Well, there's "almost dead", which Miracle Max can still cure, as opposed to "all dead" when all that's left is search their pockets for loose change.

Then there is "mostly dead" which you can have all day and still foil the plan of your adversaries.

It seems to me that the poor saps who tried to invade the NSA went from "mostly dead" to "almost dead" to "all dead" in very short succession. Thus they are a special class of "dead dead".

Still way too small for the size of the US Govt.

Seriously, a modern state needs some modern buildings.

Plus the so-called 'curtains' in the blue room are so tacky - they are painted on the wall. Not only is it cheap, but it looks gross.

The White House was built to try to impress the 18th century folks that we *maybe* had some class. It was cheap shit that we just sort of faked even back then. Let's build something worthy of the most powerful nation on earth.

For that kind of money it would be more economical to actually build a real work residence for the president. Why stay in a 18th century mansion when you can build a modern facility with serious infrastructure. Keep the White House for tourists and perhaps as a museum or special press meetings, but let real work take place in a secure environment that is actually designed for the modern state.

But I guess 8 million for a full-scale doll house is better for morale.

Brilliant summary of European history from 800 to present day, all in one sentence!

On the contrary, not all OSS software is immediately useful to the task at hand. Someone has to install it, maintain it, and eventually rewrite it or add to it in order that it fulfils government requirements.

This is what you do in industry, it won't be much different. Perhaps there won't be any more cubical farms of coders (thank God), but there will be work for small teams all the time to add a feature or provide a patch.

What is even better is that they will be government jobs, which are about as secure as you can get. If I could get a government job coding, I would be a very happy person.

You must be new here.....

On Slashdot, breaking news is at least a week late.
On Slashdot, we don't comment on the news, but on the duplicate story.
On Slashdot, we don't even read the article. It's much better trolling in comments.
On Slashdot, we already have opinions so the actual news doesn't really matter

Maybe the *ancients* could add some...

Code has to be AVAILABLE - this is the most important. That means it must be OPEN SOURCE.

If it is CRAPPY code, it can be MADE BETTER if it is open source.
If it is INEFFICIENT code, it can be REWRITTEN if it is open source
If it is HARD TO UNDERSTAND code, it can be COMMENTED if it is open source.

So any code that is OPEN SOURCE, even if it is crappy, inefficient and hard to understand, can be improved.

But any code that is CLOSED is absolutely useless in my opinion.

And Shakespeare came so very close to doing so:

HAMLET [...] we fat all creatures else to fat us, and we fat ourselves for maggots. Your fat king and your lean beggar is but variable service, two dishes, but to one table; that's the end.

POINS [Henry IV, part 1] .... there are pilgrims going to Canterbury with rich offerings and traders riding to London with fat purses.

As a matter of fact, the Oxford English Dictionary says that Barclay wins the honor for using fatly first.

Some beast agayne, styll leane and poore is sene Though it fatly fare, within a medowe grene.

Magnificent thing, the English language, so fatly adorned with so many words.

For monitoring motherboard stuff:

http://www.freshports.org/sysutils/healthd/>systutils/healthd

There are actually certain physical phenomenon that would confirm that we are in a simulation, just from the mathematical constraints.

Here is a link to the actual paper.

The supplementary spending bills passed by congress put the cost of one day of war in Iraq to $280 million, and this number does not include the long term costs.

Imagine what we could do if we had a war on ignorance?

The two numbers Phi and Pi are actually related by trigonometry, so it is hardly surprising that they would show up in a ratio concerning the rotation of stars.

If you divide a circle into 5 sections of 2*Pi/5 each you will get the five points of a pentagon, whose dimensions are all based on phi relationships [i.e. the Golden Mean]. Thus one can state:

2 * cos (Pi / 5) = Phi or
2 * sin (Pi / 5) = sqrt ( 3 - Phi )

or even better:

Pi = 5 arccos (Phi / 2)

that is,

Phi = 1 - 2 * cos (3 * Pi / 5)

So it is not entirely strange that the simple harmonic motion of a star could be expressed as some ratio of Phi.

It's all numbers, numbers all the way down.

The GPS devices that you use would like to differ with you

The modern media is no longer about communicating the news. Its is committed to instituting ideology. If you control the vocabulary of the debate, you control the outcome of the debate.

From Orwell's 1984

The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible. It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought — that is, a thought diverging from the principles of Ingsoc — should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words. Its vocabulary was so constructed as to give exact and often very subtle expression to every meaning that a Party member could properly wish to express, while excluding all other meanings and also the possibility of arriving at them by indirect methods. This was done partly by the invention of new words, but chiefly by eliminating undesirable words and by stripping such words as remained of unorthodox meanings, and so far as possible of all secondary meanings whatever. To give a single example. The word free still existed in Newspeak, but it could only be used in such statements as ‘This dog is free from lice’ or ‘This field is free from weeds’. It could not be used in its old sense of ‘politically free’ or ‘intellectually free’ since political and intellectual freedom no longer existed even as concepts, and were therefore of necessity nameless. Quite apart from the suppression of definitely heretical words, reduction of vocabulary was regarded as an end in itself, and no word that could be dispensed with was allowed to survive. Newspeak was designed not to extend but to diminish the range of thought, and this purpose was indirectly assisted by cutting the choice of words down to a minimum.

What is interesting is that this beam is made by several beams interacting at a focal point. What if they changed the difference of the focal point? Sure, one beam would dissipate over 70km, but perhaps they could manipulate intensity of the beam at a certain distance by the interaction....

What you describe are engineering problems. If history is any indication, the military is pretty good at [eventually] solving them. Nothing like the instinct to destroy someone else to get the human intellect working.