People who write HTML are bitter. We've been bitter for the last 4 years or so, when it because obvious that MS was going to take the joke it called IE 6 and just walk away from fixing it, leaving that steaming pile of crap as everyone's default browser.
Well, I stand corrected. The fucktards at MS don't even let you disable remote access to your own system. (Yes, yes, fast user switching is good, but there's absolutely no reason to leave a damn port open.) I was thinking of 'remote assistance' that you can disable. So you can apparently disable you sending people invitations, but not them connecting without an invite. Real logical there.
And, FYI, there are almost no 'non-modular' settings in Linux. If it's a system parameter, it's usually set via/proc/sys, and not only are those changable after boot, that is, in fact, the only time you can change them. (Although a startup script usually sets them.)
About the only things can't change after boot are settings on devices you can't stop using. Like you can't set an IDE bus from 33Mhz to 66Mhz if a drive on it is mounted. Or rescan the bus. Although if your root filesystem is on an IDE drive, you probably have IDE support compiled in and thus couldn't change it anyway without reboot.
But I've changed my IDE bus speed when I've booted off a USB stick before. (Any USB drive is pretend SCSI. Even IDE to USB adapters.) Removed the ide module, reinstalled it with idebus0=66 or whatever it was.
And, of course, anything you randomly decide to compile into the kernel that takes command line parameters can't be changed without a reboot, but that's just delibrately being stupid.
Oh, there is one thing you can't change without a reboot. The damn VESA screen mode if you're using a VESA framebuffer. To access the VESA BIOS, the processor has to be in real mode, and Linux will not go into real mode, so it has to set the video mode before it changes out of it, right at the start of the boot process.
Although the VESA framebuffer is the framebuffer of the last resort anyway, as it has no acceleration, and most newer cards don't even have VESA support.
Oh, and there are security patches that let you change various security-related things until you set one specific value, and then completely disable changing stuff without a reboot. (And, sometimes, a specific command line at reboot.) So you can configure things via startup scripts (Instead of having to compile settings in.), but if someone breaks in, they can't change things without a very noticable reboot. But that's delibrate behavior.
Oh, and can you change the port of the linux kernel HTTPD without reboot?
Yes, you can. You remove the module and reinsert it to change it. How do you think you specify the port number in the first place?
And no one uses that thing anyway. It's just a proof of concept, written back when IIS+Windows was faster than Apache+Linux, and the theory was that tying it to the kernel would make it faster. Which it did.
But that wasn't the real problem, the real problem was that Linux had a poor way to have multiple threads wait on one socket, or something like that, and that's been fixed at the kernel level. So khttpd no longer outdistances Apache, although it's still slightly faster.
I still think some extreme web servers use the kernel httpd server for static pages, via some sort of pass-though, because their dynamic httpd server is overloaded. (Or is it khttpd passing though to theid dynamic one? That makes more sense.)
But no one uses it as an 'actual' web server by itself. It has no security, no CGI, and no dynamic content. It's not a real web server.
And 'Remote Desktop' isn't part of the kernel. I can start it and stop it just fine, with it opening and closing a port, but mysteriously when I change the port number, I have to reboot? No, that's just shoddy coding.
Serious. What kind of horrible wife would rig things to send someone on a pro bono trip to Niger, anyway? What would she do for their aniversary, surprise him by running him over with a car?
Seriously, all right-wing defenders that is Good and Holy, stick with the 'It was a conspiracy to get him over there to discredit the uranium story' story.
I know that makes you look silly, because that story needed to be discredited and brings up the fact Wilson was right. (Because it's apparently okay to expose CIA agents and cripple the intelligence gathering aperatus of the US if their husbands are factually incorrect or have a bias in their report, under playground rule #7, 'He started it.'.)
But claiming 'She rigged things to send him on an all-expenses paid vacation to Niger.' requires postulating a bizzaro universe where people actually wish to go to Niger.
There's a wall in the CIA headquarters, with stars on it to memorialize fallen CIA agents. It's got about 77 stars on it, but more than half don't have names.
Of the ones that don't have names, there are intelligent guesses about many of them. The CIA will not officially confirm, but they are probably correct guesses.
But there are about seven that no one outside of the CIA has any idea who they are for. When they were added, no country expressed outrage over the CIA spying on it, there was no suspicious death, no relative has come forward and said 'I know who that was', there's no cover name we know but have been unable to get past, no one has the slightest clue who that star is for.
Hey, don't blame me if Mission Impossible used actual spy terminology.;)
And there actually are people we've left to die in enemy hands working for fictional companies, and if they broke down and admitted they were CIA we said 'No they aren't. We have no idea what they are talking about.'.
Most CIA agents are the other kind, the kind that pose as aides to diplomats, with diplomatic immunity, and if they get caught they get the frowning of a lifetime before being sent home. If they do not get sent home, the US government has harsh language about 'diplomatic immunity' and has even sent in rescue teams.
But NOCs...NOCs are on their own. Screw up bad enough, and we might shoot you. And that's what they sign up for.
No, she wasn't a 'regular CIA employee'. You can't go from a NOC to a regular employee, because NOCs have elaborate covers that other agents use. And have been seen with 'coworkers' that are other NOCs, and, using their cover, have perfectly innocent chats with important assests in various countries.
You can stop being a NOC, or, in her case, just stop going on missions, but you can't ever 'out' ourself as a CIA employee.
That would be rather idiotic to allow...that invites other intelligence agencies to look back over your past trips and see who you were working for, who with, and who you talked with, and thus learn a hell of a lot about the CIA, and, incidently, kill our informants.
It might be possible to pretend to be newly recruited by the CIA, and leave your cover that way, but she did not do that.
Or considering the probable burn-through rate of NOCs and cover organizations, you might be able to out yourself after a certain number of years, if all the covers have been blown and all the agents and assests you worked with were dead, but I think we ought to let the CIA decide when that is, and we better hope that 6 years after she left active duty we hadn't had such an absurd turnover.
She didn't 'authorize' a damn thing, and wasn't in position to authorize anything.
She might, or might not, have suggested her husband, but everyone knew Joe Wilson and knew of his record in Niger. He had a ton of contacts that and had worked there repeatedly.
So they approached him and he offered to make a pro bono eight-day visit to what is, according to the CIA, 'one of the poorest countries in the world with minimal government services', Niger, which he spent visiting contacts and doing his job.
However, don't take my word for it. Demand Joe Wilson pay for his lovely eight-day vaction to Niger. So if the GDP per capita is $900, divide that by 365, we get roughly...three dollars a day manufactured per person.
Let's assume he ate and slept in the best places, costing up to, oh, twenty dollars a day! (The equivalent of 2000 dollars a day here.)
So if eight days costs, oh, about 200 dollars, plus 150 dollars airfair, so 350 dollars for that vacation. Or it would be if anyone ever wanted to go to Niger.
Of course, you'd then have to pay him for his job. How much is eight days of diplomatic research worth?
Jesus. When did Niger become the Switzerland of Africa, with people jaunting off on vacations to it? They barely have paved roads there.
Well, apparently we're in luck, because Brewster Jennings wasn't used a 'real' cover identity when abroad. When she visited other countries, she probably used another cover company. (The CIA does not want to talk about exactly how it operates NOCs, unsupringly.)
Of course, that doesn't gain anyone anything. Brewster Jennings was just located because it was on her FEC filing.
Other countries know damn well who she claimed to be working for when she visited them, and they've 'googled' those names, too. (And they have search capablities that makes google look like an paper encyclopedia.)
She didn't officially work for the US government in any capacity, neither for the CIA or the State Department, where almost all the non-NOCs operatives pretend to work.
She was a NOC, someone with 'non-offical cover'. Some people know what that means, but many apparently don't.
For those who don't, anything listing her job would have had her working at that CIA front, 'Brewster Jennings & Associates'. Completely unrelated to the government.
Which also means she was DISAVOWED if she got caught, not sent home with a stern note and public complaints like those with diplomatic immunity pretending to work for the state department.
Many times spouses of NOCs don't even know who they really work for. Although presumably hers did, considering who he worked for.
OTOH, you can have great fun outing CIA agents by googling "Brewster Jennings" and seeing who claims to work for them.
String theory can be tested. It just hasn't been tested, mainly because it's a big confusion at this point that hasn't settled down.
And if you honestly think they're 'teaching' string theory, you're confused, because, like I said, it's not even vaguely useful yet.
They're teaching quantum mechanics and relativity to physics majors, just like they always have. That's where you sit and down the math. Those are the 'real' things physics majors learn. They're just presenting string theory to them as a possiblity.
And there's a bit of a difference between teaching 9th graders in a required biology class a religious explanation of evolution with no evidence that doesn't solve any problems, and talking to college students majoring in physics about a possible new scientific theory that has no evidence but could resolve the large question hovering over physic's head.
And no one would have the least problem with biology majors in college talking about 'intelligent design', and in fact I'm sure they do. College isn't high school, biology isn't a required class, and people majoring in a subject are expected to know lots of stuff about it, including random theories and even discredited ones.
And, BTW, 'string theory' hasn't been in for quite a while.They're talking about m-branes now.
But they never stop to think that the entire reason it's there, publicly available is because some people want it, some people don't have a problem with it. There's not some secret think tank of deviants producing uncomfortable-for-some material just to muck with those conservatives. There is a demand, and hence a supply.
Oh, they know there's a demand. They want that stuff, but know they must never never never look at it because it is Evil(TM).
And if they can't have it, no one can. Plus, banning it makes it harder for them to get it.
Those parents are lying to themselves and everyone.
Almost everyone who has kids with the ability to play these games, let's call it 13-18, hit 18 themselves between 75 and 64.
'Free love' ring a bell? 'The Summer of Love'?
Underground abortion clinics?
The pretend 'reality' of the 1950s we all see on TV didn't even last out that decade. They might have grown up watching Leave it to Beaver, but when they hit college, they were smoking dope, barricading themselves in the Dean's office, and sleeping with random people.
And instead of spending the time making it work with standards and standards-compliant browsers...
Where, exactly, did he say anything about violating any standards? He said it didn't work on IE, which probably means it is using standards correctly, specifically CSS2.
I think what we ought to do with pretend that if you download publically available stuff, you can pretend you downloaded it an infinite amount of times. (Simply to save resources.)
And if you've downloaded it an infinite amount of times, you can now legally give those copies out one at a time.
Except that, despite the fact everyone seems to be ignoring it, copyright doesn't apply to admitted evidence.
I don't really understand where this suit is coming from. Yes, possibly they could be sued normally for giving this out, but if I own a copy of a rare book, and it gets photocopied for evidence by the court, I am not in violation of copyright.
It especially doesn't apply to the works made by people in the case. You can't claim copyright over something to keep it from being submitted as evidence!
You own a copy of the work the second you download it. Duh.
In fact, that could solve the problem right here. The internet archive could just download million of copies of the work, keeping track of how many it got, and give those back out, deleting each copy after it gave it out once.
Tada. No copying at all. It picked up a bunch of free copies printed by the copyright owner, and handed those free copies out.
To the original question, another poster pointed out that Japan, a county with perhaps the lowest teen birth rate in the world, is *very* sexually repressed.
Well, yes, but Japan is very repressed regardless compared to the rest of the world. But I don't think that's a sane measure of sexual repression...it really only makes sense within a society. So: Is sex repressed more than other things? Probably not.
Whereas in America we pride ourselves on individuality and expression and freedom and whatnot.
I.e., it's not some absolute measure. Obviously in a completely fascist society that controls every aspect of people's lives, teen pregnancy will not exist.
And I don't know in what universe Japan is the paradigm of sexual uprightness, anyway. Have you seen their porn? Have you seen their game shows? Their repression comes out in very...odd...ways. Just apparently not in the actual 'teenagers having sex' way.
Japan is a very wacked-out culture to start with. They haven't quite figured out what they want to be after WWII.
One question to get to the bottom of the high US rates is, why are the rates so much higher among blacks? I suspect that there are socio-economic explanations behind it.
Well, yes. In fact, it's high among the poor. Check out Washington D.C. stats, which is the only 'state' that consists of one poor inner-city area.
(Switching to per thousand.)
France: 20.2
Sweden: 25.0
Canada: 45.7
Great Britain: 46.7
United states: 83.6
These statistics are about a decade old, but I couldn't find any newer. So the US is outpacing the UK by 2, and France, of all places, by 4.
And here are the teen pregnancy stats broken down by state. Texas falls to fifth. (And that's for 2000, so we can see the average rate in America still '84'.)
You're right about New York, though. Either they have shitty healthcare or a lot of abortions or, more likely, some combination thereof.
And according to that sight, the teen pregnancy rate did slip back up 10% at the end of the 80s (Although not to where it started at), and now it's way under.
And other countries show a lot more nudity on television, at least. I don't think you can measure 'sex' on TV.
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People who write HTML are bitter. We've been bitter for the last 4 years or so, when it because obvious that MS was going to take the joke it called IE 6 and just walk away from fixing it, leaving that steaming pile of crap as everyone's default browser.
And, FYI, there are almost no 'non-modular' settings in Linux. If it's a system parameter, it's usually set via /proc/sys, and not only are those changable after boot, that is, in fact, the only time you can change them. (Although a startup script usually sets them.)
About the only things can't change after boot are settings on devices you can't stop using. Like you can't set an IDE bus from 33Mhz to 66Mhz if a drive on it is mounted. Or rescan the bus. Although if your root filesystem is on an IDE drive, you probably have IDE support compiled in and thus couldn't change it anyway without reboot.
But I've changed my IDE bus speed when I've booted off a USB stick before. (Any USB drive is pretend SCSI. Even IDE to USB adapters.) Removed the ide module, reinstalled it with idebus0=66 or whatever it was.
And, of course, anything you randomly decide to compile into the kernel that takes command line parameters can't be changed without a reboot, but that's just delibrately being stupid.
Oh, there is one thing you can't change without a reboot. The damn VESA screen mode if you're using a VESA framebuffer. To access the VESA BIOS, the processor has to be in real mode, and Linux will not go into real mode, so it has to set the video mode before it changes out of it, right at the start of the boot process.
Although the VESA framebuffer is the framebuffer of the last resort anyway, as it has no acceleration, and most newer cards don't even have VESA support.
Oh, and there are security patches that let you change various security-related things until you set one specific value, and then completely disable changing stuff without a reboot. (And, sometimes, a specific command line at reboot.) So you can configure things via startup scripts (Instead of having to compile settings in.), but if someone breaks in, they can't change things without a very noticable reboot. But that's delibrate behavior.
Yes, you can. You remove the module and reinsert it to change it. How do you think you specify the port number in the first place?
And no one uses that thing anyway. It's just a proof of concept, written back when IIS+Windows was faster than Apache+Linux, and the theory was that tying it to the kernel would make it faster. Which it did.
But that wasn't the real problem, the real problem was that Linux had a poor way to have multiple threads wait on one socket, or something like that, and that's been fixed at the kernel level. So khttpd no longer outdistances Apache, although it's still slightly faster.
I still think some extreme web servers use the kernel httpd server for static pages, via some sort of pass-though, because their dynamic httpd server is overloaded. (Or is it khttpd passing though to theid dynamic one? That makes more sense.)
But no one uses it as an 'actual' web server by itself. It has no security, no CGI, and no dynamic content. It's not a real web server.
And 'Remote Desktop' isn't part of the kernel. I can start it and stop it just fine, with it opening and closing a port, but mysteriously when I change the port number, I have to reboot? No, that's just shoddy coding.
Seriously, all right-wing defenders that is Good and Holy, stick with the 'It was a conspiracy to get him over there to discredit the uranium story' story.
I know that makes you look silly, because that story needed to be discredited and brings up the fact Wilson was right. (Because it's apparently okay to expose CIA agents and cripple the intelligence gathering aperatus of the US if their husbands are factually incorrect or have a bias in their report, under playground rule #7, 'He started it.'.)
But claiming 'She rigged things to send him on an all-expenses paid vacation to Niger.' requires postulating a bizzaro universe where people actually wish to go to Niger.
There's a wall in the CIA headquarters, with stars on it to memorialize fallen CIA agents. It's got about 77 stars on it, but more than half don't have names.
Of the ones that don't have names, there are intelligent guesses about many of them. The CIA will not officially confirm, but they are probably correct guesses.
But there are about seven that no one outside of the CIA has any idea who they are for. When they were added, no country expressed outrage over the CIA spying on it, there was no suspicious death, no relative has come forward and said 'I know who that was', there's no cover name we know but have been unable to get past, no one has the slightest clue who that star is for.
And there actually are people we've left to die in enemy hands working for fictional companies, and if they broke down and admitted they were CIA we said 'No they aren't. We have no idea what they are talking about.'.
Most CIA agents are the other kind, the kind that pose as aides to diplomats, with diplomatic immunity, and if they get caught they get the frowning of a lifetime before being sent home. If they do not get sent home, the US government has harsh language about 'diplomatic immunity' and has even sent in rescue teams.
But NOCs...NOCs are on their own. Screw up bad enough, and we might shoot you. And that's what they sign up for.
You can stop being a NOC, or, in her case, just stop going on missions, but you can't ever 'out' ourself as a CIA employee.
That would be rather idiotic to allow...that invites other intelligence agencies to look back over your past trips and see who you were working for, who with, and who you talked with, and thus learn a hell of a lot about the CIA, and, incidently, kill our informants.
It might be possible to pretend to be newly recruited by the CIA, and leave your cover that way, but she did not do that.
Or considering the probable burn-through rate of NOCs and cover organizations, you might be able to out yourself after a certain number of years, if all the covers have been blown and all the agents and assests you worked with were dead, but I think we ought to let the CIA decide when that is, and we better hope that 6 years after she left active duty we hadn't had such an absurd turnover.
But, believe me, other intelligence did this two years ago. It's not like I'm telling anyone anything new.
She might, or might not, have suggested her husband, but everyone knew Joe Wilson and knew of his record in Niger. He had a ton of contacts that and had worked there repeatedly.
So they approached him and he offered to make a pro bono eight-day visit to what is, according to the CIA, 'one of the poorest countries in the world with minimal government services', Niger, which he spent visiting contacts and doing his job.
However, don't take my word for it. Demand Joe Wilson pay for his lovely eight-day vaction to Niger. So if the GDP per capita is $900, divide that by 365, we get roughly...three dollars a day manufactured per person.
Let's assume he ate and slept in the best places, costing up to, oh, twenty dollars a day! (The equivalent of 2000 dollars a day here.)
So if eight days costs, oh, about 200 dollars, plus 150 dollars airfair, so 350 dollars for that vacation. Or it would be if anyone ever wanted to go to Niger.
Of course, you'd then have to pay him for his job. How much is eight days of diplomatic research worth?
Jesus. When did Niger become the Switzerland of Africa, with people jaunting off on vacations to it? They barely have paved roads there.
That's being covert right there. Her cover was still there.
Of course, that doesn't gain anyone anything. Brewster Jennings was just located because it was on her FEC filing.
Other countries know damn well who she claimed to be working for when she visited them, and they've 'googled' those names, too. (And they have search capablities that makes google look like an paper encyclopedia.)
She didn't officially work for the US government in any capacity, neither for the CIA or the State Department, where almost all the non-NOCs operatives pretend to work.
For those who don't, anything listing her job would have had her working at that CIA front, 'Brewster Jennings & Associates'. Completely unrelated to the government.
Which also means she was DISAVOWED if she got caught, not sent home with a stern note and public complaints like those with diplomatic immunity pretending to work for the state department.
Many times spouses of NOCs don't even know who they really work for. Although presumably hers did, considering who he worked for.
OTOH, you can have great fun outing CIA agents by googling "Brewster Jennings" and seeing who claims to work for them.
And if you honestly think they're 'teaching' string theory, you're confused, because, like I said, it's not even vaguely useful yet.
They're teaching quantum mechanics and relativity to physics majors, just like they always have. That's where you sit and down the math. Those are the 'real' things physics majors learn. They're just presenting string theory to them as a possiblity.
And there's a bit of a difference between teaching 9th graders in a required biology class a religious explanation of evolution with no evidence that doesn't solve any problems, and talking to college students majoring in physics about a possible new scientific theory that has no evidence but could resolve the large question hovering over physic's head.
And no one would have the least problem with biology majors in college talking about 'intelligent design', and in fact I'm sure they do. College isn't high school, biology isn't a required class, and people majoring in a subject are expected to know lots of stuff about it, including random theories and even discredited ones.
And, BTW, 'string theory' hasn't been in for quite a while.They're talking about m-branes now.
Oh, they know there's a demand. They want that stuff, but know they must never never never look at it because it is Evil(TM).
And if they can't have it, no one can. Plus, banning it makes it harder for them to get it.
What I think is scary in this country is we're discussing this like consensual sex and violence are somehow comparable.
Almost everyone who has kids with the ability to play these games, let's call it 13-18, hit 18 themselves between 75 and 64.
'Free love' ring a bell? 'The Summer of Love'?
Underground abortion clinics?
The pretend 'reality' of the 1950s we all see on TV didn't even last out that decade. They might have grown up watching Leave it to Beaver, but when they hit college, they were smoking dope, barricading themselves in the Dean's office, and sleeping with random people.
Where, exactly, did he say anything about violating any standards? He said it didn't work on IE, which probably means it is using standards correctly, specifically CSS2.
And if you've downloaded it an infinite amount of times, you can now legally give those copies out one at a time.
I don't really understand where this suit is coming from. Yes, possibly they could be sued normally for giving this out, but if I own a copy of a rare book, and it gets photocopied for evidence by the court, I am not in violation of copyright.
It especially doesn't apply to the works made by people in the case. You can't claim copyright over something to keep it from being submitted as evidence!
We need to find all web server operators who think like this, and download their pages several billion times.
We now own several billion copiesof each page,and can give each copy out (once) to whoever we damn well please.
In fact, that could solve the problem right here. The internet archive could just download million of copies of the work, keeping track of how many it got, and give those back out, deleting each copy after it gave it out once.
Tada. No copying at all. It picked up a bunch of free copies printed by the copyright owner, and handed those free copies out.
They have to do with stuff like duplication of out-of-print books, and the making of various copies for archive purposes.
Well, yes, but Japan is very repressed regardless compared to the rest of the world. But I don't think that's a sane measure of sexual repression...it really only makes sense within a society. So: Is sex repressed more than other things? Probably not.
Whereas in America we pride ourselves on individuality and expression and freedom and whatnot.
I.e., it's not some absolute measure. Obviously in a completely fascist society that controls every aspect of people's lives, teen pregnancy will not exist.
And I don't know in what universe Japan is the paradigm of sexual uprightness, anyway. Have you seen their porn? Have you seen their game shows? Their repression comes out in very...odd...ways. Just apparently not in the actual 'teenagers having sex' way.
Japan is a very wacked-out culture to start with. They haven't quite figured out what they want to be after WWII.
One question to get to the bottom of the high US rates is, why are the rates so much higher among blacks? I suspect that there are socio-economic explanations behind it.
Well, yes. In fact, it's high among the poor. Check out Washington D.C. stats, which is the only 'state' that consists of one poor inner-city area.
But pregnancy isn't much better:
(Switching to per thousand.)
France: 20.2
Sweden: 25.0
Canada: 45.7
Great Britain: 46.7
United states: 83.6
These statistics are about a decade old, but I couldn't find any newer. So the US is outpacing the UK by 2, and France, of all places, by 4.
And here are the teen pregnancy stats broken down by state. Texas falls to fifth. (And that's for 2000, so we can see the average rate in America still '84'.)
You're right about New York, though. Either they have shitty healthcare or a lot of abortions or, more likely, some combination thereof.
And according to that sight, the teen pregnancy rate did slip back up 10% at the end of the 80s (Although not to where it started at), and now it's way under.
And other countries show a lot more nudity on television, at least. I don't think you can measure 'sex' on TV.