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  1. Re:Article summary wrong (surprise) on Gilmore Loses Airport ID Case · · Score: 1

    I hate to piss myself laughing at your rather morbid post, but here I am doing just that. There's nothing like seeing one of your own die to really take the fight out of a group of people.

    Professionals are trained to handle that, and some unfortunate civilian people who've experienced death around them in the past will continue to function, but many people do not respond well to death.

    Even worse, say you managed to kill a hijacker - then you'd have to fend off all the assholes trying to beat the shit out of you for killing someone. I mean, don't you realise that was just too excessive? Couldn't you just disable him?

    Truth be told, it's easier for an untrained person to kill someone than it is for them to disable them purely because most of us don't know where to start disabling someone. At least when they're dead, you know they are disabled.

    I can't remember the exact quote, or even who said it, but it goes something like this:
    'We sleep soundly in our beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do unspeakable violence on our behalf.'

  2. Re:Article summary wrong (surprise) on Gilmore Loses Airport ID Case · · Score: 1

    Actually, taking down people in a plane is not as simple as you would think...

    Because of the constricted space, you cannot easily bring more than 4 people to bear on a single hijacker. One person in the aisle behind an in front of them - these people can self select for size, strength, etc. But the other two people, the people to the right and the left of the hijacker are random choices. If grandma has the one aisle seat and 12 year old tiffy has the other, you don't exactly have a killer team there. This reduces the number of usable defenders to two. That's without considering that not everyone is prepared to risk pain or death, even when the other option is certain death. That's a funny thing about humans.

    The other issue is coordination. You need to stop all 5 attackers at roughly the same time or hostages may die. Even a single hostage being killed will most likely cause panic among the victims / defenders, and then you will have the added problem of defenders fighting among themselves. You'll now have Bubba trying to take a knife away from a hijacker, but tiffy's mum will be all over him trying to stop him so that the terrorists don't kill her precious little girl in retaliation.

    Guns aren't the answer unless using ammunition that is guaranteed to fragment or otherwise not exit initial targets. Even then, the last thing you want is a plane load full of poorly trained hysterical people breaking out the cannons - this is the best way to guarantee innocent people getting killed. A single well trained marshall is a good idea, but the problem here lies with concentrating your entire defense plan in one person. He may be asleep when the manure enters the turbine farm.

    So do I have a solution? Other than the El Al way of life, not really. But to be honest, even a well coordinated team of attackers would think twice before trying to take a plane today. They'd have to consider a mass uprising and the consequences of that. Short of convincing your sheep that you are able to totally disable / destroy the plane if they misbehave, there is no simple way to take a plane anymore.

  3. Mod parent up! on Fedora Core and Fedora Extras To Merge · · Score: 1

    The parent has a very good point. Even in the recent interview with the Fedora maintainer, he seemed to go to lengths to explain why fedora is NOT just a test bed for RHEL (despite the RHEL 4 product manager telling me this in person).

    Fedora is a great test bed or desktop distro for bleeding edge users. With its 13 month life-cycle, it's all but useless as a server tool.

    I made the mistake of moving from FreeBSD to Fedora at home (we use RHEL at work because we can afford it :)) I'll be back on a BSD or Solaris by April when my current FC stops being supported but it's a lot of work to get all the services migrated back and tested. Although, it's still easier than moving to Debian :D

  4. Re:It would be nice on Fedora Core and Fedora Extras To Merge · · Score: 1

    But with Fedora, if the user cares about security then they HAVE to switch within the lifetime of one computer!

    Fedora is flat out unsuitable for a stable environment. It's only good for people who are happy to upgrade / re-install every 13 months when their current version becomes insecure and unsupported.

    That's why my home server is moving to either OpenBSD or Open Solaris - I'm tired of this re-install / upgrade game.

  5. MOD PARENT UP on Second Life Mogul Challenges Press Freedom · · Score: 1

    A lot of the discusion here seems to focus on dignity. If this statement is true, this person obviously didn't see dignity as a problem in the past when profit was more important.

  6. Re:If only... on The Impact of Immigrant Innovators · · Score: 1

    So what if he does 'pocket his options and sod off back to Norway' ? He's already directly contributed £150,000 to our government through tax and NI. A conservative guess based on that tax figure, he's probably also contributed about £150,000 to the economy unless he's been saving everything to go home. That's all beyond the jobs he's created and economic contributions that result from that.

    Yeah, you're right... he's an evil conniving furrin git just here to rape our horses and steal our wimmin... Oh no, wait - even those are better where he comes from (well, the women at least, I am not familiar with Norwegian horses)

  7. Re:If only... on The Impact of Immigrant Innovators · · Score: 1

    All I can say is that you must have a stunningly good accountant! I'm also an immigrant to the UK, and I pay between £30-35k per year in taxes and NI. That's even AFTER coming off of my emergency tax code that I had when I got here.

    Having said that, the area I live in has recently been flooded with new EU immigrants. There are a lot of LT, RO and PL number plates on cars in my neighborhood and some of these people really are taking from the rest of us. Most of the vehicles are not paying road tax (although they do still contribute through fuel tax), many are uninsured from the police I've had conversations with in the neighborhood, and very few of them would get through an MOT so they are more dangerous to other cars.

    The big plus I guess is that they don't pay the congestion charge :)

    Many immigrants from the recently added EU countries are unskilled or manual labourers. I know that a lot of them have struggled to find work despite the construction and hospitality industry in London booming. They're not mooching off of welfare though (I'm not even sure that they are entitled), but are instead living miserable lives.

    While this may not be related, drug and vice related crime in my area has soared since the additions of these new countries, and many of the suspects / alleged doers are of eastern European origin from the recently added countries.

    I guess what you can learn from this is that while immigration is a good thing, you need to have a structured system in place to support these people, especially in the case of mass immigration as we are seeing now. There needs to be some way to help these people find the right place in the country to be, where their skills are the most needed and their chances of finding gainful employment are at their highest.

  8. Re:Do they mean a cluster on Year of the Mainframe? Not Quite, Say Linux Grids · · Score: 1

    In the areas I've worked, we usually use cluster to mean a number of machines that share the load of a task in a way that allows for failover. We normally put a lot of thought into the design of the cluster and all machines do one task.

    A big plus side to clusters is the fact that each machine in the cluster normally knows enough about its role to operate in the absence of all of the others.

    I've only used grids for computationally intensive tasks. Failover and recovery is something that we just got for free as a nice side benefit. a grid, each engine may perform multiple different tasks at different times. It might be a workstation from 9-5 and an engine from 6-8. It might be a proxy server during the day and become available for grid work at 19:00. But best of all, we don't need to reboot, we just have the agent running all the time.

    Another big plus side to grids is that we can easily add and remove engines. We don't meticulously plan the number of engines when building a grid and more can be added with very little effort. We can have x engines dedicated to the grid, and for our month-end run we can up that by 50%.

    A downside to most of the grid solutions that I've worked with, they are controlled by a couple of machines. The engines are just dumb processing things that carry out the work as it is allocated to them. They don't know enough about their environment to deal with clients, take work, farm it out, etc. Without the main machines that control the grid, it becomes useless.

  9. Re:Linux Niche on Year of the Mainframe? Not Quite, Say Linux Grids · · Score: 1

    Yay you! You setup a desktop that will be obsolete and unsupported in 12 months. Is this really something we should be encouraging users to do?

    12 months from today you'll either have to futz with your setup (something most users won't want to do) or stop receiving patches and updates.

    This is one of the main reasons I'm moving my servers to Solaris.

  10. 64bit browser plugin on Which Text-Based UI Do You Code With? · · Score: 2, Insightful

    1997 can have its rant back when someone tells me how to run java apps inside firefox on a 64bit machine. Installing 32bit firefox on 64bit FC5 is more grief than I ever thought would be possible, and Sun don't have a mozilla plugin for 64bit Linux.

  11. Re:Scary! on UK Teachers Say Censor The Internet · · Score: 1

    Oh I so wish I hadn't wasted all my mod points yesterday, that had me spewing tea on my keyboard :)

  12. Scary! on UK Teachers Say Censor The Internet · · Score: 1

    This is scary because our Labour government are largely funded by unions. We also have a recent history here of seeing a problem and a headline, and legislating for the headline.

    If the tubes were censored, all that would happen is that this kind of movie would be distributed mobile to mobile as happens in Iraq right now. Distribution wouldn't be affected, just the means.

  13. Re:My, my... on UK Teachers Say Censor The Internet · · Score: 1

    We can't - we have stupid charities over here pushing for a law that will ban parents from smacking their children.

    Of course, they're not volunteering to step in and raise them on our behalf, so who knows wtf we are supposed to do ?

  14. Cameras are a deterrent, nothing more on Cameras Help Cops Catch a Killer · · Score: 1

    In the UK I see signs every day explaining how I am being recorded for my safety. But how often do you hear of a crime being STOPPED by someone monitoring the CCTV systems? All you ever hear about is the use of CCTV after the crime to identify the participants.

    Sure, arrests and convictions are up because of cameras, no arguing there. But are deaths down? Are rapes down? Are assaults down? I've not seen any statistics showing a decline in violent crime that coincides with the number of cameras monitoring an area.

    So great, you'll be able to avenge my death. Thanks, but I'd prefer more officers on patrol which might put me in a position where I can get help and not need avenging!

  15. Re:This is a non issue (mostly) on The Problem With Driver-Loaded Firmware · · Score: 1

    I couldn't find a mod to mark you as inaccurate, so I'll reply.

    This is NOT how things have always been. In the past, the firmware was part of the device. The driver was simply the means to communicate with that device. Loadable firmware is a new(ish) thing, having only popped up around the time of the winmodems some years back.

  16. Re:Better yet on Flying To the US? Pay In Cash · · Score: 1

    I'm in the same boat. I used to make 3 personal trips and 2 business trips to the US per year, spending several thousand dollars with US businesses each trip. Now I don't go there any more and it kills me :(

    Outside of my home, the US is one of the most beautiful places on earth, but I don't go there anymore because they made it clear that they don't want me there.

    I know the statistics for tourism and job creation in South Africa, and assuming the US numbers are even half of that, for every family like me that stops going to the US, 2 jobs are destroyed :(

  17. Re:Places to avoid on Flying To the US? Pay In Cash · · Score: 1

    Actually, we're screwing the foreigners over pretty badly right now... Ask anyone who packed up their life and moved to the UK on a Highly Skilled Migrant Programme visa (HSMP). After they got here, the government changed the requirements for the visa and now people who expected to settle here are getting kicked out after 2 years.

    In some cases, people had less than 30 days notice that they would no longer be welcome here :(

  18. Re:Just one more thing to nudge me back to Solaris on Fedora Legacy Shutting Down · · Score: 1

    I'd be on Solaris 10 tomorrow morning if there was a way of running Windows as a guest on there (VMware, Qemu, etc.).
    I recently tried to move from Fedora to Ubuntu, and detailed the fun involved here. It would have been easier to move to Solaris if not for the virtualisation thing!

  19. Is the hard drive usable as evidence ? on What Questions Would You Ask An RIAA 'Expert'? · · Score: 1

    I know nothing about the US legal system, but I have to ask... Is this hard drive even submittable as evidence?

    As far as I am aware, during a discovery phase of a lawsuit, specific items / information may be subpoenaed. I don't know the specifics of the request that gave the prosecution this hard disk, but they seem to have gone well beyond the realm of looking for data about file sharing.

    Surely the fact that the expert witness accessed and read a resume would mean that they have exceeded the bounds of the subpoena ?

  20. Re:Patents kill in a lot of sectors... on Nobel Laureate Attacks Medical Intellectual Property · · Score: 1

    I believe that was Zimbabwe. It was probably the only time in the last 27 years I've agreed with anything that Mugabe said...

    He said that they would take the grain if it was milled first, but he did not want to risk contamination destroying the agricultural industry (he had thugs and murderers for that). The organisation donating refused to have it milled, so he stood by his claims and refused the grain.

    That would have been brilliant if his henchmen hadn't been killing farmers at the same time, thus restricting the country's ability to produce its own grain.

  21. Small problem with your post... on Wiimote Straps Result in Class Action Suit · · Score: 1

    just shows why people enjoy lawyer jokes so much

    Bullshit - there are only two lawyer jokes. The rest are just true stories.

  22. Re:Linux is in a confused state on Linus Puts Kibosh On Banning Binary Kernel Modules · · Score: 1

    Firstly, nice going on the personal attack front... I'm hardly a hard-line nut and believe me, I make compromises with Linux every day... You have to to get around its weaknesses... Decent replacement for Powerpath anyone? That doesn't mean that I have to like it or that I have to approve when a prominent figure in the FOSS sector goes down this road.

    Secondly, I think that you will find that using binary drivers may very well be a violation of the license. This is one of the things that is still up in the air because of the GPL license... Is a driver a derived work? There are those that argue yes, and those that argue no. Personally, believe it is a derived work... it'd be damn difficult to have that driver without the GPL licensed Linux kernel.

    As for you wanting to use nvidia's closed source drivers - like I said... we're all for freedom until someone gets in the way of the shiny. It is quite possible that with the market today, specifically in high-end graphics and grid based render farms that we have enough clout to force the release of the specs. But we won't because much as we stand on soap boxes and whine about how evil Microsoft is and how much we want Freedom, we only really want Freedom if it doesn't inconvenience us.

    At least the OpenBSD guys are prepared to actually fight for freedom in hardware.

  23. Linux is in a confused state on Linus Puts Kibosh On Banning Binary Kernel Modules · · Score: 1

    Linux is punted as the 'Free' OS but Linus has always tried to remain apolitical. He doesn't have a problem with binary drivers, etc.

    I believe that this is a really bad thing in the long term. What use is a Free OS if you can't find hardware to run it on without being forced to trust someone else with no peer review?

    Hard as this is to say, I really agree with Theo DeRaadt on this point - binary drivers are just evil. We can't see the source so we have no idea what is in there (see the recent security hole within the Nvidia drivers for an example of how this can bite you) and we can't fix it when there are issues. The Nvidia vuln was around for months if I remember right and the last time I checked, the workaround was to run a beta version. We often can't distribute the drivers with or firmware with the OS, making it more difficult to provide something that is easy for users to use.

    Linus' continued acceptance of binary drivers removes the incentive to produce Free drivers or at least release the specs so that the community can write their own. Specifically in the server arena, we have enough market share now to apply pressure to the vendors, but as long as they know that they can get away with providing us a closed source driver to use our hardware, they have no incentive to release specs or work with the community.

    And this doesn't just hurt Linux. Linus is choosing to allow code that restricts the rights of the users in his kernel. That's his choice. But I personally believe he has a wider responsibility. Because Linux has a large share of the Free unix market, all of the other Free unixes are losing out and as a society we are becoming more and more restricted in how we can use the things we pay for.

    Despite his invoking the RIAA as someone we don't want to be like, the unintended consequences of his actions are doing the same thing that the RIAA do to us - restricting our ability to use the things we buy in the way we want to.

    The Linux crowd scream for Freedom when it's convenient, but when it impacts their ability to have shiny 3D graphics, they just roll over and take it from behind. Sad :(

  24. So important? Then why are the cops walking? on Liquid Terror Charges Dropped · · Score: 1

    If this whole thing was such a big deal, and so many lives were at risk, why are the police here threatening to walk away from the site if they don't get more money?

  25. No need to fork! on MySQL Quietly Drops Support For Debian Linux [UPDATED] · · Score: 3, Insightful

    There are a lot of calls here to fork the code. I'm a bit wary of calls to fork a project by people who lack the reading comprehension to understand the project. These may not be the best people to direct a project :)

    Just to clarify the crappy summary, MySQL are not saying that their software won't run on Debian or Ubuntu or whatever... It will still run on most OSs and distros, but if you are using Linux, MySQL AB will only sell you a support contract for MySQL if you are running on Dead Rat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) or Novhell (SLES?).

    Get it? Got it? Good!