The first thing any sane (read: emacs-using) user should do with screen is change the command key from ^A to ^O. Nobody I know that uses emacs uses ^O, but *everyone* needs ^A. That means adding:
escape "^O^O"
to your ~/.screenrc.
I do wish that GNU screen was a little easier to use. Because of its name, it's hard to search for help on it, and it's not the most intuitive software in the world. However, it is *incredibly* useful, especially once it becomes second nature to use, and anyone that does much console work (especially remotely) should absolutely learn GNU screen. The biggest obvious feature is the ability to detatch and reattach to sessions a la VMS, but it also does split screens, scrollback buffers (in a standardized way -- most remote consoles you use probably have some form of scrollback buffer), copy-paste, monitoring of daemons for activity or inactivity...
Gnome does not have the right infrastructure to do that easily. Just the same reason why they've now only managed to access remote sites with Gedit while every KDE app has had this capability for ages. IMHO Gnome looks quite pretty on the outside but is very rotten on what matters most, its internals.
(Rolls eyes) Ah, I see. Well, you keep using KDE, then, if it makes you happy.
$ rpm -qi gnome-spell [some content clipped to avoid lameness filter] Description : Gnome Spell is a GNOME/Bonobo component for spell checking. In the current version, it contains a GNOME::Spell::Dictionary object, which provides a spell checking dictionary (see Spell.idl for exact API definition). It is based on pspell package, which is required to build gnome-spell.
They keep all their manuals and technical information online on their website, and let you search for nearby stores *and* stock availability in those stores. I've found Radio Shack to have one of the better retailer websites out there.
I've read some older fiction -- there were lots of books from forty or more years ago where the hero was an engineer. Tom Swift (and Tom Swift Jr.), Danny Dunn, and so forth.
The problem is, in the media that kids see today, in the video games and movies, how often is it an inventor or engineer that is a hero? In the content in the 80s, when I was a kid, "hero inventors" were already only in dusty books. Today, you get movies where you have the "action hero" as the main character, maybe with a sidekick "computer guy" who probably spends most of his time breaking into computers or doing other illegal stuff. There are no *positive* idols to provide kids with -- just the guy that shoots people in righteous anger and the hacker type.
Sigh.
Maybe Dexter's Lab, but there the wonders of technological advancement is not the point of the cartoon, but more of a backdrop.
Okay, maybe the earlier stuff was just propaganda to get kids excited about and interested in engineering...but, you know, it worked.
* They have small stores, so whatever it is that they sell, they can't have many choices compared to a place like Circuit City or Best Buy. Sometimes this is okay -- I just bought their top-of-the-line cordless phone, because it's a really good cordless phone.
* They are one of the few national franchises out there where I find that people still seem to have some degree of domain knowledge. I have only a little EE knowledge, just enough to like to solder things together and play with simple devices, and when I asked last about why there was an audio and linear version of a pot, the guy quickly started to describe response curves. That, I thought, was pretty cool.
* They have relatively expensive store locations -- Best Buy stores are usually out of town, where land is cheap. Radio Shacks are usually in malls.
* They sell things that can only apply to an extremely limited market. How many people need banana clips or prototyping boards? Sure, many Slashdotters love 'em, but how much money does that work out to? I'll bet even most people here spend more on consumer electronics than components.
The problem with this is that they have little space, and high costs.
I'd be sad to see them go, but honestly, a lot of people who would have been electronics hobbyists thirty years ago are now computer hobbyists...
All the other junk is just overpriced whats-its, like speaker wire.
They have a pretty hefty markup on that (it's just that if you're making one hobby instance of a project, components are generally so cheap that you don't care).
They ought to get back to their roots...providing components for tinkerers. I know there's not as much potential profit in this, but if they were to partner with the editors of Make Magazine, they could become the new hope for the home brew crowd.
I've been wondering for a while how Radio Shack keeps making money with that dusty component box in the back. I mean, I love it (I can get parts without waiting for mail order!), but they *can't* sell many components, even at the huge markup they ask, unless maybe they're situated in a town where HP has a big EE lab or something and everyone likes to tinker.
See, the thing is, companies wouldn't ask for a degree if it didn't find some correlation useful in making hiring decisions.
Sure, this guy has proven himself, but if they keep him now, they set an example for everyone *else* that applies at Radio Shack to lie on their resume and manage to keep it quiet for a couple years. There's a significant cost to the company there.
The point is, they want to make very clear that lying about yourself to the company has a severe cost -- it will landmine your career for your entire time at the company.
It's a different job, and the fact that there is an organizational hierarchy (because, you know, you don't need one organizer for every bottom-tier worker) doesn't mean that those people are "better" than you. Okay, maybe at the low-level management positions, senior workers generally wind up being team leads. But there's a big difference between low-level management and middle management.
Granted C** positions probably are given somewhat more than they should get, given that they have a lot of input into their own salary. Michael Eisner infamously made $1M salary + $7.25M bonus in 2004. Is he really worth the many, many bottom-tier workers that cost the company? I doubt it. But, on the other hand, not that many CEOs make that much, Eisner got booted partly as a result of making this much.
educational background has little relevance to one's capabiltiy of doing many corporate jobs.
The problem is not that the guy didn't have whatever degree he said he had.
The problem is that he lied to the company about it.
A long time ago, there was someone who had blogged about applying for some kind of very sensitive job at the FBI (or maybe it was the NSA) posting about the interview process. The point is that they asked all kinds of seemingly senseless questions, mixed with questions that he considered invasive and not relevant to the job. "Have you ever put a finger inside your anus for sexual pleasure" and things like that. Someone else said that they were familiar with the process and the interviewer didn't really care about the answers -- they just wanted to see whether when the person was under intense pressure, they'd start trying to lie. So a failing response to "have you ever had sex with a dog" would be "Err....heh...well, not as such" with the lie detector going off and a passing one "Hell, yes. I fucked a Chihuahua five years ago in Mexico City and it was *great*!"). If the interviewer's take is that the candidate is lying on any of the questions, they pass on them. I've no idea as to the accuracy of the posts; however, it certainly struck me as an interesting approach.
If someone starts lying to their employer when they think it's to their benefit to do so, the employer loses the ability to trust them. Better to have a slightly worse employee whose statements can be trusted than one who might do a good job but produces useless status information when backed into a corner. Because there *will* be times when people are scared to tell the truth "Is this project done?" "Are you going to make deadline?" etc but it really, really matters that the people above them get accurate information from them.
His lack of success as CEO can just as easily be explained by a) inheriting a mess, b) lack of board support, and c) not the right man for the job.
Or just that CEOs are used as scapegoats. They know about this when getting hired, and this is why the golden parachutes.
As long as the company does well, the CEO can interview with Fortune and so forth to build his reputation. However, if it goes downhill, the company *will* blame things on this one guy, fire him, hire another CEO, incur steep "one-time restructuring costs" to "implement the new guy's ideas", and with the costs they've shifted to that quarter, be able to report profitability immediately after getting the new CEO.
See, the thing is, most of the stuff that mplayer does just can't be done with something like Windows Media Player.
When you have a really powerful application, you start looking at complexity in terms of usage.
If you don't like it, mplayer does have a GUI (gmplayer), and you can fiddle little GUI controls. You can also use a less capable movie player like totem that more closely approximates Windows Media Player.
Open up links in new windows, unless its for a reason.
I thought that there was some sort of link attribute that would allow this to happen. I wish to high heaven webpage authors would actually use the damned thing instead of Javascript so that I could disable it and never have this behavior and not break other websites.
The only environment in which I can imagine someone actually wanting the remote website being able to change the function of your left mouse button is if your hand is fused to your mouse and the fingers over the left and right mouse button have been cut off. When I want a new tab, I'll middle-click.
- should ideally make your browser crash or stop responding
Yes. I dread that moment of churning on a Windows browser where someone has the Adobe PDF webbrowser plugin installed. A significant percentage of the time, it winds up killing the browser, and if it doesn't, it's slow to load.
I don't really understand what's wrong with PDF anyway. It's an open standard, it doesn't seem to be horrifically inefficient or lacking any features that *I* want in a readable document distribution system, etc.
Actually, my worst gripe with PDF is that Adobe's plugins have for years been the one thing that have a good chance of taking down my web browser (or at the very least, bogging it down badly). Under Linux, where I have PDFs handled by an external copy of xpdf, things are much better.
And yet, *every time* I ask for examples of sites that are so elegant and usable on Slashdot, I get these links to absolutely abysmal sites.
I think the only time I've seen a single practically useful application of Flash was when Creative Labs was trying to show of the interface to their new MP3 player and wanted to interactively demo it online.
I'm not saying that it isn't fun for people to *make* Flash sites, but it's like someone painting for fun. There's nothing wrong with it as a fun hobby, but it's pretty unlikely to actually be something good in the absolute sense of the word.
Jakob Nielson isn't always fun and exciting in what he says, but I rarely disagree with him. Usability is all that matters in the long run. A Flash site can offer nothing more than a brief bit of novelty, and all the time spent developing it could have been spent developing useful content.
Look at Google. They stomped all their competitors. There were a number of reasons for this, but one of the most obvious is that they were as simple and minimalist as possible. Winning websites are minimalist. That doesn't mean dumbed-down or feature-reduced.
Amazon.com, for example, has great features. However, it is approaching the point where *I* am intimidated by all the features jammed onto one page, and I happily use emacs each day.
Adobe has gone from being a technology driven company that does interesting creative things, to a marketing driven company that slowly pares back functionality in its Acrobat products and charges you more for the privilege.
I've thought a lot about why companies seem to suck more as they get bigger.
I've a number of theories -- here's a plausible one. If you start a company with five people, everyone is driven and interested in the idea. There is no room for dead weight, so everyone there is actually working with the team. Everyone sees the contribution that they make to the business. Everyone is familiar with the product, so you don't run into the embarassing inefficiencies common in large businesses. These come up when someone produces a requirement and after filting down through three layers of people, it hits someone who has to fulfill that requirement, who thinks "this is stupid; I could do a much better job by taking a different approach", but is too far away from the requirement-issuer to do anything about it. As a result, you have a driven, connected, knowledgeable set of people doing a good job.
I can think of very few companies that have not increasingly sucked as they have gotten larger. Once you don't know most of the people at the company, you start having a problem, IMHO.
Has everyone forgotten that the purpose of html is that the pages look different on different devices?
While I agree that this is the original purpose of HTML, and the best purpose (IMHO), HTML has long since been perverted with things like pixel-level positioning in CSS into a layout markup language. Regrettable, but you can't take the general document-designing world and try to teach them to think in an abstract fashion when they are accustomed to thinking in a visual fashion about things. Real HTML only lasted as long as the people writing documents were computer science types.
I remember when using I tags was advised against, since the end user might not have an output device that could display italics -- EM was preferred. Boy, are those days long in the past.
Except it's not really "wartime". Congress never declared "war" on Iraq. Bush just sent troops over there, abusing Constitutional powers granted the President that were intended for short-term rapid defensive necessities, not invading and occupying countries.
Because "news for nerds" is really "advertising dollars for Slashdot's parent company", and this article is a clickfest goldmine.
Unlike, say, any other news source?
The article is really about Rumsfeld being, gasp, honest about one of the fronts of the war.
Really. Do you have inside information into Islamic media to validate his claims?
Kneejerks will misinterpret this as Donald "Big Brother" Rumsfeld trying to control their minds.
Well, yes, we got a little bit burnt when we listened to him last time and he convinced everyone to, you know, invade, occupy, and set up a puppet government in Iraq without any legitimate justification? Why would be believe him now?
Oh, that's right. It was all the CIA.
The CIA was scapegoated for Iraq by the Rumsfeld-Cheney-Wolfowitz faction, which has a long history of pushing for more hawkish policies against the recommendations of the CIA. You have to know a bit of the background story.
Let's see: first it was the Soviets. The CIA said that they weren't going to nuke us. Wolfowitz's Team B decided that the CIA didn't know what the hell it was talking about, and that we needed to jack up our weapons production:
Team B, came to the conclusion that the Soviets had developed several terrifying new weapons of mass destruction, featuring a nuclear-armed submarine fleet that used a sonar system that didn't depend on sound and was, thus, undetectable by contemporary Western technology. When the CIA argued that the economic chaos in the Soviet Union was hindering their ability to produce an air defense system, Team B countered by claiming that the Soviet Union was trying to deceive the American public when in fact their air defense system worked perfectly.Some members were even considering promoting a "first strike policy" against the U.S.S.R.[13][14][15]. Rumsfeld took a good deal of power from the CIA during the Ford Administration.
During this period [Rumsfeld]...was instrumental in increasing the power of the military within the administration and at the expense of the CIA and Henry Kissinger. This was accomplished by promulgating the view that the Soviet Union was increasing defense spending and pursuing secret weapons programs, and that the proper response was a re-escalation of the arms race. Some say that this view was in direct contrast to CIA and generally accepted reports on the declining state of the Soviet economy, and the earlier success of Richard Nixon in establishing Detente (referring to a thawing of the Cold War) with the Soviet Union.
In Iraq, the CIA did their job well, handing up data that Iraq and al-Qaeda were *not* linked. Rumsfeld took issue with this.
"[OSP] was created in order to find evidence of what Wolfowitz and his boss, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, believed to be true--that Saddam Hussein had close ties to Al Qaeda, and that Iraq had an enormous arsenal of chemical, biological, and possibly even nuclear weapons that threatened the region and, potentially, the United States. [...] 'The agency [CIA] was out to disprove linkage between Iraq and terrorism,' the Pentagon adviser told me. 'That's what drove them. If you've ever worked with intelligence data, you can see the ingrained views at C.I.A. that color the way it sees data.' The goal of Special Plans, he said, was 'to put the data under the microscope to reveal what the intelligence community can't see.'"
After the fact that Iraq didn't actually have any weapons of mass destruction, and the justification-of-the-day-for-invading-Iraq started shifting around, the PR strategy began to blame "bad intelligence" for the invasion -- which was effectively taken by the public as being the CIA's fault. A Congressional investigation into the CIA was started, the Bush Administration put pres
Pat Robertson is the founder of the Christian Coalition, the large and powerful group that is the main political arm of Christianity in the United States. He is a major media voice. He is not marginalized, and while many US citizens dislike Pat Robertson, he has an awful lot of supporters keeping him where he is.
Actually, the Bible is self-contradictory on many points, and as any other set of axioms that are self-contradictory, can be used to prove absolutely anything.
Most of the Bible is today ignored, except for chunks that fit in with modern culture.
You have to understand that Christianity is an emminently pragmatic organization, and despite claiming absolute morality, very much changes to fit the times. The Pope has switched around on whether and what types of abortion are appropriate over the centuries (currently none). Homosexuality is still opposed based on chunks of text like that in Leviticus 18:22 Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination., but eating of various animals is commonly performed (Leviticus 11:7 And the swine, though he divide the hoof, and be cloven-footed, yet he cheweth not the cud; he is unclean to you.)
Slashdot Mirror
The first thing any sane (read: emacs-using) user should do with screen is change the command key from ^A to ^O. Nobody I know that uses emacs uses ^O, but *everyone* needs ^A. That means adding:
escape "^O^O"
to your ~/.screenrc.
I do wish that GNU screen was a little easier to use. Because of its name, it's hard to search for help on it, and it's not the most intuitive software in the world. However, it is *incredibly* useful, especially once it becomes second nature to use, and anyone that does much console work (especially remotely) should absolutely learn GNU screen. The biggest obvious feature is the ability to detatch and reattach to sessions a la VMS, but it also does split screens, scrollback buffers (in a standardized way -- most remote consoles you use probably have some form of scrollback buffer), copy-paste, monitoring of daemons for activity or inactivity...
Gnome does not have the right infrastructure to do that easily. Just the same reason why they've now only managed to access remote sites with Gedit while every KDE app has had this capability for ages. IMHO Gnome looks quite pretty on the outside but is very rotten on what matters most, its internals.
(Rolls eyes) Ah, I see. Well, you keep using KDE, then, if it makes you happy.
$ rpm -qi gnome-spell
[some content clipped to avoid lameness filter]
Description :
Gnome Spell is a GNOME/Bonobo component for spell checking. In the current
version, it contains a GNOME::Spell::Dictionary object, which provides
a spell checking dictionary (see Spell.idl for exact API definition).
It is based on pspell package, which is required to build gnome-spell.
Any other ways in which Gnome poisons your life?
Modern blenders have an IC and buttons and wires and so forth. They aren't purely mechanical like the old things.
They keep all their manuals and technical information online on their website, and let you search for nearby stores *and* stock availability in those stores. I've found Radio Shack to have one of the better retailer websites out there.
I've read some older fiction -- there were lots of books from forty or more years ago where the hero was an engineer. Tom Swift (and Tom Swift Jr.), Danny Dunn, and so forth.
The problem is, in the media that kids see today, in the video games and movies, how often is it an inventor or engineer that is a hero? In the content in the 80s, when I was a kid, "hero inventors" were already only in dusty books. Today, you get movies where you have the "action hero" as the main character, maybe with a sidekick "computer guy" who probably spends most of his time breaking into computers or doing other illegal stuff. There are no *positive* idols to provide kids with -- just the guy that shoots people in righteous anger and the hacker type.
Sigh.
Maybe Dexter's Lab, but there the wonders of technological advancement is not the point of the cartoon, but more of a backdrop.
Okay, maybe the earlier stuff was just propaganda to get kids excited about and interested in engineering...but, you know, it worked.
There aren't enough geeks.
My take on Radio Shack:
* They have small stores, so whatever it is that they sell, they can't have many choices compared to a place like Circuit City or Best Buy. Sometimes this is okay -- I just bought their top-of-the-line cordless phone, because it's a really good cordless phone.
* They are one of the few national franchises out there where I find that people still seem to have some degree of domain knowledge. I have only a little EE knowledge, just enough to like to solder things together and play with simple devices, and when I asked last about why there was an audio and linear version of a pot, the guy quickly started to describe response curves. That, I thought, was pretty cool.
* They have relatively expensive store locations -- Best Buy stores are usually out of town, where land is cheap. Radio Shacks are usually in malls.
* They sell things that can only apply to an extremely limited market. How many people need banana clips or prototyping boards? Sure, many Slashdotters love 'em, but how much money does that work out to? I'll bet even most people here spend more on consumer electronics than components.
The problem with this is that they have little space, and high costs.
I'd be sad to see them go, but honestly, a lot of people who would have been electronics hobbyists thirty years ago are now computer hobbyists...
All the other junk is just overpriced whats-its, like speaker wire.
They have a pretty hefty markup on that (it's just that if you're making one hobby instance of a project, components are generally so cheap that you don't care).
They ought to get back to their roots...providing components for tinkerers. I know there's not as much potential profit in this, but if they were to partner with the editors of Make Magazine, they could become the new hope for the home brew crowd.
I've been wondering for a while how Radio Shack keeps making money with that dusty component box in the back. I mean, I love it (I can get parts without waiting for mail order!), but they *can't* sell many components, even at the huge markup they ask, unless maybe they're situated in a town where HP has a big EE lab or something and everyone likes to tinker.
See, the thing is, companies wouldn't ask for a degree if it didn't find some correlation useful in making hiring decisions.
Sure, this guy has proven himself, but if they keep him now, they set an example for everyone *else* that applies at Radio Shack to lie on their resume and manage to keep it quiet for a couple years. There's a significant cost to the company there.
The point is, they want to make very clear that lying about yourself to the company has a severe cost -- it will landmine your career for your entire time at the company.
Seriously, that is one of the most annoying things a store can do -- to demand your personal information at the counter.
Also, the guy at the register hates doing it, because half the people that go by hate him asking them for it.
Do you *want* to manage?
It's a different job, and the fact that there is an organizational hierarchy (because, you know, you don't need one organizer for every bottom-tier worker) doesn't mean that those people are "better" than you. Okay, maybe at the low-level management positions, senior workers generally wind up being team leads. But there's a big difference between low-level management and middle management.
Granted C** positions probably are given somewhat more than they should get, given that they have a lot of input into their own salary. Michael Eisner infamously made $1M salary + $7.25M bonus in 2004. Is he really worth the many, many bottom-tier workers that cost the company? I doubt it. But, on the other hand, not that many CEOs make that much, Eisner got booted partly as a result of making this much.
educational background has little relevance to one's capabiltiy of doing many corporate jobs.
The problem is not that the guy didn't have whatever degree he said he had.
The problem is that he lied to the company about it.
A long time ago, there was someone who had blogged about applying for some kind of very sensitive job at the FBI (or maybe it was the NSA) posting about the interview process. The point is that they asked all kinds of seemingly senseless questions, mixed with questions that he considered invasive and not relevant to the job. "Have you ever put a finger inside your anus for sexual pleasure" and things like that. Someone else said that they were familiar with the process and the interviewer didn't really care about the answers -- they just wanted to see whether when the person was under intense pressure, they'd start trying to lie. So a failing response to "have you ever had sex with a dog" would be "Err....heh...well, not as such" with the lie detector going off and a passing one "Hell, yes. I fucked a Chihuahua five years ago in Mexico City and it was *great*!"). If the interviewer's take is that the candidate is lying on any of the questions, they pass on them. I've no idea as to the accuracy of the posts; however, it certainly struck me as an interesting approach.
If someone starts lying to their employer when they think it's to their benefit to do so, the employer loses the ability to trust them. Better to have a slightly worse employee whose statements can be trusted than one who might do a good job but produces useless status information when backed into a corner. Because there *will* be times when people are scared to tell the truth "Is this project done?" "Are you going to make deadline?" etc but it really, really matters that the people above them get accurate information from them.
His lack of success as CEO can just as easily be explained by a) inheriting a mess, b) lack of board support, and c) not the right man for the job.
Or just that CEOs are used as scapegoats. They know about this when getting hired, and this is why the golden parachutes.
As long as the company does well, the CEO can interview with Fortune and so forth to build his reputation. However, if it goes downhill, the company *will* blame things on this one guy, fire him, hire another CEO, incur steep "one-time restructuring costs" to "implement the new guy's ideas", and with the costs they've shifted to that quarter, be able to report profitability immediately after getting the new CEO.
See, the thing is, most of the stuff that mplayer does just can't be done with something like Windows Media Player.
When you have a really powerful application, you start looking at complexity in terms of usage.
If you don't like it, mplayer does have a GUI (gmplayer), and you can fiddle little GUI controls. You can also use a less capable movie player like totem that more closely approximates Windows Media Player.
Open up links in new windows, unless its for a reason.
I thought that there was some sort of link attribute that would allow this to happen. I wish to high heaven webpage authors would actually use the damned thing instead of Javascript so that I could disable it and never have this behavior and not break other websites.
The only environment in which I can imagine someone actually wanting the remote website being able to change the function of your left mouse button is if your hand is fused to your mouse and the fingers over the left and right mouse button have been cut off. When I want a new tab, I'll middle-click.
- should ideally make your browser crash or stop responding
Yes. I dread that moment of churning on a Windows browser where someone has the Adobe PDF webbrowser plugin installed. A significant percentage of the time, it winds up killing the browser, and if it doesn't, it's slow to load.
Xpdf under Linux makes me much happier.
I don't really understand what's wrong with PDF anyway. It's an open standard, it doesn't seem to be horrifically inefficient or lacking any features that *I* want in a readable document distribution system, etc.
Actually, my worst gripe with PDF is that Adobe's plugins have for years been the one thing that have a good chance of taking down my web browser (or at the very least, bogging it down badly). Under Linux, where I have PDFs handled by an external copy of xpdf, things are much better.
And yet, *every time* I ask for examples of sites that are so elegant and usable on Slashdot, I get these links to absolutely abysmal sites.
I think the only time I've seen a single practically useful application of Flash was when Creative Labs was trying to show of the interface to their new MP3 player and wanted to interactively demo it online.
I'm not saying that it isn't fun for people to *make* Flash sites, but it's like someone painting for fun. There's nothing wrong with it as a fun hobby, but it's pretty unlikely to actually be something good in the absolute sense of the word.
Jakob Nielson isn't always fun and exciting in what he says, but I rarely disagree with him. Usability is all that matters in the long run. A Flash site can offer nothing more than a brief bit of novelty, and all the time spent developing it could have been spent developing useful content.
Look at Google. They stomped all their competitors. There were a number of reasons for this, but one of the most obvious is that they were as simple and minimalist as possible. Winning websites are minimalist. That doesn't mean dumbed-down or feature-reduced.
Amazon.com, for example, has great features. However, it is approaching the point where *I* am intimidated by all the features jammed onto one page, and I happily use emacs each day.
Adobe has gone from being a technology driven company that does interesting creative things, to a marketing driven company that slowly pares back functionality in its Acrobat products and charges you more for the privilege.
I've thought a lot about why companies seem to suck more as they get bigger.
I've a number of theories -- here's a plausible one. If you start a company with five people, everyone is driven and interested in the idea. There is no room for dead weight, so everyone there is actually working with the team. Everyone sees the contribution that they make to the business. Everyone is familiar with the product, so you don't run into the embarassing inefficiencies common in large businesses. These come up when someone produces a requirement and after filting down through three layers of people, it hits someone who has to fulfill that requirement, who thinks "this is stupid; I could do a much better job by taking a different approach", but is too far away from the requirement-issuer to do anything about it. As a result, you have a driven, connected, knowledgeable set of people doing a good job.
I can think of very few companies that have not increasingly sucked as they have gotten larger. Once you don't know most of the people at the company, you start having a problem, IMHO.
Has everyone forgotten that the purpose of html is that the pages look different on different devices?
While I agree that this is the original purpose of HTML, and the best purpose (IMHO), HTML has long since been perverted with things like pixel-level positioning in CSS into a layout markup language. Regrettable, but you can't take the general document-designing world and try to teach them to think in an abstract fashion when they are accustomed to thinking in a visual fashion about things. Real HTML only lasted as long as the people writing documents were computer science types.
I remember when using I tags was advised against, since the end user might not have an output device that could display italics -- EM was preferred. Boy, are those days long in the past.
patient passivized-intransitive preposition
What is a patient, and what is a passivized-intransitive?
The only lawyer I know that works for the government doesn't like the current administration very much at all.
Except it's not really "wartime". Congress never declared "war" on Iraq. Bush just sent troops over there, abusing Constitutional powers granted the President that were intended for short-term rapid defensive necessities, not invading and occupying countries.
Because "news for nerds" is really "advertising dollars for Slashdot's parent company", and this article is a clickfest goldmine.
Unlike, say, any other news source?
The article is really about Rumsfeld being, gasp, honest about one of the fronts of the war.
Really. Do you have inside information into Islamic media to validate his claims?
Kneejerks will misinterpret this as Donald "Big Brother" Rumsfeld trying to control their minds.
Well, yes, we got a little bit burnt when we listened to him last time and he convinced everyone to, you know, invade, occupy, and set up a puppet government in Iraq without any legitimate justification? Why would be believe him now?
Oh, that's right. It was all the CIA.
The CIA was scapegoated for Iraq by the Rumsfeld-Cheney-Wolfowitz faction, which has a long history of pushing for more hawkish policies against the recommendations of the CIA. You have to know a bit of the background story.
Let's see: first it was the Soviets. The CIA said that they weren't going to nuke us. Wolfowitz's Team B decided that the CIA didn't know what the hell it was talking about, and that we needed to jack up our weapons production:
Team B, came to the conclusion that the Soviets had developed several terrifying new weapons of mass destruction, featuring a nuclear-armed submarine fleet that used a sonar system that didn't depend on sound and was, thus, undetectable by contemporary Western technology. When the CIA argued that the economic chaos in the Soviet Union was hindering their ability to produce an air defense system, Team B countered by claiming that the Soviet Union was trying to deceive the American public when in fact their air defense system worked perfectly.Some members were even considering promoting a "first strike policy" against the U.S.S.R.[13][14][15]. Rumsfeld took a good deal of power from the CIA during the Ford Administration.
During this period [Rumsfeld]...was instrumental in increasing the power of the military within the administration and at the expense of the CIA and Henry Kissinger. This was accomplished by promulgating the view that the Soviet Union was increasing defense spending and pursuing secret weapons programs, and that the proper response was a re-escalation of the arms race. Some say that this view was in direct contrast to CIA and generally accepted reports on the declining state of the Soviet economy, and the earlier success of Richard Nixon in establishing Detente (referring to a thawing of the Cold War) with the Soviet Union.
In Iraq, the CIA did their job well, handing up data that Iraq and al-Qaeda were *not* linked. Rumsfeld took issue with this.
"[OSP] was created in order to find evidence of what Wolfowitz and his boss, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, believed to be true--that Saddam Hussein had close ties to Al Qaeda, and that Iraq had an enormous arsenal of chemical, biological, and possibly even nuclear weapons that threatened the region and, potentially, the United States. [...] 'The agency [CIA] was out to disprove linkage between Iraq and terrorism,' the Pentagon adviser told me. 'That's what drove them. If you've ever worked with intelligence data, you can see the ingrained views at C.I.A. that color the way it sees data.' The goal of Special Plans, he said, was 'to put the data under the microscope to reveal what the intelligence community can't see.'"
After the fact that Iraq didn't actually have any weapons of mass destruction, and the justification-of-the-day-for-invading-Iraq started shifting around, the PR strategy began to blame "bad intelligence" for the invasion -- which was effectively taken by the public as being the CIA's fault. A Congressional investigation into the CIA was started, the Bush Administration put pres
Pat Robertson is the founder of the Christian Coalition, the large and powerful group that is the main political arm of Christianity in the United States. He is a major media voice. He is not marginalized, and while many US citizens dislike Pat Robertson, he has an awful lot of supporters keeping him where he is.
Actually, the Bible is self-contradictory on many points, and as any other set of axioms that are self-contradictory, can be used to prove absolutely anything.
Most of the Bible is today ignored, except for chunks that fit in with modern culture.
You have to understand that Christianity is an emminently pragmatic organization, and despite claiming absolute morality, very much changes to fit the times. The Pope has switched around on whether and what types of abortion are appropriate over the centuries (currently none). Homosexuality is still opposed based on chunks of text like that in Leviticus 18:22 Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination., but eating of various animals is commonly performed (Leviticus 11:7 And the swine, though he divide the hoof, and be cloven-footed, yet he cheweth not the cud; he is unclean to you.)
So ... are y'all ever going to step in and get these people to fucking cut it out? Or are you waiting for "us" to?
Because military force is such a good way to pacify people. Boy, look at the Soviet example. They sure crushed opposition.