Re: Consider Her Ways

> John Wyndham

Holy shit, Im' not the only one who remembers Wyndham's writing not about Triffids???

Steam?

You might well find that it is the vapor emanating from the presidential erections.

And if these retards really run "Syria I" and then "Cakewalk II" against Iran, you ain't seen nothing yet. Odds are not good. Not good at all.

And then again, we have seen it all before...

"Throughout the year 1937 the President was busy with his misbegotten war on the Supreme Court. But there was at least a hearty draught of good cheer in the rosy reports about business that came to him from the New Deal statisticians. Despite all the fatalities amongst his glittering plans it did look to him as if his great task —rescuing the nation from the depression—was about to be completed. For a brief moment his mind wandered away from the tricky schemes of the reformers for remaking America.... By August, however, while he was yet smarting under the Court defeat, signs began to appear that the vitality was oozing out of the boom. People were still talking about recovery, but the thing that makes for solid recovery in the capitalist system — the revival of real investment — had failed to materialize. The building industry was in the doldrums. Private financing was still on a hopelessly inadequate level ... In 1932 there were 11,385,000 unemployed. But employment improved all during the President's first term. By June, 1937 unemployment was down to 4,464,000, which was still too large. And it never got any better. It got worse and by November, 1937, there were 7,000,000 people out of work. As early as July men were asking: "What has become of the boom?" ... Stock prices began to decline and by September the unpleasant prospect could be no longer hidden. Daniel Roper, Secretary of Commerce, was putting out rosy statements about business. But the facts had seeped into the White House and on October 8, 1937, Jim Farley talked to Roosevelt about business. Roosevelt pooh-poohed it. Everything was all right, he said. It was all a move by business to discredit his policies. But by the end of October, the grim facts about conditions could no longer be ignored. The market crashed and administration critics were saying this was the end of the New Deal. In November, at a cabinet meeting, Miss Perkins brought up a report just prepared by her statistician, Isador Lubin. It showed employment was off two per cent, she said, when it ought to be up two per cent. The heavy industries were behind and sales following the automobile show were disappointing. She feared things might be dangerous in view of conditions. Henry Morgenthau, the Milquetoast of the cabinet, got the courage to speak up. He said business was complaining that the capital gains and undistributed profits taxes were impairing recovery. Then he dared to say: "I think it would be heartening for you to show how far better off we are today." Roosevelt shut him up with a rude rebuff: "Oh, for God's sake, Henry! Do you want me to read the record again?" Poor Henry reddened as Roosevelt glowered at him amidst an embarrassing silence. Farley spoke up. "Boss," he said, "I think the situation would be helped if you would say something that would

alleviate the fears in business. Frankly, I think you should make a quieting statement." Other cabinet officers—Woodring and Wallace—expressed the same views. But Roosevelt was angry. He blamed the depression on Wall Street. Then he burst out: "I get all kinds of criticisms and complaints about the economic situation, but few people come into me with any concrete suggestions as to how the situation can be alleviated. It's easy enough to criticize, but it's another thing to help." Here was the man who had blasted Hoover so unmercifully when it was Hoover's depression. Now there was a Roosevelt depression after he had spent 17 billion dollars. And he didn't like even to be told of it. He denied it at first..." [John T. Flynn, The Roosevelt Myth, 116 ff]

Nuke blow, because ... well, it's "Demand-producing Keynesianism", right?

"But my dear, have you ever THOUGHT what would happen if your machine PRINTED ITS OWN CARDS?"

> the essential differences between program and data...

Ah, but things become far more interesting when you notice that there IS NO ESSENTIAL DIFFERENCE. That's when computer science starts in earnest and you fire up your Lisp interpreter.

This is a batch-processing calculator - one program acting on one input - and it is being developed by coming at it from the engineering side of things, not from the theoretical side. There is an allusion to the looping construct: "By the introduction of the system of backing into the Jacquard-loom itself, patterns which should possess symmetry, and follow regular laws of any extent, might be woven by means of comparatively few cards.... This process may obviously be repeated any number of times." Evidently she makes no distinction between what the machine would be able to do when capable of FOR loops - and what the machine would be able to do when capable of WHILE loops. Might she have developed these ideas later? Who knows...

Re: The AMD quandary

AMD has crap CPUs?

Re: Bah!

I'm getting out my old book "Tales of Pirx the Pilot" NOW!

"...The date squared, though; it was exactly nineteen years ago that… Whoa, there! Easy does it…

He went back to the log. A strong and legible hand, in faded ink. First day out. Second day, third day… Moderate reactor leakage: 0.42 roentgen per hour. All leaks sealed. Course coordinates such-and-such… Stellar fix…

Come on, come on!

He was no longer reading, just skimming over the hand-written lines.

There it was!

The date he had been forced to memorize as a schoolkid, and underneath it:

1640 hours. Rec'd. Deimos's met. warning re: cloud headed our way from Jupiter perturbation of the Leonids. Cloud approaching on a collision course at vel. 40 km/sec. MW confirmed. PM alert sounded for crew. Despite persistent reactor leakage of 0.42 roentgen per hour, full-thrust escape maneuver on a course approximating Orion delta.

New paragraph:

1651. Im-

The rest of the page was blank.

No marks, no scribbling, no ink stains-nothing except for the final vertical stroke of the letter m, dipping down in willful defiance of the rules of good penmanship.

This wobbly, several-millimeters-long extension, breaking off the text to wander aimlessly across the white expanse of paper, told the whole story: the crash on impact, the exploding decompression, the shrieks of men at the moment their throats and eyeballs burst…

But Momssen's ship had a different name. What was it called?

It was unreal. A ship almost as famous as Columbus's, and he couldn't remember the name of it!

What was the name of that ship, Momssen's last ship?

He hopped over to the bookshelf. The fat volume of Lloyd's Shipping Register seemed to plunk down right into his hands. A word that began with C. Cosmonaut? No. Condor? Not it, either. A longer name… the title of a play… a hero, a knight…

He flung the book down on the desk and squinted at the walls. Hanging between the chart cabinet and the bookshelf were some instruments: a hygrometer, a radiation counter, a carbon-dioxide gauge…

He scrutinized each of them, turning them this way and that. Not one inscription. They looked brand new, in fact.

Over in the corner!

Screwed into the oak paneling was a chronometer, plainly visible because of its shiny dial. A rather quaint-looking model, an antique, with cute little brass doodads around the dial… Wasting no time, he undid the screws, carefully slipped the chassis out with his fingertips, and cradled it in his palm. The glossy, brass-plated bottom bore the engraving CORIOLANUS.

That was it-the name of Momssen's ship."

Re: Planetary defence system

I don't think this probe will slow down enough to park in Docking Bay 46.....

Re: Wavevolution

> And the elephamts and turtle are created when, exactly?

Dunno, it was clearly ants what put them together. Yes, ants! IT'S THE ANTS, I SAY!!

Re: Dark Matter ..

> What imparts mass to the Higgs boson ?

That question doesn't actually make massive sense. The Higgs has energy, hence mass. The fact that it "imparts mass" to other particles is something else entirely (it is also wrongly formulated as the Higgs boson is just a side-effect of the mass-imparting mechanism in the first place).

The gist of the matter: Learn Group Theory and Quantum Field Theory first, then start discussing. Not that I know anything about second quantization and whatnot.

Re: "It will be written entirely from scratch."

> So what language are they going to use to write it in? Unless they really go off the reservation, it would be C, wouldn't it? And if they choose another language, then it's going to be a lot slower.

I can't believe this "anything that is not C is [a lot] slower" is still haunting the meme sphere. It was wrong 20 years ago. It is wrong today.

The only thing that is faster when writing in C is shooting yourself in the foot.

Moreover, if you are going to write anything like Kaspersky pretends to do and you instead on a "bracy" language, you are to a minimum going to use a subset of C only.

Hey, yesterday was Ada Lovelace day. You know know what I'm thinking!

Re: Half Life

If I search my soul ... no, Half-Life 2 raises the bar waaay higher.

Obligatory Follow the thoughts of Dr. Gordon Freeman, a 27 year old physicist and neurotic individual. (Youtube says 'Viewer discretion advised' ... LOLWHAT?)

It exists? Obligatory Kornheiser Why!

If this ever came to fruition, Ballmer would throw an IP chair at it and that would be that.

Re: "Heinz Haber [famous for applying gas warfare..."

Uh... yeah. How could I confuse.. I think that Alzheimer thing running in the family is activating. Oh shit.

Re: I can't believe this

Qubes (PDF) - never heard of it but an intriguing idea for sure. Somewhat similar to Bromium.

I took a look-see at IEEE Xplore. There is no entry for the "Qubes" or "Bromium" search terms in metadata, but full-text search for "Qubes" elicits VSK - "Virtual Security Kernel", another secure kernel. The author says:

"The Qubes secure hypervisor presents some similarities with VSK by moving most of the resource management out of the kernel, resulting in a thin OS running over bare metal. In Qubes, a form of security management plane is split between system VMs and the administrative domain (Dom0). However, Qubes mainly tackles isolation, while VSK addresses access control. In Qubes resources are virtualized, whereas simply abstracted as components in VSK. Qubes presents some level of reconfigurability due to dynamic VM spawning, but not the full adaptation capabilities both in and out of the kernel made possible by the VSK component-based design. Finally, Qubes does not address self-protection issues."

It also brings up "TrustBox - A Security Architecture for Preventing Data Breaches" and "SAFE-OS: a Secure and Usable Desktop Operating System" ...

So many things, so little time...

Re: Wish they

>They wouldn't sell very many new ones if they never broke down.

If I hear this B.S. once again I swear I'm gonna barf.

The alternative to the "never gonna break" car is "infinite warranty". Are your ready to drive a car built like a Humvee but that costs enough to cover the "infinite warranty"? Yeah right.

Re: As I say every year

> over people who actually achieved real things in the messy real world

Hah. Who remembers Georg and Edvard Scheutz who - contrary to the perfectionist Babbage - actually built working difference engines - 3 of them?

Even their Wikipedia page is crummy.

"Aryan students want Aryan mathematics and not Jewish mathematics"

Unwise - especially if Jewish Mathematics kicks Austrian 99-percenter ass. On the other hand, Nazis were interested in retaining "jewish" Heinz Haber [famous for applying gas warfare for the benefit of the Kaiser somewhat earlier] or even on pilfering smelly ideology from "jewish" philosophers. Very practical people, those Nazis, in a "bully who failed at any original thought" way.

Such things happen in ideologically oriented regimes all the time. Einstein's Relativity was no-go era in the Soviet Union for a long time and later Norbert Wiener's 'Cybernetics' went straight to the 'secret archives' as being incompatible with Marxism ("Cybernetics serves the reactionaries of bourgeois society and idealistic philosphy" - 'Problems of Philosophy', 1953) were no-go areas in the Soviet Union for a long time.

Re: Random burglary or professional job?

> HELICOPTERS

Don't you mean fuel drums and jerrycans?

Re: Recognition of Mary Somerville

> better going

Not sure whether all that naming can be totally ordered, but if you want to go down that road I actually prefer a live language than a random building.

> a programming language that's now hardly used outside the military

Really! What are all these safety-criticial systems written in then? Futzy C and its bastard offpsrings? Must be all those fresh graduates full of illusions regarding their mad hacker skills.

For what it's worth: Ada on Place 15 for general purpose programming.

''Dr. King agreed that mathematics kept sexual longings at bay.''

> the Navy uses JOVIAL to disguise what is really a bad situation for gays in the field.

Fixed for you.

In truth [follow the link to Tracy Kidder's review, it's a good read] Dorothy Stein's statement was made in 1985. We have come some ways since then, although the complaining goes on.

In another truth, we love our mascots! Now, can I have an Ada Lovelace Action Figurine, please. No, not the US ones that are 'Made In China', they suck, the Japanese ones. Not, not Sheldon!! ARRRGH!!

Re: Where is Patrick McGoohan when you need him?

Yeah but it will only stop you getting out of the parking until you cough up.

[Bonus if accompanied by two hired muscle goons in gay outfits coming at you in a golf cart.]

Re: May explain SOME ocurrences

Citation needed!

Re: "will take any necessary disciplinary action"

In the present case, that would be Diego Garcia.

Re: How many more Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear power plants exist around the world?

"The Japanese disaster came at a propitious time for VietNam"

Who the hell writes Vietnam in CamelCase?

Re: Baron Samedi FTW!

But that was in "Mona Lisa Overdrive"?

Re: Novartis CEO?

Not sure whether antivaxer....

supicious_dog.jpg

Additionally, a CEO is just a CEO. He changes and works for the shareholders. So it should be the shareholders wot done it.

Re: SSDs and HDDs both require backup...

You have the SMART value "reallocated sector count" which tells you the number of remaps performed so far. You also have the self-tests which you should run regularly via smartd or whatever.

Google says this:

"Our results confirm the findings of previous smaller population studies that suggest that some of the SMART parameters are well-correlated with higher failure probabilities. We find, for example, that after their first scan error, drives are 39 times more likely to fail within 60 days than drives with no such errors. First errors in reallocations, offline reallocations, and probational counts are also strongly correlated to higher failure probabilities. Despite those strong correlations, we find that failure prediction models based on SMART parameters alone are likely to be severely limited in their prediction accuracy, given that a large fraction of our failed drives have shown no SMART error signals whatsoever."

So it's pretty useful.

Ceterum censeo, not being able to get SMART data from USB-attached disks, varying/obscure/properietary interpretation and differences in commands and reporting between ATA and SCSI is frankly retarded. Disk industry is controlled by lazy jerks who can't into usable software and who should be visited by Vlad Tepes for some attitude adjustment.

Re: "Wealth is the product of man's capacity to think." – Ayn Rand

Insurances insure, film at 11!

So you pay or someone else may or may not pay more. So what? Too costly? Stop being insured or go to insurance company with better rates (which is the company which is luckier or insures better-controlled risks).

Meanwhile, another container of QE3 dollars hits the road and your savings are inflated away.

Re: Don't you go hijacking this topic.

In a sense, in a sense. We have to keep on going because changing demands quantum tunnelling of the painful sort.

In reality, we are in the Economic Matrix, where Krugman types pretend that things are perfectly all right and the uncomfortable feeling of the unseen feeding tubes starting to run on empty is just a by-effect of the Good Hand of Wise Economic Planning.

Follow the <del>White Rabbit</del>Ludwig von Mises.

Re: Swiss Neutrality ?

> Switzerland will still providing Nazi Germany with weapons and especially munitions in early 1944

Citation needed.

While I'm not big on Switzerland in WWII [turning away Jews at the border as per official policy was a dick move], this sounds unlikely.

They would certainly accept a train of Gold from Bavaria though. Gnomes love Gold.

Re: Precision?!

> I'd have assumed they use the electric grid.

You could have provided a link you lazy bastard.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/43532031/ns/technology_and_science-innovation/t/power-grid-experiment-could-confuse-electric-clocks/

Well, anyone who uses the 50Hz signal on the power supply line to synch time for serious applications (i.e. anything else than a coffeemaker) deserves what he gets.

When you wish upon a star...

> Trademarks are a company's intellectual property even if not registered

Good luck defending those though.

TM stands for "Totally Meaningless"

Re: Is Toyota now an American company, then?

The UAW isn't too strong at Toyata. Maybe it's not an "American Company" in that sense?

It also makes money.