The one that bugged me the worst was... well, okay, a little sanitizing here.
I was reading articles in the public media about how the Administration was worrying about the Bad Guys -- call them Freedonia -- building anti-whaleboat weapons. The Public Media was saying this was silly, because there was no evidence that Freedonia had anti-whaleboat weapons, or would for ten years, and in any case protecting our whaleboats would be destabilizing.
The thing being that I was working at an operational site, intercepting intelligence about Freedonia testing their newly operational anti-whaleboat weapons.
Of course, the problem was that writing the scathing letter that the story really called for would have gotten me shot.
So what you're saying is that you're totalling all government expenditures at the Federal, State, and local levels, allocating more than half of it to the military -- which means you're totalling in things like VA hospitals and the CERT -- and then announcing it's all being used to point at peepees.
All rightie, then.
Gee, I can't imagine why you might think you might get modded as a troll.
Sory, son, but you've got your terminology backwards. For the British, a "billion" is a million million; a US billion -- a thousand million -- is called a "milliard." A British "billion" is what we call a "trillion", 1e12, not vice versa; a British trillion, 1e18, we call a "quintillion."
Actually, you usually don't find vending machines inside the kind of classified facility that cares about a cell phone. You have to leave the controlled area to get a coke.
For someone who uses a tag of "may the maths be with you", you seem to have a little numeracy problem: $1.1 trillion is in the close neighborhood of the entire federal budget.
UNless you're trying to claim that the entire federal government shut down to fund a few prison guards pointing at peepees and laughing?
Get a grip, folks. The sort of environment they're talking about is extremely sensitive: like, the definition is "revelaing this information could lead to critical danger to the US and its citizens."
This isn't a joke. A few years ago, some member of Congress (Orrin Hatch is what I recall) proved how much an Insider he was, and what Good Stuff He Knew, by telling a reporter that we were intercepting Usama bin Laden's satphone calls. The reporter, also being a moron, reported this. Soon enough, UbL stopped making open satphone calls.
Some time later, 9/11/2001.
Quibble if you like about the absurdities to which this leads -- like the books I wrote twenty years ago which I can no longer legally read -- but if you look into the history of bugs, subversions, and general espionage, you'll find that worrying about someone bringing an unexamined cellphone into a classified facility is pretty reasonable.
At the risk of slipping off topic, actually advertising doesn't really work that way. Advertisers want to target thir advertising, meaning they want to make sure the advertising is reaching the subset of people they want. (Old advertising axion: 90 percent of advertising is wasted; the problem is you don't know which 90 percent.)
By using registration, the NYT has a basic demographic measure to show advertisers, one that even includes click-through from other sites; this makes page views ten or a hundred times more valuable than random page views.
Nice misquote, too, since what I said was that he should look into Asperger's, rather than delivering a definite diagnosis. He may not have Asperger's; he may be having similar problems and be sub-clinical; hell, maybe it wouldn't give him any insight at all.
If you know what the word actually means you can say "no, it means I don't believe in God." If you know the history of the question, you'll know that it doesn't apper to be amenable to proof. And if you've got the sense God gave six feet of manila rope, you'll see that attempting to suborn the word "bright" -- and thereby its antonyms, like "dull", "dim", and "stupid" -- isn't just looking for a descriptive term, but implicitly trying to start an argument.
You might want to look into Asperger's Syndrome. Hard to say from your note, but the proportionof Asperger's (a/k/a the "Geek Syndrome") in the/. readership has to be pretty high.
I'm actually rather pleased that the heading proves your silly, arrogant, asinine use of a perfectly fine word is not catching on. If you're embarrassed by the word "atheist" maybe it's not the word's issue.
Yep., absolutely. The only thing is that I seem to recall writing a little wrapper to M-x grep to look specifically for TODO and FIXME, and I may have posted it to comp.emacs or gnu.emacs.sources....
But -- for that matter -- when did M-x grep first get into emacs?
I'd normally twit you for "Pessamistic" but since I see I spelled "history" with a 'j' I guess I'll resist the urge.
Back in the 1880s there were grand predicitons of the end of the world, the Second Coming, and the elevation of the Elect. They sold or gave away their property, and flocked to where they were told to wait. The Second Coming didn't happen.
There are lots of people who still await the Second Coming. They have faith.
But "excessively pessamistic" predictions, in science, are also called "wrong". Ehrlich has made a succession of predictions that didn't prove to be correct: continued predictions on the same model don't have much weight except to true believers. Ehrlich's followers have faith.
Faith is a wonderful thing, but I recommend continuing to make your house payments.
The "Club of Rome" thing is a nice dance, but pointless; the most probable model crashed in the '80s, the models that lasted into this century required major changes in policy that largely didn't happen. What's more, the entire model is flawed: it doesn't take into account the fact that as prices for one commodity rise, another commodity takes its place. Add to that the fact that known petroleum reserves are growing rather than shrinking, the basic assumptions of the model are simply not valid.
What's worse, for the model at least, is that some of Gold's predictions from the "abiological model" are working out: new oil fields are being found (like the big ones in Russia), and salt dome fields are refilling when they were supposedly "played out". (Examples abound in Texas and off the Louisiana coast.)
Oh, by the way, you might want to check out how predictive futures prices really are over a term of 5+ years.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh jeeez I can identify with that.
The one that bugged me the worst was... well, okay, a little sanitizing here.
I was reading articles in the public media about how the Administration was worrying about the Bad Guys -- call them Freedonia -- building anti-whaleboat weapons. The Public Media was saying this was silly, because there was no evidence that Freedonia had anti-whaleboat weapons, or would for ten years, and in any case protecting our whaleboats would be destabilizing.
The thing being that I was working at an operational site, intercepting intelligence about Freedonia testing their newly operational anti-whaleboat weapons.
Of course, the problem was that writing the scathing letter that the story really called for would have gotten me shot.
So what you're saying is that you're totalling all government expenditures at the Federal, State, and local levels, allocating more than half of it to the military -- which means you're totalling in things like VA hospitals and the CERT -- and then announcing it's all being used to point at peepees.
All rightie, then.
Gee, I can't imagine why you might think you might get modded as a troll.
Sadly, most of those stories that make the military look foolish are true.
But thank you for playing.
(Check Mathworld for the details.)
Well, it's really only a +1 funny; I'm guessing that's for my wry asides in making my point, but I'll take any points I get.
Actually, you usually don't find vending machines inside the kind of classified facility that cares about a cell phone. You have to leave the controlled area to get a coke.
There are lots of people whose job description in the military is "worry". We try to split up the load.
For someone who uses a tag of "may the maths be with you", you seem to have a little numeracy problem: $1.1 trillion is in the close neighborhood of the entire federal budget.
UNless you're trying to claim that the entire federal government shut down to fund a few prison guards pointing at peepees and laughing?
Get a grip, folks. The sort of environment they're talking about is extremely sensitive: like, the definition is "revelaing this information could lead to critical danger to the US and its citizens."
This isn't a joke. A few years ago, some member of Congress (Orrin Hatch is what I recall) proved how much an Insider he was, and what Good Stuff He Knew, by telling a reporter that we were intercepting Usama bin Laden's satphone calls. The reporter, also being a moron, reported this. Soon enough, UbL stopped making open satphone calls.
Some time later, 9/11/2001.
Quibble if you like about the absurdities to which this leads -- like the books I wrote twenty years ago which I can no longer legally read -- but if you look into the history of bugs, subversions, and general espionage, you'll find that worrying about someone bringing an unexamined cellphone into a classified facility is pretty reasonable.
Bytes? You had bytes?
(Actually, I kind of miss the blinkenlights. Anyone know of a front panel casemod?)
At the risk of slipping off topic, actually advertising doesn't really work that way. Advertisers want to target thir advertising, meaning they want to make sure the advertising is reaching the subset of people they want. (Old advertising axion: 90 percent of advertising is wasted; the problem is you don't know which 90 percent.)
By using registration, the NYT has a basic demographic measure to show advertisers, one that even includes click-through from other sites; this makes page views ten or a hundred times more valuable than random page views.
You guys just think I'm being funny. My office is about ankle-deep in 3x5 cards.
3x5 cards. You get all the advantages abouve, plus they're random-access.
Nice misquote, too, since what I said was that he should look into Asperger's, rather than delivering a definite diagnosis. He may not have Asperger's; he may be having similar problems and be sub-clinical; hell, maybe it wouldn't give him any insight at all.
Ach, I zee, Profezzor -- zee diagnoziss you haff made on zee bazis of one paragraph? Unglaublich.
Literally.
If you know what the word actually means you can say "no, it means I don't believe in God." If you know the history of the question, you'll know that it doesn't apper to be amenable to proof. And if you've got the sense God gave six feet of manila rope, you'll see that attempting to suborn the word "bright" -- and thereby its antonyms, like "dull", "dim", and "stupid" -- isn't just looking for a descriptive term, but implicitly trying to start an argument.
Which isn't very bright at all, is it?
You might want to look into Asperger's Syndrome. Hard to say from your note, but the proportionof Asperger's (a/k/a the "Geek Syndrome") in the /. readership has to be pretty high.
I'm actually rather pleased that the heading proves your silly, arrogant, asinine use of a perfectly fine word is not catching on. If you're embarrassed by the word "atheist" maybe it's not the word's issue.
Oh, I love that cartoon. Thanks.
Matt, if you're a Jr in CS, I left the department not long after you were born.
You might say hello to Owen Astrakhan for me, though.
Yep., absolutely. The only thing is that I seem to recall writing a little wrapper to M-x grep to look specifically for TODO and FIXME, and I may have posted it to comp.emacs or gnu.emacs.sources....
But -- for that matter -- when did M-x grep first get into emacs?
*sigh*
Let that be a lesson to you, kids.
I was doing that in the 70's. Bill Gates hadn't even flunked out of Harvard yet.
Somebody with an old old usenet archive, grep through comp.emacs for crm@duke....
I'd normally twit you for "Pessamistic" but since I see I spelled "history" with a 'j' I guess I'll resist the urge.
Back in the 1880s there were grand predicitons of the end of the world, the Second Coming, and the elevation of the Elect. They sold or gave away their property, and flocked to where they were told to wait. The Second Coming didn't happen.
There are lots of people who still await the Second Coming. They have faith.
But "excessively pessamistic" predictions, in science, are also called "wrong". Ehrlich has made a succession of predictions that didn't prove to be correct: continued predictions on the same model don't have much weight except to true believers. Ehrlich's followers have faith.
Faith is a wonderful thing, but I recommend continuing to make your house payments.
The "Club of Rome" thing is a nice dance, but pointless; the most probable model crashed in the '80s, the models that lasted into this century required major changes in policy that largely didn't happen. What's more, the entire model is flawed: it doesn't take into account the fact that as prices for one commodity rise, another commodity takes its place. Add to that the fact that known petroleum reserves are growing rather than shrinking, the basic assumptions of the model are simply not valid.
What's worse, for the model at least, is that some of Gold's predictions from the "abiological model" are working out: new oil fields are being found (like the big ones in Russia), and salt dome fields are refilling when they were supposedly "played out". (Examples abound in Texas and off the Louisiana coast.)
Oh, by the way, you might want to check out how predictive futures prices really are over a term of 5+ years.
Worse, in a few years they'll start to complain about you missing words in conversations, and then they'll complain about your hearing aides sqealing.