Might be overkill? That system has serious grunt power; there's no way it's warranted for "everyday... desktop usage" unless your idea of "desktop usage" is serious number crunching. Scientific work, rendering, large scale video editing, yes; "desktop usage", absolutely not.
Yeah, but think how fast Google's homepage will load!
I am relatively confident, however, that you won't ever have 24 Mbps of wide-open unrestricted IP for anything less than several thousand dollars a month (call Sprint for a fractional DS3 cost which, delivered over old copper typically, is inferior to that fancy new glass you're getting).
While the handoff is coax, DS3 transport is carried over fiber and split off an OCn mux at the customer prem. The difference between a fractional DS3 and the SBC offering isn't the medium, it's the network the packets travel on; decision-making on oversubscription differs markedly for consumer networks vs. business networks, based on the fact businesses generate more revenue overall and would be less tolerant of networks that don't run at rated speeds.
SBC's lightwave or lightspeed or lightstream or whatever they're calling it, that 24Mb HDSL circuit the original comment spoke of, is intended for delivering large media files, specifically movies-on-demand. They're partnering with a set-top box manufacturer and a large web portal to offer these services to their customers. That should roll out relatively soon. These files will be hosted on-net within SBC, or via some private peering point with a fat pipe, so SBC endusers should have no issue getting the movies at 24Mb. However, the rest of their infrastructure (specifically their peering circuits) won't change much, if at all, so the Internet will be as fast (or slow) as it is now. That's not what they're interested in, that's not why they're investing gargantuan sums of cash for buildout, they're not doing it to provide fast HTTP access to the Internet for customers, they're doing it to sell movies-on-demand.
Personally I've got no problem with that. Give me the fat pipe now, spend the $$$ to get fiber to my house, then I'll gripe until you upgrade your throughput to the rest of the Internet. I figure that they will have to do it eventually.
It must be a workstation thing, my bad. Or, more accurately, a desktop OS thing. I was thinking of their servers.
If you look at their configurator for the 2850, for example, the rackmountable server, you'll see it is discounted $599 over Win Server 2K3 for the No OS option.
Yeah OK, I get it now. But what's your point? They were spying on conversations, they weren't using the phone as a microphone so why this crossways rant about not being able to do it?
By the way, Mr. Telecommunications Technician, Mrs. Richardson needs another phone jack in her sitting room, so you'll be dispatched out there shortly. Manwhile, backbone engineering will be propping our feet up on the desk, keeping a lazy eye on the network management system, telling jokes, drinking coffee, cruising Slashdot and making triple what you make.
To get a non MS operating system from any major computer vendor and see a monopoly in action.
For a home user, that can be problematic, but that could be as much a result of vendors who want their bloatware installed as Microsoft throwing their weight around. Apparently supposedly, PCs from major vendors have dropped in price due in part to companies paying to have their software preinstalled.
The "No OS" option is now the default for Dell Servers and this change is relatively recent. I remember not too long ago all servers came with Windows preinstalled (and included in the price of course) and even if you were going to just erase the OS and install Linux, you'd still pay for it. You didn't have a choice.
Microsoft doesn't seem as big and bad as they used to be. Maybe they've matured somewhat... though I'm sure the DOJ had something to do with that.
Having been a telecommunications technician for 15 years, I probably understand modern telecom networks better than you.
Apparently not, because the guy was absolutely right. They were tapping conversations at switch interchanges going overseas, notably to Afghanistan for obvious reasons. Voice traffic is packetized at the CO for transport, where it can be replicated to a third party who wants to listen in with minimal effort or risk of being detected. There's little or no reason to put a tap on a local loop anymore.
if you are speaking of iraq, i would like to point out that it's people that are shooting at our army troops that get killed
Dude, imagine this. The Chinese send an occupying force to America, overthrow our government, begin blowing things up, kill 30,000 civilians while proclaiming they're doing it in our best interests, set up detention centers where torture and humiliation are common occurences, set up an election that's thought of as a sham in order to put a regime in place that's thought of to be a puppet government which would sell our natural resources back to China for bottom dollar. They throw our entire way of life into disorder doing it, disbanding our military and imprisoning all of our law enforcements, leaving us impoverished in an anarchic state where anyone with a weapon can pretty much do it themselves. Then they have the nerve to tell us it's our fault.
Ok, now a bunch of teenage Chinese dudes are strolling around your block with their assault rifles and their attitude. They can do whatever they want, the bastards. You may not have had it good before, but you've got shit nothing now. They took away everything. You've got a gun. Do you throw a shot at them?
My personal preference would be for a constitutional amendment that added a wholly new branch of Government - outside the Executive, Legislative and Judicial - that has all the necessary powers, clearances, means and protections to investigate corruption at absolutely any level in every branch of Government. That is it. That is all it would do. Just investigate. Because it was independent of all other branches, it would not have political appointments made to it, could not be ordered to stop, or indeed even ordered to start. The power of such a body is not in what it could do, but in what it could know.
There is such a body. It's the citizenry of the United States. It's our responsibility to keep tabs on our elected officials, to make sure they don't misuse the power we've granted to them. If they start to act outside of our best interests, we are supposed to speak up. If they don't do a good job, we are supposed to vote them out of office. If they attempt to turn the country into a fascist state, we are supposed to remove them from power, with force if necessary. These are the responsibilities that come along with our rights. Some people take them more seriously than others, and that's OK, as long as someone is doing it.
Linux is great for commodity x86 servers, but on IBM's high-end hardware AIX stands head and shoulders above it.
That's sort of true.
I worked not too long ago for a company with an 8xCPU, 12TB Oracle instance running on RedHat Linux 3.0 (32bit). It worked perfectly well, but we were bottlenecked on CPU and memory (needed to move to 64bit) and wanted to hook a SAN up to it (before that we ran it over NFS, which works believe it or not). We tried to find a combination of 64-bit Linux, Oracle and Veritas (to manage volumes on the SAN) to run on the high-end Linux hardware available but there just wasn't enough out there at that point.
We ended up moving the DB to AIX, at the strong urging of IBM, on whose server the bottlenecked Oracle instance had been running. They were far more motivated to sell us a RISC box than they were to try and find a Linux solution (the profit margin was substantially higher) and we knew that, but we couldn't find the combination we needed to move forward with Linux. IBM went to a lot of trouble to show us benchmarks that showed AIX was superior to Linux, which says a lot about their Linux strategy, namely it's all well and good until it steals market share from their high-margin products.
It's possible IBM shifted policy after they got burned on 64bit Itaniums. At that same job I was on, they had put one in, wanting to increase Oracle's addressable memory space, but the performance of the CPUs was so abysmal they ended up moving backwards to P4s and 32bit, which as I mentioned did the job until the application finally bottlenecked. At the time we purchased the AIX box from them, they didn't have any x86 boxes in their pipeline that would run 64bit Linux (they had a new xseries that would scale past eight of those 32bit CPUs with 64bit extensions I believe, but it wouldn't run 64bit Linux), so it's possible they've clipped the higher-end x86 boxes from their offerings altogether in order to keep AIX viable in this enterprise market.
What IBM does or does not do should always be taken with a grain of salt.
The problem with people who post things like this anti-Bush rant is that, while they state how individual rights are being trampled (and I agree), they then tend to somehow convert that into the idea that you should vote for a Democrat instead.
I didn't say that, not at all. You assume that because that is how you think. There are Democrats I wouldn't vote for and Republicans I would. That's the way it's supposed to be. For example, if McCain were president instead of Bush, and more importantly if Cheney was nowhere near the Oval Office, I doubt things would be as bad as they are today.
Hitler was a fierce racist, not just nationalist. Bush obviously has no problems with Americans of any race -- just look at his administration. You can't dismiss Rice, Gonzales, Powell, Alito as "uncle toms". There is no nationalism as in "America for Americans" either -- if anything, Bush is blasted by dimwits from Left and Right for being too easy on the immigrants (legal and otherwise).
The point is Bush is using patriotic fervor as a tool to deflect criticism and get his agenda passed, an agenda that includes reduction of civil liberties and intimidation of American citizens who are doing nothing wrong. Hitler used the same sort of approach to gain power, then used violence to gain domination over his citizens. Don't we owe it to ourselves, to this country, to speak up when something looks fishy so that doesn't happen here? History repeats itself, you might have heard. If you can't accept that, you're a blind apologist and a fool.
Addiction is a poorly-defined word. In fact, it means very little at this point.
It used to be reserved for OCD-type behaviors where the individual would continue engaging in an activity clearly detrimental to his or her well-being, such as using cocaine or heroin, gambling excessively, overeating, etc. Now the word has morphed to include behaviors that individuals would simply rather not stop doing, like listening to an IPod or watching television, even if doing so would make their pockets fatter or spouses happier or what have you. The difference is in the intensity of the desire and the ramifications of the behavior.
Unless you've ever been addicted to something in the old sense of the word, it's difficult to distinguish between the two.
While it might be fun and easy to compare G.W. Bush to Hitler, it's not at all accurate.
The key similarities between Bush and Hitler are that both are fierce nationalists pushing agendas that include aggressive foreign policies and a reduction in civil rights. The conditions in Germany following WW1 gave Hitler the support he needed; the conditions in America following 911 gave Bush the support he needed. Both societies were deflated and wanted to rally around a strong leader. Both leaders used that to their advantage, breaking long-standing rules, purportedly for purposes of strengthening the nation.
Nationalism and intimidation is how Hitler did his thing. It's creepy as hell to watch the President deflect pertinent questions with patriotic jargon. It's even creepier when DHS agents bang on people's doors who aren't doing anything wrong. Of course Hitler went farther, and of course W isn't the first president to do such things, but that doesn't make it any less creepy.
Our goal is to organize all of the world's information. When we say 'all the world's information,' this includes AOL's.
Well of course, because Sally from Topeka's Brown Betty recipe, the weight of Susie from Hackensack's new baby boy, the measurements of Tony from Jersey City's new boss rims and Jennifer from Atlanta's belief that Britney Spears is "so cool and sexy" is information we all can't do without.
Organize these under "who gives a shit." Way to go, Google.
If a comet were to approach the planet when this current administration is in power, judging by their previous actions when the country is threatened, they'd send the space shuttle up with a dozen astronauts carrying brooms to attempt to swat the comet in a different direction while at the same time firing an arsenal of nuclear missles at the moon, destroying it completely, while citing its gravitational pull as evidence of complicity with the comet, then awarding an enormous no-bid contract to a defense contractor to investigate means of recreating tides.
Comets Crashing into our small planet is one of our biggest long term threats. The samples will go a long way in being able to identify their composition and look at means to destroy them in future.
Yes, let us all start to prepare for The War on Comets, those Cosmic Weapons of Mass Destruction. Haliburton should be awarded a contract to develop a weapon against them. Everything is fear and destroy nowadays.
Should a comet ever threaten this planet, it won't be its composition that prevents us from deflecting it. It will be the paucity of resources available to the space program, the lag created by bureacracy and the general lack of concern in all things planet-related. It will take so long for some one to notice a comet is coming, for that person to pass that knowledge to their superiors, for their superiors to pass it up to their superiors, all the way until it reaches someone with enough authority to do something about it, then to convince them that there is a real threat, at which point a committee must be formed to figure out what should be done, with various subcommittees creating plans of action, debating the seriousness of the threat and generating something for the press, then of course to figure out how it could be politically beneficial, and finally to allocate budget for it, which in itself could be a deal-breaker extinction or no extinction, by the time all that's done, the thing will be right on top of us. Boom.
Our biggest long-term threat is ourselves, period.
No doubt, but if you look at "The Real Story" you'll see they're not fussing over plutonium, they're fussing over color printers. They have operations issues.
I guess that's not surprising considering they're in New Mexico and probably have a low-rent IT staff. If I'm a nuclear scientist, I might move to Los Alamos but if I'm an SA, what's the attraction?
It becomes complex when you add a database layer that's slow and an application layer that's slower.
It becomes complex when you push out 100 Mb/s or more around the world and suddenly you get complaints about slow connectivity to Poland.
It becomes complex when you start getting targeted by 13-year old hackers with a bevy of compromised Windoze boxes at their disposal.
It becomes complex when you have to figure out how to conserve state information across a few dozen web servers and a dozen or so app servers, particularly when one of them goes down.
It becomes complex when you have several thousand simultaneous connections choking up your load balancers and you're on the phone with a vendor trying to convince some punk that their gear isn't working.
It becomes complex when you have to pause and explain why such-and-such is such-and-such to some underclued ass who insists otherwise because they're convinced they're much more knowledgeable than they actually are.
Apparently it left with Clinton and Carter, seeing as how they did the exact same thing. Read: Aldrich Ames as an example.
Ah, the "Yeah, well Clinton did it, too" approach. The Carter wrinkle's a new touch, though. Very nice. For clearly what's going on right now is nothing that hasn't happened before, these measures are here to protect us, to strengthen us in a world that's out to get us, you're all just overreacting and if something is wrong, then it's Clinton's fault. Substitute Clinton with "the Jews," and you've got Hitler's platform down pat. If things get as bad as we fear, it'll be on the head of nationalistic morons like yourself.
America isn't a baseball team; you don't cheer for it no matter what. This is not a Republican-Democrat issue. It is not a conservative-liberal issue. This is about keeping your leaders in check by watching what they do instead of listening to what they say, because every word that comes out of their mouth is something you want to hear. They've turned the country into a partisan sinkhole, where people are so busy choosing sides and playing favorites that they've forgotten what really matters, namely what the guys are actually doing. It was a master play.
The natural inclination of any organization, including a governmental administration, once it has succeeded, is to dominate. In the US at least, this must been done at the expense of the system that brought them to power in the first place, for that system discourages domination. The inclination to dominate has nothing to do with political ideology or the personality of the leaders, though clearly the people currently in power are showing little or no restraint whatsoever. In business, antitrust legislation prevents large businesses from destroying the economy. In government, similar restrictions were put in place to prevent administrations from attacking its internal enemies in order to perpetuate itself and grow in power. If you let these go without a fight, you are a fool.
... and spent about a month answering the question: "What is this popping up on my screen all the time? Do I need to do something?"
It's a nice machine but it took forever to clean up. These guys weren't exaggerating when they said it's bogged down with bloatware. No, I really don't want to sign up for AOL, use your personal firewall, browse the MusicMatch online store, purchase Quickbooks for a low low price, participate in your survey, buy a year's subscription of virus definitions, mow Michael Dell's lawn, tell Peter Norton my life story, yadda yadda yadda, ad nauseam. Really, I don't. No, I mean really. Really, goddamn it!
It's pretty amazing that other software was prevented from installing correctly and performance was degraded to a considerable extent. The story implied that about 80MB of RAM was consumed by the bloatware, but the computer has 1GB RAM. Assumedly it's not chewing all the CPU, so what exactly is it doing that breaks The Sims, for example?
Mr Bush criticised the press for revealing this earlier in the week. "Yesterday the existence of this secret was revealed in media reports, after being improperly provided to news organisations. As a result, our enemies have learned information they should not have, and the unauthorised disclosure of this damages our national security and puts our citizens at risk," he said.
But remember - a lot (?) of people reading militant Communist propaganda are millitant communists, and hence the concern of the government.
Well, that's their argument at least. The Patriot Act can hide behind the premise it intends to attack coercives, terrorists and revolutionaries, but it's proving useful to attack liberals as well. Just like McCarthy's red scare, they can cast a net using the guise of protecting the nation and start intimidating those individuals who trouble them.
Everyone's choosing sides nowadays and as this thread indicates, it's getting ugly. By putting measures in place that allow the federal government to act against US citizens unilaterally, this administration has put the country's well being in jeopardy. Conservatives can take comfort that their side is winning today but future administrations not behind their cause can use these same measures to hassle them.
There used to be laws that prevented those in power from acting on its preservation and dominations instincts, and those laws more or less held us together all these years, despite our differences. Now that there's so much money at stake and the country is so divided along ideological lines, it wass imperative to keep these barriers up to prevent the people in power from attacking their own citizens in an effort to protect themselves. Instead, we've made the fight a lot uglier, our government much more suspect and moved the entire country several steps forward towards its seemingly inevitable implosion.
do you really believe that the Bush administration would have been able to orchestrate 9/11 without any hint of the connection leaking out in the aftermath?
One assumes they didn't, being that the plot started before they were in office. What isn't clear is whether they turned their heads the other way, knowing that the aftermath would give them the political fuel they needed to attack Iraq (which they had been planning from day one) and knowing they could always claim ignorance if it got back to them. Kind of an odd coincidence the only plane that didn't hit its target was the one destined for the White House, no?
There's plenty of suspicious evidence and it's more than likely the truth will never be known. It doesn't really matter because the WTC is gone, all those people are dead and things will never really be the same.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm on a plain. I can't complain.
Yeah, but think how fast Google's homepage will load!
While the handoff is coax, DS3 transport is carried over fiber and split off an OCn mux at the customer prem. The difference between a fractional DS3 and the SBC offering isn't the medium, it's the network the packets travel on; decision-making on oversubscription differs markedly for consumer networks vs. business networks, based on the fact businesses generate more revenue overall and would be less tolerant of networks that don't run at rated speeds.
SBC's lightwave or lightspeed or lightstream or whatever they're calling it, that 24Mb HDSL circuit the original comment spoke of, is intended for delivering large media files, specifically movies-on-demand. They're partnering with a set-top box manufacturer and a large web portal to offer these services to their customers. That should roll out relatively soon. These files will be hosted on-net within SBC, or via some private peering point with a fat pipe, so SBC endusers should have no issue getting the movies at 24Mb. However, the rest of their infrastructure (specifically their peering circuits) won't change much, if at all, so the Internet will be as fast (or slow) as it is now. That's not what they're interested in, that's not why they're investing gargantuan sums of cash for buildout, they're not doing it to provide fast HTTP access to the Internet for customers, they're doing it to sell movies-on-demand.
Personally I've got no problem with that. Give me the fat pipe now, spend the $$$ to get fiber to my house, then I'll gripe until you upgrade your throughput to the rest of the Internet. I figure that they will have to do it eventually.
If you look at their configurator for the 2850, for example, the rackmountable server, you'll see it is discounted $599 over Win Server 2K3 for the No OS option.
http://configure.us.dell.com/dellstore/config.aspx ?c=us&cs=04&kc=6W300&l=en&oc=pe2850-max&s=bsd
By the way, Mr. Telecommunications Technician, Mrs. Richardson needs another phone jack in her sitting room, so you'll be dispatched out there shortly. Manwhile, backbone engineering will be propping our feet up on the desk, keeping a lazy eye on the network management system, telling jokes, drinking coffee, cruising Slashdot and making triple what you make.
Watch your mouth.
For a home user, that can be problematic, but that could be as much a result of vendors who want their bloatware installed as Microsoft throwing their weight around. Apparently supposedly, PCs from major vendors have dropped in price due in part to companies paying to have their software preinstalled.
The "No OS" option is now the default for Dell Servers and this change is relatively recent. I remember not too long ago all servers came with Windows preinstalled (and included in the price of course) and even if you were going to just erase the OS and install Linux, you'd still pay for it. You didn't have a choice.
Microsoft doesn't seem as big and bad as they used to be. Maybe they've matured somewhat ... though I'm sure the DOJ had something to do with that.
Maybe Google will buy the 49ers and we can replace Candlestick with something fancy. Googlestick? I like it.
Apparently not, because the guy was absolutely right. They were tapping conversations at switch interchanges going overseas, notably to Afghanistan for obvious reasons. Voice traffic is packetized at the CO for transport, where it can be replicated to a third party who wants to listen in with minimal effort or risk of being detected. There's little or no reason to put a tap on a local loop anymore.
Dude, imagine this. The Chinese send an occupying force to America, overthrow our government, begin blowing things up, kill 30,000 civilians while proclaiming they're doing it in our best interests, set up detention centers where torture and humiliation are common occurences, set up an election that's thought of as a sham in order to put a regime in place that's thought of to be a puppet government which would sell our natural resources back to China for bottom dollar. They throw our entire way of life into disorder doing it, disbanding our military and imprisoning all of our law enforcements, leaving us impoverished in an anarchic state where anyone with a weapon can pretty much do it themselves. Then they have the nerve to tell us it's our fault.
Ok, now a bunch of teenage Chinese dudes are strolling around your block with their assault rifles and their attitude. They can do whatever they want, the bastards. You may not have had it good before, but you've got shit nothing now. They took away everything. You've got a gun. Do you throw a shot at them?
There is such a body. It's the citizenry of the United States. It's our responsibility to keep tabs on our elected officials, to make sure they don't misuse the power we've granted to them. If they start to act outside of our best interests, we are supposed to speak up. If they don't do a good job, we are supposed to vote them out of office. If they attempt to turn the country into a fascist state, we are supposed to remove them from power, with force if necessary. These are the responsibilities that come along with our rights. Some people take them more seriously than others, and that's OK, as long as someone is doing it.
That's sort of true.
I worked not too long ago for a company with an 8xCPU, 12TB Oracle instance running on RedHat Linux 3.0 (32bit). It worked perfectly well, but we were bottlenecked on CPU and memory (needed to move to 64bit) and wanted to hook a SAN up to it (before that we ran it over NFS, which works believe it or not). We tried to find a combination of 64-bit Linux, Oracle and Veritas (to manage volumes on the SAN) to run on the high-end Linux hardware available but there just wasn't enough out there at that point.
We ended up moving the DB to AIX, at the strong urging of IBM, on whose server the bottlenecked Oracle instance had been running. They were far more motivated to sell us a RISC box than they were to try and find a Linux solution (the profit margin was substantially higher) and we knew that, but we couldn't find the combination we needed to move forward with Linux. IBM went to a lot of trouble to show us benchmarks that showed AIX was superior to Linux, which says a lot about their Linux strategy, namely it's all well and good until it steals market share from their high-margin products.
It's possible IBM shifted policy after they got burned on 64bit Itaniums. At that same job I was on, they had put one in, wanting to increase Oracle's addressable memory space, but the performance of the CPUs was so abysmal they ended up moving backwards to P4s and 32bit, which as I mentioned did the job until the application finally bottlenecked. At the time we purchased the AIX box from them, they didn't have any x86 boxes in their pipeline that would run 64bit Linux (they had a new xseries that would scale past eight of those 32bit CPUs with 64bit extensions I believe, but it wouldn't run 64bit Linux), so it's possible they've clipped the higher-end x86 boxes from their offerings altogether in order to keep AIX viable in this enterprise market.
What IBM does or does not do should always be taken with a grain of salt.
I didn't say that, not at all. You assume that because that is how you think. There are Democrats I wouldn't vote for and Republicans I would. That's the way it's supposed to be. For example, if McCain were president instead of Bush, and more importantly if Cheney was nowhere near the Oval Office, I doubt things would be as bad as they are today.
Yeah, that's his argument, too. Hey I like black people, look at Colin Powell, he's black. Well, maybe you should ask black people whether he's been a good president. A whopping 2% of them agree with you: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/blog/ 2005/10/13/BL2005101300885.html
But that's not the point.
The point is Bush is using patriotic fervor as a tool to deflect criticism and get his agenda passed, an agenda that includes reduction of civil liberties and intimidation of American citizens who are doing nothing wrong. Hitler used the same sort of approach to gain power, then used violence to gain domination over his citizens. Don't we owe it to ourselves, to this country, to speak up when something looks fishy so that doesn't happen here? History repeats itself, you might have heard. If you can't accept that, you're a blind apologist and a fool.
It used to be reserved for OCD-type behaviors where the individual would continue engaging in an activity clearly detrimental to his or her well-being, such as using cocaine or heroin, gambling excessively, overeating, etc. Now the word has morphed to include behaviors that individuals would simply rather not stop doing, like listening to an IPod or watching television, even if doing so would make their pockets fatter or spouses happier or what have you. The difference is in the intensity of the desire and the ramifications of the behavior.
Unless you've ever been addicted to something in the old sense of the word, it's difficult to distinguish between the two.
The key similarities between Bush and Hitler are that both are fierce nationalists pushing agendas that include aggressive foreign policies and a reduction in civil rights. The conditions in Germany following WW1 gave Hitler the support he needed; the conditions in America following 911 gave Bush the support he needed. Both societies were deflated and wanted to rally around a strong leader. Both leaders used that to their advantage, breaking long-standing rules, purportedly for purposes of strengthening the nation.
Nationalism and intimidation is how Hitler did his thing. It's creepy as hell to watch the President deflect pertinent questions with patriotic jargon. It's even creepier when DHS agents bang on people's doors who aren't doing anything wrong. Of course Hitler went farther, and of course W isn't the first president to do such things, but that doesn't make it any less creepy.
Well of course, because Sally from Topeka's Brown Betty recipe, the weight of Susie from Hackensack's new baby boy, the measurements of Tony from Jersey City's new boss rims and Jennifer from Atlanta's belief that Britney Spears is "so cool and sexy" is information we all can't do without.
Organize these under "who gives a shit." Way to go, Google.
If a comet were to approach the planet when this current administration is in power, judging by their previous actions when the country is threatened, they'd send the space shuttle up with a dozen astronauts carrying brooms to attempt to swat the comet in a different direction while at the same time firing an arsenal of nuclear missles at the moon, destroying it completely, while citing its gravitational pull as evidence of complicity with the comet, then awarding an enormous no-bid contract to a defense contractor to investigate means of recreating tides.
Yes, let us all start to prepare for The War on Comets, those Cosmic Weapons of Mass Destruction. Haliburton should be awarded a contract to develop a weapon against them. Everything is fear and destroy nowadays.
Should a comet ever threaten this planet, it won't be its composition that prevents us from deflecting it. It will be the paucity of resources available to the space program, the lag created by bureacracy and the general lack of concern in all things planet-related. It will take so long for some one to notice a comet is coming, for that person to pass that knowledge to their superiors, for their superiors to pass it up to their superiors, all the way until it reaches someone with enough authority to do something about it, then to convince them that there is a real threat, at which point a committee must be formed to figure out what should be done, with various subcommittees creating plans of action, debating the seriousness of the threat and generating something for the press, then of course to figure out how it could be politically beneficial, and finally to allocate budget for it, which in itself could be a deal-breaker extinction or no extinction, by the time all that's done, the thing will be right on top of us. Boom.
Our biggest long-term threat is ourselves, period.
I guess that's not surprising considering they're in New Mexico and probably have a low-rent IT staff. If I'm a nuclear scientist, I might move to Los Alamos but if I'm an SA, what's the attraction?
It becomes complex when you push out 100 Mb/s or more around the world and suddenly you get complaints about slow connectivity to Poland.
It becomes complex when you start getting targeted by 13-year old hackers with a bevy of compromised Windoze boxes at their disposal.
It becomes complex when you have to figure out how to conserve state information across a few dozen web servers and a dozen or so app servers, particularly when one of them goes down.
It becomes complex when you have several thousand simultaneous connections choking up your load balancers and you're on the phone with a vendor trying to convince some punk that their gear isn't working.
It becomes complex when you have to pause and explain why such-and-such is such-and-such to some underclued ass who insists otherwise because they're convinced they're much more knowledgeable than they actually are.
Stay in your small pond.
Ah, the "Yeah, well Clinton did it, too" approach. The Carter wrinkle's a new touch, though. Very nice. For clearly what's going on right now is nothing that hasn't happened before, these measures are here to protect us, to strengthen us in a world that's out to get us, you're all just overreacting and if something is wrong, then it's Clinton's fault. Substitute Clinton with "the Jews," and you've got Hitler's platform down pat. If things get as bad as we fear, it'll be on the head of nationalistic morons like yourself.
America isn't a baseball team; you don't cheer for it no matter what. This is not a Republican-Democrat issue. It is not a conservative-liberal issue. This is about keeping your leaders in check by watching what they do instead of listening to what they say, because every word that comes out of their mouth is something you want to hear. They've turned the country into a partisan sinkhole, where people are so busy choosing sides and playing favorites that they've forgotten what really matters, namely what the guys are actually doing. It was a master play.
The natural inclination of any organization, including a governmental administration, once it has succeeded, is to dominate. In the US at least, this must been done at the expense of the system that brought them to power in the first place, for that system discourages domination. The inclination to dominate has nothing to do with political ideology or the personality of the leaders, though clearly the people currently in power are showing little or no restraint whatsoever. In business, antitrust legislation prevents large businesses from destroying the economy. In government, similar restrictions were put in place to prevent administrations from attacking its internal enemies in order to perpetuate itself and grow in power. If you let these go without a fight, you are a fool.
It's a nice machine but it took forever to clean up. These guys weren't exaggerating when they said it's bogged down with bloatware. No, I really don't want to sign up for AOL, use your personal firewall, browse the MusicMatch online store, purchase Quickbooks for a low low price, participate in your survey, buy a year's subscription of virus definitions, mow Michael Dell's lawn, tell Peter Norton my life story, yadda yadda yadda, ad nauseam. Really, I don't. No, I mean really. Really, goddamn it!
It's pretty amazing that other software was prevented from installing correctly and performance was degraded to a considerable extent. The story implied that about 80MB of RAM was consumed by the bloatware, but the computer has 1GB RAM. Assumedly it's not chewing all the CPU, so what exactly is it doing that breaks The Sims, for example?
Mr Bush criticised the press for revealing this earlier in the week. "Yesterday the existence of this secret was revealed in media reports, after being improperly provided to news organisations. As a result, our enemies have learned information they should not have, and the unauthorised disclosure of this damages our national security and puts our citizens at risk," he said.
Well, that's their argument at least. The Patriot Act can hide behind the premise it intends to attack coercives, terrorists and revolutionaries, but it's proving useful to attack liberals as well. Just like McCarthy's red scare, they can cast a net using the guise of protecting the nation and start intimidating those individuals who trouble them.
Everyone's choosing sides nowadays and as this thread indicates, it's getting ugly. By putting measures in place that allow the federal government to act against US citizens unilaterally, this administration has put the country's well being in jeopardy. Conservatives can take comfort that their side is winning today but future administrations not behind their cause can use these same measures to hassle them.
There used to be laws that prevented those in power from acting on its preservation and dominations instincts, and those laws more or less held us together all these years, despite our differences. Now that there's so much money at stake and the country is so divided along ideological lines, it wass imperative to keep these barriers up to prevent the people in power from attacking their own citizens in an effort to protect themselves. Instead, we've made the fight a lot uglier, our government much more suspect and moved the entire country several steps forward towards its seemingly inevitable implosion.
One assumes they didn't, being that the plot started before they were in office. What isn't clear is whether they turned their heads the other way, knowing that the aftermath would give them the political fuel they needed to attack Iraq (which they had been planning from day one) and knowing they could always claim ignorance if it got back to them. Kind of an odd coincidence the only plane that didn't hit its target was the one destined for the White House, no?
There's plenty of suspicious evidence and it's more than likely the truth will never be known. It doesn't really matter because the WTC is gone, all those people are dead and things will never really be the same.