I'm writing to inform you that your use of the pejorative term, "Spider," is a hurtful and unwarranted attack on our nation's hard-working, industrious population of Arachnid Americans. The term you used (hereafter referred to as the "S-word") has a long and dark history of being used to demean, degrade, and debase select members of the animal kingdom, due to their 8-legged status. We understand that you probably grew up in a conservative household, where songs like "The Itsy Bitsy S-word" were sung freely and without any thought given to the pain and subjugation inherent in that song's subject. Could you imagine singing about a person of Caucasian ancestry climbing up a water spout, only to be frustrated by repeated rain showers washing him down again? I bet you wouldn't find it funny at all, yet you sling hurtful words around, blithely unaware of - or worse, uncaring for - the damage they do.
We hope that you will consider your word choices more carefully in the future, to avoid causing unnecessary emotional pain to our long-suffering Arachnid brethren.
Thank you for your time and consideration.
Peter Parker Director, Arachnid-American National Tolerance Initiative (AANTI)
Somebody has no understanding of the amount of living space actually available in the ISS.
Pressurized volume on the ISS is 837 cubic meters. In relatable terms, roughly the size of 6-7 economy hotel rooms (which tend to be ~35-40 sq. meters in size).
How many people do you think you're actually going to cram in there, when you factor in staffing, fuel, food, etc., plus the need to boost people and supplies up to it on a constant, recurring basis?
More to the point, how many people have the resources, and would be willing to spend the thousands of dollars required to ship themselves up to a tin can in LEO, and spend a week crammed into a space far smaller than the average Super 8 room with nothing to do, alongside 20 other people?
I can count exactly zero space companies who'd bid on it, because the plan is impractical, and would be a complete waste of money.
It's not necessarily a question of "needing" the space. But if somebody handed you all that space, don't you think you could find a use for it? I know I sure could. I have 2 24" monitors at work, and regularly have them filled with browsers displaying multiple references, terminal windows, email, im chats with coworkers, an IDE, test instances, perhaps a remote desktop connection to a second test system, a ticketing/bug reporting app, etc...
Yeah, I could alt-tab between them all, but having them arrayed so that I can easily view any piece of information I want quickly without searching through a dozen programs definitely speeds up the work.
Your statement that it's evil assumes a deliberate intent to kill civilians who happen to be at the wrong place at the wrong time, and that simply isn't the nature and character of the military's behavior. In civilian life, this is why we have different punishments for manslaughter and murder.
What you're suggesting here is - to use an extreme example - Mother Theresa getting in a car accident that resulted in someone's death would make her an evil hypocrite, and invalidate every principle of charity and good works she ever espoused.
There is no inherent hypocrisy in stating that you are pro-liberty, pro-freedom, pro-democracy, and having unfortunate - even tragic - collateral civilian deaths as the result of military action prompted by those principles. The military - overwhelmingly as an institution, there are of course individual exceptions, as there are in ANY large group of people - goes to extraordinary lengths to reduce and avoid these events, and suggesting that they set out with the express intention of killing civilians in some sort of evil hypocrisy while using talk of freedom and democracy as a smoke screen is naive and fatuous.
They are combatants, and you can fire at will. However, the people in the van were unarmed.
After the fact, we certainly know that they were unarmed.
At the time, they were driving up to a group of men who were armed with AK-47s and what appeared to be RPGs, and attempting to load some of them into a vehicle. They were not medical personnel, they were not in a vehicle that was marked as a medical vehicle.
This event is certainly - in hindsight, with full knowledge of the circumstance - tragic, but the decisions of the soldiers involved were also completely legitimate, given their view of the activity on the ground: unmarked, non-medical personnel driving up and attempting to load combatants (and possibly equipment) into a vehicle and drive them away minutes after they've been attacked by a gunship certainly also appear to be combatants, and thus, legitimate targets.
Was the van marked with a red cross, or some other internationally-recognized symbol which would designate it as a protected non-combatant vehicle, which would afford your point some measure of logic?
A soldier - or in this case, an insurgent - rendering first aid and assistance to a wounded comrade is still a combatant. You don't get a special "don't shoot me, bro" immunity from being shot in a war zone because you're trying to slap a bandage on your friend's wound. There were absolutely no markings on that vehicle that would lead anybody to remotely suspect they were anything but fellow insurgents trying to evacuate wounded, weapons, and possibly actionable intelligence.
But if you want to talk discuss "atrocities," we should also include events like the killing - and subsequent mutilation, burning, and hanging - of contractors in Fallujah - remember that one? Getting killed is certainly a risk military personnel and contractors have to live with. Where's the Collateral Murder video & your outrage over that *actual* atrocity, or any of the other documented cases of Taliban or al Qaeda linked executions, torture, abduction, murder, and other assorted savagery?
Or have you unilaterally redefined the word "atrocity" and the phrase "war crime" to mean "that thing that only happens when a soldier with an American flag on his shoulder pulls a trigger, no matter what the situation, no matter what the circumstances, and no matter what the outcome?"
Now, since that question has absolutely no bearing in any way to what happened in the case of the "Collateral Murder" video, may I presume you're just trying to save face and make it look like you had a point, rather than conceding that my points have merit, and you're just knee-jerking in relation to a cleverly edited propaganda piece?
Here's my enterprise anecdote: Corporate standard is IE 8; Firefox is also available as a corporate-sanctioned browser. Years ago, before they started supporting FF, the engineers all had Firefox, and everybody else used IE6, because the engineers knew how to find, install, and use Firefox.
I see that same thing happening with Chrome today: most of the engineers I work with run Chrome as their "unofficial"-but-default browser; IE 8 & FF are installed too, but they are only used when necessary. And most of the engineers use IETab for Sharepoint and other IE-specific functionality, and simply avoid using FF unless something is completely unusable in Chrome, IETab, or IE itself. And sites matching that description are pretty few & far between these days.
I think Mozilla is at very real risk of losing a lot of the inroads into enterprise that it has made over the past few years.
Yeah... "Two new computers were released without NFC support, and support for the newest version of Bluetooth, older versions of which Apple's computers have supported for years now. We can then conclude from this that the iPhone 5 will definitely not support NFC, and instead will simply support BT4."
FTA:
we suspect that it could even be used to rival NFC (Near Field Communication).
So they don't know, they're pulling a wild guess out of their collective asses. Using that same logic, I suspect that my urine could be a suitable replacement for a cold glass of lemonade on a hot day! After all, they're both liquid, and both have a yellowish hue!
Just like Thunderbolt, Apple could singlehandedly decide to pioneer that technology against all the odds,
So an industry standard developed by Intel, slated for inclusion in all their chipsets, and offering immense benefits for throughput and standardized connectivity is a technology that "Apple is singlehandedly pioneering against all odds"? Apple may have been an early adopter, but I'd say that, given Intel's commitment to supporting it on their chipsets, calling it a bold, contrarian move is a little much.
Apple may use only one
Translation: "I need to fill up a page with senseless ramblings so we have more ad impressions. I will now compare a new desktop and a new portable computer to some speculative vision of what may or may not be included in the iPhone 5 when it finally sees the light of day."
And the extra you're paying is exactly for the shiny: -- Generally better battery life than its contemporaries - sometimes significantly longer; -- Generally lighter/thinner than its contemporaries - sometimes significantly smaller/lighter; -- A whole bunch of fairly good consumer software to power your shiny new toy;
None of this comes without additional cost. Apple offers less choice in terms of customizability & models - but if you limit your search to similar sizes, weights, battery life, screen quality, and software (not just X Ram, X CPU, X HD capacity), the prices are fairly competitive.
Yes, you can get a laptop that will do "everything a Macbook does" for less money. But it will, almost invariably, be a heavier, bulkier model with lower battery life, and a shitload of preloaded crapware (including, for some people, Windows itself) that you'll want to delete almost immediately.
I don't see the problem with that. It's an unsecured area, where people carrying weapons have just been killed; the weapons and the scene haven't been secured, so why would they let every Tom, Dick and Osama roll up, strip the corpses of useful intelligence and weapons, and disappear off into the city?
You presume that it's possible to divine someone's intentions from a couple thousand yards away through a grainy black and white video camera mounted on a moving vehicle that's circling over the city blocks where the event occurred. That notion is either naive, or arrived at through deliberate obtuseness in an attempt to bolster your own predetermined conclusions that war is always evil and anybody who pulls a trigger is automatically a war criminal.
You claim that it's "obvious" they were "just recovering the bodies," yet what proof can you provide of that that's NOT based on knowledge available only because you know what the people arriving at the scene on foot reported after the fact, or gleaned from careful frame-by-frame reviews of the video footage? Remember, this happens in real time, there's no time to load up video footage in an advanced video analysis tool to figure out what you're looking at.
The people in the helicopter simply know that they shot some people who appeared to be carrying weapons, and some other people drove up and started trying to load those people into a van. If you see people, in a war zone, carrying what appear to be assault rifles and RPGs, and you know that they're not part of YOUR military... what conclusion, exactly, would you draw?
And you cite a creatively edited propaganda piece as your sole argument?
Oh please, tell us about Loose Change next. I love seeing that hot mess of debunked conspiracy theory cited as a compelling "documentary." It's almost as funny as the assertion that "Collateral Murder" is raw, unedited war footage.
"Optimal" conditions: 8 hours of battery life. This means it realistically can be expected to get 4-6 hours of "real-world" usage. Plug in a couple of peripherals and reduce your charge time to 2-3 hours of actual use - far short of the length of a typical workday.
This is targeted at "professional" and "workplace" usage. If the point is mobility, why would you consider being tethered to a charger every couple hours a value-add? Do you think any user is going to consider it a good thing that they have to constantly return to a charging station and charge their "mobile" device because their USB-powered peripherals are draining the battery so fast?
USB port also might be able to power devices, which would *greatly* increase ease of use and potential use cases.
Yes, instead of getting 5 hours of battery life, your new accessories can activate the Lenovo ThinkPad Tablet's "paperweight mode" in half the time! That's a tremendous speed increase!
A USB port powering external devices means that those devices are draining your Tablet's battery that much faster. I don't see that being a very compelling use case.
assuming it can stabilize, increase its performance, and get better driver support.
In other words, it'll be successful, provided it grows to provide the many things it lacks currently, which happen to be table stakes for being taken seriously as a usable operating system in any remotely serious computing task.
This argument only holds weight if we assume that government employees are qualified and capable of managing a project of this size and scope for less money than the private contractors' bid. We have a huge deficit because we keep spending like a piss-drunk sailor, without any regards for how much money the government actually has in its pocket - unless you're arguing that the government could do all of the work it outsources to private firms today for less money in-house, I'm not sure what your point is.
It's only the vendor's fault if he does not perform. It doesn't sound like SAIC performed.
Agreed, and Bloomberg is completely correct in trying to recoup some of the city's losses. However, it's also worth noting that there's way more than simple "management incompetence" at work here - indictments have already been filed against numerous people working on the project for defrauding the city out of millions of dollars. I suspect we'll find a lot of blame that can be shared around between SAIC and its subcontractors, and city officials.
And guarantee that nobody, anywhere, will ever bid on government contracts, at any price short of extortionary? These companies have to extract system requirements from the government workers - I'd say the fault lies equally with people inside the government who don't understand what they need, and people inside SAIC low-balling every estimate. There's lots of blame to go around at SAIC, and the NY government.
It also doesn't help that two people (Padma & Reddy Allen) who run TechnoDyne, one of SAIC's subs on this project, also are charged with skimming somewhere between 40 and 90 million dollars off the payments the city made, and at least 2 other people have also been indicted for kickbacks and other fraud. This isn't just a case of normal stupidity and scope creep causing project overruns - this is active criminal behavior, for which numerous people are being charged.
This demand that SAIC repay at least some of the money to the city is probably pretty reasonable in light of the fact that SAIC's controls & vetting of its subcontractors failed so spectacularly.
Of course, that's predicated on a host of assumptions, most notably that immigration & birth rates will stay constant.
I think it's ridiculously unlikely that French Muslims are going to suddenly turn into fundamentalist sharia adherents, about as likely that the millions of Muslims here in the US are suddenly going to decide it's time to put aside their comfortable, peaceful middle class lives and wage jihad. I'm not particularly concerned about that, and anybody who is worried about that should probably get their head checked. But *literally* speaking, it is entirely possible for France to be a majority-Muslim society in our lifetimes.
Yes, it's all just a conspiracy from the US government.
I'm fairly certain that if they wanted to take him out, a simple gunshot to the head as part of a mugging-gone-wrong-in-NYC, with the perpetrator conveniently dropping off the face of the planet would be a lot easier to pull off.
But of course nobody in a position of authority and privilege has ever treated service people poorly, or abusively, either. So it *must* be a conspiracy because the US didn't particularly like him.
I can second this. By way of comparison, quick benchmark I just ran right now on my laptop:
-- Opened chrome - no extensions but adblock/flashblock, opened 8 tabs - one to each of my bookmark bar sites, and 1 to youtube, where I played a random video from the front page. Memory usage: 162MB.
-- Opened firefox - no extensions but adblock/flashblock, opened the same 8 tabs and started the same video playing. Firefox.exe usage is 140 MB; plugin-container.exe takes up an additional 143MB to handle the video playback. Total usage: 283 MB.
That's a HUGE difference in memory utilization, and that's fairly "light" usage. Firefox is a bit of a pig when it comes to memory usage, and frankly its performance pales in comparison to Chrome, as well. I didn't like Chrome at first, I hated the way they handled tabs, and I thought I'd miss not having the file/edit/etc. menu visible... but the performance and stability have absolutely converted me... still get a little turned around with menu operations, but it's forced me to learn more of the keyboard shortcuts, and that's also a time saver in the long run.
Because the cheapass lazy corporations don't want to spend the money. So what they will do is look for other free browsers that offer a model they're after, or do business with the corporations who they're already spending a shitload of money on with support contracts: i.e., Microsoft, and perhaps Google.
If Firefox wants to remain competitive, they cannot simply say "Tough shit, you're on you're own." This move will drive enterprise away from FF and into the waiting, loving arms of IE and Chrome. I know plenty of people in my dev organization have already uninstalled FF and installed Chrome, alongside the corporate-standard IE8. IE is for internal IE-only sites (yeah, they do still exist), and Chrome is for everything else.
Firefox is eminently replaceable, and Mozilla ignores that fact at its own peril. Companies start rolling out IE8 & 9, or Chrome, and you can bet that folks at home will start saying, "Gee, maybe I should install that version on my home computer, keep things consistent."
One of the people who organized the pageants was friends with one of the officers who worked for the ROTC detachment at my school, I'm not sure if it's "common," to have this, but the pageants we did it for felt it added a little "ceremony" to the usual playing of the national anthem, I guess.
I was 19-20 years old at the time, studying at a male-dominated engineering school. I wasn't asking too many questions!
And, to answer your question - basically, it involves carrying in the national & state flags and "presenting them" while the national anthem is played. After that, the flags are left up on the stage while the pageant goes on and me and the other color guard members would sit offstage and try to chat with some of the girls. At the end of the pageant, we'd go up and take the flags off the stage, and then leave.
There's some pomp & ceremony that goes along with it, but we basically made some money for cadet activities by dressing up in our Army or Air Force uniforms, looking pretty, and doing about 5 minutes worth of work. And the added bonus for a group of college guys, you get to chat with some pageant contestants.
Slashdot Mirror
Dear Sir or Madam,
I'm writing to inform you that your use of the pejorative term, "Spider," is a hurtful and unwarranted attack on our nation's hard-working, industrious population of Arachnid Americans. The term you used (hereafter referred to as the "S-word") has a long and dark history of being used to demean, degrade, and debase select members of the animal kingdom, due to their 8-legged status. We understand that you probably grew up in a conservative household, where songs like "The Itsy Bitsy S-word" were sung freely and without any thought given to the pain and subjugation inherent in that song's subject. Could you imagine singing about a person of Caucasian ancestry climbing up a water spout, only to be frustrated by repeated rain showers washing him down again? I bet you wouldn't find it funny at all, yet you sling hurtful words around, blithely unaware of - or worse, uncaring for - the damage they do.
We hope that you will consider your word choices more carefully in the future, to avoid causing unnecessary emotional pain to our long-suffering Arachnid brethren.
Thank you for your time and consideration.
Peter Parker
Director, Arachnid-American National Tolerance Initiative (AANTI)
Somebody has no understanding of the amount of living space actually available in the ISS.
Pressurized volume on the ISS is 837 cubic meters. In relatable terms, roughly the size of 6-7 economy hotel rooms (which tend to be ~35-40 sq. meters in size).
How many people do you think you're actually going to cram in there, when you factor in staffing, fuel, food, etc., plus the need to boost people and supplies up to it on a constant, recurring basis?
More to the point, how many people have the resources, and would be willing to spend the thousands of dollars required to ship themselves up to a tin can in LEO, and spend a week crammed into a space far smaller than the average Super 8 room with nothing to do, alongside 20 other people?
I can count exactly zero space companies who'd bid on it, because the plan is impractical, and would be a complete waste of money.
It's not necessarily a question of "needing" the space. But if somebody handed you all that space, don't you think you could find a use for it? I know I sure could. I have 2 24" monitors at work, and regularly have them filled with browsers displaying multiple references, terminal windows, email, im chats with coworkers, an IDE, test instances, perhaps a remote desktop connection to a second test system, a ticketing/bug reporting app, etc...
Yeah, I could alt-tab between them all, but having them arrayed so that I can easily view any piece of information I want quickly without searching through a dozen programs definitely speeds up the work.
Your statement that it's evil assumes a deliberate intent to kill civilians who happen to be at the wrong place at the wrong time, and that simply isn't the nature and character of the military's behavior. In civilian life, this is why we have different punishments for manslaughter and murder.
What you're suggesting here is - to use an extreme example - Mother Theresa getting in a car accident that resulted in someone's death would make her an evil hypocrite, and invalidate every principle of charity and good works she ever espoused.
There is no inherent hypocrisy in stating that you are pro-liberty, pro-freedom, pro-democracy, and having unfortunate - even tragic - collateral civilian deaths as the result of military action prompted by those principles. The military - overwhelmingly as an institution, there are of course individual exceptions, as there are in ANY large group of people - goes to extraordinary lengths to reduce and avoid these events, and suggesting that they set out with the express intention of killing civilians in some sort of evil hypocrisy while using talk of freedom and democracy as a smoke screen is naive and fatuous.
After the fact, we certainly know that they were unarmed.
At the time, they were driving up to a group of men who were armed with AK-47s and what appeared to be RPGs, and attempting to load some of them into a vehicle. They were not medical personnel, they were not in a vehicle that was marked as a medical vehicle.
This event is certainly - in hindsight, with full knowledge of the circumstance - tragic, but the decisions of the soldiers involved were also completely legitimate, given their view of the activity on the ground: unmarked, non-medical personnel driving up and attempting to load combatants (and possibly equipment) into a vehicle and drive them away minutes after they've been attacked by a gunship certainly also appear to be combatants, and thus, legitimate targets.
Was the van marked with a red cross, or some other internationally-recognized symbol which would designate it as a protected non-combatant vehicle, which would afford your point some measure of logic?
A soldier - or in this case, an insurgent - rendering first aid and assistance to a wounded comrade is still a combatant. You don't get a special "don't shoot me, bro" immunity from being shot in a war zone because you're trying to slap a bandage on your friend's wound. There were absolutely no markings on that vehicle that would lead anybody to remotely suspect they were anything but fellow insurgents trying to evacuate wounded, weapons, and possibly actionable intelligence.
But if you want to talk discuss "atrocities," we should also include events like the killing - and subsequent mutilation, burning, and hanging - of contractors in Fallujah - remember that one? Getting killed is certainly a risk military personnel and contractors have to live with. Where's the Collateral Murder video & your outrage over that *actual* atrocity, or any of the other documented cases of Taliban or al Qaeda linked executions, torture, abduction, murder, and other assorted savagery?
Or have you unilaterally redefined the word "atrocity" and the phrase "war crime" to mean "that thing that only happens when a soldier with an American flag on his shoulder pulls a trigger, no matter what the situation, no matter what the circumstances, and no matter what the outcome?"
Of course I don't.
Now, since that question has absolutely no bearing in any way to what happened in the case of the "Collateral Murder" video, may I presume you're just trying to save face and make it look like you had a point, rather than conceding that my points have merit, and you're just knee-jerking in relation to a cleverly edited propaganda piece?
Here's my enterprise anecdote: Corporate standard is IE 8; Firefox is also available as a corporate-sanctioned browser. Years ago, before they started supporting FF, the engineers all had Firefox, and everybody else used IE6, because the engineers knew how to find, install, and use Firefox.
I see that same thing happening with Chrome today: most of the engineers I work with run Chrome as their "unofficial"-but-default browser; IE 8 & FF are installed too, but they are only used when necessary. And most of the engineers use IETab for Sharepoint and other IE-specific functionality, and simply avoid using FF unless something is completely unusable in Chrome, IETab, or IE itself. And sites matching that description are pretty few & far between these days.
I think Mozilla is at very real risk of losing a lot of the inroads into enterprise that it has made over the past few years.
Yeah... "Two new computers were released without NFC support, and support for the newest version of Bluetooth, older versions of which Apple's computers have supported for years now. We can then conclude from this that the iPhone 5 will definitely not support NFC, and instead will simply support BT4."
FTA:
So they don't know, they're pulling a wild guess out of their collective asses. Using that same logic, I suspect that my urine could be a suitable replacement for a cold glass of lemonade on a hot day! After all, they're both liquid, and both have a yellowish hue!
So an industry standard developed by Intel, slated for inclusion in all their chipsets, and offering immense benefits for throughput and standardized connectivity is a technology that "Apple is singlehandedly pioneering against all odds"? Apple may have been an early adopter, but I'd say that, given Intel's commitment to supporting it on their chipsets, calling it a bold, contrarian move is a little much.
Translation: "I need to fill up a page with senseless ramblings so we have more ad impressions. I will now compare a new desktop and a new portable computer to some speculative vision of what may or may not be included in the iPhone 5 when it finally sees the light of day."
And the extra you're paying is exactly for the shiny:
-- Generally better battery life than its contemporaries - sometimes significantly longer;
-- Generally lighter/thinner than its contemporaries - sometimes significantly smaller/lighter;
-- A whole bunch of fairly good consumer software to power your shiny new toy;
None of this comes without additional cost. Apple offers less choice in terms of customizability & models - but if you limit your search to similar sizes, weights, battery life, screen quality, and software (not just X Ram, X CPU, X HD capacity), the prices are fairly competitive.
Yes, you can get a laptop that will do "everything a Macbook does" for less money. But it will, almost invariably, be a heavier, bulkier model with lower battery life, and a shitload of preloaded crapware (including, for some people, Windows itself) that you'll want to delete almost immediately.
I don't see the problem with that. It's an unsecured area, where people carrying weapons have just been killed; the weapons and the scene haven't been secured, so why would they let every Tom, Dick and Osama roll up, strip the corpses of useful intelligence and weapons, and disappear off into the city?
You presume that it's possible to divine someone's intentions from a couple thousand yards away through a grainy black and white video camera mounted on a moving vehicle that's circling over the city blocks where the event occurred. That notion is either naive, or arrived at through deliberate obtuseness in an attempt to bolster your own predetermined conclusions that war is always evil and anybody who pulls a trigger is automatically a war criminal.
You claim that it's "obvious" they were "just recovering the bodies," yet what proof can you provide of that that's NOT based on knowledge available only because you know what the people arriving at the scene on foot reported after the fact, or gleaned from careful frame-by-frame reviews of the video footage? Remember, this happens in real time, there's no time to load up video footage in an advanced video analysis tool to figure out what you're looking at.
The people in the helicopter simply know that they shot some people who appeared to be carrying weapons, and some other people drove up and started trying to load those people into a van. If you see people, in a war zone, carrying what appear to be assault rifles and RPGs, and you know that they're not part of YOUR military... what conclusion, exactly, would you draw?
And you cite a creatively edited propaganda piece as your sole argument?
Oh please, tell us about Loose Change next. I love seeing that hot mess of debunked conspiracy theory cited as a compelling "documentary." It's almost as funny as the assertion that "Collateral Murder" is raw, unedited war footage.
"Optimal" conditions: 8 hours of battery life. This means it realistically can be expected to get 4-6 hours of "real-world" usage. Plug in a couple of peripherals and reduce your charge time to 2-3 hours of actual use - far short of the length of a typical workday.
This is targeted at "professional" and "workplace" usage. If the point is mobility, why would you consider being tethered to a charger every couple hours a value-add? Do you think any user is going to consider it a good thing that they have to constantly return to a charging station and charge their "mobile" device because their USB-powered peripherals are draining the battery so fast?
Yes, instead of getting 5 hours of battery life, your new accessories can activate the Lenovo ThinkPad Tablet's "paperweight mode" in half the time! That's a tremendous speed increase!
A USB port powering external devices means that those devices are draining your Tablet's battery that much faster. I don't see that being a very compelling use case.
In other words, it'll be successful, provided it grows to provide the many things it lacks currently, which happen to be table stakes for being taken seriously as a usable operating system in any remotely serious computing task.
That's all?
This argument only holds weight if we assume that government employees are qualified and capable of managing a project of this size and scope for less money than the private contractors' bid. We have a huge deficit because we keep spending like a piss-drunk sailor, without any regards for how much money the government actually has in its pocket - unless you're arguing that the government could do all of the work it outsources to private firms today for less money in-house, I'm not sure what your point is.
Agreed, and Bloomberg is completely correct in trying to recoup some of the city's losses. However, it's also worth noting that there's way more than simple "management incompetence" at work here - indictments have already been filed against numerous people working on the project for defrauding the city out of millions of dollars. I suspect we'll find a lot of blame that can be shared around between SAIC and its subcontractors, and city officials.
See http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303936704576398100826124240.html for a fairly thorough writeup on what investigators have uncovered so far.
And guarantee that nobody, anywhere, will ever bid on government contracts, at any price short of extortionary? These companies have to extract system requirements from the government workers - I'd say the fault lies equally with people inside the government who don't understand what they need, and people inside SAIC low-balling every estimate. There's lots of blame to go around at SAIC, and the NY government.
It also doesn't help that two people (Padma & Reddy Allen) who run TechnoDyne, one of SAIC's subs on this project, also are charged with skimming somewhere between 40 and 90 million dollars off the payments the city made, and at least 2 other people have also been indicted for kickbacks and other fraud. This isn't just a case of normal stupidity and scope creep causing project overruns - this is active criminal behavior, for which numerous people are being charged.
This demand that SAIC repay at least some of the money to the city is probably pretty reasonable in light of the fact that SAIC's controls & vetting of its subcontractors failed so spectacularly.
You can read some more about the sordid details here: http://www.businessinsider.com/reddy-padma-allen-citytime-2011-6
You should really get some better, or at least more interesting, friends then.
Seriously.
It's about 1.44 billion USD, to be precise. "A lot more than?" We're not talking orders of magnitude.
And wherever did you get the notion that the Euro is immune to inflation?
In terms of pure demographics, there is some indication that if "current birth rates" continue, France could be majority-Muslim in about 25 years: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/personal-view/3601901/Is-France-on-the-way-to-becoming-an-Islamic-state.html
Of course, that's predicated on a host of assumptions, most notably that immigration & birth rates will stay constant.
I think it's ridiculously unlikely that French Muslims are going to suddenly turn into fundamentalist sharia adherents, about as likely that the millions of Muslims here in the US are suddenly going to decide it's time to put aside their comfortable, peaceful middle class lives and wage jihad. I'm not particularly concerned about that, and anybody who is worried about that should probably get their head checked. But *literally* speaking, it is entirely possible for France to be a majority-Muslim society in our lifetimes.
Yes, it's all just a conspiracy from the US government.
I'm fairly certain that if they wanted to take him out, a simple gunshot to the head as part of a mugging-gone-wrong-in-NYC, with the perpetrator conveniently dropping off the face of the planet would be a lot easier to pull off.
But of course nobody in a position of authority and privilege has ever treated service people poorly, or abusively, either. So it *must* be a conspiracy because the US didn't particularly like him.
I can second this. By way of comparison, quick benchmark I just ran right now on my laptop:
-- Opened chrome - no extensions but adblock/flashblock, opened 8 tabs - one to each of my bookmark bar sites, and 1 to youtube, where I played a random video from the front page. Memory usage: 162MB.
-- Opened firefox - no extensions but adblock/flashblock, opened the same 8 tabs and started the same video playing. Firefox.exe usage is 140 MB; plugin-container.exe takes up an additional 143MB to handle the video playback. Total usage: 283 MB.
That's a HUGE difference in memory utilization, and that's fairly "light" usage. Firefox is a bit of a pig when it comes to memory usage, and frankly its performance pales in comparison to Chrome, as well. I didn't like Chrome at first, I hated the way they handled tabs, and I thought I'd miss not having the file/edit/etc. menu visible... but the performance and stability have absolutely converted me... still get a little turned around with menu operations, but it's forced me to learn more of the keyboard shortcuts, and that's also a time saver in the long run.
Because the cheapass lazy corporations don't want to spend the money. So what they will do is look for other free browsers that offer a model they're after, or do business with the corporations who they're already spending a shitload of money on with support contracts: i.e., Microsoft, and perhaps Google.
If Firefox wants to remain competitive, they cannot simply say "Tough shit, you're on you're own." This move will drive enterprise away from FF and into the waiting, loving arms of IE and Chrome. I know plenty of people in my dev organization have already uninstalled FF and installed Chrome, alongside the corporate-standard IE8. IE is for internal IE-only sites (yeah, they do still exist), and Chrome is for everything else.
Firefox is eminently replaceable, and Mozilla ignores that fact at its own peril. Companies start rolling out IE8 & 9, or Chrome, and you can bet that folks at home will start saying, "Gee, maybe I should install that version on my home computer, keep things consistent."
One of the people who organized the pageants was friends with one of the officers who worked for the ROTC detachment at my school, I'm not sure if it's "common," to have this, but the pageants we did it for felt it added a little "ceremony" to the usual playing of the national anthem, I guess.
I was 19-20 years old at the time, studying at a male-dominated engineering school. I wasn't asking too many questions!
And, to answer your question - basically, it involves carrying in the national & state flags and "presenting them" while the national anthem is played. After that, the flags are left up on the stage while the pageant goes on and me and the other color guard members would sit offstage and try to chat with some of the girls. At the end of the pageant, we'd go up and take the flags off the stage, and then leave.
There's some pomp & ceremony that goes along with it, but we basically made some money for cadet activities by dressing up in our Army or Air Force uniforms, looking pretty, and doing about 5 minutes worth of work. And the added bonus for a group of college guys, you get to chat with some pageant contestants.