The point I'm driving at is that even modern units, designed in a big creationist leap, and in common use for only a century or two, have grown warts, and require a handful of magic numbers. People are willing to trade conversion consistency (between interstellar units and terrestrial units, in the parsec/light-year example) for convenience in rule-of-thumb calculations within a certain field of endeavor. If you stamp out non-standard units, new ones crop up, showing that people want non-standard units and don't care about conversion factors.
Whoever likes modern units is, of course, free to use them, but the bureaucratic mandate to force them in the face of people who don't want them is questionable.
I didn't invent this phrase, but it is quite apt, "The size of a brick has more to do with a bricklayer's hand than the length of the Prime Meridian."
I have never seen a problem with using traditional units for traditional uses and using modern units for technical uses. Just as pound-denoiminated mesurements have no place on a space probe trajectory caluculation, metric units have no place in my kitchen. My electronic scale annoys me when it defaults to grams every time I power it on; I don't build bombs in my kitchen, so get those grams out of here. My heirloom recipe books will never be converted to metric.
Much of the proselytizing of the metric system seems to be motivated by the mistaken belief that, if only we could stamp out traditional units, then the world would be free of clumsy unit conversions forevermore. Even if traditional units never existed, we would still be stuck with conversions because people adapt measurement systems, like any other tool, for their own uses.
I don't buy gemstones by the gram.
Kilograms are more often a unit of force than mass.
120 volts is neither the nominal peak nor average voltage at a power outlet.
My calandar is not marked in kiloseconds.
Light-years and parsecs are not metric units, nor are barns and Angstroms.
European weather reports don't give temperatures in Kelvin, the proper SI unit.
And of course, pi and the square root of 2 don't co-operate with our nice, neat metrology schemes.
Unit conversions are with us to stay, because it is easier that way.
I wouldn't worry about world wars over super-expensive oil too much. The reason we use oil so much is because is it cheap. The Fischer-Tropsch process for making gasoline from coal has been known since the 20's and has been proven on an industrial scale by the Germans during WWII. At some price (I think I computed it at around $35/bbl) everyone will switch to fuels derived from coal, which will give us 2 or 3 centuries to think of something else. The effect will be geopolitcally stabilizing because coal deposits are more evenly scatttered around the world. It may not be coal right away, we may have a few decades of oil-shale or tar-sand derived energy, depending on how the economics work out.
The only reason we don't see a boom in Fischer-Tropsch plant construction right now is because everyone is expecting the Saudis to punch another hole in the sand and drop the price into the $20's again. That's what happened in the 80's and all the energy companies had to leave stranded their (albeit DOE-subsidized) oil shale investments.
If the Saudi oil industry falls flat on its face (a very real possibility) then the scramble will be on to build alternatives.
Same story for your solar-hydrogen idea. Apparently no one with $billions to invest believes that the cost will come in lower than the expected Saudi oil. Maybe you can convince them; it helps if the idea can be scaled down to mere $thousands, so the cost of being wrong is not so steep. Hence the buzz about these manure conversion projects, windmills, etc. Observe how windmills, once the economics were proven, started to scale up in size.
Um, you are omitting the fact that all the judicial appointments were bottled up in committe for--what was it? A year? It is one thing to deny an appointment, but to refuse to vote on the whole block is quite another. The Dems were using procedural shenanigans on that one.
I can't speak on Cad/edonkey specifically, but wide-area packet-switched networks generally use multiple hops and time-to-live counters on the packets. If the machines forwarding packets are properly configured (and not compromised), jamming attacks can only take down the local subnet and in that case everyone else routes around. Wireless LAN's have to use a shared RF channel and thus are vulnerable jamming.
Insufficent spectrum with which to develop long enough spreading codes to both achieve the needed low cross-correlation (from one code to any other code), and still maintain 11 Mbits/sec transmission speed.
In spread-spectrum jargon, we would say, "insufficient processing gain."
But anyhow, cellphone- or 802.11-style direct-sequence spread spectrum is not known for resistance to intentional jamming (in some ways it is actually worse than narrow band). For jamming resistance you need military-style frequency hop. But the problem with ad-hoc networks seems more fundamental to me. How can a new device join a network without some sort of shared secret? You have to have some sort of publically accessible channel to get the spreading or hopping codes. If that channel is publically accessible, then it can be jammed. Hence Bluetooth
"pairing", where you mometarily open a channel for exchange of persistent keys.
In that excerpt: Open Source software...that will destroy 85% of the market value of US companies
This think-tank is espousing mercantilism (i.e. managing government policy to agglomerate measurable assets), the very policies that de Tocqueville himself so bitterly criticized.
If I invent an affordable Star Trek transporter, the value of United Airlines would go down, because we won't need them anymore, and that is a good thing. Even if it is not good for UAL stockholders.
How about this? Building a reputation of releasing formerly commercial products as GPL makes your current commercial products more future-proof. MS has always appeared future-proof because they are the One-That-Won't-Go-Outta-Business (the Highlander effect: there can only be one). Not much consolation to those who want to continue using Win9x, OE, etc., though. But if a company builds a history of GPL'ing stuff, that lowers barriers to adoption even while products are still closed-source commercial.
750 ml is, colloquially, a "fifth", as in 1/5th of a US gallon (which would be 756 ml to the mearest ml). Of course in Canada you have Brit gallons (which are about 20% bigger) so you're still screwed. Maybe you can call them "sixths".
I actually see backsliding on this one, 0.354" caliber. I guess that way they can put it on the shelf in order with all the other inch-denominated calibers. (That's right cousin Jessie, right thar between the thirty-aught-six (.3006") and the.357" magnum.)
The nice thing about the Farenheit scale is that zero is the eutectic point of salt water (the lowest temperature that could be created in an 18th century laboratory) while 100 is roughly mammalian body temperature. That pretty much encompasses the whole range at which life can exist. Below zero everything is frozen no matter how much salt is present, while much above 100, proteins un-fold and living things die. That makes temperature in F nicely suited for weather reports, where I am interested in temperature's effect on my living body, outdoor plants, etc. Not so good for engineering work though.
The results seem to resemble a lottery. Most suits lose, but you still have the occasional jackpot. Witness Bernard Goetz. $45,000,000. It seems this is the case everyone has in mind when they say, "If you shoot him, make sure you kill him." Because you don't want a quadrapalegic testifying against you.
The young-ish crowd on/. doesn't remember these things, I suppose. It was one of the top news stories of 1984-5.
A word on strain relief. If you are going to rig up your own cable-reinforcement scheme, the principle behind strain relief is to prevent tight (short radius) bends. Look at a good quality headphone cable and see how the cable passes through a tapered, semi-soft plastic covering. The taper in this covering allows the cable to gradually transistion in stiffness between the supple uncovered cable and the rigid connector. By doing this, a sideways tug on the cable will create a gentle bend near the connector, instead of a sharp bend there. A simple way to improve the performance of a consumer-grade cable is to put a few inches of heat shrink tubing over each end and create a longer stiffness transition region.
There are other ways to do it. Payphone-style armored cable works by limiting the bend radius everywhere; if you try to bend it too severely the metal joints bottom out. If your headphone cable emerges from a conical recessed hole, that will help limit the bend curvature vs. simply jutting out from a flat surface.
Just look out for the counter-intuitive result, that stiffening a cable on its main run without a stiffness transition at the connector, will make the cable less durable.
Well, there is, in fact, scarcity of spectrum, so sooner or later someone who wants some isn't going to get it. The difference is how to decide who gets it. Maybe most of these "pirate" radio stations could be on the air if they can, though donations, sponsorship, or t-shirt sales, scrape together a few $thousands a year in spectrum rent. Maybe they would be crowded out by higher bids from commercial stations offering, oh say, all-traffic, all-weather, all-sports, all Linux, & (hey this is my example I can make up what I want) all Amiga rumors. Without functioning markets in broadcast spectrum, we will never know.
If some wanna-be broadcaster can't get together enough money for spectrum rent, at least we now have a moral case for allocating the spectrum to someone else. Someone else paid more for it, so it must be creating better value for somebody. Not a bullet-proof moral case (Ms. Rand notwithstanding), but it is better than saying, "Some bureaucrat decided it is not in the public interest."
I suspect that frequency markets would shape up similarly to real estate markets, where we have high-rent areas (High Street shops), low-rent areas (penny-saver strip malls), and niche areas (the Akihabara district in Tokyo). Some areas have consolidated ownership (malls & strip malls) while others are finely subdivided (urban sidewalk shopping areas). And non-commercial activity can be found scattered from place to place (churches, libraries).
As it turns out, in the mid 20's radio was in the state that Dunifer is advocating, i.e. pure chaos. You had grocery stores putting up transmitters and advertising without licensing, or auto-dealers, or whoever could afford the hardware. A true free-for-all.
Ah, but the history-written-by-the-winners omits the fact that a non-regulatory solution to this had already evolved by the 30's. Dealing with diputes like these, the courts hammered out a common-law-like homesteading principle. In essence, first person to use & "improve" (by building a transmitter on a hill, for example) a portion of spectrum could claim a property right over it. Subsequent people who transmit on top of an already claimed frequency could be sued for damages analogous to tresspass.
Instead of building on and codifying all this "market" knowlege embodied in the case law, the Communications Act threw it all out and replaced it with a centrally planned beauracracy. This stuck in the craw of the Iron Lady & her ilk ever since. (Forgive her wrath, she never lived to see the Great Spectrum Auctions of 1996.) The FCC's best sucesses (cell phones, Wi-Fi) come when the agency hews close to a frequency-as-property approach.
Of course, many of these "free radio" types aren't particularly interested in respecting others' property-like rights either. They want people to listen to their message, regardless of how interesting or credible it is.
Re:Finally, more bandwidth for World's Scariest...
on
Comcast Fires TechTV Staff
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
The pattern appears to be establish niche & then broaden appeal, and appears to be quite established. Witness:
Early A&E, Arts & Entertainment, really was artsy. We don't, however, see televised performaces of Stravinsky's ballet Petrushka on it anymore. It's all Hollywood interviews now.
TLC goes from educational to the Trading Spaces Channel (TSC?)
History channel (yeah it was the Hitler Channel early on, but that's because WWII was an easy source of lots of film footage) is now the Big Machines & Garden tools channel half the time.
The christian channels start to look like the Disney Channel (don't watch much of either so don't put too much faith on my word on this one, but christian music certainly has gone through a transistion like this).
HBO goes form pure movies, to a mix of movies, boxing, and a crime drama series.
TechTV becomes another Cartoon Channel plus a bunch of nearly-infomercial video game content. A generic teen channel seem to be the target.
In the end, if you want specialized content, you will have to constantly seek young, new channels. (In HBO's case new pure-movie channels have sprung up.) Those channels need an audience whose interest is focused strongly enough to switch viewing habits. They don't have broad appeal yet so they are not losing anything by showing narrowly focused content.
It's not just TV channels. The same thing happens to Magazines. Remember Byte?
if the computer crashed, and I only have some old Amiga or a 1985 Mac lying around or some DOS boot disk, and I need something from a mail right now, I can get at it if the files are plain text.
Believe it or not, Amiga YAM uses mbox files natively. I downloaded my Pine folders (from when ISP's gave you shell accounts, hah the good old days) and YAM took them straight in with no conversion. The ol' Miggy still hosts my continuous email archive going back to 1993.
My impression was that if you work as an employee for somebody, they have to pay you at least minimum wage.
Until they hire cheap outsourced telelmarketers from India. Just wait for this [Apu voice], "Please vote for candidate X. He is good for America. I love America." [/Apu voice]
The discussion on LKML makes it look like the developers, in their attempt to enforce truthful taint flags, are responding in a way that is headed for a cat-and-mouse game of the sort we see in the spam wars. We all know how ugly that can get. I see two ways out, both techniques borrowed from the spamwar trenches.
(1) Trademarks: A company gets in the business of certifying drvers as GPL, and allows a unique string to be embedded in the binary. Because the taint function is purely informative, binary-only driver makers can't claim a need to use it, unlike, for example, the filenames IBMBIO.COM and IBMDOS.COM.
(2) Crypto web-of-trust: For a kernel to accept a module as open source, it must have a trusted signature.
Both apporaches require some infrastructure, so there is work to be done now to save a greater amount of work later.
But then where is the secret? And if no secret what's the scandal? W's intent was clear to anyone who listened. I remember endless banter about "regime change" as they called it then. Ok they didn't mention 350,000 troops specifically but anyone who was surprised wasn't paying attention. If a (very) few more people didn't like it and voted for The Other Guy, we would have a different policy.
FWIW, I agree with much of zogger's post, though I would suggest a more hands-off policy of simply taxing energy imports commensurate with their security risk and directly subsidizing domestic energy of whatever form with the proceeds. But a thesis of the form, "Let them {bomb Pearl Harbor | shoot JFK | invade Kuwait | hijack the planes | assassinate the archduke | shell Fort Sumter | fire a shot at Lexington } and give us an excuse for war," assumes more conspiracy than is necessary. Yeah the Nazi's did it in Poland but even then the attack by the Poles was staged, and nobody was fooled for long.
Slashdot Mirror
...Japan! You left out Japan!
The point I'm driving at is that even modern units, designed in a big creationist leap, and in common use for only a century or two, have grown warts, and require a handful of magic numbers. People are willing to trade conversion consistency (between interstellar units and terrestrial units, in the parsec/light-year example) for convenience in rule-of-thumb calculations within a certain field of endeavor. If you stamp out non-standard units, new ones crop up, showing that people want non-standard units and don't care about conversion factors.
So maybe some of those warts are really miswarts.
Whoever likes modern units is, of course, free to use them, but the bureaucratic mandate to force them in the face of people who don't want them is questionable.
I didn't invent this phrase, but it is quite apt, "The size of a brick has more to do with a bricklayer's hand than the length of the Prime Meridian."
I have never seen a problem with using traditional units for traditional uses and using modern units for technical uses. Just as pound-denoiminated mesurements have no place on a space probe trajectory caluculation, metric units have no place in my kitchen. My electronic scale annoys me when it defaults to grams every time I power it on; I don't build bombs in my kitchen, so get those grams out of here. My heirloom recipe books will never be converted to metric.
Much of the proselytizing of the metric system seems to be motivated by the mistaken belief that, if only we could stamp out traditional units, then the world would be free of clumsy unit conversions forevermore. Even if traditional units never existed, we would still be stuck with conversions because people adapt measurement systems, like any other tool, for their own uses.
Unit conversions are with us to stay, because it is easier that way.
I wouldn't worry about world wars over super-expensive oil too much. The reason we use oil so much is because is it cheap. The Fischer-Tropsch process for making gasoline from coal has been known since the 20's and has been proven on an industrial scale by the Germans during WWII. At some price (I think I computed it at around $35/bbl) everyone will switch to fuels derived from coal, which will give us 2 or 3 centuries to think of something else. The effect will be geopolitcally stabilizing because coal deposits are more evenly scatttered around the world. It may not be coal right away, we may have a few decades of oil-shale or tar-sand derived energy, depending on how the economics work out.
The only reason we don't see a boom in Fischer-Tropsch plant construction right now is because everyone is expecting the Saudis to punch another hole in the sand and drop the price into the $20's again. That's what happened in the 80's and all the energy companies had to leave stranded their (albeit DOE-subsidized) oil shale investments.
If the Saudi oil industry falls flat on its face (a very real possibility) then the scramble will be on to build alternatives.
Same story for your solar-hydrogen idea. Apparently no one with $billions to invest believes that the cost will come in lower than the expected Saudi oil. Maybe you can convince them; it helps if the idea can be scaled down to mere $thousands, so the cost of being wrong is not so steep. Hence the buzz about these manure conversion projects, windmills, etc. Observe how windmills, once the economics were proven, started to scale up in size.
Um, you are omitting the fact that all the judicial appointments were bottled up in committe for--what was it? A year? It is one thing to deny an appointment, but to refuse to vote on the whole block is quite another. The Dems were using procedural shenanigans on that one.
I can't speak on Cad/edonkey specifically, but wide-area packet-switched networks generally use multiple hops and time-to-live counters on the packets. If the machines forwarding packets are properly configured (and not compromised), jamming attacks can only take down the local subnet and in that case everyone else routes around. Wireless LAN's have to use a shared RF channel and thus are vulnerable jamming.
Insufficent spectrum with which to develop long enough spreading codes to both achieve the needed low cross-correlation (from one code to any other code), and still maintain 11 Mbits/sec transmission speed.
In spread-spectrum jargon, we would say, "insufficient processing gain."
But anyhow, cellphone- or 802.11-style direct-sequence spread spectrum is not known for resistance to intentional jamming (in some ways it is actually worse than narrow band). For jamming resistance you need military-style frequency hop. But the problem with ad-hoc networks seems more fundamental to me. How can a new device join a network without some sort of shared secret? You have to have some sort of publically accessible channel to get the spreading or hopping codes. If that channel is publically accessible, then it can be jammed. Hence Bluetooth "pairing", where you mometarily open a channel for exchange of persistent keys.
In that excerpt:
Open Source software...that will destroy 85% of the market value of US companies
This think-tank is espousing mercantilism (i.e. managing government policy to agglomerate measurable assets), the very policies that de Tocqueville himself so bitterly criticized.
If I invent an affordable Star Trek transporter, the value of United Airlines would go down, because we won't need them anymore, and that is a good thing. Even if it is not good for UAL stockholders.
Evolution doesn't support NTLM2
But fetchmail apparently does. Don't know if that helps you with calandar features, though.
How about this? Building a reputation of releasing formerly commercial products as GPL makes your current commercial products more future-proof. MS has always appeared future-proof because they are the One-That-Won't-Go-Outta-Business (the Highlander effect: there can only be one). Not much consolation to those who want to continue using Win9x, OE, etc., though. But if a company builds a history of GPL'ing stuff, that lowers barriers to adoption even while products are still closed-source commercial.
750 ml is, colloquially, a "fifth", as in 1/5th of a US gallon (which would be 756 ml to the mearest ml). Of course in Canada you have Brit gallons (which are about 20% bigger) so you're still screwed. Maybe you can call them "sixths".
I actually see backsliding on this one, 0.354" caliber. I guess that way they can put it on the shelf in order with all the other inch-denominated calibers. (That's right cousin Jessie, right thar between the thirty-aught-six (.3006") and the .357" magnum.)
The nice thing about the Farenheit scale is that zero is the eutectic point of salt water (the lowest temperature that could be created in an 18th century laboratory) while 100 is roughly mammalian body temperature. That pretty much encompasses the whole range at which life can exist. Below zero everything is frozen no matter how much salt is present, while much above 100, proteins un-fold and living things die. That makes temperature in F nicely suited for weather reports, where I am interested in temperature's effect on my living body, outdoor plants, etc. Not so good for engineering work though.
the RESULTS of those lawsuits
The results seem to resemble a lottery. Most suits lose, but you still have the occasional jackpot. Witness Bernard Goetz. $45,000,000. It seems this is the case everyone has in mind when they say, "If you shoot him, make sure you kill him." Because you don't want a quadrapalegic testifying against you.
The young-ish crowd on /. doesn't remember these things, I suppose. It was one of the top news stories of 1984-5.
make sure to rig them with a stress relief.
A word on strain relief. If you are going to rig up your own cable-reinforcement scheme, the principle behind strain relief is to prevent tight (short radius) bends. Look at a good quality headphone cable and see how the cable passes through a tapered, semi-soft plastic covering. The taper in this covering allows the cable to gradually transistion in stiffness between the supple uncovered cable and the rigid connector. By doing this, a sideways tug on the cable will create a gentle bend near the connector, instead of a sharp bend there. A simple way to improve the performance of a consumer-grade cable is to put a few inches of heat shrink tubing over each end and create a longer stiffness transition region.
There are other ways to do it. Payphone-style armored cable works by limiting the bend radius everywhere; if you try to bend it too severely the metal joints bottom out. If your headphone cable emerges from a conical recessed hole, that will help limit the bend curvature vs. simply jutting out from a flat surface.
Just look out for the counter-intuitive result, that stiffening a cable on its main run without a stiffness transition at the connector, will make the cable less durable.
Well, there is, in fact, scarcity of spectrum, so sooner or later someone who wants some isn't going to get it. The difference is how to decide who gets it. Maybe most of these "pirate" radio stations could be on the air if they can, though donations, sponsorship, or t-shirt sales, scrape together a few $thousands a year in spectrum rent. Maybe they would be crowded out by higher bids from commercial stations offering, oh say, all-traffic, all-weather, all-sports, all Linux, & (hey this is my example I can make up what I want) all Amiga rumors. Without functioning markets in broadcast spectrum, we will never know.
If some wanna-be broadcaster can't get together enough money for spectrum rent, at least we now have a moral case for allocating the spectrum to someone else. Someone else paid more for it, so it must be creating better value for somebody. Not a bullet-proof moral case (Ms. Rand notwithstanding), but it is better than saying, "Some bureaucrat decided it is not in the public interest."
I suspect that frequency markets would shape up similarly to real estate markets, where we have high-rent areas (High Street shops), low-rent areas (penny-saver strip malls), and niche areas (the Akihabara district in Tokyo). Some areas have consolidated ownership (malls & strip malls) while others are finely subdivided (urban sidewalk shopping areas). And non-commercial activity can be found scattered from place to place (churches, libraries).
As it turns out, in the mid 20's radio was in the state that Dunifer is advocating, i.e. pure chaos. You had grocery stores putting up transmitters and advertising without licensing, or auto-dealers, or whoever could afford the hardware. A true free-for-all.
Ah, but the history-written-by-the-winners omits the fact that a non-regulatory solution to this had already evolved by the 30's. Dealing with diputes like these, the courts hammered out a common-law-like homesteading principle. In essence, first person to use & "improve" (by building a transmitter on a hill, for example) a portion of spectrum could claim a property right over it. Subsequent people who transmit on top of an already claimed frequency could be sued for damages analogous to tresspass.
Instead of building on and codifying all this "market" knowlege embodied in the case law, the Communications Act threw it all out and replaced it with a centrally planned beauracracy. This stuck in the craw of the Iron Lady & her ilk ever since. (Forgive her wrath, she never lived to see the Great Spectrum Auctions of 1996.) The FCC's best sucesses (cell phones, Wi-Fi) come when the agency hews close to a frequency-as-property approach.
Of course, many of these "free radio" types aren't particularly interested in respecting others' property-like rights either. They want people to listen to their message, regardless of how interesting or credible it is.
The pattern appears to be establish niche & then broaden appeal, and appears to be quite established. Witness:
In the end, if you want specialized content, you will have to constantly seek young, new channels. (In HBO's case new pure-movie channels have sprung up.) Those channels need an audience whose interest is focused strongly enough to switch viewing habits. They don't have broad appeal yet so they are not losing anything by showing narrowly focused content.
It's not just TV channels. The same thing happens to Magazines. Remember Byte?
...is of that type. It's eeeeeeeeeeeeevil.
if the computer crashed, and I only have some old Amiga or a 1985 Mac lying around or some DOS boot disk, and I need something from a mail right now, I can get at it if the files are plain text.
Believe it or not, Amiga YAM uses mbox files natively. I downloaded my Pine folders (from when ISP's gave you shell accounts, hah the good old days) and YAM took them straight in with no conversion. The ol' Miggy still hosts my continuous email archive going back to 1993.
How about Thunderthrush? Has a nice ring to it, and fits both the alliterative and the semantic element-animal themes.
Or are there any elements beginning with 'b'? And don't give me Beryllium!
My impression was that if you work as an employee for somebody, they have to pay you at least minimum wage.
Until they hire cheap outsourced telelmarketers from India. Just wait for this [Apu voice], "Please vote for candidate X. He is good for America. I love America." [/Apu voice]
how will people cheat, and how can we stop this
The discussion on LKML makes it look like the developers, in their attempt to enforce truthful taint flags, are responding in a way that is headed for a cat-and-mouse game of the sort we see in the spam wars. We all know how ugly that can get. I see two ways out, both techniques borrowed from the spamwar trenches.
Both apporaches require some infrastructure, so there is work to be done now to save a greater amount of work later.
Isn't that, "Fall down and forget to hit the ground," as when you see, in an unexpected place, your long lost airline baggage?
But then where is the secret? And if no secret what's the scandal? W's intent was clear to anyone who listened. I remember endless banter about "regime change" as they called it then. Ok they didn't mention 350,000 troops specifically but anyone who was surprised wasn't paying attention. If a (very) few more people didn't like it and voted for The Other Guy, we would have a different policy.
FWIW, I agree with much of zogger's post, though I would suggest a more hands-off policy of simply taxing energy imports commensurate with their security risk and directly subsidizing domestic energy of whatever form with the proceeds. But a thesis of the form, "Let them {bomb Pearl Harbor | shoot JFK | invade Kuwait | hijack the planes | assassinate the archduke | shell Fort Sumter | fire a shot at Lexington } and give us an excuse for war," assumes more conspiracy than is necessary. Yeah the Nazi's did it in Poland but even then the attack by the Poles was staged, and nobody was fooled for long.