Pangloss

Regarding the Soviet Union, isn't it a rather serious piece of semantical parsing to say that they never threatened "the west"? Poland, Romania, Czechoslovakia, Yuoslavia, East Germany, Albania, Bulgaria... none of these countries WANTED to be ruled by the iron fist of the Soviet Union. They did so at the point of a gun. More to the point, why would the Soviets put nuclear missiles in Cuba if their intent was not to "threaten the west"? Sure you can claim that it was in response to missiles Europeans placed that threatened the Soviet Union, but even so don't you still have to acknowledge that those missiles "threatened the west"? Wasn't that the whole point of having them there? The point is that you can make a case that the Soviets were just responding to US aggression if you like (I don't agree, but you're certainly entitled to your opinion), but you cannot make a legitimate case that they were only innocent pawns in a vast corporate conspiracy. Certainly the military-industrial complex was a factor. But the Soviets knew what they were doing, and history can hold them responsible for their choices too. The world is gray. Not black-and-white. Gray.

Yes they could, since the late 1970s or early 1980s, depending on which sources you believe. BTW, what North Korea has been testing doesn't meet the traditional definition of an ICBM either, if memory serves. But if our sworn enemy deploys a weapon capable of wiping Seattle off the face of the Earth, I think we can be forgiven for calling it an ICBM. Not that it really matters.

Of course he was. What's wrong with being an extremist? Anyway, you have it backwards on Chinese ICBMs. They're not just starting to "develop them now"; they've had the capability since the 1960s.

Odd. It does this with all discs placed in the drive? I would remove the drive and place it in a different system and see if the behavior is repeated. Assuming it acts normally, that will indicate some problem with the system software or a driver in your computer.

China does in fact have ICBMs. The Federation of American Scientists has a page on them here: http://www.fas.org/nuke/guide/china/icbm/index.html You can dismiss that source if you wish (though I wouldn't, as it's a generally-accepted expert and objective source on military matters), but I would point out that China also launched a man into orbit in 2003, you may recall. Orbital launch vehicles are similar in capability to ICBMs (in fact ICBMs are arguably an "easier" feat of engineering). Just FYI, I'm ignoring the rest of your post not because I'm denigrating your point of view (which you're perfectly entitled to), but because I prefer to let extremists have all the rope they want. Just more fun that way, and it preserves the respectful nature of discourse. I give you credit for defending your position on Putin, and I respect an extremist who defends his opinion and attempts to be reasonable. When one looks at the same evidence as everyone else but simply comes to a different point of view, that has to be respected. Good luck with that.

Lack of hard drive space can definitely stop a DVD from playing or burning. They use them as buffer space in both operations. Other requirements like RAM and processor are usually related to software provided with the drive. As the Cap'n said, more information is needed.

I think that's an interesting assessment. You have some intriguing observations there.

You know what I found to be the most interesting aspect of using the plagiarism-detection software? The fact that it ultimately turned into an exercise in determining the degree of cheating that the students were undertaking. Whether this was indicative of a limitation in the software or an indictment of the current state of affairs is something I'm still trying to sort out. Essentially what happened is that the system gave me a report on each student's paper, showing the percentage of quotations they used compared with the overall paper size. There was a button which caused to recalculate the percentage once "proper attribution" was taken into account (which I presume is optional because there are different ways to attribute quotes, so the software may not make this second calculation correctly). In the end the percentages were kinda useless. What was more effective was the side-by-side comparison screen that threw up the student's paper against the ostensibly plagiarized source that the system found. Then I could eyeball them and decide for myself. But as I say, the overall eye-opener for me was ultimately the fact that there was no clear way to differentiate the "cheaters" from the "non-cheaters" at a glance. Some of those with high percentages turned out not to be cheating, while some with low percentages were more suspect, at least to me. At one point I actually found myself tempted to give the students letter grades based on the percentage of misquoted material in their papers! Oh, you only had 24% of mis-attributed material in your paper? Why, you get a B+! Congratulations! What a crock.

This raises something that I've wondered about from time to time regarding the Viking program of Mars landers. They were RTG-powered, which I've always thought meant that there was a nuclear device on board which provided an ongoing supply of power. But the eventual failure (after long success) of both units was ultimately related to their loss of battery capacity. In the case of Viking 1 an errant command caused the loss of communication, but the reason for the command was to upload new software designed to improve battery efficiency, to stave off the gradual decline in battery power. In the case of Viking 2, the unit was shut down (yes, shut down) when its batteries stopped working. These attributions to me sound like the situation with a several-years-old laptop or cell phone -- the battery just becomes kinda useless after a while. That bit about Viking 2 is particularly confusing, because it implies that the unit still had operational power at the time it was shut down, but that operators expected to lose that power at some point due to the loss of those "batteries", so they "shut it down". Are they saying that sometimes it ran on the RTG, and at other time it ran on "batteries"? And if so, why was this necessary?

Oh really? Would that be admiration of the fact that he's accused of being in bed with corrupt corporations, has poorly handled the war on terror, or that he's currently threatening to run for re-election even though the Russian constitution forbids him from doing so? Gosh. Kinda sounds like the anti-BUSH refrain to me. Are you sure you're being consistent there, Bombus?

I like Callipygous's ideas. You could also make a little sign that reads "NOT YOURS" and place it next to the little piles of coaxial cable. Kinda like this: But on a less humorous note, you could test electronic interference on the cable. That might be kinda interesting. Then you could compare it with the amount of interference suffered in a twisted pair line. I've always wondered which way is better.

Right. Obviously we aren't going to enslave people, but I'm just tired of having our hands tied behind our backs by people who don't have the cojones to get involved (or even have an opinion until it's too freaking late to matter). It's war. People are going to die. They'd better, or we're going to lose. If people don't like it, do what it takes to stop things from getting that far. Don't just sit back and scream "no blood for oil!" What possible relevence can there be, for example, in the number of Iraqis that've been killed since the US invaded? We can put a man on the moon, so therefore we ought to be able to overthrow a government of 30 million people 15,000 miles away without a single casualty? It's not just Iraq, we see this kind of nonsense all over the spectrum. Disaster preparedness comes to mind. I read a news story the other day that showed just PITIFUL preparation statistics amongst Gulf Coast residents for this year's hurricane cycle (and El Nino's gone and we've already had one tropical storm...). But they know EXACTLY whom they're going to blame after the next Katrina. Because, you know, we can put a man on the moon but we can't stop people from dying after a hurricane. It's not that the Katrina victims didn't have a point, just like it's not to say that the number of dead in Iraq isn't important and awful. But dammit, how can a society exist like this? Will we ever again be able to recognize accomplishment? Cheer for a real success? I'm certain if we cured cancer tomorrow there'd be a story by nightfall about how the cure was damaging to the environment. But whatever. Maybe I'm just getting curmugeonly in my old age.

First of all, the point about peace by killing everyone else is completely facetious, given the other acknowledgements in your post. Are you so outraged by my suggestion that war brought peace that you're losing track of your own argument? And maybe I'm just being dense, but I still don't see that you've made any point at all by mentioning Gallic citizenship, because they wouldn't have become Roman citizens had it not been for that (or some other) merging of those incompatible cultures. And why lament about the 2.5 million Caesar-impacted Gauls, and not the millions of human sacrifices to Druidic gods? But the point you seem determined to miss is not about rationalizing colonialism. That wasn't our motivation in Iraq, and it wasn't Caesar's purpose in Gaul. Republican Romans were not a colonial people or power. They usually conquered regions to stop them from attacking Rome. Exceptions fall mainly in the area of individual corruption (and of course this changes after the fall of the Republic). (Come to think on it, Republican Rome did have dealings with the "Iraq" of that day, and they were based on corrupt, profit motive, and they suffered a terrible fate. I leave it to the individual to decide whether that was due to a failure of moral virtue or not.) Anyway, your profit motive may well have been the case with Caesar, but I'm using this example based on the assumption that it was not, which I think is sufficient example for my purposes here. Were "Republican Rome" in Iraq today instead of the "United States and its allies", we would probably have to make it the 51st state, I agree. Fortunately we have more palatable alternatives available. (This seems a good time to reiterate that I'm not opposed to the war in Iraq along moral grounds. My objections were more in the realm of what is realistic and feasible in terms of both domestic and international politics.)

True. Chosing peace and prosperity over endless war and famine are powerful incentives. Assuming, of course, that's what happened there. (History is written by the victors, and all that.) I don't automatically assume Caesar's justifications are honest ones (though they do stand up to analysis). I don't understand your second point.

Reminds me of a comparison I recently made between Iraq and Caesar's conquest of Gaul. A million dead gauls, another million sold into slavery (mainly the women and children), and another half a million homeless. But 500 years of relative peace in the region, the civilization that gave birth to France was created, and the citizens of Italia were successfully protected from the Germans (for a while, anyway). It would be interesting to see how much more efficiently we could do things if we didn't constantly tie our own hands behind our backs with unrealistic expectations of civility during wartime.

Ah, for the old days when ALL programs were simple executables.

Well they haven't really done anything negative to it, it's just no longer bolstered by up-and-coming programmers like in the old days. You used to be able to download a dozen different shells and text editors just like with Linux. Today's Windows programmers focus on GUI. Ironically, Microsoft has had to go back and essentially reinvent the command line, adding new commands and functionality in a very old-fashioned shell concept. They call it "Monad", or "Windows PowerShell", and you can download it and throw it into Vista, Server or XP. Where you typically see it used is in Exchange administration, or scripting server admin tasks in a DB cluster or VM farm. It seems crazy, but more and more often Windows administrators are staring at blanking cursors again.

They may not allow any software installation, but yeah YT raises a good point there about using a third party program. It's also worth noting that if they're blocking the usual RPC port (337?), you can use Port 80 instead (the web port). The catch is that you'll have to configure the web component in your machine at home, which is a little tricky if you're not familiar with it.

Oh we could secure the border if we wanted to. It just takes more than a simple fence. There's also an argument to be made about the number of crossings being reduced by fencing. But the main thing is that people need to realize that fencing alone doesn't accomplish anything. We need a comprehensive approach. And as you say I think that fits the subject of this thread very well. Great example. Thanks for the P&T thing, btw. I found it on YouTube and linked it to my blog, if anybody wants to see it (see sig). I haven't watched it yet but I'll check it out later.

I ran into an interesting example of that last term when I taught a class on web servers, which is an elective in our IT program. Most of the folks in the program are planning to be network administrators and will likely pick up certifications such as MCSE, A+ and/or CCNA, etc. These are the kind of people you expect to become core Linux constituents -- the "base", if you will. I don't normally teach networking classes, although I used to do corporate MCSE and Network+ training, but it was many years ago, so what happened was a bit of an eye opener. Windows has become so prevalent in the K-12 arena that they typically come to college having zero command line experience these days. It's like a foreign language. They prefer to run the GUI and configure everything with the mouse, and they get really discombobulated when I make them configure IP addresses and basic Apache stuff through the INI files. It works out fine in the end (I'm quite the taskmaster -- "Would you rather get a zero, Mister Smith?"), and as teachers I guess we just have to view it as an opportunity and a challenge. But it's important because command line efficiency (and low RAM profile) is one of the areas where Linux is most effective and useful.

That's hillarious! I presume they restricted them from simply walking around it, right? Did they also mention how little it probably cost to build it compared with what taxpayers will actually spend? I can see I'm going to have to renew my subscription to Showtime.

Just to put my own spin on what I see as the underlying subject of this thread, I think there's an interesting challenge here for scientists and engineers arising from slippery-slope arguments specifically from the left. I think we see it all the time right here on Science Forums. The general trend amongst scientists and engineers these days is to skew left, even if it's only moderate left. But I see scientists and engineers fall down slippery slopes all the time right here on these boards. Ostensibly intelligent people, who dedicate their lives to science and engineering, proclaiming mad 9/11 conspiracy theories, or vast right-wing conspiracies, or the complete and total loss of all personal liberties. In a sense they "fall down", and the rest of us, knowing that they're smart people who maybe just haven't thought that particular subject all the way through, have a great opportunity at that point to pick them back up and set them back on the right track. In a way it's this board's greatest blessing and its greatest curse. Our main purpose of course is to communicate science and engineering concepts. But if, along the way, we can get smart people thinking along lines they haven't thought before, I consider that a victory.

I just love this headline today being used in a number of newspapers and online sources: "Bush Says Russia No Threat to Europe" Because, you know, if there's one thing we've learned over the years, it's that Bush knows exactly when a country is a threat and when it is not.

Hear, hear, to the OP. And by golly I'm sick and tired of people telling me that I can't be upset about the erosion of civil liberties without engaging in a slippery slope fallacy. I absolutely can do both and be 100% logical in doing so. Reasonable concern is not the same thing as irrational fear, dammit. What makes our 21st century society great is the way we've learned how to implement compromise without loss of core ideals. It's when we FORGET how to do that that we fail.