a little TOO much TV airtime after Tet, but I don't think that's the case with Iraq. If Bush pulls us out of Iraq with our tails between our legs, it'll be because he pissed away his oportunities to conduct the war effectively, not because he wasn't better able to pull the wool over our eyes.
This is possible reason for concern especially considering MySpace's blog population for a MySpace run blog is technically owned by the same people who bring you Fox News.
There's nothing "technical" about it. News Corp owns both entities, with Rupert in a controlling position analagous to Gates at MicroSoft. Rupert is a big believer in exercising whatever added value he can extract by having his assets interact. How this'll play out may be interesting, but it won't be pretty.
It's you're legal right to defend yourself against such an act, but a cop can't give you a ticket because he thinks you might have been speeding, he gives it to you because you were freaking caught.
Unless, as is sometimes the case, the cop who "caught" wasn't using a calibrated measurement, but "has a radar in his heart", or similar subjective criteria.
While Bill is speaking nationally, Steve is acting locally. Back in WA, Ballmer is telling the Seattle area school districts that they need to step up and provide better prepared students.
On the other hand, he and his minions have been pushing hard for corporate tax cuts and credits. In other words, we want better employee fodder, and we want (the rest of) you to pay for it.
I saw this at the Kahului Walmart a couple of months ago, where they were evidently trying to clear them out at $35. Worth it just for the wifi access point, if it's not too locked down. I had looked over the hacking sites to see if the client device could support Jabber IM s/w, and it seems plausable.
You think just because someone is at the ass end of the supply train, no got batteries? During my Scout troops' 50 miler in backcountry Iran, I found that if a village stand was selling anything other than vegetables and dung "fuel discs", there'd be a few 9v and AA batteries in stock... which fueled my Dooble Bros jones.
Slashdot Mirror
[Donald's] work in making the "piles of PCs" approach to high performance computing a reality with Beowulf has been responsible for vastly expanding the construction and use of massively parallel systems. Now, viturally any high school - never mind college - can afford to construct a system on which students can learn and apply advanced numerical methods.
In retrospect, however, it would seem that the obvious cost benefits of Beowulf very nearly killed the development and use of large SMP and vector processing systems in the US. My understanding of the situation is this:
* Before Beowulf, academics had a very hard time getting time on hideously expensive HPC systems.
* When Beowulf started to prove itself, particularly with embarrassingly parallel problems using MPI, those academics who happened to sit on DARPA review panels pushed hard to choke off funding for other HPC architectures, promising that they could make distributed memory parallel systems all singing, all dancing, and cheap(er).
* They couldn't really deliver, but in the meantime, Federal dollars for large shared memory and vector processing systems vanished, and the product lines and/or vendors with it.... at least in the US.
* Eight years later, only Fujitsu and NEC make truly advanced vector systems [top500.org], and Cray is only now crawling back out of the muck to deliver a new product. Evidently someone near the Beltway needs a better vector machine, and Congress ain't paying for anything made across the pond.
Cutting to the chase, did [Donald Becker] advance a "political" stand among [his] peers within the public-funded HPC community, or [was he] just trying to get some work done with the budget available at NASA?
They also comment that the Redhat update system is "unacceptible" because SAP may not support a particular patch, then comment that Microsoft's similar system (which does the same thing) is a key reason to change. HUH? If SAP hasn't stated they will support a MS update vs. a RH update, who is at fault when running a "certified" operating system with a standard means of performing updates as part of the OS.
Exactly. I smelled a rat the moment I read that (according to the article) SAP supports Windows autoupdating, but not RH autoupdate.
Personally, this feels like a "SAP supports Windows as a server OS better than they support Linux" statement vs. a Windows vs. Linux argument. In situations where you are buying servers just to support a single app, the golden rule is "call the support line, ask for a level 2 engineer, and ask them if THEY had to support an install, what OS would they use". That will give you the answer that in the long run will save you money.
For that matter, I'd be curious if the customer had even asked the SAP sales rep what RH and/or Windows server features they supported, or if they could supply any customer references. Sounds like someone (not the interviewee) made too many assumptions before cutting a P.O.
Eventually, Howard's distant relatives beat the medical foundation's board in court, and sold HAC to GM. Thanks to corporate inertia, the new bosses weren't able to screw up the work environment immediately, but it went downhill from there, nevertheless.
If I assume the rumor is close to the truth, I'm thinking now is the time to write in. If a proposal is still being mooted, it's easiler to kill than it is after someone's gone to the trouble to get it inserted into draft legislation.
Anyone who has a copy of their previous Broadcast Flag letter won't need more than about five minutes to edit it for reuse.
Unfair to Edgar's artists? Perhaps he should slide his dick out from "his" artists' arses before telling Apple about fairness. And note that in regard to consumers, he says "appropriate" rather than "fair", because it's a given that one tries to screw the consumers to the wall as hard as the music industry has with CDs. Jesus, what a dick.
In the US, blame WWII economic mobilization. The job market was tight, and employers had strict wage and price controls to deal with. Generous medical benefits were a payment in kind for employers to attract bodies. Postwar management/labor court cases reinforced the employment-based system. Tax benefits accrued. [1]
Individual insurance costs more, because the underwriter is pretty much stuck with assessing your individual risk. You may think you're a big, healthy buck, but they may not. With a group plan, the sort you often can't get your hands on without a big-ass employer, the underwriter can make the stats work such that he can charge less and still get a warm fuzzy.
Talking points: 1) an offensive abuse of national security laws; 2) may stifle future offerings to the Federal Government; 3) the opsec angle. Frankly, I'd be shocked if the government program manager didn't bitch slap his/her counterparts at Lucent for pulling this stunt. Lucent may have underbid the orginal contract, or already run through their contract funding solving technical issues before discovering the "crater coupling". Regardless, by in essence pushing their costs down the vendor chain by cheating a small sub, they've brought undesirable attention to whatever the project is. If the UK/France/FRG/Russia/China et al weren't targeting it for more research before, they are now.
At the moment, Missouri counts as a "red" state in D.C., so if the plantiffs do a good job of selling their case politically on these points, they might get some traction.
From a lessons learned angle, this should warn other pontential Federal contractors and subs that business law is big on the Beltway for a reason. They can either sweat the contract details now, or sweat the litigation later.
When you act, you get to decide how you might deploy your resources to prevent (presumably) undesireable climate changes. When you react, you're performing triage while deciding when you're going to deploy resources to protect against the symptoms of climate change, and when you're going to tell it slide.
Ok, so here's where your wallet comes in: reacting is more expensive than acting, as a general rule.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems you assume that because the Soviet Union did break up that it was always going to be so. Within its limits, the SU was able to crank along adequately, even with the enormous burden of 20-25% GDP going to military spending. Western European historians, given the opening to poke around files and interview officials more or less at will during the Soviet withdrawal from eastern Europe, found that the forces, infrastructure, and written plans suggested an ability and will to roll over their opponents, whatever the trigger.
I'd suggest that the Soviet problem was much the same as many a usx large US corporation, that the leadership grew chrysler old and lazy, and their replacements' were att inept in their attempts to turn things around.
windowsSuccess and scofailure in any endevour is always obvious in retrospect.
I haven't yet spotted mention of x-rays before or during impact. If you've got url on hand, I'll go dig there.
How A Comet Holds Together: Gravity. All matter features it, and when enough dust and snow collect in one spot, their combined gravitation is great enough to keep the whole mess together. It doesn't matter if the comet is moving at 2 or 220000kph relative to the Sun, since the individual pieces all move together, just like the earth and its atmosphere. If - like comet Shoemaker - a loose comet gets close enough to a gravity sink like Jupiter to put some stress on it, then sure, it flies apart.
The solar 'wind' can be considered 'high powered' in the sense that individual particles have high kinetic energy, and that on the average of the 'wind' is denser and more energetic than the interstellar gas it blows up against. However, just on a common sense level, the solar wind constitutes a vacuum better than anything possible in a lab, and even less dense than our own ionosphere. It's enough to blow evaporating material away from a comet's coma (itself pretty low density, and hence the tail), but that's about it.
As for how long a comet can discharge gas before losing all of it's volatiles, yes, you can certainly come up with a good guess as to when Halley gives up the ghost, but it takes a lot of close up sunlight , and most comets don't spend a lot of time inside Jupiter's orbit. Those that do have much less noticeable comas and tails, and it's surmized it's because their nucleus has less material to give up, because they've been evaporating continuously for quite a while. From about Jupiter on out, there's not enough solar energy hitting comets to cause them to lose virtually any material.
Ya think? ;-) Most proto- or pseudo-scientific theories don't get (or take) a lot of chances to test their theories in the field, so I've got to give the folks at thunderbolts.info credit for stating up front what they expected to see if their comet model held any water. The next test for electric universe proponents is if/how they go about tweaking their theories in response to experimental observation.
Granted, this one sample of cometary material doesn't totally shitcan their overall model of the universe, but it should force them out of that unnecessarily doctrinaire "comets aren't snowballs" stand.
For the love of God, can we give uncreditted The Onion links a rest until their appointed time? We already sort through enough dupes and weak stories during the rest of the year.
After the war, while helping the US Army launch liberated V2s in New Mexico, Wernher continued to screw off, and eventually scribbled enough material for a small book, Das Marsprojekt. It was quickly offered in English translation as The Mars Project, and is still available in paperback. It's only 90 pages cover to cover, and covers all of the basic math, engineering concepts, and logistics of loading up the wagon for a trip.
In particular, the orbital calculations are laid out and illustrated in such a way that anyone with any faculty in math can come to grips with it. THEN, you can go apeshit with tomes such as Introduction To Space Dynamics.
The only exception to the blanket statement above is if a plurality of large US-based enterprises come to the corporate conclusion that their mid-term profitability (10 years) will get seriously screwed without some major action. Given the gradual nature of the climate change, the chances for this are about zero.
So, if you want to even attempt effective action against global warming, your major thrusts are: 1) try to wake up the other stockholders at firms your 401(k) invests in, and 2) contribute money and time to elect a candidate that supports action, and has half a chance of getting a GOP or Democratic nomination.
In the meantime, someone's surplus B&W G3 has come my way, so I'm tempted to put a few lunch hours into a three way thread bench test between OSX, Darwin, and Debian. We'll see if temptation overcomes the anticipated boredom from sitting through three different hour long installation sessions.
Compare with the average US 500 megawatt coal fired electric plant, issuing 15,000 metric tons of non-CO2 crap, and 1,000,000 metric tons of CO2. Multiply by at least 500 for all US coal-fired electricity. Add the rest of the world.
Missing from the equation is the number of megawatts it takes to produce the 27,000 metric tons of missiles and their fuel... an exercise for the reader.
Ok, I know this is a case of the royal "we", but please, let's cut the bs. Eric Schmidt (and perhaps his wife, Wendy) was angered, and used his position as CEO to promulgate a company policy. I think another personal data point we can now tease out of Google (if it's still indexing C/NET) is that he's pretty thin skinned.
Since war was a given, it would have been nice if the Administration had a clue how to conduct one, or the occupation that would follow. The only saving grace was that the uniformed leadership did have a clue, and many a general staff career was snuffed as the services fought to educate the likes of Rummy and Wolfowitz as to what was needed to get their war on. Otherwise, the US would have gone in with 75k soldiers instead of 150K, and had their ass handed to them. Although at least 50.5% of the voters will vote for a retard, they won't vote for a retard who's a loser. Hence, the brass inadvertently saved the President's ass. But, they can't work miracles, leading to our current mess... the appearance of which ain't the "liberal" media's fault.
1) Scientific inquiry != Political reporting. Scientific reporting is carried out in the open because the cycles of publish and review has been shown a particularly effective means to zero in on the nature of nature. Research that is seen to result in the researchers and writers being blackballed, harrassed by government officials, or killed doesn't get pursued. Political reporting is usually an open process in the US, but because of the insiders advantages of acting without public scrutiny, the players are often willing to seriously screw anyone who shines a light where it isn't wanted. Ergo, there's sometimes a need to allow for anonymous sources to give the researched topic enough exposure that the players can't effectively retaliate.
2) Censorship & War: In WWII, the Federal Govt and DoW frequently hid or spun facts regarding the war effort, but there was a payoff that everyone saw. In Vietnam, the Feds and DoD played the same game. Unfortunately, and for a variety of reasons, they oversold their progress against the NVA and VC, which made everyone look like idiots when the Reds pulled off Tet. The US/RVN victory during Tet might have been capitalized after the Paris peace accords. But, since Nixon felt the need to play dirty during an election he could have won clean, he wasn't in a position to keep the North Vietnamese in line when he needed to.
Granted, the Vietnam War probably got a little TOO much TV airtime after Tet, but I don't think that's the case with Iraq. If Bush pulls us out of Iraq with our tails between our legs, it'll be because he pissed away his oportunities to conduct the war effectively, not because he wasn't better able to pull the wool over our eyes.
There's nothing "technical" about it. News Corp owns both entities, with Rupert in a controlling position analagous to Gates at MicroSoft. Rupert is a big believer in exercising whatever added value he can extract by having his assets interact. How this'll play out may be interesting, but it won't be pretty.
Unless, as is sometimes the case, the cop who "caught" wasn't using a calibrated measurement, but "has a radar in his heart", or similar subjective criteria.
On the other hand, he and his minions have been pushing hard for corporate tax cuts and credits. In other words, we want better employee fodder, and we want (the rest of) you to pay for it.
I saw this at the Kahului Walmart a couple of months ago, where they were evidently trying to clear them out at $35. Worth it just for the wifi access point, if it's not too locked down. I had looked over the hacking sites to see if the client device could support Jabber IM s/w, and it seems plausable.
You think just because someone is at the ass end of the supply train, no got batteries? During my Scout troops' 50 miler in backcountry Iran, I found that if a village stand was selling anything other than vegetables and dung "fuel discs", there'd be a few 9v and AA batteries in stock... which fueled my Dooble Bros jones.