***Abandon the ISS now and channel all its investiment to the next generation space shuttle.***
Regretably, that's more easily said than done. The I in ISS stands for International. It's International because when Reagan's misbegotten "Space Station Freedom" predictably ran out of schedule and funding simultaneously along about 1993 we sold a bunch or suckers on making this useless and rather silly project an International effort. So, the US doesn't own the thing any more.
As far as I can see, it really doesn't matter very much. The Bush league fantasies about going to Mars via the space station and the moon are probably going to flounder sometime just before or after we get back to the moon for a day or two. Reason -- cost overruns and the fallout from Bush's nutty fiscal policies.
In the meantime, these man in space projects are going to continue to drain resources from real science.
The only bright spot is that George W seems possibly to have somehow put someone competent in charge of NASA -- quite possibly for the first time ever. Griffin is an advocate of men in space and human settlement of space. But he also appears possibly to have some sort of tenous grip on reality. If the politicians will just leave him alone, maybe he can come up with a realistic plan to back up to 1970, forget the last 35 years of floundering, and set up a space program that has some remote chance of eventual success. But don't expect the path from where we are today into space to be quick, easy, or cheap. (And don't expect the free market to somehow fix everything).
***This again offers the advantage of making it hard to find senior leadership while it has the disadvantage of not allowing them to utilize their assets in a centralized manner which would be far more efficient and effective.***
Seems to me that the insurgent's loosly coupled network is working just fine from their point of view. I would imagine that a "better" command and control structure might well have the perverse effect of allowing the damn fools who gravitate to the top of most organizations to micromanage the effort to death. In fact, we might do well the GIVE the insurgents an advanced communication system although they might be to smart to take it. Why not? It's not like what we are doing is working.
===
If the insurgency is using cell phones effectively, why not randomly shut down the cell phone network? I suspect that if cell phone coverage in Iraq was as erratic as it is in Vermont, the insurgents would quickly cease to depend on it for command and control.
'Well, in our country, said Alice, still panting a little, 'you'd generally get to somewhere else - if you ran very fast for a long time as we've been doing.' 'A slow sort of country!' said the Queen. 'Now, here, I see. it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!...
"Lewis Carroll" (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) -- Through the Looking Glass
***... and still isn't. It used to be that a 3 year-old PC would be almost obsolete, whereas nowadays for most businesses and even most home users (hardcore gamers notwithstanding) there's very little reason to buy a new one.***
That has been true since the P54 Pentium hit the streets back around 1995. What's really happening is that some IT people and even members of the general public are finally beginning to realize down deep inside that there is very little difference for many applications between a P-100 running Windows 95 and the latest multi-GHz wonder-- I can't even tell you what it is -- running Windows XP, OSX, or the Open Source flavor of the month.
The PC industry for the past decade has reminded me a lot of American cars when I was a teenager in the 1950s. All the attention went to style (fins and portholes) and to huge engines that generated about five times the horsepower that anyone other than affecionados actually wanted. In the 1960s, people sort of lost interest in Detroit's wonders. But that's nothing compared to what happened in the 1970s and 1980s when people wanted more reliable, fuel efficient cars and Detroit turned out to have no clue how to build them.
Gates is correct. The PC industry isn't going away any time soon. But so is the WSJ. The PC industry is bogged down stamping out commodity products (mostly in East Asia) on fairly thin margins. Digital Rights Management is apparently going to impede the PC as an entertainment device. The dearth of programming that any sane person would pay money for isn't going to do wonders for that either. Legal wrangling over the metaphysics of Intellectual Property is likely to do a lot of damage. There is a whole industry devoted to making sure that no patent application is remotely comprehensible. And it looks to me like the industry has not the slightest clue how to provide communications security. The idea that Unix has communications security right looks like wishful thinking to me. Unix basically uses the same flawed technologies that make Windows the equivalent of an unlocked car with the keys in the ignition. I fear that communications insecurity may well result eventually in the demise of some -- not all but some -- Internet based commerce. Anybody want to guess how long it will be before the malware boys go after AJAX and start attacking via all the cute and sometimes even useful applications that the industry hype machine is currently trumpeting?
So, the digital revolution is over? Of course not. But the PC may not be the base that newer technologies build on. My guess is that in 2026, you'll still be able to buy a PC. And it'll be smaller, faster, prettier, and maybe even easier to use than the PC you buy today. But the percentage of the population that uses PCs may well be way down from its peak which may not be all that far in the future.
***Linux is very reliable for me, even on newer hardware with a bleeding edge kernel.***
You're dead right of course. The Linux kernel is more than good enough for common desktop usage, and I don't see anything that Tannenbaum has written that indicates that he wouldn't agree.
Tannenbaum appears to be more interested in the OS that you might want to use in your air traffic control system, ATM, or the control system for your neighborhood nuclear power plant. There, he may well be right in that Microkernels used optimally might produce more reliable systems than macrokernels.
Much as I admire both Tannenbaum and Torvalds, and acknowledging that both are far smarter than I am, I have doubts that interrupt driven, message passing is the right architecture for high reliability systems. Every attempt that I saw back in the 1960s-1980s to do a real time system based on that architecture -- and I've seen a number -- has been pretty shakey. As far as I can see, the architecture doesn't permit you to build such that there is a guarantee that critical functions will run with a known frequency (or indeed, ever). You can use watchdog timers to trap functions that aren't getting run often enough, but trying to fix the system based on timers usually results in the timing problems moving someplace else. Timers seem mostly to be the digital equivalent of duct tape.
Anyway, I suspect that there are both microkernels and macrokernels in all our futures. But I don't see all that much need for improved reliability on the desktop. As long as the system doesn't crash more often than maybe once or twice a month, most of us can live with it. Even Windows 95 can run that well if you load enough patches.
***Well, I know how to build a secure system. For a bunch of money, I'll tell you. We've know for years how to do security right, but when it is done right, it's a hassle, and not percived as being worth it.***
I suppose that at the limit, I know also. On the back of most every PC today is an 8 pin RJ-45 connector or occasionally a BNC or 4 pin RJ-11. Unplug it. Cut the wire connected to it. Put the plug back in. You now have near perfect communications security.
Short of that, I don't think you can really secure a modern system. You apparently think differently... which is fine. I'm sure whatever you would do would be vastly better than nothing. But don't be too suprised if you find out in coming years that your best isn't anywhere near good enough.
Seems to me that most of the responses miss the point. The point is that the computer industry to a very great extent does not know HOW to build a secure system. At least not if the system is hooked up to an external network. And things are, it is asserted, getting worse, not better.
I think the article's case for eventual total security breakdown is a bit overstated, but not wildly so.
The question that we should be asking is... If current trends continue, ten years from now will we be able to safely connect to the Internet (or any similar network) for any purpose whatsoever? IMHO, That's a really good question.
Sounds to me like you're asking a great question. One that a lot more teachers ought to ask. I'll make five points or suggestions or something, then shut up.
1. I think you are correct about Grammer. I have no idea if the first two sentances above are gramatically correct. But they reflect English as it is commonly used. I think they flow well. I don't think they are ambiguous. Arguments about whether the second sentance lacks a subject or has some other heinous grammatical fault seem to me pointless. (and yes, I know that a Grammar Nazi would probably want that to be "...seem to me to be pointless".]
2. In 1958 or 1959, I took a wonderful course at UCLA called English 106S -- English for Science and Engineering Students. It was one of about four college courses I suffered through that wasn't either tedious, badly presented, or both. I really enjoyed it even though it involved taking an hour every other day out of play/work time to write a 300 word essay.
The course started with a class period devoted to discussing a word. I believe it was "measurement". Homework: write 300 words on measurement. Next class. (Some of the) students read their essays. We discussed them. Homework: write 300 words on measurement. Next class. (Some of the) students read their essays. We discussed them. Homework: write 300 words on measurement.... This went on for three or four weeks.
Points successfully made by that exercise:
There is a LOT to be said about measurement.
There are a lot of ways to say it
Some presentations of the same thought are a lot clearer and more enjoyable for those presented to than are others.
3. Scientists, Engineers, and Programmers face a problem not faced by politicians and lawyers. The former sometimes really need to express thoughts clearly while latter only have to sound like they are expressing themselves clearly. English often doesn't make clear expression easy. 'And' and 'or' are a lot mushier than they seem. "Vistors must turn off Cell Phones or Improvised Explosive Devices". I've got both, Do I get to pick which I turn off? Is that 'or' inclusive or exclusive? If I try to clarify things, I may get into trouble with the lack of an explict convention in English for evaluating sentances with both 'and' and 'or'. Left to Right? So, "A and B or C" always evaluates to "(A and B) or C"? Not Hardly. Even 'not' can be tricky. I'm told that in some languages "Isn't the door closed?" means exactly the same thing as "Is the door open?" English isn't one of those languages.... and pronouns... There are perfectly adequate rules for using them. But people often ignore those rules without problems. Need to be a bit more diligent in technical writing. Not because adhering to rules is important, but because not building stuff that doesn't work is important.
etc, etc, All that stuff should be addressed, no?
4. Frequently, I encounter writing done by people for whom English is a second language. Some of them express themselves clearly. Some don't. This is entirely independent of whether they occasionally stumble over English grammar, case, tense, gender, voice or our appalling spelling conventions. My conclusion: clarity may well be largely independent of grammer and spelling.
Might be fun to present the class with a paragraph or two written clearly by a non-native speaker who has some difficulties with English and contrast them with the same material garbled by someone who writes correctly, but not clearly..
5. It might also be fun to present some examples of really awful writing. I once had an example of a paragraph by an computer scientist noted for his turgid style. I'm nearly certain it said "Sometimes you have to use big words because small ones won't do the job". I just said that in 14 words -- most of them 1 syllable. He took about 300 words -- most of them polysyllables. I suspect the guy had good things to say. But, man, did he need an editor.
On the surface, McKinnon's interview seems pretty whacko. But it's clear that he's playing a clever game here. Clearly, he believes that he will be extradited to the US and tried for his crimes. What he is doing here is laying down the foundation for an insanity defense.
But I'm confident that the Bush administration is ready for him. This is an outfit that knows fruitcakery inside and out. I predict that if necessary, they will bring back John Ashcroft to deal with this Al Queda supporting, pro-Venezualan, evolutionist, super-hacker scum. Let me assure you -- one does not out fruitcake John Ashcroft.
===
Nobody seems to have mentioned it, but US government policy has always been that classified information is not allowed on computers that are connected to unsecured networks -- especially, but not limited to, the Internet. This means that all the purported UFO stuff McKinnon purportedly found must be unclassified. Which means that those posters who feel it really exists should be able to go after it with a Freedom Of Information Act lawsuit. If anyone does so, by all means let us know what you turn up.
I can't find any references to a post-PRC invasion of Mongolia. In fact, the Chinese dropped all claim to (Outer) Mongolia after requesting a free and fair election there in October 1945. When it became clear that (literally) no one in Mongolia wanted to be Chinese, China recognized the Mongolian government and has -- so far as I can tell, behaved themselves in a rather exemplary fashion with regard to a region that they could surely overrun in about 72 hours I'll save you the trouble of pointing out that a Chinese takeover of Mongolia would produce a truly spectacular negative reaction from Russia. Would that the US had behaved as responsibly in Vietnam or the Indians in Kashmir.
Perhaps you are thinking of Inner Mongolia -- A chinese province with a largely Mongolian population. I don't think much of China's conduct there (or Tibet or East Turkestan come to that), but no one, not even the Mongolians, thinks that Inner Mongolia is not part of China.
East Turkestan has pretty much always been under Chinese control with occasional periods of Russian control or (very short lived) periods of independence. The Communists did not invade the place, they took it over from the nationalists. The modern Chinese conduct there has been roughly comperable to 19th century American conduct in dealing with the American Indians -- which is to say pretty despicable. But it is not expansionist.
Tibet was regarded by everyone except the Tibetans as a semi-autonomous province of China. As I said, I don't approve of the Chinese conduct there, but their invasion was probably more justified on a strictly legal basis than Lincon's sending the US Army into Virginia in 1861. My point was that the Chinese are not expansionist beyond what they regard as part of China -- which they certainly did think Tibet was and is. And, no, you are incorrect, China was a party to the McMahon line talks as well as Britain and Tibet and did not agree to the proposed line. (If Tibet was not within the Chinese sphere of influence, why was China invited to the party?) See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McMahon_Line
Calling South Korea a democracy at the time of the Korean War is more than a bit of a stretch. It was the domain of one Syngman Rhee whose government started off with some democratic trappings and ended up as a nasty little dictatorship which (thankfully) collapsed in 1960. While some of the military governments that followed Rhee weren't too awful, real and hopefully permanent democracy didn't arrive there until the 1992 election. I think perhaps you think terms "democratic" and "anti-communist" are synonymous. They really aren't.. Rhee was not the former. He was the latter.
In any case, the Chinese didn't enter North Korea until they were asked to by the North Koreans, and left in 1958. The other major power party to that conflict -- the US -- is still in Korea. I don't see how any reasonable person who doesn't see the US as expansionist (and I don't think many would ignoring the Iraq lunacy) can see the Chinese conduct in Korea as expansionist
(My guess is that the Bush Administration, UN, and North Korea's neighbors other than South Korea would view a takeover of North Korea by just about anyone including the Chinese as a blessing almost equivalent to having aliens snatch the population of that unhappy land and ship it off to Arcturas, but no one is going to say so, and the Chinese are surely not about to do that).
Yes the Chinese -- who did not get on well with Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Mihn -- backed the psychopathic Khymer Rouge leader Pol Pot. What you conveniently forget to mention is that Pol Pot's other major supporter was the US. Note that China's solution was not to set its army rolling toward Hanoi. It was to back governments that didn't get along with Ho Chi Mihn -- exactly what the US did. That has to do with lack of moral fibre not expansionism. Yes the Chinese
***-We've already have antisattelite missles. in the mid 80s, an ASAT took out a satellite in a successful test.***
Taking out a satellite looks to be pretty much trivial. Really. Their orbit is (almost) entirely predictable. Taking out a satellite is less complicated than mooring a space shuttle or Soyez capsule. In fact it is the same job with one requirement removed -- approaching the satellite at very near zero closing velocity.
I have always syspected that any of the dozen or so countries that can get a few kilograms into orbit could build a satellite capable of taking pot shots at satellites they view as unfriendly with a bunch of "dumb pebbles' (e.g shotgun pellets). Given the proper choice of orbit it's 'just' a matter of shoving the pellets out the door and letting the combined relative velocities of the two satellites do the rest of the job.
The relative ease with which satellites can be attacked (at least in principle -- I haven't tried it of course and it may be harder than it looks) has always seemed to me to be a strong argument against putting weapons into space. Standing out there with a "take your best shot, mate" pose is only a good strategy if you know you can handle your opponent's best shot. But I doubt that th US's -- or anyone else's -- hypothetical space based weapons can take anyone's best shot.
So what's the point in spending say $50 billion for a space based weapons system if your opponent can disable it with $50 million worth of simple launch vehicles and a few payloads that are barely more complex than an IED with a timer?
***The anti-sat laser race began years ago. Whilst the US was cutting back defense research into all but the most pork laden projects, China was pushing a serious military space strategy. This included new ICMBs, satellite and anti-sat and guidance technology. All very dual use for their manned program, but by comparison we've been looking the other way whistling whilst a non-democratic expansionistic country that tends to threaten our major trading partners and threaten first strike nuclear assaults against the US is building weapons to cripple the US military. ***
That's a bad case of paranoia you're working on there fella. And like most paranoid delusions, it's probably misdirected. Let's straighten out a few things here. First of all China definitely is, as you say, building new ICBMs. The reason isn't hard to figure out. It's because the 1980 style Long Trail ICBMs are liquid fueled. That means a two hour fuel up before launch and excessive vulnerability to a pre-emptive strike. The US long ago switched to solid fuel ICBMs because of near instant availability and reduced likelyhood of a missile blowing up in the silo China appears to be making the same transition for the same reasons.
China is also deploying nuclear SLBM carrying submarines ("boomers" if you will). But there is no evidence that they are trying to match the US warhead for warhead. It looks more like a move to make a successful pre-emptive strike by the US impossible. Given the Bush administration's bererker approach to foreign policy, it's hard to fault the Chinese for taking a few precautions.
There's no sign that the Chinese are seeking a 'first strike' capability -- which is, so far as I can see, an utter impossiblity against a country with as many diverse nuclear delivery systems and warheads as the US has.
I don't know where you got the idea that the Chinese are expansionist. If anything, they are the most insular bunch of folks on the whole damn planet (with the possible exception of native Vermonters). I read a book a number of decades ago that projected that China's foreign goals would be restricted to taking over Tibet, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau, and regions of traditional Chinese/Tibetan culture that the McMahon line (which China never at any time accepted as a legitimate border) put into India. Wish I could remember the title and author. So far, it's been pretty much dead on.
At any rate, let me point out that China has refrained from expanding into Indochina, North Korea, or Burma (Myanmar) although it would have been easy enough to do so, and in the case of the latter two, I'm not sure that anyone would mind all that much.
So, China is no danger? I didn't say that, and don't think that. But I think that their plan probably is to swamp the US economically, not militarily. You don't have to be very bright (just smarter than the average garden vegetable or Neoconservative) to figure out that an all out military conflict between any two major powers will probably clear the planet of multicellular life -- which means that the victory party -- no matter who 'wins' -- is likely to brief and not very much fun.
Consider what 100,000 or so Japanese did to the US economy between 1960 and 1980 -- starting with just about destroying the vaunted US automobile industry (Those "voluntary import limits Reagan negotiated are still in effect). Now imagine what ten times that number of Chinese can do if the US continues to be led by nitwits. Now, THERE's something to get paranoid about.
***That's because the primary purpose of this program, like so many others, is to transfer vast amounts of money from the federal treasury to certain politically cooperative industries***
If you'll reread the article, you'll note that this weapon is ground based, not space based, and is really pretty damn cheap by DOD standards -- hardly worth bribing a congressman for. I'm serious. Allowing for overruns and all, I imagine that a decade of R&D followed by a working installation would come in around the price of a half dozen F117A Stealth Fighters (@$45 million each). At that price, any country that has two PhDs to rub together, including a bunch of countries we don't like, can probably afford to build one of these -- especially if they phase the development out over a few decades.
A whole new world. Try to invade Iraq (not that I expect we'll be doing that again any time soon) and watch the satellites blink out. Try to overthrow Ceasar Chavez (which we apparently did attempt to do) and Zhango!!! all satellite communications in and out of North America are toast -- as are all out intelligence satellites that can ever be seen from Venezuala (which is most of them) -- Oh yeah, and GPS... history.
And the best thing... while this entails a lot of inconvenience it doesn't entail killing and maiming tens of thousands of innocent bystanders.
***Why wouldn't Wal-Mart customers "have a chance" to install Linux? Do they connect to a different internet than everyone else? Are they banned from entering computer and book stores?***
Reason 1 -- WalMart may not want most customers using Linux because Linux hardware support and detection still is somewhere between Windows 95 and Windows 98 in terms of maturity. That's not all that good. Poor Plug and Play means returns and that costs money. Maybe, if they make it clear that they do not support equipment not purchased from WalMart, they can offer a Linux distribution that is tested with the hardware they sell.
My last experience with Installing Linux -- Slackware 10.2
The display, mouse, and keyboard actually installed and worked right without tweaking(The second time this has happened. Progress IS being made).
BUT
NIC (an NE2000 clone) wasn't detected and had to be insmodded
HP 3670 Scanner not supported
INTEL QX3 microscope detected, but the option to control the lights doesn't work. And when I finally got around to installing Web camera software to use the imaging, that doesn't work either.
Sound Card -- detected and makes noises, but they aren't remotely the right noises.
CUPS -- The network aspects work, but would surely be impossible for a non-geek to configure. Of more importance to me, it generates a garbled PCL header that causes my HP-IIP to demand A4 paper. However, the printout is truncated to A4 size (unusable), not scaled to A4 size (which would be not quite as bad).. And, BTW, this whole idea of using HTTP to configure things really needs more work before it is turned loose on unsupecting users. e.g. turn page caching of the configuration pages OFF dammit.
SAMBA -- I got it running without a lot of trouble, but I think a non-geek would probably be in real trouble.
I somehow ended up with a 4mb swap file. This produced a truly spectacular swapping storm when I installed KDE and started up a few tasks. This particular problem may have been self inflicted in some fashion that a non-geek wouldn't blunder into.
I was able to detect, mount, and use USB flash memory pen drives, but the process wasn't even remotely a Windows plug and play experience.
IMO **ANY** of the above except maybe the Intel QX3 which is a discontinued product that a non-geek probably wouldn't expect to work would be enough to think twice about selling non-geeks Linux over the counter.
Reason 2 -- Boxed software products like TaxCut, games, mapping programs often won't run on Linux even if it has WINE. Explaining to customers why not would be painful and many wouldn't understand. Why ask for pain?
I'm not against selling Linux to non-geeks, but I think that the right place to start is single purpose machines -- e.g. A real cheap web browsing PC with a bundled printer.
***History is littered with many examples of sudden changes in power structure causing a lot of pain all around (Roman Empire, break up of USSR,...***
Well, Yes. But the hypothesis that the demise of Microsoft (which looks pretty lively for a corpse incidentally) is somehow equivalent to the fall of Rome, the end of the Caliphate; or the French Revolution seems to be a bit overblown. The original Dow-Jones Industrial average consisted of twelve stocks http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dow_Industrials of which many are gone and only General Electric is still a major company. In the 110 years since the DJI index first appeared, a number of huge companies have risen, thrived, and faded. United States Steel. American Telephone and Telegraph, Enron, Digital, Polaroid. The total disappearance of a company seems to be rare unless, like Enron, it has so utterly disgraced itself that no one wants of be associated with the brand or products, but one would be hard put to identify remaining fragments of once thriving companies like CDC, Digital, Wang, etc.
The likely demise of General Motors will, in fact, cause a great deal of pain in places where it has plants. The same for Kodak. I don't see a lot of concern outside of Detroit, Rochester, and the various smaller towns where plants are closing Microsoft? I don't expect it to die off anytime soon. But if it did, who, other than realtors and property owners in the Northern Seattle suburbs would much care? The techies would move on. The products and patents would wind up in someone's inventory. In fact, one could make a case that the company has fulfilled its mission, has no especially interesting avenues for expansion and should simply liquidatea and distribute its assets to the stockholders.
Considering how awful the Office UI has been traditionally, and how few users ever get formally trained in using it, it seems unrealistic to reject the new interface just because it's different. It could easily be better, and isn't likely to be worse... I mean how bad can it be?
Lack of a 'Classic Mode'... That could well be a legitimate complaint. Depends on whether the new interface is actually well designed and intuitive.
Does the new UI include fixing Excel's non-standard and non-intuitive clipboard usage? Probably not. For some reason, Microsoft has always seemed to be very proud of the Excel UI. I can't think why.
***But the higher cancer rates quite baffle me. Strange stuff.***
One possible contributor to the difference is skin cancers. Many skin cancers are related to sun exposure, and frankly, the residents of the British Isles don't see the sun all that often. OTOH, much of the US is at lower latitudes and/or higher altitudes and experiences a lot less cloud cover.
The good news is that most skin cancers are comparatively benign (a small percentage are not), so that to the extent that the US "cancer" rate is inflated by skin cancers, it won't be as much of a public health concern as one might think.
***Electricity doesn't have the insane levels of taxes gasolene and diesel do (this is the primary reason it costs a fortune to fill up at the pump.)***
Hogwash!!! At least in the US. Average gasoline taxes -- state plus federal -- are well under 50 cents a gallon. About 15% at this week's pricing. See http://www.energy.ca.gov/gasoline/statistics/gas_t axes_by_state_2002.html. There are surely some hidden taxes (e.g. property taxes on refineries, etc), but I doubt they amount to all that much. Now residents of other countries... THEY have gasoline taxes.
I couldn't find a quick number for electricity taxes, but I'll be suprised if they aren't between 5% and 10% of most customer's bills.
***Rolling blackouts in California were not caused by lack of generation capacity. They were caused by Enron calling up plant operators and saying "Hey. Shut down for maintenance.***
That's correct, but it seems to me that the market probably couldn't have been manipulated so readily if there were any significant amount of excess capacity. The one thing I do recall from the California fiasco is that the US transmission line system was not then capable of bringing in large amounts of energy from distant parts of the country (or even distant parts of California). As far as I know, there hasn't been much expansion of tranmission capacity in the intervening 5 years. So maybe there really is a problem lurking there.
***The WMDs had been used extensively, with our support, during the Iran-Iraq war***
Not entirely wrong, but probably not entirely true either.
WMDs in the Iraq-Iran war translates to poison gas. There's no meaningful evidence that Iraq (or Iran) used biological weapons, and no indication whatsoever that Iraq had or used anything resembling a nuclear or radiation weapon of any sort.
TRUE: The US backed Saddam Hussein's Iraq against Iran.
TRUE: Saddam Hussein used poison gas several times during the Iran-Iraq war. Iran may also have used poison gas but there is no solid proof that they did so.
PROBABLY NOT TRUE: The US government supplied raw materials for poison gas to Iraq. The US government provided intelligence data and 'crop dusting' helicopters to Iraq. On the other hand, the Reagan admistration made an apparently sincere attempt in 1984 to prevent further shipping of precursor chemicals to Iraq after it was discovered that an Iraqi front business was buying and shipping DMMP (a nerve gas precursor) to Iraq. Didn't impede the Iraqis much, they just bought the stuff elsewhere.
***I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you Vista fanatics? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of a Windows Vista PC (Pentium 4/3000 w/64 bits of power) for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to copy a 17 Meg file from one folder on the hard drive to another folder. 20 minutes. At home, on my Pentium Pro 200 running NT 4, which by all standards should be a lot slower than Windows Vista, the same operation would take about 2 minutes. If that.***
Hmmmmmm. Time to copy a 12mb file (biggest file I could find quickly) on a P166 running Windows 95 in a MSDOS Window was a bit under 8 seconds. And no, I don't think the file was cached. Extrapolating to 17mb, the copy time should be around 11.3 seconds. And that's on a machine that is really subminimal by most folks standards.
So, apparently what Vista gives me is the capability to slow a modern PC down by a factor of upwards of 2000 relative to a simpler OS. Boy, I can't tell you how I have been begging vendors to slow my PCs down by three orders of magnitude. I thank God that Microsoft is finally going to come to my rescue.
And yes, I do understand that VAXGeek's PC is probably misconfigured. (He probably knows that also, but I'd guess that if it's true, it's probably not his fault). Sounds to me like maybe he is swapping what should be resident parts of the OS to disk non-stop. Still, though, my question would be, what exactly is in Vista that any sane user might be willing to take a performance hit for?
***I lost all interest in Vista the second they dropped the idea of WinFS***
As I understand it (and I may not), WinFS -- if it is ever released -- will ride on top of the current file system and will be released for both Vista and XP. Keep in mind that WinFS was originally scheduled for Windows 95. Clearly, it's not so easy to do. If it were, we'd have gotten it in Windows 98 or W2K . While accessing data by content rather than file-directory heiarchy (I think that's what it is supposed to do) sounds like a nifty idea, I suspect that the idea might be fundamentally flawed. Basically, I suspect you need pretty good metadata to make WinFS work, and that it's hard to get metadata that good for all the files that people might want to find.
We'll see how right I am if WinFS is ever released.
***You can sell nuclear energy to me when you can answer the question "What do we do with 48 tons of nuclear waste generated per year per plant ***
The short answer is that you load it into two eighteen wheelers or one railroad car and cart it off to Yucca Mountain where it occupies maybe the volume of a suburban living room (after packaging). Even if the number of US nukes were to quadruple -- which is probably pushing what can be done with current technology and site availability -- that's about three truckloads a day arriving at the storage facility. I'd imagine that 100 guys working with hand tools could excavate enough storage space to handle the likely load. Obviously, that's not the way excavation will be done, but it should help to make the point that storage space is not the issue that it seems to be. With reprocessing, (a proven technology that has been used in Europe for more than a decade) the weight and volume of this stuff can be reduced by a lot, BTW.
Why Yucca Mountain? Because, if it leaks, there is essentially no one downstream. The drainage is into one of two closed basins -- Yucca Flat or -- via the Armagosa River (which carries a trace of surface water maybe five days a year) to Death Valley. Considering the number of Nuclear devices that were tested in the Nevada Test Range in the 1950s, I'm not sure that even a defective waste repository at Yucca Mountain would be the worst nuclear polluter in the area.
The long answer is a lot longer, and takes into account waste from Uranium mining (toxic heavy metals as well as radioactives); the radon and other radioactives released by alternatives like petroleum and coal; half lives of everything; the liklihood that damn fools will blow up a reactor by doing something mistaken (Three Mile Island--which, in the long run, did not blow) or incredibly stupid (Chernobyl -- which did) etc, etc, etc.
I don't know the answer -- and neither does anyone else. But I do know that if the planet plans to support 6 or 7 billion folks in reasonable comfort, it will take a lot of joules (about a thousandth of a BTU for us Americans). Probably not the million BTUs a day that each American or Canadian consumes, but way more than the few thousand a day currently used by the average person in say Somolia. My take is that trying to provide all that energy from fossil fuels is going to be a lot worse than nuclear power even if free market forces and the general stupidity of mankind manage to take a few power plants critical I also think that fission power plants are the only proven, available, source that is likely to be able to provide that much energy short term.
I'm not against ethanol, windpower, tidal generation, and solar power, but it's clear that both proponents and opponents of those technologies are lying nonstop about their virtues and defects. When one of them proves itself, and is clearly capable of massive deployment, maybe I'll change my mind about nukes. But for now, fossil fuels are a disaster in progress. Nuclear power is a solvable engineering problem. Other alternatives are betting on unproven technology.
They use curved photons that bend around corners, but don't tell anyone, because it was a secret until someone in the administration leaked it the Des Moines Weekly Shopping News.
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Seriously, if these lasers work out, they may be a better solution to intercepting incoming warheads than the interceptor missiles that Bush-Rumsfeld and crew are spending billions to deploy despite the fact that they are unlikely to work. The interceptors historically have a lot of trouble hitting a target that wants to be hit. It is not hard to imagine their probablility of success with targets that do not want to be hit. The lasers also have the potential to allow incoming warheads to be intercepted far enough along their trajectory that simple decoys can be discriminated from real warheads by drag.
Might have some other uses besides Anti-ballistic missile.
But, I expect that the lasers will need a decade or two of development. (Presumably these are the distant descendants of the X-Ray Lasers that Teller sold Reagan but couldn't build once he got funding?)
And frankly, I would imagine that if they do work out (or even if they don't) serious attackers will simply select a different method of delivery -- launch from a supposedly peaceful satellite, or an airliner, stealth aircraft, cruise missiles, or a 1987 Honda Civic.
And one other minor point. If the US can build these suckers, so eventually can the Russians, Chinese, Iranians, North Koreans and, for all we know, eventually six guys in a mud hut in Yemen. They ought to be just great at shooting up US surveillence satellites and other impediments to crackpot schemes for word domination.
***About 2% of NPR's funding comes from bidding on government grants and programs (chiefly the Corporation for Public Broadcasting);***
Two percent is an average, the Public Radio stations that do get more significant amounts of government funding are often in sparsely populated regions like the Great Basin and Northern New York. There are still parts of the country where the only radio station you can hear on the FM dial is Nevada Public Radio or the local North Country Public Radio repeater. The wingnut contingent probably think that if the PR transmitters went away commercial stations would pop up to fill the gap. Didn't happen between 1920 and 1980, Why it would happen now eludes me.
As for programming. NPR is the only 1950s style Radio Network remaining on the radio dial for most Americans. (Those near the Canadian border may be able to get CBC Radio). Unless you enjoy a steady diet of pseudo-Christianity, truly awful popular music, right wing nonsense from Limbaugh or worse, or equally wierd left wing stuff from Air America, Pacifica, or Democracy Now!!!, you might as well turn off the radio. Even my wife -- who is not especially NPR friendly -- has been known to take refuge in the BBC news relay from our local PBS station.
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Regretably, that's more easily said than done. The I in ISS stands for International. It's International because when Reagan's misbegotten "Space Station Freedom" predictably ran out of schedule and funding simultaneously along about 1993 we sold a bunch or suckers on making this useless and rather silly project an International effort. So, the US doesn't own the thing any more.
As far as I can see, it really doesn't matter very much. The Bush league fantasies about going to Mars via the space station and the moon are probably going to flounder sometime just before or after we get back to the moon for a day or two. Reason -- cost overruns and the fallout from Bush's nutty fiscal policies.
In the meantime, these man in space projects are going to continue to drain resources from real science.
The only bright spot is that George W seems possibly to have somehow put someone competent in charge of NASA -- quite possibly for the first time ever. Griffin is an advocate of men in space and human settlement of space. But he also appears possibly to have some sort of tenous grip on reality. If the politicians will just leave him alone, maybe he can come up with a realistic plan to back up to 1970, forget the last 35 years of floundering, and set up a space program that has some remote chance of eventual success. But don't expect the path from where we are today into space to be quick, easy, or cheap. (And don't expect the free market to somehow fix everything).
Seems to me that the insurgent's loosly coupled network is working just fine from their point of view. I would imagine that a "better" command and control structure might well have the perverse effect of allowing the damn fools who gravitate to the top of most organizations to micromanage the effort to death. In fact, we might do well the GIVE the insurgents an advanced communication system although they might be to smart to take it. Why not? It's not like what we are doing is working.
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If the insurgency is using cell phones effectively, why not randomly shut down the cell phone network? I suspect that if cell phone coverage in Iraq was as erratic as it is in Vermont, the insurgents would quickly cease to depend on it for command and control.
"Lewis Carroll" (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) -- Through the Looking Glass
That has been true since the P54 Pentium hit the streets back around 1995. What's really happening is that some IT people and even members of the general public are finally beginning to realize down deep inside that there is very little difference for many applications between a P-100 running Windows 95 and the latest multi-GHz wonder-- I can't even tell you what it is -- running Windows XP, OSX, or the Open Source flavor of the month.
The PC industry for the past decade has reminded me a lot of American cars when I was a teenager in the 1950s. All the attention went to style (fins and portholes) and to huge engines that generated about five times the horsepower that anyone other than affecionados actually wanted. In the 1960s, people sort of lost interest in Detroit's wonders. But that's nothing compared to what happened in the 1970s and 1980s when people wanted more reliable, fuel efficient cars and Detroit turned out to have no clue how to build them.
Gates is correct. The PC industry isn't going away any time soon. But so is the WSJ. The PC industry is bogged down stamping out commodity products (mostly in East Asia) on fairly thin margins. Digital Rights Management is apparently going to impede the PC as an entertainment device. The dearth of programming that any sane person would pay money for isn't going to do wonders for that either. Legal wrangling over the metaphysics of Intellectual Property is likely to do a lot of damage. There is a whole industry devoted to making sure that no patent application is remotely comprehensible. And it looks to me like the industry has not the slightest clue how to provide communications security. The idea that Unix has communications security right looks like wishful thinking to me. Unix basically uses the same flawed technologies that make Windows the equivalent of an unlocked car with the keys in the ignition. I fear that communications insecurity may well result eventually in the demise of some -- not all but some -- Internet based commerce. Anybody want to guess how long it will be before the malware boys go after AJAX and start attacking via all the cute and sometimes even useful applications that the industry hype machine is currently trumpeting?
So, the digital revolution is over? Of course not. But the PC may not be the base that newer technologies build on. My guess is that in 2026, you'll still be able to buy a PC. And it'll be smaller, faster, prettier, and maybe even easier to use than the PC you buy today. But the percentage of the population that uses PCs may well be way down from its peak which may not be all that far in the future.
You're dead right of course. The Linux kernel is more than good enough for common desktop usage, and I don't see anything that Tannenbaum has written that indicates that he wouldn't agree.
Tannenbaum appears to be more interested in the OS that you might want to use in your air traffic control system, ATM, or the control system for your neighborhood nuclear power plant. There, he may well be right in that Microkernels used optimally might produce more reliable systems than macrokernels.
Much as I admire both Tannenbaum and Torvalds, and acknowledging that both are far smarter than I am, I have doubts that interrupt driven, message passing is the right architecture for high reliability systems. Every attempt that I saw back in the 1960s-1980s to do a real time system based on that architecture -- and I've seen a number -- has been pretty shakey. As far as I can see, the architecture doesn't permit you to build such that there is a guarantee that critical functions will run with a known frequency (or indeed, ever). You can use watchdog timers to trap functions that aren't getting run often enough, but trying to fix the system based on timers usually results in the timing problems moving someplace else. Timers seem mostly to be the digital equivalent of duct tape.
Anyway, I suspect that there are both microkernels and macrokernels in all our futures. But I don't see all that much need for improved reliability on the desktop. As long as the system doesn't crash more often than maybe once or twice a month, most of us can live with it. Even Windows 95 can run that well if you load enough patches.
I suppose that at the limit, I know also. On the back of most every PC today is an 8 pin RJ-45 connector or occasionally a BNC or 4 pin RJ-11. Unplug it. Cut the wire connected to it. Put the plug back in. You now have near perfect communications security.
Short of that, I don't think you can really secure a modern system. You apparently think differently ... which is fine. I'm sure whatever you would do would be vastly better than nothing. But don't be too suprised if you find out in coming years that your best isn't anywhere near good enough.
I think the article's case for eventual total security breakdown is a bit overstated, but not wildly so.
The question that we should be asking is ... If current trends continue, ten years from now will we be able to safely connect to the Internet (or any similar network) for any purpose whatsoever? IMHO, That's a really good question.
1. I think you are correct about Grammer. I have no idea if the first two sentances above are gramatically correct. But they reflect English as it is commonly used. I think they flow well. I don't think they are ambiguous. Arguments about whether the second sentance lacks a subject or has some other heinous grammatical fault seem to me pointless. (and yes, I know that a Grammar Nazi would probably want that to be "...seem to me to be pointless".]
2. In 1958 or 1959, I took a wonderful course at UCLA called English 106S -- English for Science and Engineering Students. It was one of about four college courses I suffered through that wasn't either tedious, badly presented, or both. I really enjoyed it even though it involved taking an hour every other day out of play/work time to write a 300 word essay.
The course started with a class period devoted to discussing a word. I believe it was "measurement". Homework: write 300 words on measurement. Next class. (Some of the) students read their essays. We discussed them. Homework: write 300 words on measurement. Next class. (Some of the) students read their essays. We discussed them. Homework: write 300 words on measurement. ... This went on for three or four weeks.
Points successfully made by that exercise:
3. Scientists, Engineers, and Programmers face a problem not faced by politicians and lawyers. The former sometimes really need to express thoughts clearly while latter only have to sound like they are expressing themselves clearly. English often doesn't make clear expression easy. 'And' and 'or' are a lot mushier than they seem. "Vistors must turn off Cell Phones or Improvised Explosive Devices". I've got both, Do I get to pick which I turn off? Is that 'or' inclusive or exclusive? If I try to clarify things, I may get into trouble with the lack of an explict convention in English for evaluating sentances with both 'and' and 'or'. Left to Right? So, "A and B or C" always evaluates to "(A and B) or C"? Not Hardly. Even 'not' can be tricky. I'm told that in some languages "Isn't the door closed?" means exactly the same thing as "Is the door open?" English isn't one of those languages. ... and pronouns ... There are perfectly adequate rules for using them. But people often ignore those rules without problems. Need to be a bit more diligent in technical writing. Not because adhering to rules is important, but because not building stuff that doesn't work is important.
etc, etc, All that stuff should be addressed, no?
4. Frequently, I encounter writing done by people for whom English is a second language. Some of them express themselves clearly. Some don't. This is entirely independent of whether they occasionally stumble over English grammar, case, tense, gender, voice or our appalling spelling conventions. My conclusion: clarity may well be largely independent of grammer and spelling.
Might be fun to present the class with a paragraph or two written clearly by a non-native speaker who has some difficulties with English and contrast them with the same material garbled by someone who writes correctly, but not clearly..
5. It might also be fun to present some examples of really awful writing. I once had an example of a paragraph by an computer scientist noted for his turgid style. I'm nearly certain it said "Sometimes you have to use big words because small ones won't do the job". I just said that in 14 words -- most of them 1 syllable. He took about 300 words -- most of them polysyllables. I suspect the guy had good things to say. But, man, did he need an editor.
Good Luck. I hope your students enjoy your class.
But I'm confident that the Bush administration is ready for him. This is an outfit that knows fruitcakery inside and out. I predict that if necessary, they will bring back John Ashcroft to deal with this Al Queda supporting, pro-Venezualan, evolutionist, super-hacker scum. Let me assure you -- one does not out fruitcake John Ashcroft.
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Nobody seems to have mentioned it, but US government policy has always been that classified information is not allowed on computers that are connected to unsecured networks -- especially, but not limited to, the Internet. This means that all the purported UFO stuff McKinnon purportedly found must be unclassified. Which means that those posters who feel it really exists should be able to go after it with a Freedom Of Information Act lawsuit. If anyone does so, by all means let us know what you turn up.
I can't find any references to a post-PRC invasion of Mongolia. In fact, the Chinese dropped all claim to (Outer) Mongolia after requesting a free and fair election there in October 1945. When it became clear that (literally) no one in Mongolia wanted to be Chinese, China recognized the Mongolian government and has -- so far as I can tell, behaved themselves in a rather exemplary fashion with regard to a region that they could surely overrun in about 72 hours I'll save you the trouble of pointing out that a Chinese takeover of Mongolia would produce a truly spectacular negative reaction from Russia. Would that the US had behaved as responsibly in Vietnam or the Indians in Kashmir.
Perhaps you are thinking of Inner Mongolia -- A chinese province with a largely Mongolian population. I don't think much of China's conduct there (or Tibet or East Turkestan come to that), but no one, not even the Mongolians, thinks that Inner Mongolia is not part of China.
East Turkestan has pretty much always been under Chinese control with occasional periods of Russian control or (very short lived) periods of independence. The Communists did not invade the place, they took it over from the nationalists. The modern Chinese conduct there has been roughly comperable to 19th century American conduct in dealing with the American Indians -- which is to say pretty despicable. But it is not expansionist.
Tibet was regarded by everyone except the Tibetans as a semi-autonomous province of China. As I said, I don't approve of the Chinese conduct there, but their invasion was probably more justified on a strictly legal basis than Lincon's sending the US Army into Virginia in 1861. My point was that the Chinese are not expansionist beyond what they regard as part of China -- which they certainly did think Tibet was and is. And, no, you are incorrect, China was a party to the McMahon line talks as well as Britain and Tibet and did not agree to the proposed line. (If Tibet was not within the Chinese sphere of influence, why was China invited to the party?) See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McMahon_Line
Calling South Korea a democracy at the time of the Korean War is more than a bit of a stretch. It was the domain of one Syngman Rhee whose government started off with some democratic trappings and ended up as a nasty little dictatorship which (thankfully) collapsed in 1960. While some of the military governments that followed Rhee weren't too awful, real and hopefully permanent democracy didn't arrive there until the 1992 election. I think perhaps you think terms "democratic" and "anti-communist" are synonymous. They really aren't.. Rhee was not the former. He was the latter.
In any case, the Chinese didn't enter North Korea until they were asked to by the North Koreans, and left in 1958. The other major power party to that conflict -- the US -- is still in Korea. I don't see how any reasonable person who doesn't see the US as expansionist (and I don't think many would ignoring the Iraq lunacy) can see the Chinese conduct in Korea as expansionist
(My guess is that the Bush Administration, UN, and North Korea's neighbors other than South Korea would view a takeover of North Korea by just about anyone including the Chinese as a blessing almost equivalent to having aliens snatch the population of that unhappy land and ship it off to Arcturas, but no one is going to say so, and the Chinese are surely not about to do that).
Yes the Chinese -- who did not get on well with Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Mihn -- backed the psychopathic Khymer Rouge leader Pol Pot. What you conveniently forget to mention is that Pol Pot's other major supporter was the US. Note that China's solution was not to set its army rolling toward Hanoi. It was to back governments that didn't get along with Ho Chi Mihn -- exactly what the US did. That has to do with lack of moral fibre not expansionism. Yes the Chinese
Make that Hugo Chavez. I shall try in the future to keep my grape picking labor activists and socialist oil state presidents straight.
Taking out a satellite looks to be pretty much trivial. Really. Their orbit is (almost) entirely predictable. Taking out a satellite is less complicated than mooring a space shuttle or Soyez capsule. In fact it is the same job with one requirement removed -- approaching the satellite at very near zero closing velocity.
I have always syspected that any of the dozen or so countries that can get a few kilograms into orbit could build a satellite capable of taking pot shots at satellites they view as unfriendly with a bunch of "dumb pebbles' (e.g shotgun pellets). Given the proper choice of orbit it's 'just' a matter of shoving the pellets out the door and letting the combined relative velocities of the two satellites do the rest of the job.
The relative ease with which satellites can be attacked (at least in principle -- I haven't tried it of course and it may be harder than it looks) has always seemed to me to be a strong argument against putting weapons into space. Standing out there with a "take your best shot, mate" pose is only a good strategy if you know you can handle your opponent's best shot. But I doubt that th US's -- or anyone else's -- hypothetical space based weapons can take anyone's best shot.
So what's the point in spending say $50 billion for a space based weapons system if your opponent can disable it with $50 million worth of simple launch vehicles and a few payloads that are barely more complex than an IED with a timer?
That's a bad case of paranoia you're working on there fella. And like most paranoid delusions, it's probably misdirected. Let's straighten out a few things here. First of all China definitely is, as you say, building new ICBMs. The reason isn't hard to figure out. It's because the 1980 style Long Trail ICBMs are liquid fueled. That means a two hour fuel up before launch and excessive vulnerability to a pre-emptive strike. The US long ago switched to solid fuel ICBMs because of near instant availability and reduced likelyhood of a missile blowing up in the silo China appears to be making the same transition for the same reasons.
China is also deploying nuclear SLBM carrying submarines ("boomers" if you will). But there is no evidence that they are trying to match the US warhead for warhead. It looks more like a move to make a successful pre-emptive strike by the US impossible. Given the Bush administration's bererker approach to foreign policy, it's hard to fault the Chinese for taking a few precautions.
There's no sign that the Chinese are seeking a 'first strike' capability -- which is, so far as I can see, an utter impossiblity against a country with as many diverse nuclear delivery systems and warheads as the US has.
I don't know where you got the idea that the Chinese are expansionist. If anything, they are the most insular bunch of folks on the whole damn planet (with the possible exception of native Vermonters). I read a book a number of decades ago that projected that China's foreign goals would be restricted to taking over Tibet, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau, and regions of traditional Chinese/Tibetan culture that the McMahon line (which China never at any time accepted as a legitimate border) put into India. Wish I could remember the title and author. So far, it's been pretty much dead on.
At any rate, let me point out that China has refrained from expanding into Indochina, North Korea, or Burma (Myanmar) although it would have been easy enough to do so, and in the case of the latter two, I'm not sure that anyone would mind all that much.
So, China is no danger? I didn't say that, and don't think that. But I think that their plan probably is to swamp the US economically, not militarily. You don't have to be very bright (just smarter than the average garden vegetable or Neoconservative) to figure out that an all out military conflict between any two major powers will probably clear the planet of multicellular life -- which means that the victory party -- no matter who 'wins' -- is likely to brief and not very much fun.
Consider what 100,000 or so Japanese did to the US economy between 1960 and 1980 -- starting with just about destroying the vaunted US automobile industry (Those "voluntary import limits Reagan negotiated are still in effect). Now imagine what ten times that number of Chinese can do if the US continues to be led by nitwits. Now, THERE's something to get paranoid about.
If you'll reread the article, you'll note that this weapon is ground based, not space based, and is really pretty damn cheap by DOD standards -- hardly worth bribing a congressman for. I'm serious. Allowing for overruns and all, I imagine that a decade of R&D followed by a working installation would come in around the price of a half dozen F117A Stealth Fighters (@$45 million each). At that price, any country that has two PhDs to rub together, including a bunch of countries we don't like, can probably afford to build one of these -- especially if they phase the development out over a few decades.
A whole new world. Try to invade Iraq (not that I expect we'll be doing that again any time soon) and watch the satellites blink out. Try to overthrow Ceasar Chavez (which we apparently did attempt to do) and Zhango!!! all satellite communications in and out of North America are toast -- as are all out intelligence satellites that can ever be seen from Venezuala (which is most of them) -- Oh yeah, and GPS ... history.
And the best thing ... while this entails a lot of inconvenience it doesn't entail killing and maiming tens of thousands of innocent bystanders.
I say, Go for it.
Reason 1 -- WalMart may not want most customers using Linux because Linux hardware support and detection still is somewhere between Windows 95 and Windows 98 in terms of maturity. That's not all that good. Poor Plug and Play means returns and that costs money. Maybe, if they make it clear that they do not support equipment not purchased from WalMart, they can offer a Linux distribution that is tested with the hardware they sell.
My last experience with Installing Linux -- Slackware 10.2
IMO **ANY** of the above except maybe the Intel QX3 which is a discontinued product that a non-geek probably wouldn't expect to work would be enough to think twice about selling non-geeks Linux over the counter.
Reason 2 -- Boxed software products like TaxCut, games, mapping programs often won't run on Linux even if it has WINE. Explaining to customers why not would be painful and many wouldn't understand. Why ask for pain?
I'm not against selling Linux to non-geeks, but I think that the right place to start is single purpose machines -- e.g. A real cheap web browsing PC with a bundled printer.
Well, Yes. But the hypothesis that the demise of Microsoft (which looks pretty lively for a corpse incidentally) is somehow equivalent to the fall of Rome, the end of the Caliphate; or the French Revolution seems to be a bit overblown. The original Dow-Jones Industrial average consisted of twelve stocks http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dow_Industrials of which many are gone and only General Electric is still a major company. In the 110 years since the DJI index first appeared, a number of huge companies have risen, thrived, and faded. United States Steel. American Telephone and Telegraph, Enron, Digital, Polaroid. The total disappearance of a company seems to be rare unless, like Enron, it has so utterly disgraced itself that no one wants of be associated with the brand or products, but one would be hard put to identify remaining fragments of once thriving companies like CDC, Digital, Wang, etc.
The likely demise of General Motors will, in fact, cause a great deal of pain in places where it has plants. The same for Kodak. I don't see a lot of concern outside of Detroit, Rochester, and the various smaller towns where plants are closing Microsoft? I don't expect it to die off anytime soon. But if it did, who, other than realtors and property owners in the Northern Seattle suburbs would much care? The techies would move on. The products and patents would wind up in someone's inventory. In fact, one could make a case that the company has fulfilled its mission, has no especially interesting avenues for expansion and should simply liquidatea and distribute its assets to the stockholders.
Lack of a 'Classic Mode' ... That could well be a legitimate complaint. Depends on whether the new interface is actually well designed and intuitive.
Does the new UI include fixing Excel's non-standard and non-intuitive clipboard usage? Probably not. For some reason, Microsoft has always seemed to be very proud of the Excel UI. I can't think why.
One possible contributor to the difference is skin cancers. Many skin cancers are related to sun exposure, and frankly, the residents of the British Isles don't see the sun all that often. OTOH, much of the US is at lower latitudes and/or higher altitudes and experiences a lot less cloud cover.
The good news is that most skin cancers are comparatively benign (a small percentage are not), so that to the extent that the US "cancer" rate is inflated by skin cancers, it won't be as much of a public health concern as one might think.
Hogwash!!! At least in the US. Average gasoline taxes -- state plus federal -- are well under 50 cents a gallon. About 15% at this week's pricing. See http://www.energy.ca.gov/gasoline/statistics/gas_t axes_by_state_2002.html. There are surely some hidden taxes (e.g. property taxes on refineries, etc), but I doubt they amount to all that much. Now residents of other countries ... THEY have gasoline taxes.
I couldn't find a quick number for electricity taxes, but I'll be suprised if they aren't between 5% and 10% of most customer's bills.
***Rolling blackouts in California were not caused by lack of generation capacity. They were caused by Enron calling up plant operators and saying "Hey. Shut down for maintenance.***
That's correct, but it seems to me that the market probably couldn't have been manipulated so readily if there were any significant amount of excess capacity. The one thing I do recall from the California fiasco is that the US transmission line system was not then capable of bringing in large amounts of energy from distant parts of the country (or even distant parts of California). As far as I know, there hasn't been much expansion of tranmission capacity in the intervening 5 years. So maybe there really is a problem lurking there.
Not entirely wrong, but probably not entirely true either.
WMDs in the Iraq-Iran war translates to poison gas. There's no meaningful evidence that Iraq (or Iran) used biological weapons, and no indication whatsoever that Iraq had or used anything resembling a nuclear or radiation weapon of any sort.
TRUE: The US backed Saddam Hussein's Iraq against Iran.
TRUE: Saddam Hussein used poison gas several times during the Iran-Iraq war. Iran may also have used poison gas but there is no solid proof that they did so.
PROBABLY NOT TRUE: The US government supplied raw materials for poison gas to Iraq. The US government provided intelligence data and 'crop dusting' helicopters to Iraq. On the other hand, the Reagan admistration made an apparently sincere attempt in 1984 to prevent further shipping of precursor chemicals to Iraq after it was discovered that an Iraqi front business was buying and shipping DMMP (a nerve gas precursor) to Iraq. Didn't impede the Iraqis much, they just bought the stuff elsewhere.
Reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halabja_poison_gas_at tack
Hmmmmmm. Time to copy a 12mb file (biggest file I could find quickly) on a P166 running Windows 95 in a MSDOS Window was a bit under 8 seconds. And no, I don't think the file was cached. Extrapolating to 17mb, the copy time should be around 11.3 seconds. And that's on a machine that is really subminimal by most folks standards.
So, apparently what Vista gives me is the capability to slow a modern PC down by a factor of upwards of 2000 relative to a simpler OS. Boy, I can't tell you how I have been begging vendors to slow my PCs down by three orders of magnitude. I thank God that Microsoft is finally going to come to my rescue.
And yes, I do understand that VAXGeek's PC is probably misconfigured. (He probably knows that also, but I'd guess that if it's true, it's probably not his fault). Sounds to me like maybe he is swapping what should be resident parts of the OS to disk non-stop. Still, though, my question would be, what exactly is in Vista that any sane user might be willing to take a performance hit for?
As I understand it (and I may not), WinFS -- if it is ever released -- will ride on top of the current file system and will be released for both Vista and XP. Keep in mind that WinFS was originally scheduled for Windows 95. Clearly, it's not so easy to do. If it were, we'd have gotten it in Windows 98 or W2K . While accessing data by content rather than file-directory heiarchy (I think that's what it is supposed to do) sounds like a nifty idea, I suspect that the idea might be fundamentally flawed. Basically, I suspect you need pretty good metadata to make WinFS work, and that it's hard to get metadata that good for all the files that people might want to find.
We'll see how right I am if WinFS is ever released.
The short answer is that you load it into two eighteen wheelers or one railroad car and cart it off to Yucca Mountain where it occupies maybe the volume of a suburban living room (after packaging). Even if the number of US nukes were to quadruple -- which is probably pushing what can be done with current technology and site availability -- that's about three truckloads a day arriving at the storage facility. I'd imagine that 100 guys working with hand tools could excavate enough storage space to handle the likely load. Obviously, that's not the way excavation will be done, but it should help to make the point that storage space is not the issue that it seems to be. With reprocessing, (a proven technology that has been used in Europe for more than a decade) the weight and volume of this stuff can be reduced by a lot, BTW.
Why Yucca Mountain? Because, if it leaks, there is essentially no one downstream. The drainage is into one of two closed basins -- Yucca Flat or -- via the Armagosa River (which carries a trace of surface water maybe five days a year) to Death Valley. Considering the number of Nuclear devices that were tested in the Nevada Test Range in the 1950s, I'm not sure that even a defective waste repository at Yucca Mountain would be the worst nuclear polluter in the area.
The long answer is a lot longer, and takes into account waste from Uranium mining (toxic heavy metals as well as radioactives); the radon and other radioactives released by alternatives like petroleum and coal; half lives of everything; the liklihood that damn fools will blow up a reactor by doing something mistaken (Three Mile Island--which, in the long run, did not blow) or incredibly stupid (Chernobyl -- which did) etc, etc, etc.
I don't know the answer -- and neither does anyone else. But I do know that if the planet plans to support 6 or 7 billion folks in reasonable comfort, it will take a lot of joules (about a thousandth of a BTU for us Americans). Probably not the million BTUs a day that each American or Canadian consumes, but way more than the few thousand a day currently used by the average person in say Somolia. My take is that trying to provide all that energy from fossil fuels is going to be a lot worse than nuclear power even if free market forces and the general stupidity of mankind manage to take a few power plants critical I also think that fission power plants are the only proven, available, source that is likely to be able to provide that much energy short term.
I'm not against ethanol, windpower, tidal generation, and solar power, but it's clear that both proponents and opponents of those technologies are lying nonstop about their virtues and defects. When one of them proves itself, and is clearly capable of massive deployment, maybe I'll change my mind about nukes. But for now, fossil fuels are a disaster in progress. Nuclear power is a solvable engineering problem. Other alternatives are betting on unproven technology.
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Seriously, if these lasers work out, they may be a better solution to intercepting incoming warheads than the interceptor missiles that Bush-Rumsfeld and crew are spending billions to deploy despite the fact that they are unlikely to work. The interceptors historically have a lot of trouble hitting a target that wants to be hit. It is not hard to imagine their probablility of success with targets that do not want to be hit. The lasers also have the potential to allow incoming warheads to be intercepted far enough along their trajectory that simple decoys can be discriminated from real warheads by drag.
Might have some other uses besides Anti-ballistic missile.
But, I expect that the lasers will need a decade or two of development. (Presumably these are the distant descendants of the X-Ray Lasers that Teller sold Reagan but couldn't build once he got funding?)
And frankly, I would imagine that if they do work out (or even if they don't) serious attackers will simply select a different method of delivery -- launch from a supposedly peaceful satellite, or an airliner, stealth aircraft, cruise missiles, or a 1987 Honda Civic.
And one other minor point. If the US can build these suckers, so eventually can the Russians, Chinese, Iranians, North Koreans and, for all we know, eventually six guys in a mud hut in Yemen. They ought to be just great at shooting up US surveillence satellites and other impediments to crackpot schemes for word domination.
***About 2% of NPR's funding comes from bidding on government grants and programs (chiefly the Corporation for Public Broadcasting);***
Two percent is an average, the Public Radio stations that do get more significant amounts of government funding are often in sparsely populated regions like the Great Basin and Northern New York. There are still parts of the country where the only radio station you can hear on the FM dial is Nevada Public Radio or the local North Country Public Radio repeater. The wingnut contingent probably think that if the PR transmitters went away commercial stations would pop up to fill the gap. Didn't happen between 1920 and 1980, Why it would happen now eludes me.
As for programming. NPR is the only 1950s style Radio Network remaining on the radio dial for most Americans. (Those near the Canadian border may be able to get CBC Radio). Unless you enjoy a steady diet of pseudo-Christianity, truly awful popular music, right wing nonsense from Limbaugh or worse, or equally wierd left wing stuff from Air America, Pacifica, or Democracy Now!!!, you might as well turn off the radio. Even my wife -- who is not especially NPR friendly -- has been known to take refuge in the BBC news relay from our local PBS station.