"Try setting up a server, running windows, IIS, Exchange, and SQL Server"
Uh, pretty simple switch to the right tools for the job, BSD or Gentoo and load it up with Snort, SNARE, Tripwire, and setup bots to monitor the logs and send alerts when something suspicious happens etc.
In the case of conventions if they need this level of "security" I think they should consider moving them out of the middle of densely populated urban areas. Sea Island for example was a lot easier to secure for the last G-8 get together. If nothing else build a convention center and hotel complex someplace that can be secured. The main reason these things are in the middle of cities are for the long gone economy boon and prestige. Thanks to the security they don't offer that any more.
Of course this would just further dispell the facade that this is a democracy but that facade is already in tatters, not much democracy around these things anyway thanks to all the storm troopers, check points and cages for protesters.
Not true. In the early days most hackers were doing open source because it was a community and sharing helped everyone. It was Gate's famous letter that was at the fore front of trying to putting an end to hacking and open source, so he could make a business out of it. He was a borderline rip off artist in his early days, with both Basic and DOS. No, I don't think Gates has ever really been liked by the hacker community.
"It's all such silly stupid bullshit. Not a year ago everyone here got hard for SCO. They sold linux. Hooray SCO! Now we hate them. In a year or so we'll hate IBM again"
SCO/Caldera was a completely different company when they were really supporting Linux. It was Ransom Love not Darl McBride calling the shots when then, he left as they transitioned to the new detestable business model. Ransom is a pretty decent guy. Corporations don't act, the people that run them do. Caldera under Ransom was a decent company, SCO under McBride is simply detestable by any measure.
Everything Microsoft has done and is doing SHOULD reflect on Gates even. Gates gave up the CEO title most probably to simplify his life but he is most assuredly still calling the shots anytime he feels like it. He owns a huge percentage of the stock so all of Microsoft's officers serve at his discretion.
The fact is companies change, as do the people that run them. If you are to dumb to judge them by their current management and behavior might I suggest you rush out and put all your money in the stock market using your obvious business acumen as a guide.
"he ran it honestly albeit aggressively"
That is simply not true. He and his company are convicted monopolists. They've engaged in illegal tactics that have driven relatively honest companies trying to innovate in to bankruptcy or various other forms of oblivion. The reason he throws these little bashes and pumps money in to the pockets of these politicians is to ensure he has political cover for any future underhanded behavior he should choose to undertake. For example he could count on the Bush administration to gut the antitrust judgement against his company.
At this point I guess I'd have to say you are either stupid or a pretty obvious troll.
What a concept. Lay your hands on a "special badge", by knocking a secret service agent on the head in the john if no other way and you have a blank check to slice your way through security. Might not be so hard to do if there is any truth to this guys report from the DNC in boston that caught pictures of someone drinking in a hotel bar and then driving away in a government car with a Homeland security/Secret Service placard. The guy that wrote this skewered the security in Boston for its incompetence and Homeland Security responded by shutting down the TSCM Yahoo list where he posted it, acquired the names of everyone on the list and everything ever said on on the list instead of fixing all the security holes he highlighted and saying thank you.
I'm increasingly getting the impression all these national security events are an utter joke. They appear to be a massive waste of money, often aren't providing real security, and are severely trampling people's civil liberties, for example allowing random searches of people on Boston mass transit. In Boston, where they hoped the DNC would be an economic boon, it actually hammered the local economy and put them 8 million in the hole instead of up $150 million as they'd hoped, thanks to the massive disruption the Feds created in Boston.
I think the problem is that none of the people you list have much world wide reach. The U.S. has soldiers and FBI agents in a remarkably large number of countries around the world thanks to the excuse of the "War on Terror" in particular.
The U.S. has declared its willingness to take preemptive action against anyone and any country it "suspects" of being a threat to the U.S. or its citizens.
Ashcroft has been bending the Patriot Act to give him jurisdiction over anything he considers to be a criminal act any place on the planet. There are two recent cases showing this tendency.
He's using the patriot act to charge an American civilian contractor in Afghanistan with killing an Afghan prisoner. The contractor was working for the military but you apparently can't court martial civilian contractors unless there is a declared war. They didn't want the Afghans to prosecute him though its their jurisdiction, presumably because their judicial system is a shambles and they probably didn't want any of the secrets he knows to get out. It is a scary precedent that someone can be prosecuted for murder by the U.S. though it occurred in another country.
The other case is Ashcroft is taking the power on himself to prosecute American's for sex crimes committed any place on the planet to fight sex tourism. Unfortunately, again these crimes should be prosecuted by the sovereign nations they occur in.
You may dimisss these now but they are setting a precedent that would allow Ashcroft to prosecute anyone for anything anywhere in the world he can lay his hands on you. This is basically whats happened to most of the people held in Gitmo. It appears the U.S. was offering bounties after the Taliban collapsed for Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters. Unscrupulous people rounded up anyone that looked the part, collected the bounty and innocent people ended up detained in Gitmo indefinitely, so far without review, and when the review comes it will likely be in the form of military show trials.
There is nothing more certain to accelerate the outsourcing of tech jobs than any attempt to form a tech workers union. If Microsoft saw it happening they would be sure to outsource anyone they caught getting involved in it.
A key goal of this outsourcing thing is to wipe out the last unionionized worker in the U.S. What a dilemma it is too. Unions are bad because they result in a work force that is completely spoiled, corrupt, incompetent, inefficient and overpriced. Not having unions is bad, because then corporations engage in rampant exploitation of working people as long as there is a surplus of warm bodies someplace that will take the work no matter how bad conditions or pay.
Unfortunately thanks to container shipping, the WTO and the internet the corporations are sitting in the cat bird seat.
Important note to all you young people out there just settling on a career. Work towards your MBA, join the right fraternity (Skull and Bones being the ultimate best), get queued up for the right country club, and aim for the upper ranks of a multinational. True you will end up being a complete and utter slime ball, you will probably have to lie, cheat, steal and exploit(the people that work for you) to get ahead, you will probably hate yourself and your life, but you will end up rich and thats all that matters if you aspire to the American dream.
The problem with the big investments in supercomputing by the U.S. government in the last decade is that they've been time after time to put one huge white elephant system after another in one national lab after another. Some problems:
- They take a long time to build from first RFP, to contract award to first delivery till they are fully deployed. By the time they are done they are usually starting to look long of tooth and the lab starts the whole process all over again.
- I don't know what their exact work load is but WAY to much money has been spent in the U.S. on simulating nuclear bombs. That is a computing work load with NO ECONOMIC benefit. It has a security benefit only if somebody decides to use one of the bloody things someday and that wont be a good day. I wager the Bush administration is using them to design new tactical nukes to bust bunkers and caves but if the U.S. starts using those as a matter of routine that will also be a bad day. Way to many of them are going in to the NSA to spy on communication. It occassionally has security benefit but it ain't worth it when traded against the invastion of privacy of everyone.
- The classification of these systems no doubt discourages their application for anything economically useful
- The same cast of characters line up to bid on them. Its just high tech pork for IBM, HP, Intel, SGI etc. They get to build leading edge one off systems that keep architects and chip designers entertained but again they are extremely poor in economic value.
If super computing is going to survive they need to do the same thing 3D graphics did, it used to be overpriced too. They need to design single chips that have:
- Really fast vector units and good scalar units - Huge memory bandwidth (with supporting cache and memory systems)
They need to drive up volume by making these chips as accessible as possible to auto manufacturers, oil and gas exploration, chemistry etc. When they get the volume up, reliability up, ease of use up and price down they might sustain a viable market though I'm still not sure there really is one. Someone also needs to fund applications and visualization that turn them in to breakthrough technology that leads to huge advances in a range of technology fields.
Of course this is kind of SGI's business model and they, for whatever reason, can't make it work either.
I could see the U.S. government, in concert with private industry, putting seed money in to developing:
- very fast vector units in commodity processors - Adapting GPU's to supercomputing apps - Very large/fast cache/memory and driving down cost so everyone benefits - Very fast I/O and driving down cost so everyone benefits - Breakthrough applications applying the above
But if instead:
- government just keeps putting out contracts for another teraflop machine to be squandered in a national lab simulating nuclear bombs screw the whole damn concept
- If IBM, Cray, SGI, HP etc. are just looking for government handouts to help them build toys that are cool but no one else really wants to pay for, again screw the whole concept.
The cool thing about Japan's premier supercomputing facility is its dedicated to climate and weather simulation so it has a purpose.
If you want to have a viable supercomputing industry you need to identify applications that make it worth while and figure out how to best develop hardware to meet a need. The apps most likely to matter are ones that lead to breakthroughs in their respective industries especially basic science and R&D but the U.S. is pathetic at basic research these days which is another reason there is no demand for supercomputers. They don't factor in well on the quarterly profits.
Just saying you need to keep handing out hundreds of millions of dollars to the same old crowd to keep doing what we've always done, whether it works or not, is a pretty dubious way to spend money (though so was squandering $200 billion on Iraq).
"Hardly the acts of a leader that isn't a dictator."
Having refreshed my memory on Venezuela I see they are going ahead with a Chavez recall August 15, the recall being the thing Chavez has been resisting, not elections. He was elected to a six year term in 2000, though the elections were heavily disputed, just like America's 2000 election. Much of the blame then fell on electronic voting, provide by America's own Republican backed ES&S. Not sure why they would have trusted their election to a company with potential ulterior motives but they did and it was a disaster. A case study in evoting gone wrong.
The August recall will also make extensive use of electronic voting machines this time by a little know Florida company, Smartmatic.
If Chavez is the dictator you say he is, and I'd say its 50/50, he will, no doubt, use these machine to insure victory. Of course, if he does rig the election using electronic voting he will just prove a dicator wannabe in the U.S. could do the same thing a few months later.
Oh, but wait apparently Venezuela's evoting machines will provide a printed record so I guess we would have to say their elections have a slightly better chance of being on the up and up than our own. Odd, that in a head to head trustworthiness contest between Chavez and his voting machines and the Bush family and their voting machines I would say Chavez wins.
"Another key reason the South fell was the continued support the North got from the USSR after the US gave up on supporting the South..."
Forgot to answer this one. Well yes the US could have kept an occupation army in the South forever and propped up one corrupt dictator after another. It would have cost another fortune in gold and blood. If the U.S. actually wanted to WIN and get out the South Vietnamese needed to find a popular, independent and strong government. A key problem with the U.S. in Vietnam is the U.S. backed the French when they were propping up their failing colonial empire. The French colonial occupation of Vietnam was thouroughly brutal and one in a string of occupiers of Vietnam. The Vietnamese people mostly wanted a nationalist government that would throw out foreign occupiers whoever they were. When the French finally gave up, unfortunately the U.S. picked up their mantle and started out being hated by all the Vietnamese who hated the French.
For better or worse Ho Chi Minh in the North and the Viet Cong were the only nationalist alternative and it was the basis for their popular support. They were nationalist first and communist second mostly to get the backing of the Soviet Union and China. Again that government has mellowed some but its the same one that won in the 70's and the U.S. has no problem doing business with them today, as long as they allow profit taking.
Its a lesson the U.S. should have learned for Iraq and Afghanistan. Unless those countries find popular, independent and sovereign governments they will continue to be a screwed up mess and the U.S. will be stuck having its sons and daughters stationed there propping up puppet governments and getting killed and wounded in a futile effort for basically ever.
Another key point about your rant on Marxism and the U.S.S.R is that thanks in part to Gorbechev, Yeltsin and Russia's Afghanistan vets the U.S.S.R is gone and Russia isn't adventuring at anything resembling the same scale as the U.S.S.R. The U.S. is, on the other hand, still manipulating the world with abandon and on a scale that rivaled anything in the 20th century. There is now no power to keep the U.S. in check when it abuses its power as it did in Iraq.
This is interesting. Yesterday I was called by a computerized phone system, ITC or IDC or some such acronym, doing a 1 minute presidential poll. Press 1 if you plan to vote for Bush, 2 for Kerry. and of course no #3 for Nadar. I hate Kerry but of the two choices he was the worst of the two evils. Then it asks question 2, are you voting for Kerry 1, because you like him or 2, you don't like Bush. I press 2.
Now that I think about it a political party or government in power can do a pretty good job of cataloging everyone by which side of the fence they are on just by computerized polling, the only people being safe are those who refused to be polled.
"We prefer to arrest people AFTER THEY HAVE COMMITTED A CRIME. I know, it's all new fangled, and hard to wrap your head around, but it is the way we do things 'round here. Y'all got that"
I must of missed something. Have they arrested anyone in the White House for exposing the identity of a CIA agent. That was a felony, there are a few people in the White House who know who did it and in fact no on has been arrested "AFTER THEY COMMITTED A CRIME", a felony punishable by I think 10 years in the federal pen.
Sorry but in this country we only arrest some people who commit crimes, others get off scot free especially if they have money or connections. We often frame people for crimes they didn't commit, especially if they are poor minorities, for example the governor of Illinois had to take everyone off death row after it became apparent Illinois police and DA's were time after time framing poor minorities for crimes they didn't commit and the frames were falling apart thanks to DNA testing.
All in all the U.S. isn't the bastion of perfection in "Freedom and Deomcracy" you seem to think it is.
The other obvious problem with relying on local police to enforce election law is its not uncommon for the police to be involved in the election rigging. Mayor's and elected county sherrifs have in the past frequently been involved in vote rigging. There were accusations police in Florida were obstructing access to polls in poor black areas in the 2000 elections.
Another tangential example, a number of people in Afghanistan have been killed recently because they were carrying papers showing they had registered to vote. The remnants of the Taliban and local war lords who are opposed to the elections are killing people for registering. All in all, voters carrying around slips of paper is not a good idea. I see today Doctors Without Borders has decided Afghanistan is so dangerous today they are pulling out after 24 years. Kind of undercuts the Bush administration of what a showcase of success the new Afghanistan is.
"I made my point without having to list the current leaders of China. And the Democrats don't bad mouth them either - one of the great mysteries of US policy..."
Actually you really didn't. China wasn't in the UN during most of Mao's reign. He was on his last legs when they were admitted.
I'm not a Democrat or saying they are any different. There are rich Dems making a buck in China too.
"...they would have made the deal with Saddam"... excepting the Bush family liked Kuwait's dictator...err... emir better and when Saddam invaded Kuwait they had to pick one oil field over another. Besides which its a lot better now that the U.S. has control of Iraq's oil through a puppet government that takes orders better than Saddam did.
"...but Hitler was also democratically elected.'"
Well so was George Bush, sort of but not really. Chavez had been facing a U.S. backed revolt pretty much since Bush came to office. Its not a very conducive environment to democracy in any form. I'll agree with you Chavez has issues if you agree the Bush administration has culpability in the mess that is Venezuela.
"Gee, if we're going to keep putting on the tinfoil hat"
Not sure why the overthrow of the Iranian governmen t by the CIA is a tinfoil hat issue. MK Ultra is the code name for the project its pretty well documented, do a google search.
Not sure why you wandered off in to your rant on the Soviet Union and Russia. It was kind of tangential to the topic here.
Leftie had a good list. He did leave out a string of corrupt dictators the U.S. proped up in South Vietnam during the war. A key reason South Vietnam fell was because the governments the U.S. was propping up were so corrupt and so unpopular they served to fuel the Viet Cong's success.
As for Mao its noteworthy that he is dead. But his party still runs China, but for some reason you didn't list Jiang Zemin or Wen Jiabao. They've moderated since Mao but they are still basically the same party and a repressive dictatorship for all practical purposes. The only thing thats changed is they now allow private ownership of capital and a lot of rich American business men and multinationals are making a pretty penny there so right wingers don't bad mouth them anymore.
I think Muammar is the best friends of the Bush administration now, since he turned over his WMD's, WMD's I wager he bought some just so he could turn them over and get the sanctions lifted. They like him because they can claim him as proof their "get tough" policy in Iraq worked though that is a dubious claim. I'm pretty sure Cheney/Halliburton and the rest of the U.S. oil and gas industry are chomping at the bit to do business with Muammar and get back in to his oil fields. Again as long as there is money to be made the U.S. LOVES dictators.
Hugo Chavez is democratically elected. He is a socialist and the Republican's hate him with a passion, he hates them too, but he was still elected. The Bush administration has tried to overthrow him at least once, and if they succeed that would probably lead to a dictatorship, but Venezuala isn't under one now.
Khomeini, well that one is interesting. He came to power because the U.S. toppled the elected government of Iran when they nationalized their oil fields taking control of them from their former colonial masters the British, who were taking the lions share of the profits. The U.S. installed the Shah of Iran who was a brutal repressive dictator. The Iranians turned to Khomeni because they hated the Shah more, and hate the U.S. to this day for inflicting him on them.
It appears this may in fact be a power grab by universities in Texas and New Mexico to wrest control of the labs from that liberal whacko Univertisty of California. Have to wonder if the Texas White House might like this idea and.
You also have to wonder if the security problem is fabricated or blown out of proportion to justify the move. This contract is probably a huge financial and prestige boon to the university and state that gets it.
I don't think it really matters what the target of this investigation did or didn't do, except the key fact that it had nothing to do with terrorism. They key point here is it shows how much the Patriot act broadened the DOJ's powers in areas that have NOTHING to do with preventing terrorism.
On a tangent here is an interesting article on Homeland Security trying to enforce security through obscurity in the physical world and the virtual world too. Someone walked around the DNC and took photos of all the weaknesses in the security in Boston and posted it on a list on Yahoo. Homeland security shut down the list and is collecting the names of everyone on the list and everything said. Should give you pause before joining any list in these dangerous times. These actions are designed to silence everyone who is critical of the government.
Welcome to the slippery slope. Watch that first step.
"how much expertise would be needed to catch that?"
Uh, not much. If the weapons aren't hitting the mark on the firing range they probably wouldn't get deployed until they are fixed.
This is probably a poor example. The danger isn't in OSS that is designed to fail. If it doesn't work it wouldn't get used. The danger is an obscure security hole that would allow infiltration.
The key point where this guys whole argument falls apart is that proprietary software isn't any better. I'm confident Microsoft employs a small army of foreigners, and I'm not sure they would be any more reliable than OSS developers and their code gets a lot less scrutiny, and absolutely none if you are a customer getting binaries. Most big companies are putting R&D centers in India and China. How do they assure us the people they are hiring don't have ulterior motives.
If you want to develop software critical to national security you have to develop it in a classified lab with cleared employees. Oh but wait, in spite of all the scrutiny people with get security clearances get, they also turn out to be foreign agents and do great damage. Los Alamos doesn't exactly have a stellar security record and those people get more scrutiny than anyone. The Navy's comsec and has been massively compromised in the past.
I'd argue the opposite case from this guy. If you want secure software the best approach is to have as many people possible, both OSS and governemnt, scrutinize the source. If you find a project that is intentionally or negligently checking in compromised code black list them or give them extra scrutiny. The NSA's secure linux effort is an example of the government making sure OSS is secure and its way more likely to be that, than anything Microsoft or Green Hills is going to give them.
On a tangent here is an interesting article on Homeland Security trying to enforce security through obscurity in the physical world. Someone walked around the DNC and took photos of all the weaknesses in their security in Boston and posted it on a list on Yahoo. Homeland security shut down the list and is collecting the names of everyone on the list and everything said. Should give you pause before joining any list in these interesting times.
Its always good to have people offer alternatives and try new things. There is no reason things like alternative file browsers couldn't be deployed on the same foundation. It would be way more productive than deploying two completely different desktops to offer alternatives.
It is just plain bad to have two completely disconnected desktops.
A. It will permanently inhibit application development and support. The Linux desktop market is already small. When a GUI application developer is forced to pick between two desktops they end up with an even smaller target audience which reduces the incentive to sink the time or money in the application's development.
B. There is a massive duplication of effort that drains open source of its strength, the huge pool of manpower. On the desktop Linux has two small pools, both doing all the same things differently.
C. It creates frustration for users and companies considering Linux deployments because they are immediately faced with a difficult choice.
Freedesktop.org and wxWidgets try to bridge the gap but as an application developer you still pick one or the other desktops and GUI toolkits to support, well, and you either write off everyone on the the other desktop or force them to put up with bad integration and memory bloat from using two disconnected sets of libraries.
I don't think you have to look much further than OSX to see a single desktop that is exceptionally well integrated and thought out, and it does just fine with out competing camps. Maybe some people wont like it or wont like parts of it but overall people love it, and the thing they love the most is everything works consistently and together. That is what a desktop is supposed to do. The Linux desktop experience is a complete mess by comparison unless you crawl in to one desktop application set and completely ignore the rest.
To put it another way Microsoft and Apple love the Linux desktop wars, because they know as long as they continue Linux will be a weak competitor for them on the desktop.
That wasn't what I saw for Dan at least. He appeared to move dramatically to the right after 9/11. I don't watch his new much but have seen him on Larry King a number of times and he doesn't sound left at all any more. Jennings is Canadian, America is so far to the right most Canadians are going to be left by comparison.
"portray Clinton's lies under oath as no big deal. It was."
After eight years of never ending Clinton hounding at great expense to the tax payers, lying about sex really wasn't a big deal. The insanity was the vast sums spent and trying to impeach him over it. It didn't get any one killed, it didn't hurt anyone besides Monica and Clinton's family. The disconnects in the truth on the war in Iraq were far more grave than any lie Clinton told, they are getting a lot of brave Americans killed for no particularly good reason.
Europeans were baffled by why the Republican's were so obsessed about a sexual liason between consenting adults. The only reason it turned in to a national embarrassment was thanks to Starr and the Republican's publishing every gory detail so everyone, including children, had to read about sexual intimacies that should have never been made public. It was assassination with words instead of a weapon. If they did it today the FCC would have to fine every network that ran the story because it was as tawdry as anything Howard Stern does.
Contrast it with the Bush administration who outed a CIA agent to extract revenge on Joe Wilson. George W.'s dad said it was one of the most reprehensible of crimes years ago. To date no one has been charged and the White House is obviously in no hurry to find the culprit and punish them.
You have a very double standard on what constitutes a big deal.
"The reason everyone says Fox is so right is that they come closest to the middle, which seems right compared to the others. Journalists are supposed to report the facts so we can draw our own conclusions. They don't."
No, you are just so far to the right Fox seems like the middle to you. We may as well call it a draw, the middle depends on how each individuals scale is calibrated.
That simply hasn't been true since 9/11 at least. Every one of the major networks was cheering the Bush administration on as they rode across the sands of Iraq sitting in U.S. armor. None of them engaged in the mildest scrutiny of why it was happening or said anything that reflected badly on the White House until very recently when it started to go bad, and it became obvious there was a disconnect in truthfullness somewhere. None of the networks had anything bad to say about the Patriot Act or its addendum snuck through Congress in the middle of the night, and they still really don't give it and Ashcroft the scrutiny and criticism they deserve.
There may have been a liberal bias in the media before 9/11 but it was erased under the massive force of flag waiving and patriotism in its wake. They simply had to follow the trend or lose ratings, for example CNN losing number 1 to Fox. So, they all swung to center or right of center but the right wingers still keep harping they are still to the left to see if they can keep pushing them even further to the right.
The one person I can think of you might still brand as left of center is Christian Amanpour but its important to note she works most of the time for CNN international and she is a lot more in tune with Europe on the left/right scale. Europeans and the rest of the world must be aghast at how far to the right American politics and media have swung, even more so when someone like you tries to claim they still have a liberal bias.
It seems to be trend that if you post something on Slashdot that slams George W. late in the evening it shoots up to 4 or 5 overnight like this did and then craters to overrated and flamebait in the morning.
My conjecture is the rest of the Slashdot world is modding overnight, and the world outside the U.S. is nearly universal in its hatred of George so the post rises while America sleeps. Then the brown shirts wake up in the morning and there is a reactionary recoil.
A key point about the right wing complaining about liberalism on Slashdot is they choose to ignore the fact there is just as much a reactionary right wing on Slashdot who are Bush/Cheney fanboys, they are just as annoying, just as off topic, and just as venomous or probably on average way more venomous, and a lot more dangerous.
"Actually, any candidate the Democrats nominated would quickly become considered "so bad no one wants to vote for him even blah blah blah".... simply because that is what the Republican Party's advertising is designed to do. John Kerry is a fine, upstanding politician and as good a choice as any other contender you could name..."
I imagine the first part is probably true, but I'm afraid, at least to me, the second part isn't. I disliked Kerry before the Republican attack dogs started working him over. He is a wealthy, prep school elitist, Yale, Skull and Bones, born to privilege, spent his whole life angling to be President. In fact, in this he is a carbon copy of George W. The big difference is George W. didn't belong in the prep school, ivy league elitist world, hated it, wasn't angling to be President until he sobered up one day, found Jesus and decided to be President though he didn't have the resume, just the family name. Kerry thrived on it which doesn't play well with most Americans who aren't ivy league, prep school elitists. JFK pulled it off because he was likable and exciting, Kerry isn't likable and he is a bore.
Kerry has spent his whole life trying to be JFK, the next generation. He flaunted his initials around Yale to this end, he no doubt went to Vietnam to rack up the same war hero record to further his political career. Only problem was Vietnam wasn't WWII. He did manage to run to the medic everytime he got scratched to rack up the purple hearts and the medals, but then he realized being a Vietnam war hero was more of a political liability than a plus so turned on it too and threw away the medals, but not really, because that was popular at the time.
Kerry has dedicated his whole life to being, doing and saying whatever he thinks he needs to, to get elected President. When he needed to be a liberal Mass. democrat to follow in Kennedy's footsteps in the Senate thats what he was. When he needed to rail against the Patriot act and the war in Iraq to snatch the Democratic nomination thats what he did. Now that he need to win over the undecided centrist voters to win the election he is a centrist and doesn't complain much about the Patriot Act or the war in Iraq. Of course thats what all good upstanding politician's do, they say and do what they think they need to to get elected. Kerry has just taken it to the point that he truly is a phony, the two faced flip flopper the Republicans say he is. I wager he doesn't even know what he really stands for, I sure can't figure it out nor can most voters, and I don't think you could have any clue what he will really do in the White House. If he was really against the Patriot Act and would work to repeal it maybe I would vote for him, but I wager he really likes the Patriot Act and he will probably work to expand it instead. If he really understood why Iraq was a mistake and wouldn't repeat the same mistakes maybe I'd vote for him but I think his judgment on it was just as bad as the rest of the herd and I can't count on him to do something just as stupid. I really get ill when I hear him sawing on squandering billions on first responders, and trying to make the ports and the homeland safe against terrorism. Wasting billions giving every fire department in the country new radios and biochem suits isn't going to make the U.S. safe from terrorism.
No, Kerry really is about as bad a choice as the Dems could have made. Of course, I'm not sure there is anyone left in that party that could have won the nomination that would have made a good President. Thats a key reason they Republicans are in power, the Democrats really are a bad party and fewer and fewer people want to vote for them, of course they've realized in the last couple of years the Republicans really are dangerous and can't be trusted with power either. It really is a pisser all around.
"What ever happened to the good old tech talk? I want the old Slashdot back, Liberal free"
I imagine you can thank people like George W., Rush and Bill O'Reilly for this. They've done something truly amazing. They took a nation that hasn't really cared about politics in 30 years and ignited passion about it in nearly every dusty corner including the geek denizens of Slashdot. Any place there is the remotest angle for political sparring people are taking it, lighting incendiary devices and running with them.
If George W. had lived up to his campaign rhetoric as a "Uniter, not a divider" and a "Compassionate Conservative" America's new right wing, if they'd played it cool, could have led a sleep walking America in to an eternity dominated by their twisted new conservativism, underpinned by the intolerance of America's ultra religious right. George, Rush and Bill were crafty successful in initially igniting the passions of only the new conservative extremists. If they'd managed to keep it that way the would have won a lasting victory with their little brown shirted army. But no they went just a little to far and one day the rest of the world woke up and realized what was happening.
George W. did his nation a great service. He woke up every radical leftist, weak kneed liberal, indifferent independent and true conservative in to forming an increasingly unified front who are waiting with unprecedented anxiety to seem if he will go down in flames in November. It warms my heart to see true conservatives hating him as much as liberals, thanks to the damage he's done to the reputation of conservatism, remember when it used to be about balanced budgets, no foreign adventuring, small government and civil liberties?
So today you have people more energized against an American President than even Richard Nixon. The end result, even here on Slashdot you can't escape massive outbreaks of vicious, polarized mud slinging.
Some may bemoan it as you just did, others like me think its fascinating and not something anyone would have imagined possible after seeing America head down a road of political indifference for 30 years as they were mesmerized by the tube.
The Democrats could have made November a slam dunk against Little George but no, just to make it a nail biting cliff hanger all the way through they nominated a candidate so bad no one wants to vote for him even when he's up against the most dangerous president the U.S. has probably had in its history. Throw in electronic voting machines, terrorist threats (real, imagined and fabricated), the Patriot act, and Jeb Bush aiming for a sequel in Florida and you have a political spectacle better than any novelist could have imagined.
It would be interesting to know if Google News has a deal with the NY times and Washington Post to get access to current content without the subscription nuisance. The New York Times and the Washington post certainly aren't hurting in their web presence through Google News. They are always at the top of major political stories, though so are some other interesting ones like Xinhua and Al Jazeera.
I love Google news for the broad sampling it gives of the internet press and opposing viewpoints you don't get if you stay in the American media cocoon.
There has been a disturbing trend on Google News to see a LOT more subscription only links showing up in their top listings. Not sure if this shows a trend where more papers are going to subscriptions on-line or if Goggle News is supporting or tolerating them more than it did.
The problem here is the only body with the ability to fix this mess across the entire nation before the November election is Congress and they've already refused. So you are stuck tryng to fix it state by state.
There is a bill with more than a hundred sponsers that would require a paper trail in November but it is being sat on by the same people who wrote HAVA which is the bill that started this mess in the first place.
Here is the statement from the bipartisan representatives and senators that have bottled it up in committee.
It contains some disturbing statements, this one in particular:
"Most importantly, the proposals requiring a voter-verified paper record would force voters with disabilities to go back to using ballots that provide neither privacy nor independence, thereby subverting a hallmark of the HAVA legislation. There must be voter confidence in the accuracy of an electronic tally. However, the current proposals would do nothing to ensure greater trust in vote tabulations"
Not sure how they can claim a recountable paper trail, "would do nothing to ensure greater trust in vote tabulations".
They also want the same agency that is apparently responsible for the current mess to sit on the problem and do nothing in time for this election:
"Questions regarding voting systems security, as well as many others, need to be examined by the entity responsible for doing so under existing law, the Election Assistance Commission, before Congress begins imposing new requirements, just months before the 2004 presidential and congressional elections, that have not been fully considered. The security of voting technology is a non-partisan issue. We encourage you to allow HAVA to be implemented as enacted and provide those who are charged with ensuring the security of voting systems the time and flexibility needed to get the job done effectively. "
As if this whole situation wasn't disturbing enough this same commission is exploring give the Bush administration, and Homeland Security power to postpone the election in the event of a terrorist attack, especially if it looks like Bush might lose in its wake the same way the Spanish government did, if it becomes apparent he may not have made America safer.
Yes open air testing was bad. Its ancient history. Learn the lesson you can never trust government or military and move on. They serve an important purpose but they have a lot of power and they will abuse it unless the people they are supposed to be working for stop them.
If you want to be concerned about something happening today and something you can do something about be very concerned the Bush administration is developing new tactical nukes for use on deep bunkers and caves. If deployed these will drop the bar for use of nuclear weapons. There is great potential the military will use them in future conflicts like Afghanistan and Iraq. Once they start using them , they might start like using then and there is great danger they will continue using them and use them in more and more situations.
If nothing else write your senators and reps and tell them why authorizing these weapons is bad.
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"Try setting up a server, running windows, IIS, Exchange, and SQL Server"
Uh, pretty simple switch to the right tools for the job, BSD or Gentoo and load it up with Snort, SNARE, Tripwire, and setup bots to monitor the logs and send alerts when something suspicious happens etc.
In the case of conventions if they need this level of "security" I think they should consider moving them out of the middle of densely populated urban areas. Sea Island for example was a lot easier to secure for the last G-8 get together. If nothing else build a convention center and hotel complex someplace that can be secured. The main reason these things are in the middle of cities are for the long gone economy boon and prestige. Thanks to the security they don't offer that any more.
Of course this would just further dispell the facade that this is a democracy but that facade is already in tatters, not much democracy around these things anyway thanks to all the storm troopers, check points and cages for protesters.
"Only a meager decade or so ago, we adored him,"
Not true. In the early days most hackers were doing open source because it was a community and sharing helped everyone. It was Gate's famous letter that was at the fore front of trying to putting an end to hacking and open source, so he could make a business out of it. He was a borderline rip off artist in his early days, with both Basic and DOS. No, I don't think Gates has ever really been liked by the hacker community.
"It's all such silly stupid bullshit. Not a year ago everyone here got hard for SCO. They sold linux. Hooray SCO! Now we hate them. In a year or so we'll hate IBM again"
SCO/Caldera was a completely different company when they were really supporting Linux. It was Ransom Love not Darl McBride calling the shots when then, he left as they transitioned to the new detestable business model. Ransom is a pretty decent guy. Corporations don't act, the people that run them do. Caldera under Ransom was a decent company, SCO under McBride is simply detestable by any measure.
Everything Microsoft has done and is doing SHOULD reflect on Gates even. Gates gave up the CEO title most probably to simplify his life but he is most assuredly still calling the shots anytime he feels like it. He owns a huge percentage of the stock so all of Microsoft's officers serve at his discretion.
The fact is companies change, as do the people that run them. If you are to dumb to judge them by their current management and behavior might I suggest you rush out and put all your money in the stock market using your obvious business acumen as a guide.
"he ran it honestly albeit aggressively"
That is simply not true. He and his company are convicted monopolists. They've engaged in illegal tactics that have driven relatively honest companies trying to innovate in to bankruptcy or various other forms of oblivion. The reason he throws these little bashes and pumps money in to the pockets of these politicians is to ensure he has political cover for any future underhanded behavior he should choose to undertake. For example he could count on the Bush administration to gut the antitrust judgement against his company.
At this point I guess I'd have to say you are either stupid or a pretty obvious troll.
"...they had special badges..."
What a concept. Lay your hands on a "special badge", by knocking a secret service agent on the head in the john if no other way and you have a blank check to slice your way through security. Might not be so hard to do if there is any truth to this guys report from the DNC in boston that caught pictures of someone drinking in a hotel bar and then driving away in a government car with a Homeland security/Secret Service placard. The guy that wrote this skewered the security in Boston for its incompetence and Homeland Security responded by shutting down the TSCM Yahoo list where he posted it, acquired the names of everyone on the list and everything ever said on on the list instead of fixing all the security holes he highlighted and saying thank you.
I'm increasingly getting the impression all these national security events are an utter joke. They appear to be a massive waste of money, often aren't providing real security, and are severely trampling people's civil liberties, for example allowing random searches of people on Boston mass transit. In Boston, where they hoped the DNC would be an economic boon, it actually hammered the local economy and put them 8 million in the hole instead of up $150 million as they'd hoped, thanks to the massive disruption the Feds created in Boston.
I think the problem is that none of the people you list have much world wide reach. The U.S. has soldiers and FBI agents in a remarkably large number of countries around the world thanks to the excuse of the "War on Terror" in particular.
The U.S. has declared its willingness to take preemptive action against anyone and any country it "suspects" of being a threat to the U.S. or its citizens.
Ashcroft has been bending the Patriot Act to give him jurisdiction over anything he considers to be a criminal act any place on the planet. There are two recent cases showing this tendency.
He's using the patriot act to charge an American civilian contractor in Afghanistan with killing an Afghan prisoner. The contractor was working for the military but you apparently can't court martial civilian contractors unless there is a declared war. They didn't want the Afghans to prosecute him though its their jurisdiction, presumably because their judicial system is a shambles and they probably didn't want any of the secrets he knows to get out. It is a scary precedent that someone can be prosecuted for murder by the U.S. though it occurred in another country.
The other case is Ashcroft is taking the power on himself to prosecute American's for sex crimes committed any place on the planet to fight sex tourism. Unfortunately, again these crimes should be prosecuted by the sovereign nations they occur in.
You may dimisss these now but they are setting a precedent that would allow Ashcroft to prosecute anyone for anything anywhere in the world he can lay his hands on you. This is basically whats happened to most of the people held in Gitmo. It appears the U.S. was offering bounties after the Taliban collapsed for Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters. Unscrupulous people rounded up anyone that looked the part, collected the bounty and innocent people ended up detained in Gitmo indefinitely, so far without review, and when the review comes it will likely be in the form of military show trials.
There is nothing more certain to accelerate the outsourcing of tech jobs than any attempt to form a tech workers union. If Microsoft saw it happening they would be sure to outsource anyone they caught getting involved in it.
A key goal of this outsourcing thing is to wipe out the last unionionized worker in the U.S. What a dilemma it is too. Unions are bad because they result in a work force that is completely spoiled, corrupt, incompetent, inefficient and overpriced. Not having unions is bad, because then corporations engage in rampant exploitation of working people as long as there is a surplus of warm bodies someplace that will take the work no matter how bad conditions or pay.
Unfortunately thanks to container shipping, the WTO and the internet the corporations are sitting in the cat bird seat.
Important note to all you young people out there just settling on a career. Work towards your MBA, join the right fraternity (Skull and Bones being the ultimate best), get queued up for the right country club, and aim for the upper ranks of a multinational. True you will end up being a complete and utter slime ball, you will probably have to lie, cheat, steal and exploit(the people that work for you) to get ahead, you will probably hate yourself and your life, but you will end up rich and thats all that matters if you aspire to the American dream.
You pretty much hit the nail on the head.
The problem with the big investments in supercomputing by the U.S. government in the last decade is that they've been time after time to put one huge white elephant system after another in one national lab after another. Some problems:
- They take a long time to build from first RFP, to contract award to first delivery till they are fully deployed. By the time they are done they are usually starting to look long of tooth and the lab starts the whole process all over again.
- I don't know what their exact work load is but WAY to much money has been spent in the U.S. on simulating nuclear bombs. That is a computing work load with NO ECONOMIC benefit. It has a security benefit only if somebody decides to use one of the bloody things someday and that wont be a good day. I wager the Bush administration is using them to design new tactical nukes to bust bunkers and caves but if the U.S. starts using those as a matter of routine that will also be a bad day. Way to many of them are going in to the NSA to spy on communication. It occassionally has security benefit but it ain't worth it when traded against the invastion of privacy of everyone.
- The classification of these systems no doubt discourages their application for anything economically useful
- The same cast of characters line up to bid on them. Its just high tech pork for IBM, HP, Intel, SGI etc. They get to build leading edge one off systems that keep architects and chip designers entertained but again they are extremely poor in economic value.
If super computing is going to survive they need to do the same thing 3D graphics did, it used to be overpriced too. They need to design single chips that have:
- Really fast vector units and good scalar units
- Huge memory bandwidth (with supporting cache and memory systems)
They need to drive up volume by making these chips as accessible as possible to auto manufacturers, oil and gas exploration, chemistry etc. When they get the volume up, reliability up, ease of use up and price down they might sustain a viable market though I'm still not sure there really is one. Someone also needs to fund applications and visualization that turn them in to breakthrough technology that leads to huge advances in a range of technology fields.
Of course this is kind of SGI's business model and they, for whatever reason, can't make it work either.
I could see the U.S. government, in concert with private industry, putting seed money in to developing:
- very fast vector units in commodity processors
- Adapting GPU's to supercomputing apps
- Very large/fast cache/memory and driving down cost so everyone benefits
- Very fast I/O and driving down cost so everyone benefits
- Breakthrough applications applying the above
But if instead:
- government just keeps putting out contracts for another teraflop machine to be squandered in a national lab simulating nuclear bombs screw the whole damn concept
- If IBM, Cray, SGI, HP etc. are just looking for government handouts to help them build toys that are cool but no one else really wants to pay for, again screw the whole concept.
The cool thing about Japan's premier supercomputing facility is its dedicated to climate and weather simulation so it has a purpose.
If you want to have a viable supercomputing industry you need to identify applications that make it worth while and figure out how to best develop hardware to meet a need. The apps most likely to matter are ones that lead to breakthroughs in their respective industries especially basic science and R&D but the U.S. is pathetic at basic research these days which is another reason there is no demand for supercomputers. They don't factor in well on the quarterly profits.
Just saying you need to keep handing out hundreds of millions of dollars to the same old crowd to keep doing what we've always done, whether it works or not, is a pretty dubious way to spend money (though so was squandering $200 billion on Iraq).
"Hardly the acts of a leader that isn't a dictator."
Having refreshed my memory on Venezuela I see they are going ahead with a Chavez recall August 15, the recall being the thing Chavez has been resisting, not elections. He was elected to a six year term in 2000, though the elections were heavily disputed, just like America's 2000 election. Much of the blame then fell on electronic voting, provide by America's own Republican backed ES&S. Not sure why they would have trusted their election to a company with potential ulterior motives but they did and it was a disaster. A case study in evoting gone wrong.
The August recall will also make extensive use of electronic voting machines this time by a little know Florida company, Smartmatic.
If Chavez is the dictator you say he is, and I'd say its 50/50, he will, no doubt, use these machine to insure victory. Of course, if he does rig the election using electronic voting he will just prove a dicator wannabe in the U.S. could do the same thing a few months later.
Oh, but wait apparently Venezuela's evoting machines will provide a printed record so I guess we would have to say their elections have a slightly better chance of being on the up and up than our own. Odd, that in a head to head trustworthiness contest between Chavez and his voting machines and the Bush family and their voting machines I would say Chavez wins.
"Another key reason the South fell was the continued support the North got from the USSR after the US gave up on supporting the South..."
Forgot to answer this one. Well yes the US could have kept an occupation army in the South forever and propped up one corrupt dictator after another. It would have cost another fortune in gold and blood. If the U.S. actually wanted to WIN and get out the South Vietnamese needed to find a popular, independent and strong government. A key problem with the U.S. in Vietnam is the U.S. backed the French when they were propping up their failing colonial empire. The French colonial occupation of Vietnam was thouroughly brutal and one in a string of occupiers of Vietnam. The Vietnamese people mostly wanted a nationalist government that would throw out foreign occupiers whoever they were. When the French finally gave up, unfortunately the U.S. picked up their mantle and started out being hated by all the Vietnamese who hated the French.
For better or worse Ho Chi Minh in the North and the Viet Cong were the only nationalist alternative and it was the basis for their popular support. They were nationalist first and communist second mostly to get the backing of the Soviet Union and China. Again that government has mellowed some but its the same one that won in the 70's and the U.S. has no problem doing business with them today, as long as they allow profit taking.
Its a lesson the U.S. should have learned for Iraq and Afghanistan. Unless those countries find popular, independent and sovereign governments they will continue to be a screwed up mess and the U.S. will be stuck having its sons and daughters stationed there propping up puppet governments and getting killed and wounded in a futile effort for basically ever.
Another key point about your rant on Marxism and the U.S.S.R is that thanks in part to Gorbechev, Yeltsin and Russia's Afghanistan vets the U.S.S.R is gone and Russia isn't adventuring at anything resembling the same scale as the U.S.S.R. The U.S. is, on the other hand, still manipulating the world with abandon and on a scale that rivaled anything in the 20th century. There is now no power to keep the U.S. in check when it abuses its power as it did in Iraq.
This is interesting. Yesterday I was called by a computerized phone system, ITC or IDC or some such acronym, doing a 1 minute presidential poll. Press 1 if you plan to vote for Bush, 2 for Kerry. and of course no #3 for Nadar. I hate Kerry but of the two choices he was the worst of the two evils. Then it asks question 2, are you voting for Kerry 1, because you like him or 2, you don't like Bush. I press 2.
Now that I think about it a political party or government in power can do a pretty good job of cataloging everyone by which side of the fence they are on just by computerized polling, the only people being safe are those who refused to be polled.
Little mistake on my part. Got my CIA malevolence code words mixed up. MK Ultra was its program to abuse test subjects with LSD.
The project to overthrow Iran's very popular Mossadeq and replace him with corrupt dictator, the Shah, was TPAJAX.
"We prefer to arrest people AFTER THEY HAVE COMMITTED A CRIME. I know, it's all new fangled, and hard to wrap your head around, but it is the way we do things 'round here. Y'all got that"
I must of missed something. Have they arrested anyone in the White House for exposing the identity of a CIA agent. That was a felony, there are a few people in the White House who know who did it and in fact no on has been arrested "AFTER THEY COMMITTED A CRIME", a felony punishable by I think 10 years in the federal pen.
Sorry but in this country we only arrest some people who commit crimes, others get off scot free especially if they have money or connections. We often frame people for crimes they didn't commit, especially if they are poor minorities, for example the governor of Illinois had to take everyone off death row after it became apparent Illinois police and DA's were time after time framing poor minorities for crimes they didn't commit and the frames were falling apart thanks to DNA testing.
All in all the U.S. isn't the bastion of perfection in "Freedom and Deomcracy" you seem to think it is.
The other obvious problem with relying on local police to enforce election law is its not uncommon for the police to be involved in the election rigging. Mayor's and elected county sherrifs have in the past frequently been involved in vote rigging. There were accusations police in Florida were obstructing access to polls in poor black areas in the 2000 elections.
Another tangential example, a number of people in Afghanistan have been killed recently because they were carrying papers showing they had registered to vote. The remnants of the Taliban and local war lords who are opposed to the elections are killing people for registering. All in all, voters carrying around slips of paper is not a good idea. I see today Doctors Without Borders has decided Afghanistan is so dangerous today they are pulling out after 24 years. Kind of undercuts the Bush administration of what a showcase of success the new Afghanistan is.
"I made my point without having to list the current leaders of China. And the Democrats don't bad mouth them either - one of the great mysteries of US policy..."
... excepting the Bush family liked Kuwait's dictator...err... emir better and when Saddam invaded Kuwait they had to pick one oil field over another. Besides which its a lot better now that the U.S. has control of Iraq's oil through a puppet government that takes orders better than Saddam did.
Actually you really didn't. China wasn't in the UN during most of Mao's reign. He was on his last legs when they were admitted.
I'm not a Democrat or saying they are any different. There are rich Dems making a buck in China too.
"...they would have made the deal with Saddam"
"...but Hitler was also democratically elected.'"
Well so was George Bush, sort of but not really. Chavez had been facing a U.S. backed revolt pretty much since Bush came to office. Its not a very conducive environment to democracy in any form. I'll agree with you Chavez has issues if you agree the Bush administration has culpability in the mess that is Venezuela.
"Gee, if we're going to keep putting on the tinfoil hat"
Not sure why the overthrow of the Iranian governmen t by the CIA is a tinfoil hat issue. MK Ultra is the code name for the project its pretty well documented, do a google search.
Not sure why you wandered off in to your rant on the Soviet Union and Russia. It was kind of tangential to the topic here.
Leftie had a good list. He did leave out a string of corrupt dictators the U.S. proped up in South Vietnam during the war. A key reason South Vietnam fell was because the governments the U.S. was propping up were so corrupt and so unpopular they served to fuel the Viet Cong's success.
As for Mao its noteworthy that he is dead. But his party still runs China, but for some reason you didn't list Jiang Zemin or Wen Jiabao. They've moderated since Mao but they are still basically the same party and a repressive dictatorship for all practical purposes. The only thing thats changed is they now allow private ownership of capital and a lot of rich American business men and multinationals are making a pretty penny there so right wingers don't bad mouth them anymore.
I think Muammar is the best friends of the Bush administration now, since he turned over his WMD's, WMD's I wager he bought some just so he could turn them over and get the sanctions lifted. They like him because they can claim him as proof their "get tough" policy in Iraq worked though that is a dubious claim. I'm pretty sure Cheney/Halliburton and the rest of the U.S. oil and gas industry are chomping at the bit to do business with Muammar and get back in to his oil fields. Again as long as there is money to be made the U.S. LOVES dictators.
Hugo Chavez is democratically elected. He is a socialist and the Republican's hate him with a passion, he hates them too, but he was still elected. The Bush administration has tried to overthrow him at least once, and if they succeed that would probably lead to a dictatorship, but Venezuala isn't under one now.
Khomeini, well that one is interesting. He came to power because the U.S. toppled the elected government of Iran when they nationalized their oil fields taking control of them from their former colonial masters the British, who were taking the lions share of the profits. The U.S. installed the Shah of Iran who was a brutal repressive dictator. The Iranians turned to Khomeni because they hated the Shah more, and hate the U.S. to this day for inflicting him on them.
It appears this may in fact be a power grab by universities in Texas and New Mexico to wrest control of the labs from that liberal whacko Univertisty of California. Have to wonder if the Texas White House might like this idea and.
You also have to wonder if the security problem is fabricated or blown out of proportion to justify the move. This contract is probably a huge financial and prestige boon to the university and state that gets it.
I don't think it really matters what the target of this investigation did or didn't do, except the key fact that it had nothing to do with terrorism. They key point here is it shows how much the Patriot act broadened the DOJ's powers in areas that have NOTHING to do with preventing terrorism.
On a tangent here is an interesting article on Homeland Security trying to enforce security through obscurity in the physical world and the virtual world too. Someone walked around the DNC and took photos of all the weaknesses in the security in Boston and posted it on a list on Yahoo. Homeland security shut down the list and is collecting the names of everyone on the list and everything said. Should give you pause before joining any list in these dangerous times. These actions are designed to silence everyone who is critical of the government.
Welcome to the slippery slope. Watch that first step.
"how much expertise would be needed to catch that?"
Uh, not much. If the weapons aren't hitting the mark on the firing range they probably wouldn't get deployed until they are fixed.
This is probably a poor example. The danger isn't in OSS that is designed to fail. If it doesn't work it wouldn't get used. The danger is an obscure security hole that would allow infiltration.
The key point where this guys whole argument falls apart is that proprietary software isn't any better. I'm confident Microsoft employs a small army of foreigners, and I'm not sure they would be any more reliable than OSS developers and their code gets a lot less scrutiny, and absolutely none if you are a customer getting binaries. Most big companies are putting R&D centers in India and China. How do they assure us the people they are hiring don't have ulterior motives.
If you want to develop software critical to national security you have to develop it in a classified lab with cleared employees. Oh but wait, in spite of all the scrutiny people with get security clearances get, they also turn out to be foreign agents and do great damage. Los Alamos doesn't exactly have a stellar security record and those people get more scrutiny than anyone. The Navy's comsec and has been massively compromised in the past.
I'd argue the opposite case from this guy. If you want secure software the best approach is to have as many people possible, both OSS and governemnt, scrutinize the source. If you find a project that is intentionally or negligently checking in compromised code black list them or give them extra scrutiny. The NSA's secure linux effort is an example of the government making sure OSS is secure and its way more likely to be that, than anything Microsoft or Green Hills is going to give them.
On a tangent here is an interesting article on Homeland Security trying to enforce security through obscurity in the physical world. Someone walked around the DNC and took photos of all the weaknesses in their security in Boston and posted it on a list on Yahoo. Homeland security shut down the list and is collecting the names of everyone on the list and everything said. Should give you pause before joining any list in these interesting times.
Its always good to have people offer alternatives and try new things. There is no reason things like alternative file browsers couldn't be deployed on the same foundation. It would be way more productive than deploying two completely different desktops to offer alternatives.
It is just plain bad to have two completely disconnected desktops.
A. It will permanently inhibit application development and support. The Linux desktop market is already small. When a GUI application developer is forced to pick between two desktops they end up with an even smaller target audience which reduces the incentive to sink the time or money in the application's development.
B. There is a massive duplication of effort that drains open source of its strength, the huge pool of manpower. On the desktop Linux has two small pools, both doing all the same things differently.
C. It creates frustration for users and companies considering Linux deployments because they are immediately faced with a difficult choice.
Freedesktop.org and wxWidgets try to bridge the gap but as an application developer you still pick one or the other desktops and GUI toolkits to support, well, and you either write off everyone on the the other desktop or force them to put up with bad integration and memory bloat from using two disconnected sets of libraries.
I don't think you have to look much further than OSX to see a single desktop that is exceptionally well integrated and thought out, and it does just fine with out competing camps. Maybe some people wont like it or wont like parts of it but overall people love it, and the thing they love the most is everything works consistently and together. That is what a desktop is supposed to do. The Linux desktop experience is a complete mess by comparison unless you crawl in to one desktop application set and completely ignore the rest.
To put it another way Microsoft and Apple love the Linux desktop wars, because they know as long as they continue Linux will be a weak competitor for them on the desktop.
"Dan Rather...very left and have not changed"
That wasn't what I saw for Dan at least. He appeared to move dramatically to the right after 9/11. I don't watch his new much but have seen him on Larry King a number of times and he doesn't sound left at all any more. Jennings is Canadian, America is so far to the right most Canadians are going to be left by comparison.
"portray Clinton's lies under oath as no big deal. It was."
After eight years of never ending Clinton hounding at great expense to the tax payers, lying about sex really wasn't a big deal. The insanity was the vast sums spent and trying to impeach him over it. It didn't get any one killed, it didn't hurt anyone besides Monica and Clinton's family. The disconnects in the truth on the war in Iraq were far more grave than any lie Clinton told, they are getting a lot of brave Americans killed for no particularly good reason.
Europeans were baffled by why the Republican's were so obsessed about a sexual liason between consenting adults. The only reason it turned in to a national embarrassment was thanks to Starr and the Republican's publishing every gory detail so everyone, including children, had to read about sexual intimacies that should have never been made public. It was assassination with words instead of a weapon. If they did it today the FCC would have to fine every network that ran the story because it was as tawdry as anything Howard Stern does.
Contrast it with the Bush administration who outed a CIA agent to extract revenge on Joe Wilson. George W.'s dad said it was one of the most reprehensible of crimes years ago. To date no one has been charged and the White House is obviously in no hurry to find the culprit and punish them.
You have a very double standard on what constitutes a big deal.
"The reason everyone says Fox is so right is that they come closest to the middle, which seems right compared to the others. Journalists are supposed to report the facts so we can draw our own conclusions. They don't."
No, you are just so far to the right Fox seems like the middle to you. We may as well call it a draw, the middle depends on how each individuals scale is calibrated.
That simply hasn't been true since 9/11 at least. Every one of the major networks was cheering the Bush administration on as they rode across the sands of Iraq sitting in U.S. armor. None of them engaged in the mildest scrutiny of why it was happening or said anything that reflected badly on the White House until very recently when it started to go bad, and it became obvious there was a disconnect in truthfullness somewhere. None of the networks had anything bad to say about the Patriot Act or its addendum snuck through Congress in the middle of the night, and they still really don't give it and Ashcroft the scrutiny and criticism they deserve.
There may have been a liberal bias in the media before 9/11 but it was erased under the massive force of flag waiving and patriotism in its wake. They simply had to follow the trend or lose ratings, for example CNN losing number 1 to Fox. So, they all swung to center or right of center but the right wingers still keep harping they are still to the left to see if they can keep pushing them even further to the right.
The one person I can think of you might still brand as left of center is Christian Amanpour but its important to note she works most of the time for CNN international and she is a lot more in tune with Europe on the left/right scale. Europeans and the rest of the world must be aghast at how far to the right American politics and media have swung, even more so when someone like you tries to claim they still have a liberal bias.
It seems to be trend that if you post something on Slashdot that slams George W. late in the evening it shoots up to 4 or 5 overnight like this did and then craters to overrated and flamebait in the morning.
My conjecture is the rest of the Slashdot world is modding overnight, and the world outside the U.S. is nearly universal in its hatred of George so the post rises while America sleeps. Then the brown shirts wake up in the morning and there is a reactionary recoil.
A key point about the right wing complaining about liberalism on Slashdot is they choose to ignore the fact there is just as much a reactionary right wing on Slashdot who are Bush/Cheney fanboys, they are just as annoying, just as off topic, and just as venomous or probably on average way more venomous, and a lot more dangerous.
"Actually, any candidate the Democrats nominated would quickly become considered "so bad no one wants to vote for him even blah blah blah".... simply because that is what the Republican Party's advertising is designed to do. John Kerry is a fine, upstanding politician and as good a choice as any other contender you could name..."
I imagine the first part is probably true, but I'm afraid, at least to me, the second part isn't. I disliked Kerry before the Republican attack dogs started working him over. He is a wealthy, prep school elitist, Yale, Skull and Bones, born to privilege, spent his whole life angling to be President. In fact, in this he is a carbon copy of George W. The big difference is George W. didn't belong in the prep school, ivy league elitist world, hated it, wasn't angling to be President until he sobered up one day, found Jesus and decided to be President though he didn't have the resume, just the family name. Kerry thrived on it which doesn't play well with most Americans who aren't ivy league, prep school elitists. JFK pulled it off because he was likable and exciting, Kerry isn't likable and he is a bore.
Kerry has spent his whole life trying to be JFK, the next generation. He flaunted his initials around Yale to this end, he no doubt went to Vietnam to rack up the same war hero record to further his political career. Only problem was Vietnam wasn't WWII. He did manage to run to the medic everytime he got scratched to rack up the purple hearts and the medals, but then he realized being a Vietnam war hero was more of a political liability than a plus so turned on it too and threw away the medals, but not really, because that was popular at the time.
Kerry has dedicated his whole life to being, doing and saying whatever he thinks he needs to, to get elected President. When he needed to be a liberal Mass. democrat to follow in Kennedy's footsteps in the Senate thats what he was. When he needed to rail against the Patriot act and the war in Iraq to snatch the Democratic nomination thats what he did. Now that he need to win over the undecided centrist voters to win the election he is a centrist and doesn't complain much about the Patriot Act or the war in Iraq. Of course thats what all good upstanding politician's do, they say and do what they think they need to to get elected. Kerry has just taken it to the point that he truly is a phony, the two faced flip flopper the Republicans say he is. I wager he doesn't even know what he really stands for, I sure can't figure it out nor can most voters, and I don't think you could have any clue what he will really do in the White House. If he was really against the Patriot Act and would work to repeal it maybe I would vote for him, but I wager he really likes the Patriot Act and he will probably work to expand it instead. If he really understood why Iraq was a mistake and wouldn't repeat the same mistakes maybe I'd vote for him but I think his judgment on it was just as bad as the rest of the herd and I can't count on him to do something just as stupid. I really get ill when I hear him sawing on squandering billions on first responders, and trying to make the ports and the homeland safe against terrorism. Wasting billions giving every fire department in the country new radios and biochem suits isn't going to make the U.S. safe from terrorism.
No, Kerry really is about as bad a choice as the Dems could have made. Of course, I'm not sure there is anyone left in that party that could have won the nomination that would have made a good President. Thats a key reason they Republicans are in power, the Democrats really are a bad party and fewer and fewer people want to vote for them, of course they've realized in the last couple of years the Republicans really are dangerous and can't be trusted with power either. It really is a pisser all around.
"What ever happened to the good old tech talk? I want the old Slashdot back, Liberal free"
I imagine you can thank people like George W., Rush and Bill O'Reilly for this. They've done something truly amazing. They took a nation that hasn't really cared about politics in 30 years and ignited passion about it in nearly every dusty corner including the geek denizens of Slashdot. Any place there is the remotest angle for political sparring people are taking it, lighting incendiary devices and running with them.
If George W. had lived up to his campaign rhetoric as a "Uniter, not a divider" and a "Compassionate Conservative" America's new right wing, if they'd played it cool, could have led a sleep walking America in to an eternity dominated by their twisted new conservativism, underpinned by the intolerance of America's ultra religious right. George, Rush and Bill were crafty successful in initially igniting the passions of only the new conservative extremists. If they'd managed to keep it that way the would have won a lasting victory with their little brown shirted army. But no they went just a little to far and one day the rest of the world woke up and realized what was happening.
George W. did his nation a great service. He woke up every radical leftist, weak kneed liberal, indifferent independent and true conservative in to forming an increasingly unified front who are waiting with unprecedented anxiety to seem if he will go down in flames in November. It warms my heart to see true conservatives hating him as much as liberals, thanks to the damage he's done to the reputation of conservatism, remember when it used to be about balanced budgets, no foreign adventuring, small government and civil liberties?
So today you have people more energized against an American President than even Richard Nixon. The end result, even here on Slashdot you can't escape massive outbreaks of vicious, polarized mud slinging.
Some may bemoan it as you just did, others like me think its fascinating and not something anyone would have imagined possible after seeing America head down a road of political indifference for 30 years as they were mesmerized by the tube.
The Democrats could have made November a slam dunk against Little George but no, just to make it a nail biting cliff hanger all the way through they nominated a candidate so bad no one wants to vote for him even when he's up against the most dangerous president the U.S. has probably had in its history. Throw in electronic voting machines, terrorist threats (real, imagined and fabricated), the Patriot act, and Jeb Bush aiming for a sequel in Florida and you have a political spectacle better than any novelist could have imagined.
It would be interesting to know if Google News has a deal with the NY times and Washington Post to get access to current content without the subscription nuisance. The New York Times and the Washington post certainly aren't hurting in their web presence through Google News. They are always at the top of major political stories, though so are some other interesting ones like Xinhua and Al Jazeera.
I love Google news for the broad sampling it gives of the internet press and opposing viewpoints you don't get if you stay in the American media cocoon.
There has been a disturbing trend on Google News to see a LOT more subscription only links showing up in their top listings. Not sure if this shows a trend where more papers are going to subscriptions on-line or if Goggle News is supporting or tolerating them more than it did.
The problem here is the only body with the ability to fix this mess across the entire nation before the November election is Congress and they've already refused. So you are stuck tryng to fix it state by state.
There is a bill with more than a hundred sponsers that would require a paper trail in November but it is being sat on by the same people who wrote HAVA which is the bill that started this mess in the first place.
Here is the statement from the bipartisan representatives and senators that have bottled it up in committee.
It contains some disturbing statements, this one in particular:
"Most importantly, the proposals requiring a voter-verified paper record would force voters with disabilities to go back to using ballots that provide neither privacy nor independence, thereby subverting a hallmark of the HAVA legislation. There must be voter confidence in the accuracy of an electronic tally. However, the current proposals would do nothing to ensure greater trust in vote tabulations"
Not sure how they can claim a recountable paper trail, "would do nothing to ensure greater trust in vote tabulations".
They also want the same agency that is apparently responsible for the current mess to sit on the problem and do nothing in time for this election:
"Questions regarding voting systems security, as well as many others, need to be examined by the entity responsible for doing so under existing law, the Election Assistance Commission, before Congress begins imposing new requirements, just months before the 2004 presidential and congressional elections, that have not been fully considered. The security of voting technology is a non-partisan issue. We encourage you to allow HAVA to be implemented as enacted and provide those who are charged with ensuring the security of voting systems the time and flexibility needed to get the job done effectively. "
As if this whole situation wasn't disturbing enough this same commission is exploring give the Bush administration, and Homeland Security power to postpone the election in the event of a terrorist attack, especially if it looks like Bush might lose in its wake the same way the Spanish government did, if it becomes apparent he may not have made America safer.
Yes open air testing was bad. Its ancient history. Learn the lesson you can never trust government or military and move on. They serve an important purpose but they have a lot of power and they will abuse it unless the people they are supposed to be working for stop them.
If you want to be concerned about something happening today and something you can do something about be very concerned the Bush administration is developing new tactical nukes for use on deep bunkers and caves. If deployed these will drop the bar for use of nuclear weapons. There is great potential the military will use them in future conflicts like Afghanistan and Iraq. Once they start using them , they might start like using then and there is great danger they will continue using them and use them in more and more situations.
If nothing else write your senators and reps and tell them why authorizing these weapons is bad.