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Banning of Fishing in State Parks ??
Whats next ?
PETA targets fishing in state parks
Associated Press Jan. 23, 2002
WINONA, Minn. Minnesota anglers like their fishing enough to wake up before dawn in the summer and sit on thin ice in the winter, so they probably won't take kindly to the latest campaign by an animal-rights group.
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals wants Minnesota to ban fishing in state parks. "Impaling him on a hook and ripping him out of his environment is cruelty to animals, plain and simple," said Dan Shannon, who is leading PETA's "Fishing Hurts" campaign.
The group launched its campaign by sending a letter to Bill Morrisey, Department of Natural Resources director of parks and recreation.
"The violent process of fishing and its consequences do not complement the peace and tranquility of a state park," Shannon said in the letter.
Speaking last week from PETA's Norfolk, Va., headquarters, he said this is the animal rights group's first anti-fishing campaign. It also began lobbying in Louisiana, Kentucky, Missouri and Michigan.
"Fishing is just hunting in the water," Shannon said, adding that Minnesota already bans hunting in state parks. "The scientific evidence clearly states that fish can feel pain."
In a return letter sent to Shannon last week, Brad Moore, the DNR's assistant commissioner for operations, said he does not believe anglers or their activities are damaging to state parks.
"We have no intention of banning fishing in state parks," Moore wrote.
Shannon said that because fish don't make a noise or a facial expression upon being hooked, they receive less sympathy from the public than do mammals and birds, he said.
Rich Enochs, president of the Win Cres Chapter of Trout Unlimited in Winona, said: "It's an interesting position, but I can't seethe point.
"A total ban seems to be contrary to any sort of reasonable balance on outdoors philosophy," he said.
Shannon said PETA's campaign hopes to foster a public debate and doesn't expect people "to agree with us overnight."
Garry Barvels, manager of Whitewater State Park, said he didn't understand why PETA would send the letter.
The park, like many in southeastern Minnesota, offers fishing for stream trout. The winter fishing season is open for catch-and-release using only hooks without barbs.
"They're not really hurting the fish that way," Barvels said. Of the PETA campaign, he said, "I don't know how to even answer those people."
I'm no biologist, but I believe that the claim that fish can feel pain is false. Something to do with their brain and nervous system etc...
PETA is definitely an organization that needs to be countered - regularly & aggressively. Just my .02....
I think read some where recently in scientific study that they can feel pain, but I am not a fisheries biologist, but why do they pull so hard when they feel the hook ?
I guess we will really never know unless fish start talking
In nature, from which we are inseperable, predators chase and take prey. Lions eat gazelle. Pirhana eat mammals in a flurry of painful bitesized flesh-cutting chunks so quickly that these large amazonian rodents haven't had the chance to die as they disappear in a bloodbath of water, cleaned to the bone. Crocodiles eat... well anything. It's a dog eat dog world out there.
And on the other end of the spectrum there's PETA. Humans, who often consider themselves above nature, yet breathe the same oxygen, drink the same water and subsist on the same core nutrients as the rest of the earth's creatures, decide that they must stop people from engaging in fishing.
How more off-base from reality can you get? If fish could vote I am sure they would choose angling over extinction - and dams have rendered entire populations of fish extinct. I have never heard of PETA attacking power conglomerates to prevent the extinction of a whole race of fish, but they are sensitive to their feelings. There are no feelings in extinction.
When they form a picket line in the water to stop cormorants from eating fry, herons from impaling fish with their beaks, bass from swallowing other fish live, they are being fair about their argument (while exposing how ludicrous it is!).
When they stop polluters from dumping fish-choking chemicals, industry from emitting sulfuric and carbonic particulates that lead to acidification of lakes that slowly and painfully eliminates sensitive species (talk about suffering!), then they are on the right track to reducing animal suffering.
Nature sacrifices the few on behalf of the many, so that all benefit. The transfer of resources in this exchange is rarely "pretty" from a PETA perspective. By focusing on such a narrow track as angling rights, they are missing the boat. They are not effecting meaningful reduction in animal suffering; nature will cull the population to a state of equilibrium in no more graceful manner than a caring angler would. Anglers are perhaps the largest body of humans on earth with a compulsion to protect not only the fish but the entire ecosystem around them, well most anyway. We suck at it sometimes but our hearts are in the right place.
If we suddenly stopped fishing in a Minnesota State Park, what has been achieved? A small enclave of anal retentive humans will be sated by the decision. That's about it.
PETA isn't about the animals feelings, it's about PETA people's feelings. Thinking they are in touch with nature, they couldn't be more out of it. Somewhere at this very moment, life on earth is succeeding because the natural cycle of life, death, and the game of numbers is taking it's course - uninterrupted by picket lines. When we choose to participate in this cycle, we confirm that we are still in our own way part of nature.
I am not biologist or a PETA fan ..that's for sure ...but I would think Fish ,like all living things of that order would feel pain... I mean pain is the body's reation to something wrong or as a self defence mechamism. If you did not feel pain you would not live long. Fish can sence temperature differences etc... now the pain may not be as we define it but there must be something that will make a fish or any animal react to an injury.
Peta just wants money!
I was reading an article on peta, and they stated that most of the money donated to the peta orginization was actually used by the managing people and none went to help out on projects to help the poor and mistreated animals. They just get to travel and play at the ignorant people who donate to them expense! Juro is right, that without the natural order of things, many would just plain disappear. The white tail deer is one of these success storys as well as many other animals. If they weren't hunted, they would eat themselves out of house and home, and you would have a mass starvation on hand. Hunting a fishing, done in a responsible manner will always leave us plenty of fish in the lakes and streams for those who choose not to do either, hunt or fish, but just to see! Even Yellowstone park cannot keep its animals in the area, because they would starve. Plus they re-introduced the wolves to help them manage the units..... Peta is just in it for the money....... Plain and Simple.... Like their minds.....:hehe:
Reginald Price
President Weber Basin Anglers
Trout Unlimited
Utah Chapter 681
Yep, I could beleive that about PETA.
Many so called public interest groups like that and they are usually operated by lawyers.
Sorry had to get that out. But I have to deal with our state and federal legal system on a daily basis at work and it is incredible as to the politics and beauvcreacy it has evolved into here in America.
One of my favorite sayings "It is out of control". No offense to the lawyers on this forumn, but I suppose I will hear something back from them.
If you do please PM me so we can do it in privacy and you will be limited to 1000 characters per message.
I battle about 30 corporate lawyers every week at work and a number of extenal firms and trade associations so I am well prepared for these conversations.
Note I am not a lawyer, but educated in business and life.
Everyone has made some excellent points. I would just like to add one thing, and it has to do with the group's money issues. PETA has a website, and I implore you not to visit it. They justify the site's existence based on the number of daily hits, and by clicking over to it, no matter how morbid your curiousity may be, you are helping the organization to spread it's skewed views. Suffice it to say that this group depends on people who are followers, not leaders, who cannot and will not think for themselves.
I realize that by discussing their website some may want to visit it to see what I'm talking about, but I think that it's worth the risk. I'd rather have people know about the consequences of curiousity first. As a rule, I don't usually discuss PETA, because I simply don't want to acknowledge them. But as Juro has described, they have double and triple standards that can set the table for dangerous precedents.
Maybe this is where we, as sportsmen, need to begin focusing our attention in dealing with such groups. The Ontario government introduced the Heritage Hunting and Fishing Act giving Canadian sportsmen the right to hunt and fish. Alabama amended their state constitution in 1996 to include a guarantee to hunt & fish. Mississippi followed, I believe. If sportsmen have the constitutional right to hunt and fish spelled out, the anti-angling groups would then be infringing upon the sportsmans constitutional rights, which arguably could also include the pursuit of happiness.
Peta ... Peta? Isn't that a
hollowed out bread which you fill with stuffing for a sandwich? Well maybe fill one with .... and ask them to 'bite this.'
We Are What We Are
There's no question that being fought and reeled in is an unpleasant experience for a fish, at least from as far as we can anthromorphize our feelings onto these animals. This, however, is beside a point which hasn't been brought up enough or made strong enough, methinks.
We are, like the fish, a product of our evolution. As Juro points out, we're all animals in this together.
The human species evolved as hunter gatherers, that is to say, we're opportunistic predators. This predatory instinct manifests itself to varying degrees within us and takes its form in many ways, fishing being one of them. We feel the need to catch fish, to pursue fish, to strategize how to catch more and catch better fish because it's in our genes. Catching fish has helped our species survive to this point. Because most of us do not need to catch fish to survive, again is not the issue. We do not want to lose the instinct and ability to pursue and capture prey -- it may not be of vital importance now, but in generations to come, on a bombed out planet, it just may become important again. Fishing is our culture, our heritage, our capital in the survivorship bank. Keep at it.
Some biologist once described the primary drives of the species as the 4F functions -- feeding, fighting, fleeing and mating behavior. To this we may add a fifth: fishing.
Join the Palindromes for Dyslexics Society Today
Eric -
Great anecdote, the five 'f's! Hopefully not in that order though
Eric I do not believe that we have evolved, one of the signs of evolution is that a species always changes for the survival of the species. The "survival of the fittes thing", if it were true,acient north amercians would have alot more body hair then thoes of european decent, as it would greatly increase their chance of survival. Shure there are abbdatations in the natural world, but if species truely evolved, nothing would ever go extinct.
I believe that Man was made manager of all things natural, And we have greatly failed at this task, Man has misunderstood the natural world. We less then a centry ago, raped the verry resorces that sustained us, never getting our bellies full, many riches were made from greed. This doesnt mean that industry is all bad. I know loggers that have great respect for the eco-system that they harvest, they actually help the system, and set out to do so. When it comes to Industry, greed is the "culprit". We as a people know what is right and wrong. I have never done anything wrong without knowing it was wrong. I also never have felt that my fishing was wrong.
Peta: is full of people that have smoked all the reasoning cells out of their brain.
Wade Softly and Carry a Big Stick
"When it comes to Industry, greed is the "culprit".
Greed and power will bring our society down, but hopefully not the fisheries until I leave this earth.
Will have to check out PETA organization and directors etc...
PETA - Tax Exempt Status
Your opportunity to voice for the redemption of PETA tax exempt status
I'd be scared to be alone with these people
Last edited by pmflyfisher; 03-22-2002 at 09:10 PM.
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Australia 1975
The perfect drip
enamel on fibreglass, polyurethane foam, wood, polyvinyl chloride pipe, filler, primer
237.0 (h) x 150.0 (w) cm
Collection of Catherine Lezer and Kevin McIsaac, Sydney
Image courtesy of the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery
When contemplating sculpture, we probably think of carved marble figures, painted wood reliefs, monument in bronzes, or abstract constructions in steel. It's unlikely, I suspect, that a giant, stylised drip descending from the ceiling would spring to mind. Traditional sculpture is durable, monumental and static. Nell's The perfect drip 1999, on the other hand, encapsulates a multi-dimensional moment, a space-time continuum, and really does look as if it might fall. The aesthetic language that informs this sculpture is, paradoxically, drawn from the ultimate two-dimensional medium―film. The perfect drip is, as the artist tells us, perfect. On the surface at least. Should we be afraid?
'Real', 'reality', 'realise'. Photography and, by extension, film, are often considered the mediums in which to portray events from life most realistically. The amorphous and space-age qualities of The perfect drip have their origins in computer-generated, action-packed sci-fi movies where we know perfectly well that the hero won't die, but suspension of belief is part of the fun. Nell's materials embrace another incongruity: the painted fibreglass, foam and wood constructions found on film-sets appear convincing, but when we actually encounter them the artifice is readily, almost painfully, apparent. We know Nell's ludicrously large drip won't fall, and because of this we admire the skills required to produce this visual joke. It's part of the inherent contradiction of portraying fluidity with solid materials. Has anything happened yet?
'Drips' appear regularly in the artist's oeuvre or, rather, often enough to be identifiable as a motif, even for one of such diversity as Nell. In a 1999 installation, The fly and the mountain, the junctions between the ceiling and the walls, as well as other architectural features within the gallery space, were the focus of her attention. But unlike Richard Serra's experiments with lead—or Jackson Pollock's expansive gestures on canvas, or even Lynda Benglis's 'frozen gestures' in foam—this was not an instance of privileging a working process over the final product. [1] At a distance the pools of thick grey matter that oozed through window frames, down walls, and onto the floor below, threatened contagion. The approaching visitor was surprised, or amused, to discover that the ooze was actually composed of many, many plastic flies. Groooss! Elsewhere Nell has produced fibreglass noses that drip, and stylised abstract, even calligraphic, renditions of drips on canvas. As fellow artist Lionel Bawden points out, when it comes to materials Nell's promiscuity is beyond compare.[2]
The perfect drip has the viscosity of oil, the mirror finish of a finely polished automobile. The fact that it's dripping from the ceiling is immediately disconcerting: is this a water leak or build up of moisture? Could it be coolant from the air-conditioning? An oil leak? Something nastier still? In architectural or automotive terms, a drip cannot be perfect; more often than not a drip signals the need for expensive repairs. These disturbing but comical contradictions are the sculptural equivalent of Salvador Dali's soft watches in his painting, The persistence of memory 1931.[3] Nell reprises ideas raised by Surrealist and Pop artists, possibly with a side-swipe at Abstract Expressionism, but her work is also a fine example of fluidity in sculptural form. Man, are we there yet? I've given up waiting for that drip to fall!
Lucina Ward
International Painting and Sculpture
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
[1] For Splashing 1968, his first lead 'casting', Richard Serra spilt molten lead along the junction where the floor meets the wall in Leo Castelli Gallery's warehouse, on New York's upper west side
[2]Lionel Bawden, Nell: all the way, Roslyn Oxley Gallery, 18 September–11 October 2008
[3] Collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York

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WillowRidgeCalls wrote:I was just in Team 5 section and tried to make a Roll Call post but it won't let us there is NO New Topic or Reply button? How are we going to post anything in there?
WillowRidgeCalls wrote:What I could do is quickly build a call and not put any finish on it, that way everybody can sign it and when we're done I can finish it and give it to whoever gets the best bird out of the team? If that's what you all want to do?
1Morgan wrote:Not knowing the rest of the teams experience, ya should prob just put an easy to play surface on it. You should prob scratch it too so we all do it the same.
1Morgan wrote:I can't believe I get to go turkey hunting next week!!
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In our region, 1,561 children in Missouri and 564 in Kansas are losing their Head Start slots. On KCPT's The Local Show last night (see video below), special correspondent Sam Zeff took a closer look at cuts to Head Start.
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By Tiernan Ray
Sid Parakh of McAdams Right Ragen this afternoon cut his rating on shares of Microsoft (MSFT) to Hold from Buy, and trims his price target to $34 from $36, writing that while the stock is "attractively valued" at 10.6 times his fiscal '14 estimates, and the company's enterprise software sales are "solid," and Microsoft's cloud computing efforts are "gathering momentum," nevertheless his estimates are going down and there's limited upside from here.
As I noted this morning, Microsoft shares have shown strength since the company's earnings report last Thursday. The stock today closed up 18 cents, or 0.6%, at $31.94.
Parakh notes the imporved operating metrics for teh "Entertainment & Devices" division, which includes the Xbox, in last week's report, and the improved profitability in the "Online Services Group" that includes Microsoft's Bing search engine.
He also notes the positive trends in Microsoft's move to the cloud:
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However, Microsoft is not immune to overall economic risk to enterprise sales, writes Parakh, and the weak PC market does weigh on results:
In particular, consumer PC uptake remains subdued and Microsoft has been unable to spur demand for its Surface devices and other Windows 8-based tablet offerings from OEMs. We view high price points for touch enabled Windows 8 devices as a gating factor for customer adoption. We estimate core licensing revenue for Windows 8 was down in line with low-to-mid double-digit declines highlighted by IDC and Gartner [...] Two thirds of all enterprise customers have now upgraded to Windows 7. Sales of other enterprise products appear to be healthy, but came in slightly below expectations. We think general macroeconomic softness and an ongoing shift toward multi-year licensing weighed on quarterly enterprise sales. We note that multi-year licenses have a negative current period revenue impact.
As far as estimates, Parakh writes "At a high level, the mix shift in Windows revenue to more hardware (Surface) sales and away from higher-margin Windows license sales (which have been weak) weighs heavily on our margin assumptions, as reflected in the sharp downward EPS revision for FY14."
"We also note that we expect earnings to grow at a slower pace than revenue growth in FY14, reflecting mix shift dynamics."
Parakh cut estimates for the fiscal year ending in June to $78.6 billion in revenue and $2.76 per share in profit, down from $80.3 billion and $2.80. He cut next year's estimates to $84.3 billion and $2.90 from a prior $89.1 billion and $3.07.


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After last month spectrum analyzer work, I also looked at the volume meters again. Handling the updates is a bit tricky as I need to sync them to the audio playback. Now I have optimizations in place to skip updates when the meter is zero or maxed and has not changed. This is actually quite often the case.
I also fixed a small UI glitch; song-io plugins did not tell so far whether they support saving and/or loading. Thus one could end up selecting a format and then getting an error. Now one will see only the formats that plugins can handle.
Finally I got around catching up on the docs too. Now all dialogs have some docs including screenshots.
One refactoring I was actually considering to push for after the next release was getting rid of the GtkListStores and use real GtkTreeModels instead. The disadvantage of a ListStore is that it is static, if the underlying object is dynamic one needs to manually synchronize it. This enlarges the code and also the duplicated data storage uses memory. Writing own models was in the end not so difficult, it is quite some boilerplate code though. The first one I wrote is a object-list-model. It allows to bind object-properties to model columns. If e.g. a field changes, the model notifies and the view updates. The whole thing could become more generic if we would have an iterator interfaces and the collection types (list, array, ..) would be gobjects implementing the iface. Well, I am not the first to notice that :). Next I made 2 specialized models and started to take them into use. As a bonus e.g. the machine model provides a nice logical sorting. One more model to implement and switch to.
72 files changed, 6268 insertions(+), 1250 deletions(-)


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Stop the NSA from gathering data via social media web site servers
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Fwd: CONFIRMED- they're spying on you
It's an outrage: The Guardian has obtained long sought-after evidence of the extent of ongoing spying on Americans under the PATRIOT Act -- and it's as bad as we'd worried.
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text:
JONATHAN MASTERS: Hi. Good morning, everyone. This is Jon Masters. I'm a writer with the Council on Foreign Relations, and I'm very pleased to be joined by two distinguished participants today for this media conference call on U.S. drone policy. Micah Zenko is CFR's Douglas Dillon Fellow and expert on conflict prevention and U.S. national security policy. He recently authored a council special report focusing on reforming U.S. drone strike policies that's now accessible on CFR.org. And we also welcome another distinguished guest, former Director of National Intelligence Admiral Dennis C. Blair.
And to begin, I'd like to give both participants a chance to give a few opening remarks. Admiral Blair, can we begin with you?
ADMIRAL DENNIS BLAIR: Sure. I can -- I could start, Jon. Everybody had the advantage of reading Micah's report, which I -- which I think is very important, because it takes on a subject which, in my opinion, has -- needs public discussion.
If the United States is a -- is a democracy, we want our people to know how we use military force and that we do it in accordance with -- and in ways that the United States is -- can be proud of and that can be effective. And so -- and there's been far too little debate on it.
Let me make -- let me make three points, though, at which I -- at which I come to slightly different conclusions from Micah, and then I -- where I agree with him.
The first point is I'm less persuaded that international norms really have much of an effect when it comes to the use of force against the United States. My experience is that nation-states are generally either encouraged or deterred by their sort of cost-benefit calculation, and so I -- as other countries develop drones of their own, I think that they will make their own decisions on how they -- on how they use them, looking at the United States' experience but drawing on their own -- on their -- on their own interests and fears. I think that nonstate organizations, terrorist groups, extremist groups, are not deterrable, and they look at U.S. norms in order to find weaknesses in them, not to -- not to be led by them. And they -- if a terrorist group can get hold of drone technology, it will use it against us every way we can. So I'm not so much persuaded that norms can be set by the United States in this area.
Second, the recommendation that Micah has that what he calls signature strikes should be -- should be halted -- I have to be very careful talking about this, of course, because this aspect is still classified, and I'm still -- I'm still subject to having to protect classified information.
But let me say it this way, we should think about drones as long-range snipers in the military sense. For years, the United States and other countries send small teams behind lines in order to try to shoot at forces that are declared hostile connected to the battlefield. And the process for declaring forces hostile and giving snipers a guidance on who they can shoot at and who they can't is a well-known process. It can be made by military commanders.
And I don't think it's any different for drones. If we are in a -- if we are fighting in Afghanistan, for example, and we know that across the border in Pakistan there are Taliban groups who are gathering and training, and then I think we could authorize either snipers -- people with rifles -- or drones to shoot at armed men who we see getting into pickup trucks and heading towards the Afghanistan border or who are in a -- in a training exercise because they've been declared hostile, having those characteristics.
So I think that these -- I think that drones can and should be used, like many military weapons, under the normal procedures for law of war, not simply for killing identified terrorist leaders who are -- who have been plotting against us.
And the third point I'll make, and then turn it over to Micah, is that they say on law, of course, that hard cases make for bad law. And I think that Pakistan is probably the hardest case of all and we should not think about our overall drone policy simply in terms of -- simply in terms of Pakistan.
There's something about Pakistan and covert action that is -- that is -- never led to good results. That the arming of the mujahadeen through Pakistan, another widely known covert-action program, was successful in the short term but in the long term caused great problems for us in terms of -- in terms of enabling a Taliban takeover of Afghanistan over the Soviets -- after the Soviets were driven out.
The current open secret covert-action drone program in Pakistan, which does nothing except enable the Pakistanis to allow us to do it, unofficially, and then officially to attack us for it and thereby make us extremely unpopular in Pakistan and interferes with all sorts of other objectives with Pakistan, is also anomalous. So let's not -- I wouldn't make all of our policies for the use of drones dependent on what goes on in Pakistan.
Let me stop there, Jon.
MASTERS: OK. Thank you, Admiral Blair.
Micah, do you -- he mentioned the characterization of long-range snipers. How do you -- how do you think of that characterization? And do you have some opening remarks you'd like to make?
MICAH ZENKO: Well, thank you so much for the opportunity and for the privilege of speaking with you all and for speaking alongside Admiral Blair, who has had a long, distinguished career of actual operational and command responsibilities, versus myself, who has the privilege of just essentially thinking and writing for a living, with no consequences of what I say.
What I try to do in this report is look at the -- to try to articulate the scope and intensity of U.S. nonbattlefield targeted killings since September 11th. You know, if you had told anybody, even soon after 9/11, that the U.S. would be -- have conducted something like 425 targeted killings in at least three countries, killing over 3,000 people, nobody who -- nobody would have believed you, even after 9/11.
And the United States has sort of merged into this policy of drones being the pre-eminent counterinsurgency tactic against a range of threats that its intended to face.
One of the biggest problems which Admiral Blair gets to is that the Obama administration's strategy for how it uses drones is poorly articulated and not very transparent. But for example, the United States and the Obama administration makes the claim that every individual targeted -- and they do this for legal purposes -- is a senior al-Qaida leader who poses a significant and imminent threat of attack to the United States homeland. Now, that's not who the United States actually targets -- and this gets to the issue of signature strikes, which the Obama administration has never, on the record, acknowledged that it conducts. So there's poor -- there's poor articulation of it.
It's also poorly coordinated with other elements of national power in the countries where it's being -- where it's being used, and you can talk to the U.S. ambassadors to Pakistan or Yemen and you can talk to the USAID contractors who are trying to do sort of soft power efforts there, and they will tell you that when you go to the tribal areas of Pakistan or you go to southern Yemen, drones are the face of U.S. foreign policy. Because we don't articulate and describe our vision for how these are used very well, we essentially -- again, to echo Admiral Blair -- we allow the Taliban and the ISI and the Pakistani government to tell our story about drones, which is a -- which is a tremendous strategic communications lapse.
And then finally, I'll just say that I slightly disagree with Admiral Blair about whether or not international norms matter. If that's true, then the administration should do -- shouldn't lay out its policies at all.
It should, you know, close down its websites, close down its spokespersons, not address people in press conferences if you don't think how you articulate these policies matter. It is the position of the Obama administration, and President Obama has said this on the record several times, that how the United States is using drones will have some normative impact on others, and they could emulate how we use them, not just emulate how we use them in the field, but the justifications we provide. So though there are plenty of potential near-term threats, or -- either to the U.S. homeland or to the governments where these strikes occur, and the United States, I think correctly, in some instances is using lethal force to deal with those threats, there is not the longer-term discussion about what impact U.S. drone use today will have on emerging drone powers once they have the technology.
MASTERS: OK. Thanks, Micah. And for those of you who may have joined us late, this is a CFR media conference call with Admiral Dennis Blair and CFR's Micah Zenko, focusing on U.S. drone policy. So at this point, operator, I think we can open it up to questions.
OPERATOR: At this time we will open the floor for questions. (Gives queuing instructions.)
MASTERS: OK. Hi there. Do we have a first question?
OPERATOR: Yes, we do.
MASTERS: OK. Please proceed with your question.
OPERATOR: Our first question comes from Gopal Ratnam with Bloomberg News.
QUESTIONER: Yes, hello. Thanks for taking my question. Appreciate it.
So I wanted to ask both of you if you would talk a little bit about the context of this report in the sense -- there was a story out in The Washington Post yesterday talking about the administration preparing a playbook for counterterrorism drone strikes that carves out an exception for the use of these drones in the Pakistan and border areas.
I was wondering if -- you know, Micah, if you could talk a little bit about whether this is a step in the direction of what you call in the report for more clarity and articulation of policy, and also to Admiral Blair, if this addresses your concern that, you know, you cannot make Pakistan and the use of drones in that area as a case for drawing up these rules, because this seems to sort of carve that out for the -- for the time being.
ZENKO: Thank you for the -- for the question. Very briefly, I think having a process that codifies and institutionalize and bureaucratizes how the U.S. will conduct targeted killings or when it will decide to kill versus capture and what degrees of cooperation they can hope for and support they can get from host nations in doing some of these operations is a useful thing. If nothing else, it simplifies the process for the executive branch and for all the various interagency players who are using it. However, if the playbook is simply an executive-branch, closed process, then it doesn't provide any transparency or oversight in how the U.S. does it. It's essentially the White House saying, trust us; we have a better process and how to do this.
And I would add that if the United States decides not to apply the, quote, playbook to Pakistan, it's essentially meaningless, because 85 percent of all the targeted killings that the U.S. has conducted in nonbattlefield settings since 9/11 have occurred in Pakistan. So the vast majority of targeted killings and drone strikes will not be covered under the playbook.
And Admiral Blair, would you like to follow up on that?
BLAIR: I agree with Micah on both those -- both those counts. A classified playbook does not reassure the -- reassure the American people, who I think are the -- are the primary ones that need to be convinced that their government is doing the right thing. And again, I think that you can't write general procedures, applicable in other countries, for Pakistan, but I think that what we -- our use of -- our use of drones in Pakistan has to be consistent with international law and the laws of -- the laws of war and so on. So Pakistan certainly doesn't get a pass for all of the laws that -- of -- and the legal use of force, which we are -- which we are pledged to both in international treaties and the way Americans think about the way they want to use our armed forces. So I think that we've got to do better than a classified playbook.
MASTERS: OK, thank you. Can we have the next question, please?
OPERATOR: Our next question comes from Siobhan Gorman with Wall Street Journal.
QUESTIONER: Hi. Thanks so much. I was actually wondering if it was possible to look at the drones a little bit more broadly outside of Pakistan, just because obviously, everyone's focused on North Africa at the moment. And I was wondering, particularly Admiral Blair, but both of you, what your sense is of the applicability of drones as part of a CT strategy in North Africa at this point or down the line for the U.S. or, I guess, in conjunction with other countries.
BLAIR: Siobhan, as you know, I'm just not quite as much a believer in how drones are wonder-weapons --
QUESTIONER: Right, right.
BLAIR: -- as some are. I think they combine a bunch of useful characteristics of different weapons systems that we -- that we already have; they can hang there longer, they can react quickly because the surveillance platform carries a -- carries a bomb and so on, but I don't think that, you know, we've suspended the -- we've suspended the laws of physics because we have this drone.
So I think drones should be -- if we are supporting the Mali government, the French -- and the French and African troops who are supporting them with drones, we use them for the things that drones can be used for under the -- under the effectiveness and rules of law.
They would -- they are excellent surveillance platforms to find out what's going on in your enemies' territory; they can be used to attack hostile forces directly. If there is a convoy of Tuareg dissident al-Qaida gunmen heading towards French forces, then they can be declared hostile, and you destroy them with drones just the way you would with artillery or fixed air or others.
So I see them as being a very useful and -- weapons system that can be used for the surveillance and attack program to -- purposes that we always do under the laws of war and the command and control procedures we've developed.
QUESTIONER: Do you -- do you think that it would be better for the military to use them rather than for sort of a whole a new CIA program in that area, that if we're providing support to the French or others there, that it would be easier or better to do it under military auspices?
BLAIR: Right, I strongly -- I strongly believe that a great majority of the use of drones should be done by the armed forces under the -- under military command. The reason that we have covert action is to be able to deny it. We need to go back to the foundations here. It was set up during the Cold War so that the United States could take action and U.S. officials could deny that we had done so. That simply does not apply in -- to long campaigns undertaken in areas of -- where other nations cannot enforce their own -- their own laws.
And I think we tie ourselves into all sorts of legal knots and we put ourselves in bad situations, like we are in Pakistan, by running these as covert action under Title 50 and then only selectively talking about them in way which, I think Micah's very eloquently said, has put us completely on the -- completely on the defensive in taking actions which I think are eminently justifiable and most Americans and most of the rest of the world would support.
ZENKO: Can I just add -- one point on that is that -- you know, which a lot of people seem to forget -- is that the United States currently does not fly armed drones off carriers, which means there needs to be airfields which they can be flown from, which means the United States needs the basing rights of coast countries to fly them from and, in the case of potential strikes in Mali, needs overflight permission from either Algiers or Mauritania or one of the neighboring countries to conduct strikes there.
And right now there is no country in Europe who supports U.S. drone strikes, and we could not fly these from any NATO bases in Southern Europe. The U.S. (sic) would not allow the U.S. to conduct lethal strikes at -- with the scope and intensity that it has in places like Pakistan and Yemen from its bases in Southern Europe. So you're tied there. And then you -- then you're essentially looking for basing rights somewhere in North Africa, and then you need overflight rights to do this. It's not clear that those -- that countries will allow the U.S. to use themselves as aircraft carriers to conduct (drone ?) strikes sort of in perpetuity.
Drones are a very effective and useful tool, as Admiral Blair points out, for surveillance, for -- you know, for route surveillance, monitoring bases, monitoring bad guys. It can conduct lethal strikes as well. But the U.S. opinion is that AQIM specifically does not -- does not pose an imminent threat to the U.S. homeland. And if the U.S. is going to conduct drone strikes against them, it should at least acknowledge that it is intervening on behalf of a domestic insurgency and on behalf of the French to do this, because then you need a whole different set of legal justifications than what you find under the AUMF, the Authorization for the Use of Military Force, which is about essentially protecting the U.S. homeland from strikes.
BLAIR: Yeah, I agree with Micah. And of course this is something that we deal with all of the time. Just to cite a European example, back in -- back in 1987, when the United States conducted the strikes against Libya, the Air Force aircraft actually had to fly around France from their bases in England in order to conduct a strike there; it was called El Dorado Canyon. So it's absolutely true that countries will decide to give basing overflight rights based on -- based on the purpose and the conditions under which a U.S. -- those U.S. forces would be used, those airplanes would be used.
And their own public opinion will be a factor, although not the only factor, in making that -- in making that decision. So to that extent, the United -- the degree to which the United States can make its case for what it's -- for what it's doing, it becomes extremely important.
MASTERS: OK. Thank you. Can we have the next question, please?
OPERATOR: Our next question comes from Scott Shane, with The New York Times.
QUESTIONER: Hi. Thanks for having this call. To follow up a little bit on what Siobhan was asking about, right now, as everyone knows, the CIA is running the targeted killing program in Pakistan. Both of you seem to think that the CIA should sort of get out of that business, at least in ongoing sort of public -- more or less public targeted killing programs like that. What -- and what should happen now in Pakistan? And also, if both of you could offer any opinion on the appointment of John Brennan at CIA and what the Senate might want to ask him about, you know, sort of on this topic.
MASTERS: Micah, do you want to --
BLAIR: Yeah, I'll start.
BLAIR: And then on John Brennan, I've got -- I've got nothing to -- nothing to say. But on the Pakistan, what we should do in Pakistan, the -- my concern with our use of drone in Pakistan, which can be denied by Pakistan -- in fact, the legislature can pass laws that say that we can't do it, and meanwhile their government actually gives us permission to use their airspace, Pakistan could shut us down anytime (they want ?), so they have their -- they have what they think is the best of all worlds; they get attacks against militants who are a threat to them as well as to us in Afghanistan, and they get to blame us -- blame us for it.
So that is not a -- that is not over the long term how we are going to control the threat to Pakistan, Afghanistan and the United States coming from the -- from the northwest areas of Pakistan. So we need to constantly be offering to Pakistan to make a better deal in which we cooperate in establishing law and order in those -- in those tribal areas, and we should offer to let go of the unilateral drone strikes which we conduct there in return for a combined campaign against those areas and then imposition of regular Pakistani law and order the way it was done in the Swat Valley, the way it was done in South Waziristan.
And we should -- we should be constantly striving for a long-term strategy which will hold down the threat from those areas and will minimize all the downsides of what we're doing now. And I'm out of government now, so I don't know the extent that we are doing that, but based on the public statements of the government, there's way too much of this, oh, drones are the best game in town; we're really killing them. And it's just a very short-term, myopic view of what is going to be a long-term problem.
ZENKO: I would just add, you know, as -- Scott (sp), as you know, the fact that the CIA is even involved in the armed-drone game is an artifice of history. You know, if you go back and read the 9/11 Commission and some of the staff statements and you talk to, you know, the people who worked at the counterterrorism center and Richard Clarke and the director of operations, Admiral Scott Fry, et cetera, you know, the CIA was tasked with the ability to track and locate bin Laden as a response to the -- what was the cruise missile problem of the four to six hours it roughly took to try to find bin Laden.
And the decision to put what was an anti-tank helicopter missile on a Predator drone and to give the CIA -- make the CIA the lead executive authority was essentially a case of bureaucratic infighting. And when 9/11 occurs, the CIA sort of has this mission.
But if you were starting from scratch today, you would put almost all of these under Title 10 DOD authority, and I think that's where they belong, in part because it gives you one single chain of command, one single justification. It -- there -- the JSOC strikes at least are reported under the biannual War Powers Resolution reporting from the White House to the Congress, so there is a slightly more transparency, and the White House could decide to give them even more transparency if they wanted to. So that's what should occur.
You know, we had the Pakistani foreign minister, who did an on- the-record press conference here at CFR last week, who, you know, was -- the first, second, third thing they were asked about is drone strikes. And so drones -- the use of drones become the sort of articulation of all U.S. actions towards Pakistan, which is a tremendous mistake. You need to think about the U.S. relationships with Pakistan in a more comprehensive, coordinated way and to think about how it is -- you know, the fact of the matter is that most of the strikes in Pakistan have to do with protecting U.S. service members serving in southern Afghanistan, and when the U.S. significantly reduces its combat footprint there, the U.S. will be able to, sort of by definition, reduce some of the strikes that occur in Pakistan, but there still will be threats to the U.S. homeland and to Europe and to other plots that emanate from the region.
But the notion that you're going to hit these guys in perpetuity and not create intense resentment from the government of Pakistan and from the people, not to mention some of -- some of them living in tribal areas, I think, is a mistake in strategy.
You can fly above these areas and target them in perpetuity, but the ground sort of burns beneath your feet as you do it, and you never get to the underlying cause of what -- why these threats emanate from there.
MASTERS: OK, thank you, Micah.
Can we have the next question, please.
OPERATOR: Our next question comes from David Wood with Huffington Post.
QUESTIONER: Good morning, gentlemen. Is there evidence that as you're targeting horizontally networked terrorist groups, that targeted killing really works? Does it really blunt their operational capability when you remove one of their leaders?
BLAIR: Yes.
ZENKO: I'll give you the academic answer, is there's a huge debate in the academic journals, like Security Studies, International Security, about how effective targeting terrorist leaders are -- people like Patrick Johnston at Rand, and Jenna Jordan at the University of Chicago. And I invite you to look at some of the evidence that they present whether or not targeting leadership leads to a reduction of threat or the collapse of terrorist groups. The evidence, as is often the case is academic studies, is quite mixed, but it's clear that there is many instances where targeting has a significant impact in ending the existence of some terrorist groups.
QUESTIONER: Could I ask Admiral Blair to elucidate on his one-word answer, which I thought was pretty interesting?
BLAIR: There are two -- I'd say there are two aspects to it. One is the competence of those who take the place of those who are killed. And so there are senior leaders who have either charismatic and inspirational qualities or who have specific operational skills which will be lost if they are replaced by someone else with either less charisma or less experience.
On the other hand, sometimes in organizations freeing up promotion is a -- is a good thing. And you get people who come in who are -- who are, in fact, more skilled, more charismatic and more energetic than those they replaced.
The second thing is that having to conduct your operations under attack makes them not impossible -- especially air attack -- but a lot more difficult than if you're not. And I would choose two extreme examples, look at the way the 9/11 attacks were planned and conducted: Long meetings in Kandahar; conferences around the world in places like Bangkok, Hamburg, Germany; long reconnaissance journeys to check things out in the -- in the target countries.
And these were all possible because al-Qaida was not under attack, in part by -- in part by drone attack and also -- and also other intelligence and security activities. Now, in large part because of the use of drones, there are not sanctuary areas where the essential functions of intelligence planning, logistics coordination and training can all be -- can all be conducted, and the drones requires these organizations to go underground, to take a long time.
So my evaluation is that on those two factors -- the quality of the leaders who are moving up to replace those killed and the difficulty of actually conducting attacks against the United States that al-Qaida has been -- has been substantially weakened by the overall measures, but -- of which the drone attacks on leadership have been a part.
MASTERS: OK, thank you. Can we have the next question, please?
OPERATOR: Our next question comes from KT McFarland with Fox News.
QUESTIONER: Hi. Thank you very much for doing this.
Has anybody, either you or others, given thought to what happens next? I mean, the United States owns the drone wars now, but technology tends to only trump temporarily. What happens down the road five years from now when other countries get drones, other countries have the ability to target American diplomats traveling around in cars in rural Yemen? Are we -- are we -- have we really thought through what kind of a world it's going to be when we have proliferating drone powers?
BLAIR: I think that --
MASTERS: (Micah, you want ?) --
BLAIR: This is Dennis Blair again.
QUESTIONER: Hi, Dennis.
BLAIR: I think we've partly thought that -- thought that through, but this is a -- this is a familiar syndrome in the sort of military technology cycle. When a new weapons program comes in, it's often introduced by the more advanced countries, the high-tech ones, and -- who take full advantage of that while they can and don't worry too much about what happens when others -- when others get it.
When you -- when you think about it, there are a couple of things that make me believe that this -- when drones do proliferate, they will not be as effective weapons against us as we are able to use them against others right now.
One is that they are -- that they are very dependent on a -- on an intelligence system which is incredibly worldwide, complicated and expensive. It uses the entire U.S. global intelligence system. No other country can afford that. It's not just the -- it's not just the money; it's the years of practice it takes to do that.
The second one is that -- what I do fear the most, though, is that a terrorist -- and let me say I don't fear too much other nation- states that gain this capability. It's very -- you know if another country has it and is using it against you and then you can use the full -- the full array of both defensive systems and of retaliation to keep it from being used against you effectively.
I do fear that -- and if al-Qaida can develop a drone, its first thought will be to use it to kill our president, senior officials, senior military officers. And it's possible, without a great deal of intelligence, to be able to do something with a drone that you can't do with a -- with a high-speed -- with a high-powered rifle or with -- driving a car full of explosives or the other ways that terrorists now use to try to kill senior officials
And I think that there are ways to deal with that that -- but it -- and I also think that whether we use them or not -- the way in which we use them or not won't affect the zeal of terrorists groups to be able to get them and to be able to kill senior officials for all of the reasons that we are familiar with.
So I think this is not opening up a huge Pandora's box which will make us wish that we'd never invented the drone, but it will cause us to have to take some more defensive measures in the future.
ZENKO: Just briefly, I agree with Admiral Blair. The -- I mean, the United States is the only country with the global architecture of intelligence communications satellites, et cetera, tacit or explicit host nation support that allows us to conduct these strikes globally. And I'm not so much worried about other states using them against the U.S., because the principles of attribution and deterrence could still adhere.
What I'm mostly worried about is when these proliferate. What we learned about drones because of their inherent advantages of responsive persistenceness (sic) without putting your own pilots or our personnel at risk is that states use lethal force more often. So the United States conducted -- 97 percent of all the targeted killings done has been with drones because of the inherent advantage of the weapons platform. And so if you think about ways state use lethal force outside of their borders today, whether this is Turkey in Northern Iraq or Democratic Republic of Congo into Rwanda or vice versa or some cross-border skirmishes, you could see uses of force outside of countries either against bordering states or regional states much more likely and -- to occur with greater scope and intensity just as they have as the U.S. has used them for strikes.
QUESTIONER: Thank you.
MASTERS: OK, thank you. I think we may have time for one or two more questions. Can we have the next question, please?
OPERATOR: Our next question comes with -- from James Kitfield with the National Journal.
QUESTIONER: Thanks, gentlemen, for doing this. Since I've talked to you, Micah, I wanted to ask Admiral Blair about whatever insight he has about the resistance of the administration to putting this program under a sort of sounder footing in terms of transparency and perhaps judicial review.
When you talk to civil rights types, you know, the idea that the president can target even Americans like al-Awlaki for assassination or for killing without any judicial review, with no due process, just drives them crazy. And they point out that, you know, you have to get a warrant from a FISA court for wire taps but not to kill someone.
I'm just curious if you can give me any insight into why there is such resistance to having even a sort of perfunctory review of this program so Americans would feel a little more comfortable that -- you know, that -- of how it's conducted.
BLAIR: You're asking why there's resistance to perfunctory judicial review?
QUESTIONER: Or basically any review that I have been able to see in terms of, you know, transparency in this program.
BLAIR: Well, I think there's a difference between review and transparency. Which one are you interested in?
QUESTIONER: Review, I guess.
BLAIR: There is review, both in the military chain of command and in the intelligence community chain of command -- designated levels of approval, review by JAG lawyers in the case of the Department of Defense and by general counsels in the case of the intelligence community. So there is a -- there is a, within the executive branch, internal process to decide who can -- who can be a target and who can shoot.
And in addition, Congress does receive briefings on both programs -- on the armed forces side and on the intelligence side -- and so they know what is happening and they have all the powers that Congress has to delve deeper into them if something doesn't look right. So I think there's plenty of review.
I don't think there is enough transparency and justification so that -- so that we remove not the secrecy, but the mystery of these things. And I -- and I think that the reason it's not been undertaken by the administration is that -- is that they just make a cold-blooded calculation that it's better to hunker down and take the criticism than it -- than it is to get into the public debate, which is going to be a hard one to win but I think in the long run is essential.
QUESTIONER: Thank you.
MASTERS: OK. I think given time constraints, we'll have to leave it there. I want to thank both participants. And again, this was a Council on Foreign Relations media conference call. Thank you all for joining us. Thank you to Admiral Blair and Micah Zenko. And that concludes our call.
ZENKO: Thank you very much.
OPERATOR: Thank you. You may now disconnect.


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| Topic: Sayyid Abu Al-ala Maududi (1903-79)
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One of the most influential Islamic thinkers of the twentieth century. His ideas have greatly influenced Islamic movements in his native subcontinent as well as the Middle East and North Africa in the west and Southeast Asia in the east.
Sayyid Maududi (ra) is author of more than 100 books on Islamic Fiqah, history, Tafseer, biography, political science, and Dawa. He wrote a pamphlet Qadiani Masla for which he was sentenced to death by the first military dictator, General Ayyub Khan.
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This is the fourth challenge of "Your Story. Brilliant!" offered as a class by Linda Sattgast of ScrappersGuide.com.
This month the focus is on "Birth and Early Years." As I have a twin brother it would be impossible to isolate my story since we were rarely apart during our youth. Peter is 5 minutes older than I and I remind him every year of how pleased I am that I'm not the oldest of four siblings—he is! Our younger brother is about 6 years young and the baby of the family is about 10 years younger than we are.
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Answer Me This
Scammers sneak you a computer virus while pretending to be who? The latest in airport-security tech at the Sunport. How much stimulus money is HUD giving New Mexico? And what's new with the Rail Runner?
1) The state Attorney General's Office says Internet scammers are pretending to be what government entity?
a. The CIA
b. Sen. John McCain's office
c. The Department of Homeland Security
d. The IRS
2) What new security feature is safeguarding the Sunport?
a. Whole-body imaging
b. Bomb-sniffing dogs
c. Machines that shoot air into your clothes
d. Guards who are not shy about screaming "Take off your shoes!" at bewildered travelers
3) The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development announced it will give New Mexico how much stimulus cash?
a. About $50,000
b. Five bucks
c. Close to $50 million
d. Close to $7 billion
4) What's the good news on the Rail Runner front?
a. Almost all the trains are running on time
b. A new Saturday train has been added
c. Beverage stations have been installed on every train
d. Mechanical glitches have been eliminated
1) D. Computer con artists are pretending to be the IRS in order to trick unsuspecting Internet users into downloading a virus. The state Attorney General's Office warns New Mexicans that the IRS never tries to contact people online. If you receive an e-mail from someone claiming to be the IRS, forward the e-mail to: firstname.lastname@example.com.
2) A. The Sunport now uses whole-body imaging technology to see what passengers are carrying with them. The technology produces images that show what's on a person's body down to their skin. The Sunport is the second airport in the nation to use this type of imaging, which looks like photo negatives.
3) C. HUD is providing New Mexico with close to $50 million in stimulus funds. The money will be used to improve public buildings, renovate public housing and build affordable housing. HUD received $10.1 billion to parcel out to states as part of the stimulus package passed in February. About 25 percent of the $10.1 billion will be awarded on a competitive basis to states creating green jobs. It will also help homeowners dodging foreclosure.
4) B. There's a new midmorning Rail Runner to ride on Saturdays. The addition should ease overcrowding on Saturday trains, according to Rail Runner officials. Before the train was added, packed cars forced some passengers to stand during the entire hour-plus commute to Santa Fe.
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ARSC HPC Users' Newsletter 411, March 19, 2010
RSS Feeds Available
System downtime notices and news items are now available via RSS feeds so you can stay updated with your favorite RSS reader. Pingo, Midnight, Seawolf, and the Linux Workstations are included. Each host has its own two feeds, one for downtime notices and one for news items. You may also subscribe to the downtime notices or news items for all hosts as a single feed.
Please visit the following URL to choose your feed criteria under the "menu to filter items by type" and then click the RSS icon to subscribe:
Many thanks go to ARSC intern Tom Sielicki for developing the initial version of this system.
5 Steps to Off Site Command Line File Transferring
[ By Oralee Nudson ]The following 5 steps describe the best options for transferring files between your home machines and the ARSC supercomputers.
Create a tar file of related data files before beginning the transfers. This will assist in ease of file transferring and may speed up transfer rates due to transferring just one file instead of many smaller files.
If you have a large amount of data to transfer, it will be best to divide the data transfers into reasonably sized chunks of 100GB or smaller.
Transferring smaller sets of files will aid in restarting the transfers if a problem occurs during the transfer.
If transferring files from $ARCHIVE_HOME, use the batch_stage command to bring your files online before beginning the transfers. See "man batch_stage" for details.
Choose the best copy method for your needs. There are a few different commands available: krcp -X, kftp, and mpscp. Here is a description of each and when to use them.
krcp -X
The "krcp -X" command is included with many of the kerberos kits and generally provides faster transfer rates when compared to scp. The -X flag turns encryption off, which should speed up the file transfers. The following is an example using "krcp -X" to copy files from my local machine to my $WORKDIR on midnight:
krcp -X myData.tar firstname.lastname@example.com:/wrkdir/username/
The kftp command can be used for uploading files to ARSC systems. After obtaining a Kerberos ticket, upload files using the following syntax:
kftp pingo.arsc.edu
If your home system is running Linux, try using the "mpscp" command (included in the HPMCP Kerberos Kit) to transfer large files from your local machine to an ARSC system. The syntax for mpscp is basically the same as "scp", but can open multiple unencrypted sockets for data transfer. You should see a noticeable speed up in data transfer when using mpscp as opposed to krcp. If mpscp is not included in the PATH environment variable on your local system, set the MPSCP_SERVER environment variable (see man mpscp). Here is an example of using mpscp to copy files to midnight from my local machine. The "-w 4" option directs the command to open 4 TCP-streams for copying data in parallel. We encourage the use of 4 streams or less because the midnight login nodes are shared among all users.
mpscp -w 4 filename.tar firstname.lastname@example.com:/wrkdir/username/
Verify the copy worked as intended by comparing the file sizes, content of the files, and/or use an MD5 Checksum. If your copies arrived at their destination successfully, delete the original copy. For the copy methods described above (with the exception of kftp), a file transfer should continue beyond the lifetime of your Kerberos ticket as long as the transfer is not interrupted. Once your Kerberos ticket expires however, you will need to obtain a new ticket to initiate a new file transfer. File transfers initiated with kftp will quit in mid-transfer if the current Kerberos ticket expires before the transfer is finished.
Even More About Git
[ By Jed Brown ][ Editor's note: Jed, who has been using git for a few years, kindly offered to share how git fits into his workflow as a follow-up to Kate Hedstrom's recent git introduction article. ]
git citool / git add -p
- To commit part of a dirty tree, handy to commit orthogonal changes separately
git rebase
- To linearize history (before pushing to a remote SVN repo, or when your changes have not been shared and are small enough that you don't want to see an explicit merge in the history. These also come in the form of 'git svn rebase' and 'git pull --rebase'.
git rebase -i
- To reorder, edit, or merge history.
In my workflow, I will often have multiple topic branches each containing one or more patches. When the feature is done, I'll send the patches upstream, but it can take time for them to be integrated, and sometimes upstream will want them changed in some way. Also, if upstream moves much before they get around to reviewing my patch, they will want me to rebase it again to make their merge easier. So I'll normally rebase each of the topic branches onto upstream whenever I pull.
$ git rebase origin/master feature1 $ git rebase origin/master feature2 $ git rebase origin/master feature3
This lets me immediately resolve any conflicts introduced upstream. If I actually use the software myself, I want to be testing the latest version (including all my patches), so after rebasing the features, I
$ git checkout master $ git reset --hard origin/master $ git merge feature1 feature2 feature3 $ make
to build after a clean merge of my features on top of upstream. To start a new feature,
$ git checkout -b feature4 origin/master
Responses to Brain Teaser
The following brain teaser appeared in issue 410 of this newsletter: [[ We were sent this puzzle by a certain esteemed reader who thought our [[ audience might enjoy it. We will put a little twist on it and say, [[ send us your answer and your algorithm for computing it and we will [[ publish all the solutions that we deem "reasonable" in the next issue. [[ We know one solution. Are there others? [[ [[ If these conditions apply: [[ 2 + 3 = 10 [[ 7 + 2 = 63 [[ 6 + 5 = 66 [[ 8 + 4 = 96 [[ [[ Then, what is the result of: [[ 9 + 7 = ???? Thanks to readers Dave Strenski, Greg Newby, Dale Clark, Scott Kajihara, Craig Knox, Ryan Czerwiec, Jim Williams and Alec Bennett for sending in solutions. Ryan gets an official HPC Newsletter Gold Star for multiple solutions. As always, some of the journeys shared were as fun as the destination: # # From Dave Strenski: # This brain teaser proved very interesting for both my spouse, Paula, and I. We attacked the problem is different ways, but came up with the same solution. Paula decided to only look at the top two lines and find a relationship. Since the "answers" differed by a lot, she chose to square the first number and then stumbled on "square the first" then add "the first times the second". 2^2 + (2*3) = 10 7^2 + (7*2) = 63 6^2 + (6*5) = 66 8^2 + (8*4) = 96 Therefore 9^2 + (9*7) = 144 I chose to look at the problem vertically. I was looking for relationships between the first column and the first digit in the answer and the second column and the second digit in the answer. This was fruitless, but got me thinking about what I would have to multiply the "sum" by when I noticed the pattern of multipling the "sum" by the first column. 2(2+3) = 10 7(7+2) = 63 6(6+5) = 66 8(8+4) = 96 Therefore 9(9+7) = 144 A little algebra shows we both have the same solution. # # From Greg Newby, ARSC Chief Scientist: # #!/usr/bin/perl -w use strict; # # If these conditions apply: # 2 + 3 = 10 # 7 + 2 = 63 # 6 + 5 = 66 # 8 + 4 = 96 # # Then, what is the result of: # 9 + 7 = ???? # Method: answer is a function of the two numeric arguments, # answer = arg1 * (arg1 + arg2) sub f{ my $arg1 = shift ; my $arg2 = shift; my $result = $arg1 * ($arg1 + $arg2); return $result; } # main: print ("Enter two numbers, separated by a space, ^D ends\n==> "); while (<>) { my @args = split; print "\tResult is: " . f($args[0], $args[1]) . "\n==> "; } exit; # # Greg also contributed a variation of the brain teaser for your # enjoyment: # 2 + 3 = 101 7 + 2 = 12 6 + 5 = 15 8 + 4 = 14 Then, what is the result of: 9 + 7 = ???? # # From Craig Knox: # #! /bin/bash # answer: # multiply the sum of the two numbers on the left-hand side (LHS) of the # equation by the first number (leftmost) on the LHS to get the number on # the right-hand side (RHS) like so: if [ $# -ne 2 ]; then echo "Usage: number1 number2" exit 1 fi let "answer = ($1 + $2)*$1" echo $answer so, 9 + 7 = 144 # # From Ryan Czerwiec: # The easy one is that you square the first number and add it to the product of the first and second numbers, or in other words multiply the first number by the sum of the 2 numbers, thus 2^2 + 2*3 = 2*(2+3) = 10. By this formula, 9+7=144. Another answer is that there are four equations, so a system of up to 4 unknowns can be solved. If you take the first number as an x-coordinate, the second as the y, and the height (z-value) of the surface as the right-hand side, 4 unknowns is enough to map a full first- order polynomial: z=Axy+Bx+Cy+D So for the x=2 and y=3 in the first equation, we get z=6A+2B+3C+D and so on. This results in: z=1/9*(41xy-13x-214y+512) For x=9 and y=7 (9+7=?) we get 1480/9. For the cryptological guys out there, I'd suggest solving for A,B,C,D where 2+3=10 suggests that A+B=C where A mod D =2, B mod D =3, and C mod D =10. Meeting the other 3 given equations would narrow down the choices, but there are still probably infinite solutions. Even tougher, make A,B,C,D all prime. # # And from our resident pragmatist, ARSC Consultant Alec Bennett: # I came up with an incredible solution to the Brain Teaser, based on years of experience in the computing field of using existing tools to find solutions to problems. It involved three simple steps: 1. Open web browser to www.google.com 2. Type "2+3=10" into search field. 3. Click "I'm Feeling Lucky" :D This works for a multitude of other problems as well. Your Mileage May Vary.
Quick-Tip Q & A
A:[[ One of the programs I use to preprocess my data occasionally hangs [[ when I give it a bad input file. Is there an easy way to set a [[ timeout for a command? [[ [[ Usually the program runs in under a minute, but it's embarrassing [[ when it hangs on the input file. [[ [[ Yes I'm trying to fix the problem, but I'm hoping a timeout will help [[ me avoid using all of my CPU time. [[ [[ My script looks like this: [[ [[ #!/bin/bash [[ ... [[ [[ # I'd like to be able to specify the following command not run longer [[ # than 90 seconds. [[ ./preprocess input [[ [[ mpirun ./myjob Thanks to Jed Brown, Don Bahls, Scott Kajihara and Ryan Czerwiec for an interesting variety of solutions to this problem. # # From Jed Brown # (ulimit -t 90; ./preprocess input) exit 1 sets a hard limit on CPU time so that ./preprocess is killed if it uses more than 90 seconds of CPU time. Unfortunately, this does not kill the process if it's just blocked (not using CPU). The following is not completely free from race conditions, but should be adequate in the present context. ( ./preprocess input & pid=$! for i in {1..90}; do sleep 1 [ -z `ps -o pid --no-headers $pid` ] && exit 0 done kill $pid exit 1) exit 1 # # From Don Bahls # Here's a perl script using the "alarm" routine which kills a command after a specified number of seconds. It sends a kill signal to the whole process group spawned by the parent process. I think this means you can send an arbitrary signal to the child process when the timeout occurs. #!/usr/bin/perl # # Uses Perl alarm() routine # See: http://perldoc.perl.org/functions/alarm.html # # use English; my $status=0; if ( scalar(@ARGV) < 2 ) { &usage(); exit(1); } my $wait=shift @ARGV; if ( ! ( $wait =~ /^\d+$/ ) ) { &usage(); exit(1); } eval { local $SIG{ALRM} = sub { die "alarm\n" }; alarm $wait; system(@ARGV); $status=$?; if ( $status != 0 ) { exit(2); } }; if ( $@ eq "alarm\n" ) { print STDERR "Command '@ARGV' exceeded timeout limit of $wait seconds!\n"; kill -2, $PID; # kill everything in the process group with signal 2-- SIGINT. # kill -30, $PID; # kill everything in the process group with signal 30-- SIGUSR1 (on OS X). exit(99); } else { exit($status); # this should never be used; } sub usage() { print STDERR "Usage: runupto s [command] ..."; print STDERR "\n"; print STDERR "Purpose: Runs an arbitrary command for up to 's' seconds\n"; print STDERR "\n"; } # # From Scott Kajihara # Assuming that Expect (command: expect) is available, the following provides a timeout of 90 seconds and gives an error message as well: expect <<EOF spawn ./preprocess input set timeout 90 expect { timeout {puts "Timed out after 90 seconds"; exit} } EOF # # From Ryan Czerwiec: # There's probably an elegant way of doing this in python. Here's my brute force bash solution: ./preprocess input & sleep 90 kill -9 %1 mpirun ./myjob This will kill the preprocess job if it's still around after 90 seconds. The drawback is that you're forced to wait 90 seconds even if preprocess ran very quickly (which of course doesn't guarantee it ran correctly!), which may or may not be a problem. If killing preprocess doesn't guarantee that myjob will crash quickly, add this below the kill command to exit before myjob runs, so you don't waste CPU time on it: if [ $? -eq 0 ] ; then exit ; fi If preprocess finishes in less than 90 seconds, and you can't afford to wait the balance of the 90 seconds before proceeding to myjob, this will work (fortunately, you've chosen bash, because this gets kind of tricky in csh/tcsh): ./preprocess input & #awk may need to be changed to nawk or gawk on your system a=`jobs -l awk '{print $2}'` ( sleep 90 ; kill -9 $a ) & wait %1 unset a #kill -9 %2 #if [ $? -ne 0 ] ; then exit ; fi mpirun ./myjob You can probably do without the "unset a" but it's in there for kicks in case having that set might affect anything else you're doing in the script. Uncomment the 2 lines after it if, like before, you don't want to let myjob even try to run if preprocess timed out. Q: Occasionally I use the "tee" command to save the output from the make command to a file. Unfortunately, the "tee" seems to mess up my error checking. Here is an example script: #!/bin/bash make 2>&1 tee make.eo if [ $? -ne 0 ]; then echo "Error running make."; else echo "make was successful."; fi A "make" error yields this disappointing result: mg56 % ./build.bash make: *** No rule to make target `fred.c', needed by `fred.o'. Stop. make was successful. It would be really nice to have my script exit if the "make" fails! How can I fix this? I can use another language to do this if that's what I have to do.
[[ Answers, Questions, and Tips Graciously Accepted ]]
Current Editors:
E-mail Subscriptions:
Ed Kornkven ARSC HPC Specialist ph: 907-450-8669 Kate Hedstrom ARSC Oceanographic Specialist ph: 907-450-8678 Arctic Region Supercomputing Center University of Alaska Fairbanks PO Box 756020 Fairbanks AK 99775-6020
Subscribe to (or unsubscribe from) the e-mail edition of the
ARSC HPC Users' Newsletter.
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text:
Swords into Plowshares is the blog of the Peacemaking Program and the Presbyterian Ministry at the United Nations of the Presbyterian Mission Agency of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).
Seeking peace. Striving for justice. Together.
The Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs South Sudan (OCHA Sudan) has launched new social media to tell about their work and the humanitarian situation in the country.
OCHA South Sudan works to identify humanitarian crises, and support the Government and humanitarian organizations to respond to emergencies in an effective and timely manner.
Learn about Presbyterians at work with the people of South Sudan.


text:
Universal Fit
Ultrasone IQ
"I went to shop for upgrade from my beloved Westone 4. Didn't bother to get custom. Aiming around $500-1000 options Audition candidates 1. Ultrasone IQ $730 2. AKG K3003 $1,140 3. Sennheiser IE800 $ 660 4. Aurisonics ASG-2 $653 5. Heir Audio IEM 5.0+ $ 690 Here are the mini review of IQ and versus of the other candidates. ..." --darkinners
iKEY Audio Q360 Ear Drumz Earbuds, BLACK
Frequency response: 20Hz-20kHz. Speaker impedance: 32Ohms. Cable length: 1.2m. Sensitivity: 115db. 3.5mm stereo.


text:
Latest Headlines
UFC 127 Panel Predictions
Posted on 26 Feb 2011 by Martin Foster.
The Panel Chris Murphy – MMA/UFC Writer Justin Barracosa – author of "Them's Fighting Words" Martin Foster – author "The 2nd Round Submission" B.J. Penn vs Jon Fitch Chris – Penn via 2nd round rear naked choke Justin – Fitch via 3rd round stoppage. I don't believe Fitch has will stand with BJ. And despite BJ excellence in the grappling world, aside from a rear naked, he...


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At least 17 journalists assaulted during Egypt clashes
New York, November 21, 2011 - Clashes between security forces and protesters in Cairo and other Egyptian cities have led to at least 17 assaults on the press over the past couple of days, including a shooting, detentions, and a beating by unidentified security personnel while in custody. The Committee to Protect Journalists condemns the attacks and calls on authorities to bring them to an immediate end.
"Journalists must be allowed to carry out their work without threat of assault," said Mohamed Abdel Dayem, CPJ's Middle East and North Africa program coordinator. "Furthermore, prosecutors have an obligation to investigate claims of abuse by military and police against journalists."


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Latest Laughables:
- 17 Cool Ways:To Lace Your Sneakers
- 17 People on Facebook agree!
- Practice Your Signature...WTF
- Tom Hanks... WISH GRANTED (shopped)
- A Brutal Wedding Card from Mom
This could explain the Immortal Keanu meme....ReplyDelete
He should be drinking wine with his latest issues with depression!ReplyDelete
"Be excellent to each other."ReplyDelete
Refracted light. It's just his jacket.ReplyDelete
His jacket is made out of wine?ReplyDelete
there's a water glass behind his coffee cup. looks like keanu just couldn't make up his mindReplyDelete
They serve water in those bottles when tap water isn't clean, and he ordered a glass of wine.ReplyDelete
no...just stop...take your high school chemistry/earth science out of here... Refracted light would also be taking effect on the bottle too, so please think before you start acting like you know something.ReplyDelete
Actually its the label, If it was refracted light then you would see his jacket through the wine bottle.ReplyDelete
or he ordered a glass of wine and a bottle of water? y'now, like any normal person might?ReplyDelete
this is really dumb. for one, when you order a glass of wine, they don't leave the whole bottle on the table. even if he ordered a whole bottle they wouldn't just leave it on the table. secondly, in many french restaurants, they will leave a glass bottle filled with water on the table.ReplyDelete
Wine is served in glass, water is served in bottle. There is a water glass behind the coffee cup.
I need to email my CV to Mythbusters
vodka and bloody backwashReplyDelete
No, it's refracted light. As they already stated :)ReplyDelete
The glass is in front of his jacket and is therefore showing the color of the jacket in the water - it ain't rocket science!ReplyDelete
Is that Mary behind HIM?ReplyDelete
the wine bottle is just being used as a carafe. i'm guessing he got the wine by the glass. so you have a glass of wine and a water bottleReplyDelete
fantastic! :-)ReplyDelete
well it's either the new Christ turning water into wine or the water bottle goes with the glass sitting behind the coffee cup.
probably had a meal with glass of wine and bottle of water followed by coffee...
Virgin Mary in the backgroundReplyDelete
i love it when people state "fake"
and then totally fuck up explaining it.
He's drinking jacket?ReplyDelete
No you twit, his jacket is red in color, which makes the glass of water in front of it look red, hence wine.
it's all water.
Lol @ "Be excellent to each other."ReplyDelete
Or perhaps he ordered a glass of wine?ReplyDelete
Have you guys never heard of people getting a glass of water along with their wine?! Pretty sure I've seen it happen...ReplyDelete
I thought it was cute. And Keanu turning water into wine is just as likely as anyone else doing it.ReplyDelete
LOL this is hilarious people! Cant you just enjoy it?ReplyDelete
KEANU IS SMILING OMGReplyDelete
Why do the comments always have to ruin something that's supposed to be funny.. Just shut up and laugh!ReplyDelete
that is just water in the glass... the image of his jacket was bent with the light, causing it to appear the exact same color as his jacket. Funny though.ReplyDelete
Maybe Keanu is Jesus, and turned the water into wine ? instead of paying for the wine..ReplyDelete
Fake!!!! This is obviously fake. I mean, you can tell his halo is real but what are the chances of someone wanting Keanu Reeves's autograph?ReplyDelete
You guys... it's supposed to be funny. Nothing philosophical. Nothing mysterious. Just plain ol' funny. We don't need an explanation, real or made up. Some of us just like a good laugh.ReplyDelete
It's is ridiculous how seriously people are taking this..ReplyDelete
Why don't... just enjoy the joke..?!!ReplyDelete
HE'S THE CHRIST, JESUS OUR LORD AND SAVIOR! LO AND BEHOLD!ReplyDelete
I feel bad for those of you explaining what is actually happening. You must enjoy nothing.ReplyDelete
White wine?ReplyDelete
just laugh next time?
also what idiot said it's red because his jacket is red? colorblind much?
Why must we get all technical?! Maybe it is scientifical. Or maybe he did order a glass of wine and some water. Or maybe he is the new Christ! OR MAYBE, we can just enjoy the picture and be happy. :) Yayy everyone!ReplyDelete
Jesus, people sure like to kill jokes with their angryfingers. No shit, for a second there, I thought he had the magical, divine ability to turn water into wine. Thank you for unveiling my eyes to the truth.ReplyDelete
Did he died?ReplyDelete
You fags trying to explain it are fags. Fags.ReplyDelete
For fucks sake people its a joke, obviously he's didn't turn the water into wine but the way the photo's arranged it makes it look so and that's the humor.ReplyDelete
hahahahahahahaha everyone who has said its refracted light is sucking it hardReplyDelete
My god
Have you never been outside?
Light refraction, really?
You're all fucking stupid
As it has all ready been stated you tards, look at where the large bottle of water is. It is also in front of his jacket, but is still clear. Why the fuck would he drink water out of a wine glass, when he has a water glass right there next to the bottle?ReplyDelete
Enjoy the humor maybe? That'd be a miracle...ReplyDelete
OR UM MAYBE HE'S JESUS. ROLL WITH IT.ReplyDelete
Feeding the trolls I see.ReplyDelete
There's actually 2 water glasses behind the coffee cup. Still doesn't change the fact that Keanu is Jesus.ReplyDelete
Wow, these comments are amazing. It's a joke, dammit. Just laugh and move on.ReplyDelete
Who gives a hoot?ReplyDelete
Daveystod for the win!!ReplyDelete
That does it. Next time I go to church, Ill bring a figurine of Keanu Revees with me, and place him on the alterReplyDelete
Enjoy the joke and stop arguing over possible explanations please.ReplyDelete
a lot of peoples here never drink wine....you need to know usually in a lot of restaurants they will sell you a glass of wine from expensives wines brand. Also if you cn see the bottle, thats usually the kind of water from thermal places or this "new age" brands.ReplyDelete
it could be a glass of wine,but i think its light refraction like stated b4 hear me out.if the glass has his dark jacket behind it it would appear to be dark and sense the water has more light behind it it does not give the illusion of being dark.
Everyone, please shut up... it's a joke. I'm sure the creator of the photo doesn't actually think Reeve's can turn water into wine, your need to rationalize this picture is ruining humor you blubbering idiots.ReplyDelete
You are all fucking retarded, the glass has water in it, the picture is clearly shopped. Its supposed to be funny so why dont you all just do me a big favor and SHUT THE FUCK UP! I mean god just look at the wine, does it look real to you? Fucking idiots....ReplyDelete
Keanu demands to have both a wine glass and water glass to pour his bottled water into!ReplyDelete
What you didn't see was that just before this picture was taken, that boy was in a wheel chair and thought he would never walk again...until Keanu came along...ReplyDelete
Are you 'tards actually debating this? Like the author is ACTUALLY sayings Keanu Reeves is Jesus? Seriously? Just shut up and enjoy the damn comedy for a change.ReplyDelete
PRAISE KEANU REEVES! HE WILL FORGIVE US FOR OUR SINS!ReplyDelete
I dunno, he has money, thus it stands to reason he's in a fancy cafe, where they do things differently. Definitely water and wine there, the water glass is behind the coffee cup. So there is coffee on the table too. Basically he has three different drinks and he would have to pee really bad but he is THE ONE, so he's fine. No doubt the kid saw him turning the water into wine, and knew who he was instantly! The autograph is just a cover for the miraculous healing, that boy was terminally ill.ReplyDelete
The bottle of wine is empty. The last of the wine is in the cup. But, I am a believer of Keanu being immortal. Also, love his movies.ReplyDelete
maybe its a bottle of table water and he ordered the glass of wine seperately...ReplyDelete
It's water in the glass.
If it were wine, the color would be constant across the whole liquid.
The dark area is caused by simple refraction. The water is not deep enough to be totally clear anywhere.


text: Story: There is no story, that is the honest truth. Then again, do you really expect a story from a parody? Churuya-chan is simply a chibi form of Tsuruya, the hyper-active friend of Mikuru from Suzumiya Haruhi no Yuutsu. This mini-parody-serie centers on one of four recurring "scenarios". These following scenarios might be of spoiler, but what is there to spoil in the first place?Churuya-chan's ongoing quest to find/have/eat smoked cheese (Smochi) and ending the small segments of roughly 30 secounds with "Nyoro~n". Skits demonstrating Churuya-chan's minute height or... See full review


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Top Definition
Jacking off over material you'd normally find offensive. Then, AFTER you've gotten yur rocks off you are thoroughly disgusted with yourself.
Melvin felt deeply ashamed and suffered from "jacker's remorse" after masturbating over the naked pictures he found of his mother.
by Mitchell_L June 02, 2009
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