And of course the time it is taking for Iraq to get a stable post-Hussein government and constitution. Two points to remember people: first, the USA didn't invent the constitution overnight, it really took years of wrangling prior to the Declaration of Independce straight on through the Bill of Rights afterwards and if you really want to get into the lineage of it, it goes back before the Magna Carta. Representative democracy isn't something that happens overnight and it takes a while to be embraced and become something people love and understand the give and take of.
Second, the Iraqis have been under top-down control for a very very long time and the only thing that happened was that the old hatreds were either in favor of only one faction or they were put on hold under threat of action from above. Just like the Soviet Union never solving the hatreds they for years kept from being acted on in open fighting and when the USSR went bye-bye...
It will take a while. But it is far better than being ruled by a guy who was running the place as if he was a two-dimensional stock enemy from a Golan-Globus film or for the ones requiring a recent example, as if they were Howard Saint in The Punisher.
I can also tell you that the people waist deep in this disaster really appreciate the media and Slashdot slashdotting the FEMA site right when they need it the most. But, at least you worthless bastards are doing your part by whining about their choice of browser, stuff that really matters! The browser debate was really important to me when I had no water or electricity for a month!
I for one would like to say that had I mod points today and were you not posting as AC, I'd mod you up in a heartbeat. You make an excellent point.
Strangely, contrary to the KDE whiners...
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GNOME 2.12 Released
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· Score: 4, Insightful
...my use of Gnome on Fedora Core 3 has been nothing short of miraculous in simplicity and efficiency and most closely comes to the interface I've come to expect after years of Windows and even, hack/wheeze/cough, OS/2.
KDE on the other hand seems to pride itself on being as different as possible, seems to be designed to make guesses as to what I want as opposed to asking me or simply doing the logical default, and is largely irrellevant to most supposedly KDE-centric apps when it comes to running them on Gnome. I don't have to change out of Gnome for KDE for them to work in almost every case.
Gnome is a pretty damn decent environment and I can see why it is the FC default.
...this will be contested. Most of the landlocked nations of the Earth, especially the most dictatorial and despotic and mismanaged, salivated of the Law of the Sea Treaty. It pretty much gave the UN control over everything and would have amounted, given the way the UN does everything, to a massive wealth transfer from nations using sea resources to those not.
I can hardly believe the same UN which knew very damn well that Iraq had VX in hand at one point but was willing to kiss Hussein's rear end for sweet deals and play up that the US was ultimately like Nazi Germany to Iraq's Poland would do any less. An entire frigging planet for the most corrupt international body in history is too much to resist.
I also doubt any single government of Earth would sit still for what amounts to any private government being created on Mars which this would essentially entail.
First, the paranoid conspiracy theorists need to try some decaff and cut their sugar intake. You're all way too hyper and not every/. article should lead to fear mongering about censorship. The Internet's history and nature shows very clearly it is its own best defense against censorship.
Second, the utopian dreamer who sound like Doug Henning on acid need to get a grip. It's a tool like any other. It is NOT on the same level as the invention of spoke and written language, it is merely a tool of conveying same. So far, the Internet has been a tool to say more nothing faster than ever before such that anyone anywhere at anytime can say nothing before they can think nothing.
Third, the negative naysayers need to get a grip as well because we already heard from your contingent regarding the feasability of ever reaching the moon or for that matter discovering the new world instead of falling off the edge of it. I'm a cynic by nature and very much given to waiting and seeing forever because the story never does reach a conclusion and the point is the ride not the destination.
That being said, I rather doubt the Internet is "making" anyone more creative, but merely passively encouraging release of what creativity they already had along the lines of the Internet Superman Syndrome we see with flamewar generals. It's the Internet, people don't take what is said here too seriously, assume that they can say whatever with impunity, and who cares in the end as it doesn't really matter. They treat it like a toy.
Why not put your horrible drawings up like the world's largest kitchen refrigerator? Why not publish your half-baked theories? Why not spew endless drivel and ramblings? Why not parade your unfinished writings? It doesn't matter in the first place and if anyone cares, its a small bonus. The shotgun method of socialization. Throw it all out there and let people pick and choose in the detritus and ignore it all if they like.
Of course the Internet cognoscenti want to wax pompous and reminisce about some mythical good old days of genteel geek users who only said wonderful things of note and value or said nothing at all but this is clearly hogwash as collections of many old mailing lists show never mind what you will hear from the same old timers when they let their guard down over a beard and aren't doing a snobbish blog post about it publicly.
Maybe in time people will throw less garbage and more gems but the whole process of peer review is slow on the net with such volume and it takes time and people actually caring about the feedback to then make the effort to work what they put out and refine it. Slowly it will happen.
We're not becoming more creative. I was extremely creative and so were my parents and their parents in their own way, setting, and environment. The kids today merely have the omnipresent world wide web thing to display their creative output. Now more people can know about the little rugrats' creativity than just the neighbors when they walk out to find their tree has been tp'd. Now the kids can scrawl grafitti from one end of the globe to the other.
"Real Soon" is also the same time frame for the return of the Red Lectroids to Planet 10 and we know what happened there so I am not very encouraged by that.
Uh, before you start feeling warm in the glow of yet another shallow and not very well concealed slap at Christianity, remember that the tales of Christians and before them Jews are replete with legendary men and women of note. It isn't about monotheism versus pantheism. It's basic to all humans; a species that is on the whole psychologically messed up and viewing itself as powerless.
Oddly, only the monotheism you take a whack at has truly embraced free will and self-determination. If anything about it rankles, it is that it also embraced the concept that it comes at the price of conscience and responsibility. How dare anyone tell anyone that there's good and evil, that some actions are right and others wrong? Only as long as everything is beyond our will and absolving us of responsibility or assuring us of our righteousness over anyone telling us different or both are we alright with it.
Obsession with heroes is if anything a tacit admission of our own surrender. Only someone else can be that good, noble, and selfless. And how wrong that idea is. Heroes aren't fictional people. They're the people who don't abdicate the power and responsibility both that are free will, make the choice to be better, and follow through even if it means giving up everything they've most desired and cherished in their whole lives.
The "cross platform standards is superior" line is only trotted out when it is against Microsoft. Apple could create a horrific new music format with more sinister DRM than Microsoft has ever remotely dreamt of and Slashdotter would give it a thumbs up. Ubuntu could drop all support for zip, bzip, etc., in favor of a proprietary new compression format that no other distro used and it would get glowing reviews and plaudits for it.
Microsoft could propose a new format the specifications of which they intend to make freely availible at no charge and they'd be excoriated faster than you can Slashdot Effect a Packard Bell running NT 3.51.
If this doesn't work across all platforms then all it is doing is seriously disenfranchising a massive number of customers and that is no better than any of the things MS is taken to task for endlessly or any company that embraces MS technologies over those of Firefox and company.
Did that say signed vs. unsigned integer bugs?
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OpenSSH 4.2 released
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· Score: 1
Isn't that a subject covered somewhere around the fourth or fifth class for ANSI C? And it took this long?
My how time flies when you're too busy with the bigger picture... At least they actually got around to the bug hunting.
Re:The new compression method is pretty fantastic.
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OpenSSH 4.2 released
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· Score: 1
That might make remote X11 useable on a cable modem..
It already is useable at the current top speeds which are now several megabits upstream and ten to fifteen down, depending on where you live. Even at 512Kbps upstream it is useable for me in concert with VNC.
I love how quickly and easily all of the myriad failings of the Clinton administration in the area of intelligence, and all the times they classified information, are conveniently forgotten and the sum total of all use, abuse, and misuse of classification quickly and hypocritically glossed over and forgotten.
Let us not forget that Mr. Habitrail for Humanity, President Jimmy Carter, went from claiming he saw a UFO and if elected he'd declassify anything and everything on the subject and promptly acted as though he never saw anything or said anything from the moment of his first preparatory intelligence briefing.
Exactly how much stuff did he declassify about Area 51, Lockheed's skunkworks, experimental aircraft development, etc? Oh yeah, NONE. To this day, it is still Shoot to Kill territory out there. If there's no need for classification, then why is that classified?
For that matter, during that period when the leftist Democrats were supposed to be so much more Soviet-friendly than anyone else and more commited to unilateral defense self-destruction, what of our nation's nuclear weapons program was declassified and released?
There are reasons, for whatever the party or politics of the administration, for classification and secrets. There are things that exist in this world, things which have happened, which if the public of the country and the world knew would lead to upheval and damage worse than anything we suffer by not knowing.
I can think of a dozen things in my own life I wish I'd never known and for which I won't sleep well ever again. But for those with even a shred of conscience, the price of knowledge of some things is to be forever peturbed by them and the only release is death. I feel for those who have to keep those secrets who can never again know ignorance.
For the shallow out there who need everything as an irreverent joke, consider what you'd give to never have seen your dad step naked out of the shower or your mother's c-section scar or your grandmother needing a sponge bath. Some things you just don't need to know or see.
...run a competition that spurs games to be written for Linux? Somehow Tux Racer with proper drivers misses people completely. I want the next Doom to come out first on Linux. Instead, we're looking at pixels trying to guess pictures.
And predictably, after this is asked, the politics resume.
*sigh*
I'm a conservative on most issues myself and a lot of what he did totally surprised even me, as jaded and given to writing off the news media blather about people like him as I am. He was an excellent jurist much of the time. We won't see his like in government again, sadly.
...was not spreadsheets. We had those on paper and this was the kind of thing high school computer classes taught towards the end of the last semester as an exercise after writing a basic text editor which was euphamistically referred to as a "word processor" at the time, but most functions dealt with letters, not words. But I digress...
The biggest contribution was the entrenchment of the phenomenon of software spurring hardware and not the other way around. In response to VisiCalc, ever larger character displays were made and they went beyond the usual 40 or 80 all the way to 128 which of course meant that you could not deal with them properly on a standard NTSC monitor. Next thing you knew, you had RGB monitors with higher resolution being pushed that could display the larger character counts.
A lot of Apple 2 display hardware advertisements revolved around how well the product worked with VisiCalc. Sadly, Paul Lutus' AppleWriter ][ didn't fare as well thanks to Apple's lukewarm embrace of it which was sad given that it took until MECC Writer took off for anything to truly outdo it as far as useability versus feature set went and it had a nice minimacro language of sorts for automation.
Today we see a similar phenomenon as vendors write software aimed at the machine which will be current and standard in three years. Except for Adobe which writes theirs aimed at machines which might be standard in five years.
Yup, still trying to strip a system down enough to boot Premiere fast enough to get a seven days of use in a week instead of six because I sacrificed one for the start-up phase.
Sarcasm or merely inarticulate you're missing the point. Electric, magnetic, and electromagnetic forces are largely IGNORED by the astrophysics community despite their obvious importance. Said forces figure in combustion of gas in a bunsen burner in highschool, not that you'd ever hear it from your teacher because orthodox science is possessed of orthodoxy that says it isn't important.
They ARE important, and beyond the simplistic things that astrophysicists deign to deal with like the Coulomb Barrier in stellar fusion which they gloss over in favor of the gravitational collapse angle. It's just too bad that we don't have the level of understanding of electromagnetism and ions that Tesla had but we've got tons of lovely extreme theories about gravity.
...but it won't save you any money on your car insurance.
And if you intend to watch pr0n on it while driving, please DON'T call Geico. Or anyone else. Call a funeral home and make plans for your arrival there shortly.
For people to speak out about incompetence, indifference, and horrible decisions is entirely proper. Politics is life.
Now is the time to be giving a flying fig about the dead and dying not the scoring of points for your pet political views and from my observation thus far, 98% of the political comments online and on television are the usual far left idiocy we got all the way through the elections which scared the electorate and cost Kerry what should have been a much easier fight. When will the Howard Dean moron brigades get it? The public doesn't want to hear it and the slaps at George Bush, Republicans, the USA in general, etc. are only going to backfire badly.
As has been shown, the bad decisions cross all the political lines. It wasn't George Bush who caused the local government down there to stumble any more than it was the Clinton administration which single-handedly undercut flood prevention funding. Either you're being naive or disingenuous. Mere politics in a theoretical vacuum wasn't being referred to. Using the tragedy to damage one side and build another was. Political opportunism is going on and it shouldn't.
or they continue the dance theme and Lambada, Macarena, Hustle, and Cabbage Patch creeped out the testers' signifigant others who caught them attempting the namesake dances. To their relief, the testers haven't figured out what a Joomla is and are now slightly less embarassing.
...and the only thing on the minds of thousands of Slashdotters is whether computer and network technology is involved and if so does it involve Linux, Firefox, and Open Source Software.
Fro crying out loud people, who gives a damn?! Thousands are dead, many thousands more injured, and most of them and thousands more homeless and an even larger amount without drinkable water and an even larger amount without electrical power. WHO CARES if Linux is involved?
I swear, the shallow and selfish opportunism never ceases to amaze me. I bet if Bill Gates donated $50M to relief efforts there would be an immediate post proclaiming it an attempt to buy influence and derail criticism while a small effort of Linux geeks to raise a few donations via PayPal would get endless glowing praise. As it is I fully expect the tragedy to be laid at the feet of the Bush administration without regard to the local government evidently collapsing on itself in the crucial first hours of the aftermath.
First, we don't know what the condition of the ozone layer over the poles was prior to CFC build up and have no idea if the holes were there before and if so, how big and what if any were the variations and with what periodicity and synchronicity re:orbital wobble, aphelion/parahelion, solar activity, etc. For all we know, the holes have always been there as a function of solar charged particle radiation following the Earth's magnetic field lines which we know for a fact happens to bring us auroras among other things.
Second, if the majority of scientists believed in G-d, which they most likely do, does that overall consensus mean G-d's existance is proven? Fark no. Nor would the consensus of the majority of children between 3 and 6 believing in a monster in the dark under their bed prove it either. What scientists choose to believe is irrellevant. What is imporant is preponderance of the evidence and we have no such thing.
We don't have it with global warming, ozone depletion, overpopulation, or any of a dozen other shibboleths the social engineering left seizes on every few years. By this time, we were all supposed to be radiation mutated zombie cannibals freezing to death under a new ice age with a planetary population of sixty billion. Predictably when it didn't happen, they took credit for it by claiming their warning was enough to change it.
I therefore would like to take credit for the saving of the world from the disaster that would be flying pigs if they are created through genetic engineering. I believe it is at least possible and I'm sure a sizeable consensus could be made that agreed with that and since I am warning all of you, you obviously will agree that pig dung slamming into your windshield and nailing you in the head would be bad. Not to mention the problem of flying pig hunters and errant shootings by mistake. Having been warned, you will no doubt via the chaos theory at the very least cause it to not come about.
You may genuflect starting now.
THAT is the nature of much of this environmental pseudo-science. We know that certain processes can happen in labs and in nature. We DO NOT know with any certainty that they happen at all or if they do to what degree in nature in concert or against unknown numbers of other unknown influences. Meanwhile we ban Halon fire extinguishers and other useful things and in the end definitely cause negative effects on society simply because of someone's theory held so tightly only because it jives with their cherished personal sociopolitcal beliefs which might as well be faith.
As rational and useful as claiming your faith means that G-d created the world in seven days. Faith and proof have nothing to do with either. We don't let creationists off the hook for purposely confusion the two and we need to stop the extremists on the other side from doing the same.
Unfortunately, one side of the political spectrum's religious faith has become intertwined with the scientific disciplines, activism made the order of the day, and the intellectual arrogance of mistaking raw intelligence as being superior to wisdom and experience all by itself has been encouraged.
This is like saying that Chrysler must accept Toyota. No they damn well don't and if they want to run a competition to put them out of business, then that's their decision. If MS wants to fight Linux, more power to them. MS doesn't have to "accept" anything. They are free to fight it as they should. I don't recall anyone saying that MS should "accept" OS/2 instead of offering incentives to IBM shops to ditch it for NT Wkstn.
...the encrypted cluster server I'm building which will have hardware encryption on every hard drive and IDE flash drive as well as software encryption of the partitions and then on top of it the files. I'm planning it to stress test these things for reliability before I press ahead with a side business for clients that need the security like HIPAA involved entities, or for that matter, the local cops and lawyers. Living in a small city with a state court and a hospital and ten dozen medical practices, it's not a bad market for people catering to info security.
I was a big fan of the first Zork, Bard's Tale, and Alternate Reality: The Dungeon. Of the three, despite its assininely insufficient attempt at graphics, AR:TD was engrossing because there were definite things to be solved, some of which came on you at random, and others which were at different places, and the included map was a stylized artsy drawing and not a literal map. You had to graph it out on paper and that took me several months of play to get each level correct.
Now it is all about super 3D, running around in ninety directions getting dizzy with bizarre amounts of controls, where the game play makes you wish you had four hands and forty fingers on each. The story is hack, the story-telling intellectually retarded, and the ultimate experience underwhelming. I could barely handle Doom, Quake was only fun when you set the gravity to zero and bounced around, and so forth. Now, I don't see anything engrossing enough to make getting good at it worth it.
Kingdom of Loathing is my new favorite and despite being free, I actually want to and have donated money. It takes up just enough and not too much time, it's still evolving, and the community of players is much closer knit than anonymous gripers about the latest craptacular EA Games offering. All things being equal I'd rather play that than anything offered right now. I don't even touch my Game Cube anymore having largely been turned off by the horrific treatment that Robotech was given. "WTF?! I waited twenty years for this game and this is the best we get?!" It was as much a letdown as the Robocop for Gameboy from Ocean which was delayed nineteen times or so before it broke and it sucked worse than the Gameboy Pit Fighter which was hard to imagine up to that point.
Slashdot Mirror
...all about GWB and the war and such...
And of course the time it is taking for Iraq to get a stable post-Hussein government and constitution. Two points to remember people: first, the USA didn't invent the constitution overnight, it really took years of wrangling prior to the Declaration of Independce straight on through the Bill of Rights afterwards and if you really want to get into the lineage of it, it goes back before the Magna Carta. Representative democracy isn't something that happens overnight and it takes a while to be embraced and become something people love and understand the give and take of.
Second, the Iraqis have been under top-down control for a very very long time and the only thing that happened was that the old hatreds were either in favor of only one faction or they were put on hold under threat of action from above. Just like the Soviet Union never solving the hatreds they for years kept from being acted on in open fighting and when the USSR went bye-bye...
It will take a while. But it is far better than being ruled by a guy who was running the place as if he was a two-dimensional stock enemy from a Golan-Globus film or for the ones requiring a recent example, as if they were Howard Saint in The Punisher.
I can also tell you that the people waist deep in this disaster really appreciate the media and Slashdot slashdotting the FEMA site right when they need it the most. But, at least you worthless bastards are doing your part by whining about their choice of browser, stuff that really matters! The browser debate was really important to me when I had no water or electricity for a month!
I for one would like to say that had I mod points today and were you not posting as AC, I'd mod you up in a heartbeat. You make an excellent point.
...my use of Gnome on Fedora Core 3 has been nothing short of miraculous in simplicity and efficiency and most closely comes to the interface I've come to expect after years of Windows and even, hack/wheeze/cough, OS/2.
KDE on the other hand seems to pride itself on being as different as possible, seems to be designed to make guesses as to what I want as opposed to asking me or simply doing the logical default, and is largely irrellevant to most supposedly KDE-centric apps when it comes to running them on Gnome. I don't have to change out of Gnome for KDE for them to work in almost every case.
Gnome is a pretty damn decent environment and I can see why it is the FC default.
...this will be contested. Most of the landlocked nations of the Earth, especially the most dictatorial and despotic and mismanaged, salivated of the Law of the Sea Treaty. It pretty much gave the UN control over everything and would have amounted, given the way the UN does everything, to a massive wealth transfer from nations using sea resources to those not.
I can hardly believe the same UN which knew very damn well that Iraq had VX in hand at one point but was willing to kiss Hussein's rear end for sweet deals and play up that the US was ultimately like Nazi Germany to Iraq's Poland would do any less. An entire frigging planet for the most corrupt international body in history is too much to resist.
I also doubt any single government of Earth would sit still for what amounts to any private government being created on Mars which this would essentially entail.
First, the paranoid conspiracy theorists need to try some decaff and cut their sugar intake. You're all way too hyper and not every /. article should lead to fear mongering about censorship. The Internet's history and nature shows very clearly it is its own best defense against censorship.
Second, the utopian dreamer who sound like Doug Henning on acid need to get a grip. It's a tool like any other. It is NOT on the same level as the invention of spoke and written language, it is merely a tool of conveying same. So far, the Internet has been a tool to say more nothing faster than ever before such that anyone anywhere at anytime can say nothing before they can think nothing.
Third, the negative naysayers need to get a grip as well because we already heard from your contingent regarding the feasability of ever reaching the moon or for that matter discovering the new world instead of falling off the edge of it. I'm a cynic by nature and very much given to waiting and seeing forever because the story never does reach a conclusion and the point is the ride not the destination.
That being said, I rather doubt the Internet is "making" anyone more creative, but merely passively encouraging release of what creativity they already had along the lines of the Internet Superman Syndrome we see with flamewar generals. It's the Internet, people don't take what is said here too seriously, assume that they can say whatever with impunity, and who cares in the end as it doesn't really matter. They treat it like a toy.
Why not put your horrible drawings up like the world's largest kitchen refrigerator? Why not publish your half-baked theories? Why not spew endless drivel and ramblings? Why not parade your unfinished writings? It doesn't matter in the first place and if anyone cares, its a small bonus. The shotgun method of socialization. Throw it all out there and let people pick and choose in the detritus and ignore it all if they like.
Of course the Internet cognoscenti want to wax pompous and reminisce about some mythical good old days of genteel geek users who only said wonderful things of note and value or said nothing at all but this is clearly hogwash as collections of many old mailing lists show never mind what you will hear from the same old timers when they let their guard down over a beard and aren't doing a snobbish blog post about it publicly.
Maybe in time people will throw less garbage and more gems but the whole process of peer review is slow on the net with such volume and it takes time and people actually caring about the feedback to then make the effort to work what they put out and refine it. Slowly it will happen.
We're not becoming more creative. I was extremely creative and so were my parents and their parents in their own way, setting, and environment. The kids today merely have the omnipresent world wide web thing to display their creative output. Now more people can know about the little rugrats' creativity than just the neighbors when they walk out to find their tree has been tp'd. Now the kids can scrawl grafitti from one end of the globe to the other.
"Real Soon" is also the same time frame for the return of the Red Lectroids to Planet 10 and we know what happened there so I am not very encouraged by that.
Uh, before you start feeling warm in the glow of yet another shallow and not very well concealed slap at Christianity, remember that the tales of Christians and before them Jews are replete with legendary men and women of note. It isn't about monotheism versus pantheism. It's basic to all humans; a species that is on the whole psychologically messed up and viewing itself as powerless.
Oddly, only the monotheism you take a whack at has truly embraced free will and self-determination. If anything about it rankles, it is that it also embraced the concept that it comes at the price of conscience and responsibility. How dare anyone tell anyone that there's good and evil, that some actions are right and others wrong? Only as long as everything is beyond our will and absolving us of responsibility or assuring us of our righteousness over anyone telling us different or both are we alright with it.
Obsession with heroes is if anything a tacit admission of our own surrender. Only someone else can be that good, noble, and selfless. And how wrong that idea is. Heroes aren't fictional people. They're the people who don't abdicate the power and responsibility both that are free will, make the choice to be better, and follow through even if it means giving up everything they've most desired and cherished in their whole lives.
Capes and spandex optional.
The "cross platform standards is superior" line is only trotted out when it is against Microsoft. Apple could create a horrific new music format with more sinister DRM than Microsoft has ever remotely dreamt of and Slashdotter would give it a thumbs up. Ubuntu could drop all support for zip, bzip, etc., in favor of a proprietary new compression format that no other distro used and it would get glowing reviews and plaudits for it.
Microsoft could propose a new format the specifications of which they intend to make freely availible at no charge and they'd be excoriated faster than you can Slashdot Effect a Packard Bell running NT 3.51.
If this doesn't work across all platforms then all it is doing is seriously disenfranchising a massive number of customers and that is no better than any of the things MS is taken to task for endlessly or any company that embraces MS technologies over those of Firefox and company.
Isn't that a subject covered somewhere around the fourth or fifth class for ANSI C? And it took this long?
My how time flies when you're too busy with the bigger picture... At least they actually got around to the bug hunting.
That might make remote X11 useable on a cable modem..
It already is useable at the current top speeds which are now several megabits upstream and ten to fifteen down, depending on where you live. Even at 512Kbps upstream it is useable for me in concert with VNC.
I love how quickly and easily all of the myriad failings of the Clinton administration in the area of intelligence, and all the times they classified information, are conveniently forgotten and the sum total of all use, abuse, and misuse of classification quickly and hypocritically glossed over and forgotten.
Let us not forget that Mr. Habitrail for Humanity, President Jimmy Carter, went from claiming he saw a UFO and if elected he'd declassify anything and everything on the subject and promptly acted as though he never saw anything or said anything from the moment of his first preparatory intelligence briefing.
Exactly how much stuff did he declassify about Area 51, Lockheed's skunkworks, experimental aircraft development, etc? Oh yeah, NONE. To this day, it is still Shoot to Kill territory out there. If there's no need for classification, then why is that classified?
For that matter, during that period when the leftist Democrats were supposed to be so much more Soviet-friendly than anyone else and more commited to unilateral defense self-destruction, what of our nation's nuclear weapons program was declassified and released?
There are reasons, for whatever the party or politics of the administration, for classification and secrets. There are things that exist in this world, things which have happened, which if the public of the country and the world knew would lead to upheval and damage worse than anything we suffer by not knowing.
I can think of a dozen things in my own life I wish I'd never known and for which I won't sleep well ever again. But for those with even a shred of conscience, the price of knowledge of some things is to be forever peturbed by them and the only release is death. I feel for those who have to keep those secrets who can never again know ignorance.
For the shallow out there who need everything as an irreverent joke, consider what you'd give to never have seen your dad step naked out of the shower or your mother's c-section scar or your grandmother needing a sponge bath. Some things you just don't need to know or see.
...run a competition that spurs games to be written for Linux? Somehow Tux Racer with proper drivers misses people completely. I want the next Doom to come out first on Linux. Instead, we're looking at pixels trying to guess pictures.
fuck all the politics , lets remember the man..
And predictably, after this is asked, the politics resume.
*sigh*
I'm a conservative on most issues myself and a lot of what he did totally surprised even me, as jaded and given to writing off the news media blather about people like him as I am. He was an excellent jurist much of the time. We won't see his like in government again, sadly.
So sorry you have to learn it this way, but she's extinct. BTW don't you worry, just about everyone here on /. hasn't had a date in eons...
Yeah, some of us are and have been married for what feels like eons.
...was not spreadsheets. We had those on paper and this was the kind of thing high school computer classes taught towards the end of the last semester as an exercise after writing a basic text editor which was euphamistically referred to as a "word processor" at the time, but most functions dealt with letters, not words. But I digress...
The biggest contribution was the entrenchment of the phenomenon of software spurring hardware and not the other way around. In response to VisiCalc, ever larger character displays were made and they went beyond the usual 40 or 80 all the way to 128 which of course meant that you could not deal with them properly on a standard NTSC monitor. Next thing you knew, you had RGB monitors with higher resolution being pushed that could display the larger character counts.
A lot of Apple 2 display hardware advertisements revolved around how well the product worked with VisiCalc. Sadly, Paul Lutus' AppleWriter ][ didn't fare as well thanks to Apple's lukewarm embrace of it which was sad given that it took until MECC Writer took off for anything to truly outdo it as far as useability versus feature set went and it had a nice minimacro language of sorts for automation.
Today we see a similar phenomenon as vendors write software aimed at the machine which will be current and standard in three years. Except for Adobe which writes theirs aimed at machines which might be standard in five years.
Yup, still trying to strip a system down enough to boot Premiere fast enough to get a seven days of use in a week instead of six because I sacrificed one for the start-up phase.
Sarcasm or merely inarticulate you're missing the point. Electric, magnetic, and electromagnetic forces are largely IGNORED by the astrophysics community despite their obvious importance. Said forces figure in combustion of gas in a bunsen burner in highschool, not that you'd ever hear it from your teacher because orthodox science is possessed of orthodoxy that says it isn't important.
They ARE important, and beyond the simplistic things that astrophysicists deign to deal with like the Coulomb Barrier in stellar fusion which they gloss over in favor of the gravitational collapse angle. It's just too bad that we don't have the level of understanding of electromagnetism and ions that Tesla had but we've got tons of lovely extreme theories about gravity.
...but it won't save you any money on your car insurance.
And if you intend to watch pr0n on it while driving, please DON'T call Geico. Or anyone else. Call a funeral home and make plans for your arrival there shortly.
For people to speak out about incompetence, indifference, and horrible decisions is entirely proper. Politics is life.
Now is the time to be giving a flying fig about the dead and dying not the scoring of points for your pet political views and from my observation thus far, 98% of the political comments online and on television are the usual far left idiocy we got all the way through the elections which scared the electorate and cost Kerry what should have been a much easier fight. When will the Howard Dean moron brigades get it? The public doesn't want to hear it and the slaps at George Bush, Republicans, the USA in general, etc. are only going to backfire badly.
As has been shown, the bad decisions cross all the political lines. It wasn't George Bush who caused the local government down there to stumble any more than it was the Clinton administration which single-handedly undercut flood prevention funding. Either you're being naive or disingenuous. Mere politics in a theoretical vacuum wasn't being referred to. Using the tragedy to damage one side and build another was. Political opportunism is going on and it shouldn't.
or they continue the dance theme and Lambada, Macarena, Hustle, and Cabbage Patch creeped out the testers' signifigant others who caught them attempting the namesake dances. To their relief, the testers haven't figured out what a Joomla is and are now slightly less embarassing.
...and the only thing on the minds of thousands of Slashdotters is whether computer and network technology is involved and if so does it involve Linux, Firefox, and Open Source Software.
Fro crying out loud people, who gives a damn?! Thousands are dead, many thousands more injured, and most of them and thousands more homeless and an even larger amount without drinkable water and an even larger amount without electrical power. WHO CARES if Linux is involved?
I swear, the shallow and selfish opportunism never ceases to amaze me. I bet if Bill Gates donated $50M to relief efforts there would be an immediate post proclaiming it an attempt to buy influence and derail criticism while a small effort of Linux geeks to raise a few donations via PayPal would get endless glowing praise. As it is I fully expect the tragedy to be laid at the feet of the Bush administration without regard to the local government evidently collapsing on itself in the crucial first hours of the aftermath.
First, we don't know what the condition of the ozone layer over the poles was prior to CFC build up and have no idea if the holes were there before and if so, how big and what if any were the variations and with what periodicity and synchronicity re:orbital wobble, aphelion/parahelion, solar activity, etc. For all we know, the holes have always been there as a function of solar charged particle radiation following the Earth's magnetic field lines which we know for a fact happens to bring us auroras among other things.
Second, if the majority of scientists believed in G-d, which they most likely do, does that overall consensus mean G-d's existance is proven? Fark no. Nor would the consensus of the majority of children between 3 and 6 believing in a monster in the dark under their bed prove it either. What scientists choose to believe is irrellevant. What is imporant is preponderance of the evidence and we have no such thing.
We don't have it with global warming, ozone depletion, overpopulation, or any of a dozen other shibboleths the social engineering left seizes on every few years. By this time, we were all supposed to be radiation mutated zombie cannibals freezing to death under a new ice age with a planetary population of sixty billion. Predictably when it didn't happen, they took credit for it by claiming their warning was enough to change it.
I therefore would like to take credit for the saving of the world from the disaster that would be flying pigs if they are created through genetic engineering. I believe it is at least possible and I'm sure a sizeable consensus could be made that agreed with that and since I am warning all of you, you obviously will agree that pig dung slamming into your windshield and nailing you in the head would be bad. Not to mention the problem of flying pig hunters and errant shootings by mistake. Having been warned, you will no doubt via the chaos theory at the very least cause it to not come about.
You may genuflect starting now.
THAT is the nature of much of this environmental pseudo-science. We know that certain processes can happen in labs and in nature. We DO NOT know with any certainty that they happen at all or if they do to what degree in nature in concert or against unknown numbers of other unknown influences. Meanwhile we ban Halon fire extinguishers and other useful things and in the end definitely cause negative effects on society simply because of someone's theory held so tightly only because it jives with their cherished personal sociopolitcal beliefs which might as well be faith.
As rational and useful as claiming your faith means that G-d created the world in seven days. Faith and proof have nothing to do with either. We don't let creationists off the hook for purposely confusion the two and we need to stop the extremists on the other side from doing the same.
Unfortunately, one side of the political spectrum's religious faith has become intertwined with the scientific disciplines, activism made the order of the day, and the intellectual arrogance of mistaking raw intelligence as being superior to wisdom and experience all by itself has been encouraged.
This is like saying that Chrysler must accept Toyota. No they damn well don't and if they want to run a competition to put them out of business, then that's their decision. If MS wants to fight Linux, more power to them. MS doesn't have to "accept" anything. They are free to fight it as they should. I don't recall anyone saying that MS should "accept" OS/2 instead of offering incentives to IBM shops to ditch it for NT Wkstn.
...the encrypted cluster server I'm building which will have hardware encryption on every hard drive and IDE flash drive as well as software encryption of the partitions and then on top of it the files. I'm planning it to stress test these things for reliability before I press ahead with a side business for clients that need the security like HIPAA involved entities, or for that matter, the local cops and lawyers. Living in a small city with a state court and a hospital and ten dozen medical practices, it's not a bad market for people catering to info security.
I was a big fan of the first Zork, Bard's Tale, and Alternate Reality: The Dungeon. Of the three, despite its assininely insufficient attempt at graphics, AR:TD was engrossing because there were definite things to be solved, some of which came on you at random, and others which were at different places, and the included map was a stylized artsy drawing and not a literal map. You had to graph it out on paper and that took me several months of play to get each level correct.
Now it is all about super 3D, running around in ninety directions getting dizzy with bizarre amounts of controls, where the game play makes you wish you had four hands and forty fingers on each. The story is hack, the story-telling intellectually retarded, and the ultimate experience underwhelming. I could barely handle Doom, Quake was only fun when you set the gravity to zero and bounced around, and so forth. Now, I don't see anything engrossing enough to make getting good at it worth it.
Kingdom of Loathing is my new favorite and despite being free, I actually want to and have donated money. It takes up just enough and not too much time, it's still evolving, and the community of players is much closer knit than anonymous gripers about the latest craptacular EA Games offering. All things being equal I'd rather play that than anything offered right now. I don't even touch my Game Cube anymore having largely been turned off by the horrific treatment that Robotech was given. "WTF?! I waited twenty years for this game and this is the best we get?!" It was as much a letdown as the Robocop for Gameboy from Ocean which was delayed nineteen times or so before it broke and it sucked worse than the Gameboy Pit Fighter which was hard to imagine up to that point.
...as a retro-virus and we get Resident Evil.
"Aim for the head!"