This doesn't have anything to do with "censorship". The guy was talking out his ass again and made a statement that could get him dragged into court. I'm surprised it actually aired on Larry King. You can bet your last nickel, though, the it got edited out based on legal advice. I can see it now:
Google Exec: Hey Bill, do you have any reason to think that's true? You know we'll go to the mat for you if you have good information, but you know how lawyers are.
Maher: My cab driver's sister's boyfriend said some Republican guy who's name starts with "M" is gay.
... for RIM if they hadn't spent a decade using litigation to force everyone else out of the market. Personally, in these kinds of situations you have to go with Kissinger's comment on the Iran-Iraq war - "It's too bad they can't [all] lose."
In order:
Yes they do. No he didn't. No he didn't. Yes it did. Half right. Yes he was. Yes he did. Yes it did. Yes it is. No, we have much more. It's not pretending if it's true.
Hey, you're almost batting 000.
Maybe it's predictable because you don't have a satisfactory answer. You can't have it both ways. Either Saddam had a nuclear program, or he didn't. You lefties have been whining "Bush lied" for three years now. Will you at least admit you were wrong? Come on, say it! "We... were... wrong. Saddam did have a nuclear program. He did attempt to buy yellowcake. He was planning to start processing uranium just as soon as the sanctions regime finished crumbling."
See, it's not that hard. Admitting you were wrong is the first step to fixing the problem.
By the way, any competent nuclear engineer can build a nuclear bomb if he has the right materials. The trick is getting your uranium enriched enough to go critical. Releasing these documents doesn't change the proliferation situation at all. In fact, when I was a kid I once checked out a library book titled "How to build a nuclear bomb". Granted, it was the easier "gun" method, but supposedly it was a working design. They built the first one sixty years ago, for God's sake! How much technology from 1945 do you think isn't on the net?
Did't these scientists pay attention when they were kids?
Tyrell: The facts of life. To make an alteration in the evolvment of an organic life system is fatal. A coding sequence cannot be revised once it's been established.
Roy: Why not?
Tyrell: Because by the second day of incubation, any cells that have undergone reversion mutations give rise to revertant colonies like rats leaving a sinking ship. Then the ship sinks.
Roy: What about EMS recombination.
Tyrell: We've already tried it. Ethyl methane sulfonate as an alkylating agent a potent mutagen It created a virus so lethal the subject was dead before he left the table.
Roy: Then a repressive protein that blocks the operating cells.
Tyrell: Wouldn't obstruct replication, but it does give rise to an error in replication so that the newly formed DNA strand carries the mutation and you've got a virus again. But, uh, this-- all of this is academic. You were made as well as we could make you.
One of the problems which has dogged airships from day 1 is the inability to replace the weight of burned fuel. There's a couple ways you can deal with this problem, but none of them are ideal. Modern blimps and airships are actually heavier than air, relying on lift from engine pods to get the airship in the air. As they burn fuel they get lighter, but they're never actually "lighter than air". Early airships were much too large for this strategy especially since engine technology was far less advanced.
The most successful airship in history, the Graf Zeppelin, used a gas called Blau Gas to power its engines. Blau Gas is just a mixture of propane and hydrogen that weighs the same as air, so when you burn it and the gas volume is replaced by air of the same weight you don't have any buoyancy problems. Graf Zeppelin used hydrogen, which is relatively cheap, for its lifting gas. If it became too light they could vent enough hydrogen to restore neutral buoyancy.
But this scheme wasn't very efficient, from an engineering perspective. Every cubic meter of fuel was a cubic meter that couldn't be used for lift. Also, as they designed the Hindenburg they were concerned about safety, so they decided the Hindenburg would be filled with helium instead of hydrogen. Since heliem is about 10% less efficient as a lifting gas, Zeppelin engineers decided they just couldn't live with Blau Gas. Also, Blau Gas has the same safety drawbacks as hydrogen. Helium is much more expensive than hydrogen, so if the company was to be profitable there was no way they could just vent helium when the ship was too light. So if they were to use diesel fuel exclusively in the Hindenburg, they needed a way to add weight to the airship in flight.
The solution was to remove water from the air and use it as ballast to replace the now-missing diesel fuel. The system they designed used a silica gel, the same stuff that comes in a little packet labeled "DO NOT EAT" when you buy a pair of shoes. Ambient air was blown over the gel, which is highly water absorbent. The gel was then heated using waste engine heat to produce water vapor, which was collected in a condenser. Eventually they decided to use the diesel exhaust (which is apparently very humid) instead of ambient air. This was 70 years ago.
That's true. As long as it's all for internal company use, OSS is really no different than code written by an employee that has since move on. Except it doesn't cost anything.
But if the oil companies charge californians more than what they charge elsewhere in the US, well its pretty obvious whats going on.
Uh, yeah, it is obvious when you realize oil companies have to produce special formulations for California because of clean-air restrictions. I still think those restrictions are a good idea, but of course we're gonna end up paying more at the pump. That and the state won't allow any new refineries, so there's an artificial bottleneck. You realize all California's imported oil comes by way of tankers and is refined in California, right?
By the way, the profit in the retail gas business all comes from the mini-mart, while the gas is break-even or a loss. I've known two gas station owners. They both made a lot of money, and both of them lost money on gas. So the retail gas price in CA is really quite a bit lower than it should be, except people are willing to drive around to pay one cent/gallon less on gas and fifty cents more on everything else they buy. Go figure.
This component crap has been an absolute disaster everywhere I've seen it tried, especially when you go with more than one vendor. Most applications are tied to an operating system version, language version, and database version(which is, in itself, tied to an OS and version).
We've been trying to maintain a product developed in-house over the last decade or so. Wouldn't it make sense to buy a GUI toolkit, they thought, so we can concentrate on our core competency? Sure, except we had to stay on Solaris 8 when everybody else was using Solaris 9, and then 10. The company that provided the toolkit got sold a couple of times, and is now part of some consulting outfit you've never heard of. They have two guys in Bombay trying to port it to newer platform versions, but they don't really test it, so we've had to take on that additional burden. Without the source code. Sometimes they're busy working on other stuff, so they don't get to our complaints for weeks. We're terrified they'll go out of business before we're able to do a rewrite.
Of course, Oracle stopped concentrating on the Solaris 8 drivers, so when we called for support all we ever heard was "upgrade to Solaris x and install the newest version". Would that solve the problem? Who knows? We can't do it anyway because of the GUI toolkit.
Now we want to move that product to Linux, but the GUI tool in question doesn't work on Linux at all. They're trying to get it working on RHEL 3, while we've just moved our other tools to RHEL 4.
You wan't to make a brittle tool and take the blame when the enterprise can't upgrade the desktop OS because a key component vendor just went out of business? By all means, knock yourself out. You can commiserate with one of our groups that's still running Java 1.1 because a piece they bought from a now-bankrupt vendor won't run on a later version. The more third party vendors you have, the worse it gets, too. You can get circular dependencies that prevent you from upgrading anything without a total rewrite.
Me? I'm not writing everything myself, but I use OSS whenever I can. After the number of times we've been burned in recent years, if you work for my company you'd better have a damn good reason to bring in third-party vendors. We're pretty much down to Java and Oracle as the only easy sells for new projects.
Yeah. But not only that - I've always considered scope creep to be a management failure. It's caused by a boss that's afraid to tell his customers "The feature list for the first release is closed. We'll put that in a later version." If the scope is creeping too much it's time to cancel the manager, not the project.
The Canadian researcher, Jeyanthi Hall, related the prints to MAC addresses and got a positive ID for devices connecting to a Wi-Fi network, claiming 95% success with no false positives.
I'm sure it works great in her lab, but here in the real world...
I work for Big Cellphone Company. We tried the same scheme in the mid '90s when analog phone cloning was all the rage (remember when it used to cost $1.50/minute? Ahhhhh, the good old days). It works, kind of.
The problem is you're not trying to decide whether or not to retry a packet, or what the transmit power should be. You're trying to decide whether or not to provide service, so you really can't afford to be wrong. We were never really able to get an acceptable reliablility in the wild.
Believe me, we had a huge incentive to roll this out to our network. The marginal bandwidth costs from fraud didn't hurt much, but when someone made a call to, say, Saudi Arabia on a cloned phone we got stuck with all the fees on the other end. A single cloning ring could cost millions, so Big Cellphone Company was willing to break the bank to get this to work.
Eventually we rolled out digital service, so the project got shut down. Cloning fraud was one of the reasons we were willing to give you a free phone if you switched over to digital. Well, that and the long-term contract.
Yeah, that was my reaction.
Microsoft is one of the few companies that has so much money they literally don't know what to do with it. Normally when you have extra cash you buy other businesses, but in Microsoft's case they can't really do that for anti-trust reasons.
That's why their research is so "bloated", and why they're willing to sink so much money into markets with a long-long-term payoff (like MSN and xbox). The only other option is to give money to the shareholders in stock buybacks and dividends, something they've already done pretty liberally.
So why in the world would they make the problem even worse by borrowing more money?
I don't see why not. We expect other countries to extraditetheircitizens for breaking US laws. It seems only fair. While in most cases they've broken the law in both countries, that's not always true.
Yes, two billion dollars would fund a good week or two attack and kill a whole lot of the people that keep fire rockets at them. Oh, wait, they're doing that now, albeit for different reasons. Good for them.
First of all, the rockets aren't what prompted the current military action. They went in because the Palestinians kidnapped one of their soldiers (and killed a few more). If it was just rockets they wouldn't have done it - they're quite good at killing people setting up rockets with helicopters, so they don't need to risk ground troops to do it.
Secondly, if they could use that two billion dollars to stop one suicide bomber from blowing up a falafel stand or a bus they would save more people than the anti-missile system. Two billion would probably stop a lot of suicide bombers.
The only way the anti-missle system makes sense is if the Palestinians start building (or buying) more accurate rockets, as well as rockets with a longer range. There's some evidence this may be the case. But even then it would probably make more sense to just go in with those big D9s and turn the entire Gaza strip into a parking lot. I just don't see the anti-missile system ever being worth the money.
Your analogy is faulty. Everybody faces risks as they live their lives. When you allocate money to save lives it's rational to allocate it where it does the most good. While this kind of thing might seem reasonable in isolation, it isn't - the money they spend on missile defense is money that could have been better spent dealing with larger threats.
The individuals blowing themselves up are not crazy, they are desperate. And while I of course don't condone it, I think we ought to at least attempt to understand why. I don't think its because they 'hate freedom'.
I don't know. Anybody who thinks God will reward him with eternal paradise for killing infidels is crazy, in my book. It makes no difference they've been fashioned into weapons by rich, cynical people far away - they're still dangerous. I think it's the excess of petrodollars that causes this problem more than anything else.
The development of these defense weapons is not an imperative. Police don't patrol down my street in APCs, even though they exist. If we allow these sorts of things to be considered necessity, it is one more step towards culture-wide FUD that leads to internal instability.
I tend to agree with you there. In my mind this isn't much different than the National Guard troops that patrolled airports after 9/11 (with empty magazines, as it turns out). Showy but of questionable value. For the money it would take to construct a system like this we could beef up our border and port security quite a bit, something that would do far more to protect us than a shiney new anti-missile system.
I was merely pointing out we were attacked over and over before we invaded anybody. What would make you think the attacks would stop if we pulled our troops out of the Middle East?
My point is this: Our foreign policy will never make everyone happy. Regardless of what we do or don't do in the world we're going to have to take these kinds of measures. It's just a sign of the times, having more to do with technology and the individual's increased capacity for mahem than anything else.
I've known about this program for years. They spent quite a bit of time testing it against Katusha rockets, mortars, and artillery shells at White Sands missile range. It works. Of course it won't shoot down ballistic missiles - they're too large and it doesn't have the range.
As to why rockets keep landing on Israel, well, consider how many people have been killed by all those unguided Kassam rockets. According to Wikipedia, thirteen people have been killed by Palestinian rocketeers after hundreds of tries. That's far less than one suicide bomber can do in a pizza joint. In the great scheme of things they're more of an annoyance than a danger - they're a psychological weapon. There's probably a hundred ways Israel can spend two billion dollars that will save more than thirteen lives over four years.
I really think it is a stretch for a laser to stick in an airport control tower to actually shoot down a missile by zapping it with the laser
I don't see why you think this is a stretch. This kind of system has already been tested against mortar rounds and Katyushas, and it seems to work. With the right sensors there's no reason this can't be done.
Shoulder-launched AAMs are relatively cheap and plentiful. They've already busted rings of terrorist wannabes trying to buy a few and use them to bring down commercial airlines. Nobody knows how effective these kind of weapons are against large passenger jets, but I sure wouldn't want to find out first-hand.
I think this is a bigger threat than terrorists boarding an airplane - the easiest way to get yourself torn to pieces by 100 strangers is to stand up on a US ariliner and say "this is a hijacking". 9/11 would never have been so costly if the passengers weren't following outdated "rules of engagement".
Now, having said that, I will say I doubt this kind of system would be more cost effective than beefing up our border and port security.
I'm not sure if you've been reading my posts or not, which makes your last question pretty ironic.
Yeah, but you have to admit. Republicans don't know their heads from their asses. I still find the first post amazing, complaining about too much regulation, and then blaming the problem on the regulators. It certainly exemplifies the Republican mindset, desperately grasping for straws to build an argument with no consistency.
Yes, there's too much regulation. California's phoney "deregulation" wasn't deregulation at all, as I've pointed out, it was just a change from one set of regulations to a worse set of regulations. What does that have to do with grasping at straws? I think it's pretty obvious to anyone with a passing understanding in economics.
And what's amazing about this, is I'm a libertarian and I don't much like regulation as I've found it serves a broader purpose of preventing competition rather than protecting rights. But that's not what the guy complained about, did he?
So what you're saying is you do support regulation, even though it goes against your principles, and then you give a (correct) reason why you shouldn't, and then you include an irrelevant point as if it had some bearing. Is your brain pretzel-shaped? Because your logic certainly is.
You complain about California politics, but refuse to do anything about it. You refuse to move, preferring instead to whine endlessly on the Internet about this horrific Socialism, which apparently has provided you with a state that you prefer living in instead of say Alabama. You defend the corrupt Republican machine because you think the Democratic machine is more corrupt.(yet strangely can provide no evidence to substantiate this) You support initiatives that simply make the situation worse, because you perceive that they may help Republicans, and then are depressed when you find out they don't and just make things worse.
What would you have me do to fix things, start an armed rebellion? The most I can reasonably do is vote and point out the substandard nature of California's political class to other voters. If that's whining, well, it sure does seem similar to your point about Duke Cunningham, doesn't it?
The reason I prefer to live in California has nothing to do with state government, I assure you. I'm here because my family is here and my job is here. At some point taxes will drive my employer to another state (or country) and I'll have some decisions to make, but for right now a good job and family wins out over better state government. If I hit the powerball lottery (well, if I played), I would move to Texas and take my whole extended family with me.
I don't see anywhere that I've supported initiatives that will make the situation worse. True deregulation will fix the energy market in CA as long as it's phased in properly. I don't see how that helps or hurts Republicans, since the Democrats control every lever of power in this state except the governor's weak "bully pulpit". I don't see why you think deregulation would make things worse, especially since I pointed out an example of its proper implementation.
I didn't say the national Democrats were more corrupt, but I don't think it's going out on a limb to say they're as corrupt as the national Republican Party. That was my point about William Jefferson and Harry Ried. I can certainly point out an instance of Democratic corruption for every instance of Republican corruption in Washington, but since it's tangential to a discussion of California's power woes I didn't see any reason to include the entire list.
Which begs the question... Are Republicans stupid, or are they just insane?
I see that a lot on slashdot from people who can't support their arguments logically.
Right. The usual... Democrats=bad, Republicans=good. Sigh, can't you guys come up with anything original?
I hate Republicans. I hate everything they stand for. - Howard Dean
Apparently not.
Yet Duke Cunningham and Jerry Lewis, last I checked weren't Democrats.
Yeah, so what? William Jefferson and Harry Ried are Democrats. But I wasn't talking about national government, I was talking about California. California politics make Washington look squeaky-clean. Even Louisianna has a paragon of good government by comparison. I would take Cunningham over the bozos in Sacramento - at least Cunninham published a price list, so you don't have to do much digging to know how much his vote costs.
Me? Why you blaming me? I don't live in California and got nothing to do with your stupid politics.
Well, at least that explains why you don't know what you're talking about. You talk about Republicans not knowing their heads from their asses and then start spouting off on a situation about which you haven't the vaguest understanding. Now that is a typical Democrat.
And if the Legislature isn't listening, that's what the bully-pulpit is for. That's what Ahnuld promised to do when he got into office. Instead he's been running around calling nurses names. That was a smooth move, pander to your special interests instead of working for the betterment of the entire state and then WHINE when you're called to the mat for it.
I've never been convinced the bully-pulpit was worth much. It works best when your opponent is trying to do the right thing and you're trying to score politcal points by undercutting him.
As I said before, Ahnuld's pretty much a RINO. His social agenda is pretty much indistinguishable from the other side. Fiscally, he got his agenda through initially because it was the only thing that could have been done. The legislature would have done the same thing without him, although they might have raised taxes more without his veto threat. He signed the.50 cal ban, which was feel-good demagoguery from start to finish.
If you're so damned convinced that the Governor can't do anything, why did you guys spend all your time and money trying to recall Davis? Why do you spend all of your money campaigning for the Governator? Give me a fucking break.
Well, I didn't actually want him to win. Now, granted, Gray Davis is a foul-mouthed creep and crooked as the day is long. I didn't really care though, because he didn't have the power to do anything. The reason I didn't want a Republican to win is now the Democrats have a Republican they can point to and say "it's all his fault", and since the media in this state functions as an arm of the Democratic party they can get away with it.
The reason Ahnuld was "running around calling nurses names" was he finally realized the public sector unions (along with lawyers and insurance companies) really call the shots in this state, since they provide the money for political campaigns. I would have found it pretty frustrating too, since they started lying their asses off to protect their legal sinecure.
If you don't like California, MOVE ALREADY. Sheesh, is it that hard? U-Haul still rents trucks in California, don't they?
Why should I move? The old media doesn't have control of the narrative like they used to, and when people realize just how corrupt the people in power are this state is gonna turn as red as they get. It'll take some time, but it's already starting to happen.
I can't stand whiney ass wankers. I don't knwo when the Republican party became filled with them, but God help me if they don't shut up already.
We'll shut up as soon as you stop screwing up our state.
Slashdot Mirror
This doesn't have anything to do with "censorship". The guy was talking out his ass again and made a statement that could get him dragged into court. I'm surprised it actually aired on Larry King. You can bet your last nickel, though, the it got edited out based on legal advice. I can see it now:
Google Exec: Hey Bill, do you have any reason to think that's true? You know we'll go to the mat for you if you have good information, but you know how lawyers are.
Maher: My cab driver's sister's boyfriend said some Republican guy who's name starts with "M" is gay.
Google Exec: Oooookay.
... for RIM if they hadn't spent a decade using litigation to force everyone else out of the market. Personally, in these kinds of situations you have to go with Kissinger's comment on the Iran-Iraq war - "It's too bad they can't [all] lose."
In order: Yes they do. No he didn't. No he didn't. Yes it did. Half right. Yes he was. Yes he did. Yes it did. Yes it is. No, we have much more. It's not pretending if it's true. Hey, you're almost batting 000.
Maybe it's predictable because you don't have a satisfactory answer. You can't have it both ways. Either Saddam had a nuclear program, or he didn't. You lefties have been whining "Bush lied" for three years now. Will you at least admit you were wrong? Come on, say it! "We... were... wrong. Saddam did have a nuclear program. He did attempt to buy yellowcake. He was planning to start processing uranium just as soon as the sanctions regime finished crumbling."
See, it's not that hard. Admitting you were wrong is the first step to fixing the problem.
By the way, any competent nuclear engineer can build a nuclear bomb if he has the right materials. The trick is getting your uranium enriched enough to go critical. Releasing these documents doesn't change the proliferation situation at all. In fact, when I was a kid I once checked out a library book titled "How to build a nuclear bomb". Granted, it was the easier "gun" method, but supposedly it was a working design. They built the first one sixty years ago, for God's sake! How much technology from 1945 do you think isn't on the net?
Did't these scientists pay attention when they were kids?
Tyrell: The facts of life. To make an alteration in the evolvment of an organic life system is fatal. A coding sequence cannot be revised once it's been established.
Roy: Why not?
Tyrell: Because by the second day of incubation, any cells that have undergone reversion mutations give rise to revertant colonies like rats leaving a sinking ship. Then the ship sinks.
Roy: What about EMS recombination.
Tyrell: We've already tried it. Ethyl methane sulfonate as an alkylating agent a potent mutagen It created a virus so lethal the subject was dead before he left the table.
Roy: Then a repressive protein that blocks the operating cells.
Tyrell: Wouldn't obstruct replication, but it does give rise to an error in replication so that the newly formed DNA strand carries the mutation and you've got a virus again. But, uh, this-- all of this is academic. You were made as well as we could make you.
One of the problems which has dogged airships from day 1 is the inability to replace the weight of burned fuel. There's a couple ways you can deal with this problem, but none of them are ideal. Modern blimps and airships are actually heavier than air, relying on lift from engine pods to get the airship in the air. As they burn fuel they get lighter, but they're never actually "lighter than air". Early airships were much too large for this strategy especially since engine technology was far less advanced.
The most successful airship in history, the Graf Zeppelin, used a gas called Blau Gas to power its engines. Blau Gas is just a mixture of propane and hydrogen that weighs the same as air, so when you burn it and the gas volume is replaced by air of the same weight you don't have any buoyancy problems. Graf Zeppelin used hydrogen, which is relatively cheap, for its lifting gas. If it became too light they could vent enough hydrogen to restore neutral buoyancy.
But this scheme wasn't very efficient, from an engineering perspective. Every cubic meter of fuel was a cubic meter that couldn't be used for lift. Also, as they designed the Hindenburg they were concerned about safety, so they decided the Hindenburg would be filled with helium instead of hydrogen. Since heliem is about 10% less efficient as a lifting gas, Zeppelin engineers decided they just couldn't live with Blau Gas. Also, Blau Gas has the same safety drawbacks as hydrogen. Helium is much more expensive than hydrogen, so if the company was to be profitable there was no way they could just vent helium when the ship was too light. So if they were to use diesel fuel exclusively in the Hindenburg, they needed a way to add weight to the airship in flight.
The solution was to remove water from the air and use it as ballast to replace the now-missing diesel fuel. The system they designed used a silica gel, the same stuff that comes in a little packet labeled "DO NOT EAT" when you buy a pair of shoes. Ambient air was blown over the gel, which is highly water absorbent. The gel was then heated using waste engine heat to produce water vapor, which was collected in a condenser. Eventually they decided to use the diesel exhaust (which is apparently very humid) instead of ambient air. This was 70 years ago.
I'm getting so tired of that quote. I'm pretty sure even Franklin didn't advocate throwing security to the wind.
Oh, and if you ever expect people to take you seriously in these kinds of discussions, you're going to have to learn how to spell "fascist".
That's true. As long as it's all for internal company use, OSS is really no different than code written by an employee that has since move on. Except it doesn't cost anything.
By the way, the profit in the retail gas business all comes from the mini-mart, while the gas is break-even or a loss. I've known two gas station owners. They both made a lot of money, and both of them lost money on gas. So the retail gas price in CA is really quite a bit lower than it should be, except people are willing to drive around to pay one cent/gallon less on gas and fifty cents more on everything else they buy. Go figure.
We've been trying to maintain a product developed in-house over the last decade or so. Wouldn't it make sense to buy a GUI toolkit, they thought, so we can concentrate on our core competency? Sure, except we had to stay on Solaris 8 when everybody else was using Solaris 9, and then 10. The company that provided the toolkit got sold a couple of times, and is now part of some consulting outfit you've never heard of. They have two guys in Bombay trying to port it to newer platform versions, but they don't really test it, so we've had to take on that additional burden. Without the source code. Sometimes they're busy working on other stuff, so they don't get to our complaints for weeks. We're terrified they'll go out of business before we're able to do a rewrite.
Of course, Oracle stopped concentrating on the Solaris 8 drivers, so when we called for support all we ever heard was "upgrade to Solaris x and install the newest version". Would that solve the problem? Who knows? We can't do it anyway because of the GUI toolkit.
Now we want to move that product to Linux, but the GUI tool in question doesn't work on Linux at all. They're trying to get it working on RHEL 3, while we've just moved our other tools to RHEL 4.
You wan't to make a brittle tool and take the blame when the enterprise can't upgrade the desktop OS because a key component vendor just went out of business? By all means, knock yourself out. You can commiserate with one of our groups that's still running Java 1.1 because a piece they bought from a now-bankrupt vendor won't run on a later version. The more third party vendors you have, the worse it gets, too. You can get circular dependencies that prevent you from upgrading anything without a total rewrite.
Me? I'm not writing everything myself, but I use OSS whenever I can. After the number of times we've been burned in recent years, if you work for my company you'd better have a damn good reason to bring in third-party vendors. We're pretty much down to Java and Oracle as the only easy sells for new projects.
Yeah. But not only that - I've always considered scope creep to be a management failure. It's caused by a boss that's afraid to tell his customers "The feature list for the first release is closed. We'll put that in a later version." If the scope is creeping too much it's time to cancel the manager, not the project.
I work for Big Cellphone Company. We tried the same scheme in the mid '90s when analog phone cloning was all the rage (remember when it used to cost $1.50/minute? Ahhhhh, the good old days). It works, kind of.
The problem is you're not trying to decide whether or not to retry a packet, or what the transmit power should be. You're trying to decide whether or not to provide service, so you really can't afford to be wrong. We were never really able to get an acceptable reliablility in the wild.
Believe me, we had a huge incentive to roll this out to our network. The marginal bandwidth costs from fraud didn't hurt much, but when someone made a call to, say, Saudi Arabia on a cloned phone we got stuck with all the fees on the other end. A single cloning ring could cost millions, so Big Cellphone Company was willing to break the bank to get this to work.
Eventually we rolled out digital service, so the project got shut down. Cloning fraud was one of the reasons we were willing to give you a free phone if you switched over to digital. Well, that and the long-term contract.
Yeah, that was my reaction. Microsoft is one of the few companies that has so much money they literally don't know what to do with it. Normally when you have extra cash you buy other businesses, but in Microsoft's case they can't really do that for anti-trust reasons. That's why their research is so "bloated", and why they're willing to sink so much money into markets with a long-long-term payoff (like MSN and xbox). The only other option is to give money to the shareholders in stock buybacks and dividends, something they've already done pretty liberally. So why in the world would they make the problem even worse by borrowing more money?
I don't see why not. We expect other countries to extradite their citizens for breaking US laws. It seems only fair. While in most cases they've broken the law in both countries, that's not always true.
First of all, the rockets aren't what prompted the current military action. They went in because the Palestinians kidnapped one of their soldiers (and killed a few more). If it was just rockets they wouldn't have done it - they're quite good at killing people setting up rockets with helicopters, so they don't need to risk ground troops to do it.
Secondly, if they could use that two billion dollars to stop one suicide bomber from blowing up a falafel stand or a bus they would save more people than the anti-missile system. Two billion would probably stop a lot of suicide bombers.
The only way the anti-missle system makes sense is if the Palestinians start building (or buying) more accurate rockets, as well as rockets with a longer range. There's some evidence this may be the case. But even then it would probably make more sense to just go in with those big D9s and turn the entire Gaza strip into a parking lot. I just don't see the anti-missile system ever being worth the money.
Your analogy is faulty. Everybody faces risks as they live their lives. When you allocate money to save lives it's rational to allocate it where it does the most good. While this kind of thing might seem reasonable in isolation, it isn't - the money they spend on missile defense is money that could have been better spent dealing with larger threats.
I don't know. Anybody who thinks God will reward him with eternal paradise for killing infidels is crazy, in my book. It makes no difference they've been fashioned into weapons by rich, cynical people far away - they're still dangerous. I think it's the excess of petrodollars that causes this problem more than anything else.
I tend to agree with you there. In my mind this isn't much different than the National Guard troops that patrolled airports after 9/11 (with empty magazines, as it turns out). Showy but of questionable value. For the money it would take to construct a system like this we could beef up our border and port security quite a bit, something that would do far more to protect us than a shiney new anti-missile system.
My point is this: Our foreign policy will never make everyone happy. Regardless of what we do or don't do in the world we're going to have to take these kinds of measures. It's just a sign of the times, having more to do with technology and the individual's increased capacity for mahem than anything else.
Uh, yeah, you're right. Brain fart.
Which country did we invade to cause the 9/11 attacks? The attack on the Cole? Our embassies in Africa?
As to why rockets keep landing on Israel, well, consider how many people have been killed by all those unguided Kassam rockets. According to Wikipedia, thirteen people have been killed by Palestinian rocketeers after hundreds of tries. That's far less than one suicide bomber can do in a pizza joint. In the great scheme of things they're more of an annoyance than a danger - they're a psychological weapon. There's probably a hundred ways Israel can spend two billion dollars that will save more than thirteen lives over four years.
I don't see why you think this is a stretch. This kind of system has already been tested against mortar rounds and Katyushas, and it seems to work. With the right sensors there's no reason this can't be done.
I think this is a bigger threat than terrorists boarding an airplane - the easiest way to get yourself torn to pieces by 100 strangers is to stand up on a US ariliner and say "this is a hijacking". 9/11 would never have been so costly if the passengers weren't following outdated "rules of engagement".
Now, having said that, I will say I doubt this kind of system would be more cost effective than beefing up our border and port security.
Yes, there's too much regulation. California's phoney "deregulation" wasn't deregulation at all, as I've pointed out, it was just a change from one set of regulations to a worse set of regulations. What does that have to do with grasping at straws? I think it's pretty obvious to anyone with a passing understanding in economics.
So what you're saying is you do support regulation, even though it goes against your principles, and then you give a (correct) reason why you shouldn't, and then you include an irrelevant point as if it had some bearing. Is your brain pretzel-shaped? Because your logic certainly is.
What would you have me do to fix things, start an armed rebellion? The most I can reasonably do is vote and point out the substandard nature of California's political class to other voters. If that's whining, well, it sure does seem similar to your point about Duke Cunningham, doesn't it? The reason I prefer to live in California has nothing to do with state government, I assure you. I'm here because my family is here and my job is here. At some point taxes will drive my employer to another state (or country) and I'll have some decisions to make, but for right now a good job and family wins out over better state government. If I hit the powerball lottery (well, if I played), I would move to Texas and take my whole extended family with me.
I don't see anywhere that I've supported initiatives that will make the situation worse. True deregulation will fix the energy market in CA as long as it's phased in properly. I don't see how that helps or hurts Republicans, since the Democrats control every lever of power in this state except the governor's weak "bully pulpit". I don't see why you think deregulation would make things worse, especially since I pointed out an example of its proper implementation.
I didn't say the national Democrats were more corrupt, but I don't think it's going out on a limb to say they're as corrupt as the national Republican Party. That was my point about William Jefferson and Harry Ried. I can certainly point out an instance of Democratic corruption for every instance of Republican corruption in Washington, but since it's tangential to a discussion of California's power woes I didn't see any reason to include the entire list.
I see that a lot on slashdot from people who can't support their arguments logically.I hate Republicans. I hate everything they stand for. - Howard Dean
Apparently not.
Yeah, so what? William Jefferson and Harry Ried are Democrats. But I wasn't talking about national government, I was talking about California. California politics make Washington look squeaky-clean. Even Louisianna has a paragon of good government by comparison. I would take Cunningham over the bozos in Sacramento - at least Cunninham published a price list, so you don't have to do much digging to know how much his vote costs. Well, at least that explains why you don't know what you're talking about. You talk about Republicans not knowing their heads from their asses and then start spouting off on a situation about which you haven't the vaguest understanding. Now that is a typical Democrat.I've never been convinced the bully-pulpit was worth much. It works best when your opponent is trying to do the right thing and you're trying to score politcal points by undercutting him.
As I said before, Ahnuld's pretty much a RINO. His social agenda is pretty much indistinguishable from the other side. Fiscally, he got his agenda through initially because it was the only thing that could have been done. The legislature would have done the same thing without him, although they might have raised taxes more without his veto threat. He signed the .50 cal ban, which was feel-good demagoguery from start to finish.
If you're so damned convinced that the Governor can't do anything, why did you guys spend all your time and money trying to recall Davis? Why do you spend all of your money campaigning for the Governator? Give me a fucking break.
Well, I didn't actually want him to win. Now, granted, Gray Davis is a foul-mouthed creep and crooked as the day is long. I didn't really care though, because he didn't have the power to do anything. The reason I didn't want a Republican to win is now the Democrats have a Republican they can point to and say "it's all his fault", and since the media in this state functions as an arm of the Democratic party they can get away with it.
The reason Ahnuld was "running around calling nurses names" was he finally realized the public sector unions (along with lawyers and insurance companies) really call the shots in this state, since they provide the money for political campaigns. I would have found it pretty frustrating too, since they started lying their asses off to protect their legal sinecure.
If you don't like California, MOVE ALREADY. Sheesh, is it that hard? U-Haul still rents trucks in California, don't they?
Why should I move? The old media doesn't have control of the narrative like they used to, and when people realize just how corrupt the people in power are this state is gonna turn as red as they get. It'll take some time, but it's already starting to happen.
I can't stand whiney ass wankers. I don't knwo when the Republican party became filled with them, but God help me if they don't shut up already.
We'll shut up as soon as you stop screwing up our state.