At least I can try most of the various versions of Linux without having to pay $400 a pop.
And, once I have a version I like. I don't have to fork out another $400 just because I decide to upgrade my motherboard.
And a lot of the so-called 4000 versions of Linux are specific versions that people have built for their preferred application. An example would be my netboot CD that allows net-booting Knoppix from a CD -- which I designed so that I can give students in a classroom their own Linux box (without touching their hard drives), and also a way to do semi-automated backups and restore for public Windows boxes.
That's something that I (as a hobbyist) could never create with Windows (much less distribute).
There is a slippery slope here, but you're turning it into a vertical cliff. The only censorship advocated by American political parties today is censorship of "obscene material" containing violence, sex, expletives, etc. While I completely agree that this ought to be covered under free speech, let's look at this honestly: this isn't political speech. Alberto Gonzales would like to could get rid of porn not because it's critical of Bush, but out of genuine (from his perspective) concern about "corrupting" children.
You forgot about people who got censured and supressed for complaining about Bush's foray into Iraq "It's unamerican to criticize the president in a time of war".
The thing is that this so-called war isn't like WWII where the start, end and opponents could be clearly deliniated by declarations of war and peace treaties. This 'war on terror' has no specific start date, and not prospective end time. The civil rights that dissapear in the name of 'The War On Terror' are not likely to be recovered anytime in the forseeable future.
"The enemy" is the ephemeral 'terrorist', but terrorism has been so generically defined, at times, that organizing a general strike to signal opposition to an impugned government policy could classify as 'terrorism' and thus get the organizers quietly taken into custody with no notification to anybody (other than a body count a year later) and precious little in the way of civil rights.
"they're terrorists, after all, not citizens.
News organizations and reporters that portray Bush in a negative light are quietly frozen out of briefings, so they learn to be silent unless 'everybody else' is also criticizing him. The result is that public debate is quietly squashed.
Similar things can be said about criticizing large corporations that media organizations rely on for advertising revenue.
I've talked to the photo editor of a large daily who pointed to one of my images as an especially good news photo, "... But we'd never print it", because it would have promoted the viewpoint of the wrong side.
She talked to me of how one well-respected photographer's images couldn't be used because he was 'to biased' (i.e. he was with the anti-logging protestors). That day, her paper back-paged the story of a large local protest against then-current logging practices. A couple of days later, the paper printed on the front page an image that was credited to the logging company that the protests were aimed at. It was an image of a smaller pro-logging rally that the company had orginized in another city.
This is a local example that I was directly involved in, but there are examples elsewhere. Censorship is alive and well and living at a news source near you. It's just not official.. As Li Datong said in TFA: "A newspaper can evaluate reporters that way, and many do, but it can't be so blatant about it."
The creators of Vorbis were careful to avoid the known patents.
Granted, that doesn't mean that there's not some patent for 1+1=2 out there, but they've avoided all the known ones for mp3.
Although using MP3 is already pretty questionable, I could almost guarantee that using mm3-surround would start with me firmly in the sights of their patent lawyers. Thanks, but if I'm gonna go past MP3, I'd rather do it on an OGG base.
A really good job that pays well, at a company that I would give my eye tooth to work for and where I'm the only one who sees the ad (so I don't have to compete for it).
It's not long ago that you could end up dead in the American south for the simplest of slights to 'the way things should be'. 50 years ago, a 14 year old boy named Emmett Hill was abducted from his bed by an angry crowd, beaten to the point of unrecognizability, and shot in the head. His crime: Saying "Hi baby!" to a young white woman.
Earlier that year two other black men were shot -- one in front of a county courthouse with many witnesses. Their crime: casting a vote.
Nobody bothered to arrest the murderers of the two voters despite copious witnesses.
Granted, we're (mostly) past that point now, but the point is that supposedly 'good christian men' are as apt to deadly riots in defence of their way of thinking as are 'good muslim men'.
According to one EPA study, Maryland alone could lose up to 1000 square miles as a result of ocean rise and related erosion in the next century. Things like seawalls and breakwaters are only temporary stopgaps.
23 feet is how much the ocean would rise if you were to take a nuclear blowtorch and melt all of the ice on greenland tomorrow.
3mm/year is the current rate of increase in the ocean -- this comes to about 1 foot by the end of the century, or about one inch in 10 years. (more than
double the rate at the begining of the 1900s). The one foot rise that would result by the end of the century (if things don't speed up any more than they already have) is expected to result in some coastlines (like in Florida) being eroded horizontally by more than 150 feet.
If you have beachside property, I suggest you sell while it's still structurally sound.
Let's invade Greenland for insulting our state religion by allowing science to accurately predict events in their country.
Unfortunately, the acceleration of the glaciers was not predicted.
I guess the bushites are going to have to be content with using this "failure of science" as proof that 1. global warming models are inaccurate, and
2. Evolution must be wrong, too.
According to my electronics instructor, electricity should generally be treated with respect, but DC is a good bit more dangerous than AC.
Edison, for some unknown reason, hated Tesla and tried to kill his ideas of AC power distribution. He apparently had the (AC-powered) electric chair created as a PR stunt so that people would know that AC power was being used to kill people -- but it turned out to be relatively difficult to reliably kill people with AC power because an AC charge turns out to be an impromptu defibrulator, so you essentially have to cook your victim.
DC on the other hand, causes the heart to go into a constricted mode which is harder to recover from. I was taught to always handle AC with one hond only, if at all possible (to avoid a possible circuit across the heart).
If you're driving at 60 miles an hour and someone tells you that, just past that dip in the road is a sudden 100foot drop, do you slow down until you're sure, or do you continue to barrel along at 60 miles per hour until you can see over the crest of the hill (at which point it may be too late to stop)??
The 'things that science was wrong about' can, for the vast majority of them be placed into two categories:
Things that we've always believed in just because we were told so.
These things should, more properly be called 'pre-scientific beliefs'. Things like a flat Earth, the sun earth orbiting around the earth and that a 10lb cannonball falls much faster than a 1lb cannonball.
Truth of the matter is that many of these things didn't make much of a difference anyways.. Orbital mechanics doesn't mean much to someone for whom a 40mile donkey ride is an extremely long trip.
Things that we had a 'decent' model for that's been improved upon. Galilean mechanics, and newtonian physics would be examples of this. Newtonian physics, while technically 'wrong' are still accurate enough for most things as long as you stay below 1% of the speed of light.
Even einsteinian physics may be off, but it doesn't show up until you're trying to do things like measure the position and speed of Voyager (out beyond Pluto) to within a few metres, or build a GPS system accurate to within a few inches.
Thing is that the second kind of 'wrongness' isn't actually wrong. Science doesn't claim to be perfect (although it aims to be). It's intended to create ever-more-accurate models thru continuing cycles of observation, modelling, prediction and testing.
Back in the early '70s The Greenhouse theory was presented to me as an "interesting but unproven theory". Nowadays it's been studied, modelled predicted and tested to death. People who oppose it are now reduced to vague "but what if it's wrong?" arguments but have been unable to present models that test out better than current greenhouse models.
Yes, further studies will come up with better models of what would happen if we continue to burn carbon fuels at the rate we have been, but it's now extremely unlikely we'll wake up one day and realize that it was just a bad dream caused by a misplaced decimal point. We're well past the question of if. We're now looking at how much, how fast and what are the implications.
They're going to be publishing a paper in "Science" today that some of the glaciers in southern Greenland have tripled the speed of their march into the sea in the past 5 years, and are now pumping 150 cubic KM of ice into the ocean. If they don't accelerate any more, this'll that Greenland will add an extra foot of ocean rise by the end of the century beyond what had already been predicted by global warming experts.
1 foot of rise may not sound like much, but
what this means is that the US is going to have to spend billions more protecting New Orleans if they don't decide to abandon the entire city, and lowlands in other areas will have to be abandoned. Many other sea coast areas could end up receeding by miles from their current locations. This also has implications for the glaciers on antarctica which are much larger. Those are the questions that need further study. If is only a question for people who want to wait until we hit the wall before they bother to slow down.
The loudest voices in the debate are generally arguing one of the two extremes, and neither extreme position is terribly useful for collecting good data or presenting real solutions.
The loudest voices in this debate are the industrial lobby. The industrial lobby tries to make it look like the environmental lobby and the scientists are making unreasonable predictions -- because that's easier to argue against.
Most scientists and members of the environmental lobby are clear that we can't totally ruin the planet, but we can totally ruin it's ability to support 4Billion people -- and when that happens, we're going to be forced to make decisions far nastier than the ones we're being asked to make now.
from TFA:
"This means that by default your hard disk is encrypted by using a key that you cannot physically get at...
The purpose is to keep the data on my computer from ME. That way, I can't share my data with Linux, or recover an MS-trashed hard drive without Microsoft's permission.
They want to own my computer from day one.
Your CPU dies, and you have to move the drive to another box... Data? what data?
Find a way to recover your own data without an MS-owned OS? Don't tell anybody or they'll send the cops to your door a'la DVD Jon.
I'm just waiting for the first virus that flips the right switch and trashes people's data or holds it hostage.
I've looked for it a couple of times, and I haven't found it. The poster for it had, among other things, one of the characters -- a cyborg with a tank-track instead of legs.
It may have been lost in the mists of time and similarity of names, or it may have been renamed. I don't know.
If you find the title, I'll add it to my rental list.
You realize, of course, that this use of the tape is not supported and carries no warranty for fitness of purpose? Remember that it's the worst movie that I'd like to see the sequel to.
Might this cause an entirely different problem -- Trigger happy soldiers?
Ultimately, success in almost any occupation situation depends on making the people accept the new government. If soldiers are too trigger-happy and don't mind shooting people, you can end up with more innocent 'collateral damage'.
Dead non-combatants can make the surviving members of the family more hateful of your army. Some of them will go into the resistance, and the army now has more people to worry about -- so they become more trigger-happy. It quickly becomes a
death-spiral.
This would explain at least part of the problem that US soldiers are having.
(( Not to be confused with Arnie's well-loved series )).
The movie was Terminators (or The Terminators). It came out around the same time as Terminator 1. To be honest, it was boring and predictable.
Finally, it got to the point where I sat up in my seat and thought "OOOH! now we're getting into the interesting story line! About 30 minutes later, the credits came up.
I've always described it as the worst movie I'd love to see the sequel to.
Way back in the mid-late 80's The SGI flight simulater was hot. Granted -- the cheapest machine that could run it was about $20K, but I worked at a biochemistry lab, and had run (thick) Ethernet cables across 2 floors and down 6 flights of stairs, so we had 6 machines on the same subnet all capable of joining in a dogfight (often it would be one lab against the other).
1024x768 in 24bit color (8 for the low-end Personal Irises) made these machines the cat's meow back then.
The worst bug on the sim was that that the guy who did the aerodynamics equations didn't know how to handle stalls, so he just turned it into a uncontrollable spin. This made landing without crashing really difficult. The correct way to land (as I understand it) is get above the runway and go into a controlled stall. (spin - splat!). Unfortunately, a decent (touch) landing was the only way to refill your missiles, so you had to learn how to do hot touch landings (often while under fire).
I wasted hours on that game!
The early version of dog also had a watcher program that gave you an AWACS type view of a dogfight. I don't know why they got rid of it. (perhaps the military convinced them that it might give 'the enemy' some ideas -- the cold war was still on back then).
Back around 1996, I had an opportunity to interview at Microsoft, but I ultimately declined. Although it would have probably been interesting and a nice addition to my resume, I'm quite clear that I would have been uncomfortable the whole time I was there. I'd been in the Unix world for too long, and had very little respect for MS's solutions. Pushing that on unwary comsumers would have just felt too slimy for me.
Perhaps a similar unease finally settled on him too.
It may be that the 8 months is because he was having a hard time finding someone to hire him... ABC Coding Solutions (presuming that this is the proper company) seems like a rather pedestrian company for someone of his ability to move to.
I'm guessing that many Linux-based companies would just look at his resume, say "He's working at Microsoft?!" and put the resume in the circular file.
True, but at least the credit union now has a decent domain name (and the scammers have to do more work to repeat their trick -- and they will repeat their trick if you give them a chance.
It's not just that the name is the same, I think that phishing would classify as reasonable proof of 'use in bad-faith'. It might be that this domain name was taken when the credit union originally decided to go on the net (it was at the beginning of the.com bubble).
In any case it's a good domain name for them to get, and I think they have a pretty good case (security/fraud) for taking it away.
My question is: Did these dogs give equifax enough information for the cops to have some hope of tracking them down? I'm guessing that at least some of this information is faked, but if there's nothing here that the cops can use, then the identity information in SSL certificates is less than worthless.
Slashdot Mirror
And, once I have a version I like. I don't have to fork out another $400 just because I decide to upgrade my motherboard.
And a lot of the so-called 4000 versions of Linux are specific versions that people have built for their preferred application. An example would be my netboot CD that allows net-booting Knoppix from a CD -- which I designed so that I can give students in a classroom their own Linux box (without touching their hard drives), and also a way to do semi-automated backups and restore for public Windows boxes.
That's something that I (as a hobbyist) could never create with Windows (much less distribute).
And I repeat: "Who ever heard of that smarmy tart" ....
(emphasis mine)
I mean, who even heard about that smarmy tart before she was shown screaming for more on thousands of spamvertized websites around the world?
You forgot about people who got censured and supressed for complaining about Bush's foray into Iraq "It's unamerican to criticize the president in a time of war".
The thing is that this so-called war isn't like WWII where the start, end and opponents could be clearly deliniated by declarations of war and peace treaties. This 'war on terror' has no specific start date, and not prospective end time. The civil rights that dissapear in the name of 'The War On Terror' are not likely to be recovered anytime in the forseeable future.
"The enemy" is the ephemeral 'terrorist', but terrorism has been so generically defined, at times, that organizing a general strike to signal opposition to an impugned government policy could classify as 'terrorism' and thus get the organizers quietly taken into custody with no notification to anybody (other than a body count a year later) and precious little in the way of civil rights.
News organizations and reporters that portray Bush in a negative light are quietly frozen out of briefings, so they learn to be silent unless 'everybody else' is also criticizing him. The result is that public debate is quietly squashed.
Similar things can be said about criticizing large corporations that media organizations rely on for advertising revenue.
I've talked to the photo editor of a large daily who pointed to one of my images as an especially good news photo, "... But we'd never print it", because it would have promoted the viewpoint of the wrong side.
She talked to me of how one well-respected photographer's images couldn't be used because he was 'to biased' (i.e. he was with the anti-logging protestors). That day, her paper back-paged the story of a large local protest against then-current logging practices. A couple of days later, the paper printed on the front page an image that was credited to the logging company that the protests were aimed at. It was an image of a smaller pro-logging rally that the company had orginized in another city.
This is a local example that I was directly involved in, but there are examples elsewhere. Censorship is alive and well and living at a news source near you. It's just not official.. As Li Datong said in TFA: "A newspaper can evaluate reporters that way, and many do, but it can't be so blatant about it."
The creators of Vorbis were careful to avoid the known patents.
Granted, that doesn't mean that there's not some patent for 1+1=2 out there, but they've avoided all the known ones for mp3.
Although using MP3 is already pretty questionable, I could almost guarantee that using mm3-surround would start with me firmly in the sights of their patent lawyers. Thanks, but if I'm gonna go past MP3, I'd rather do it on an OGG base.
I'll post again when I finally wake up.
Earlier that year two other black men were shot -- one in front of a county courthouse with many witnesses. Their crime: casting a vote.
Nobody bothered to arrest the murderers of the two voters despite copious witnesses.
Granted, we're (mostly) past that point now, but the point is that supposedly 'good christian men' are as apt to deadly riots in defence of their way of thinking as are 'good muslim men'.
According to one EPA study, Maryland alone could lose up to 1000 square miles as a result of ocean rise and related erosion in the next century. Things like seawalls and breakwaters are only temporary stopgaps.
3mm/year is the current rate of increase in the ocean -- this comes to about 1 foot by the end of the century, or about one inch in 10 years. (more than double the rate at the begining of the 1900s). The one foot rise that would result by the end of the century (if things don't speed up any more than they already have) is expected to result in some coastlines (like in Florida) being eroded horizontally by more than 150 feet.
If you have beachside property, I suggest you sell while it's still structurally sound.
BTW: Canada's CBC has it's own take on the melting glaciers in Greenland.
Unfortunately, the acceleration of the glaciers was not predicted.
I guess the bushites are going to have to be content with using this "failure of science" as proof that
1. global warming models are inaccurate, and
2. Evolution must be wrong, too.
Edison, for some unknown reason, hated Tesla and tried to kill his ideas of AC power distribution. He apparently had the (AC-powered) electric chair created as a PR stunt so that people would know that AC power was being used to kill people -- but it turned out to be relatively difficult to reliably kill people with AC power because an AC charge turns out to be an impromptu defibrulator, so you essentially have to cook your victim.
DC on the other hand, causes the heart to go into a constricted mode which is harder to recover from. I was taught to always handle AC with one hond only, if at all possible (to avoid a possible circuit across the heart).
The 'things that science was wrong about' can, for the vast majority of them be placed into two categories:
-
Things that we've always believed in just because we were told so.
These things should, more properly be called 'pre-scientific beliefs'. Things like a flat Earth, the sun earth orbiting around the earth and that a 10lb cannonball falls much faster than a 1lb cannonball.
- Things that we had a 'decent' model for that's been improved upon. Galilean mechanics, and newtonian physics would be examples of this. Newtonian physics, while technically 'wrong' are still accurate enough for most things as long as you stay below 1% of the speed of light.
Back in the early '70s The Greenhouse theory was presented to me as an "interesting but unproven theory". Nowadays it's been studied, modelled predicted and tested to death. People who oppose it are now reduced to vague "but what if it's wrong?" arguments but have been unable to present models that test out better than current greenhouse models.Truth of the matter is that many of these things didn't make much of a difference anyways.. Orbital mechanics doesn't mean much to someone for whom a 40mile donkey ride is an extremely long trip.
Even einsteinian physics may be off, but it doesn't show up until you're trying to do things like measure the position and speed of Voyager (out beyond Pluto) to within a few metres, or build a GPS system accurate to within a few inches.
Thing is that the second kind of 'wrongness' isn't actually wrong. Science doesn't claim to be perfect (although it aims to be). It's intended to create ever-more-accurate models thru continuing cycles of observation, modelling, prediction and testing.
Yes, further studies will come up with better models of what would happen if we continue to burn carbon fuels at the rate we have been, but it's now extremely unlikely we'll wake up one day and realize that it was just a bad dream caused by a misplaced decimal point. We're well past the question of if. We're now looking at how much, how fast and what are the implications.
They're going to be publishing a paper in "Science" today that some of the glaciers in southern Greenland have tripled the speed of their march into the sea in the past 5 years, and are now pumping 150 cubic KM of ice into the ocean. If they don't accelerate any more, this'll that Greenland will add an extra foot of ocean rise by the end of the century beyond what had already been predicted by global warming experts.
1 foot of rise may not sound like much, but what this means is that the US is going to have to spend billions more protecting New Orleans if they don't decide to abandon the entire city, and lowlands in other areas will have to be abandoned. Many other sea coast areas could end up receeding by miles from their current locations. This also has implications for the glaciers on antarctica which are much larger. Those are the questions that need further study. If is only a question for people who want to wait until we hit the wall before they bother to slow down.
The loudest voices in this debate are the industrial lobby. The industrial lobby tries to make it look like the environmental lobby and the scientists are making unreasonable predictions -- because that's easier to argue against.
Most scientists and members of the environmental lobby are clear that we can't totally ruin the planet, but we can totally ruin it's ability to support 4Billion people -- and when that happens, we're going to be forced to make decisions far nastier than the ones we're being asked to make now.
Only another 99.99954% of the way to go! . Wohooo!
"This means that by default your hard disk is encrypted by using a key that you cannot physically get at...
The purpose is to keep the data on my computer from ME. That way, I can't share my data with Linux, or recover an MS-trashed hard drive without Microsoft's permission.
They want to own my computer from day one.
Your CPU dies, and you have to move the drive to another box ... Data? what data?
Find a way to recover your own data without an MS-owned OS? Don't tell anybody or they'll send the cops to your door a'la DVD Jon.
I'm just waiting for the first virus that flips the right switch and trashes people's data or holds it hostage.
It may have been lost in the mists of time and similarity of names, or it may have been renamed. I don't know.
If you find the title, I'll add it to my rental list.
You realize, of course, that this use of the tape is not supported and carries no warranty for fitness of purpose? Remember that it's the worst movie that I'd like to see the sequel to.
Europe?
Might this cause an entirely different problem -- Trigger happy soldiers?
Ultimately, success in almost any occupation situation depends on making the people accept the new government. If soldiers are too trigger-happy and don't mind shooting people, you can end up with more innocent 'collateral damage'.
Dead non-combatants can make the surviving members of the family more hateful of your army. Some of them will go into the resistance, and the army now has more people to worry about -- so they become more trigger-happy. It quickly becomes a death-spiral.
This would explain at least part of the problem that US soldiers are having.
The movie was Terminators (or The Terminators). It came out around the same time as Terminator 1. To be honest, it was boring and predictable.
Finally, it got to the point where I sat up in my seat and thought "OOOH! now we're getting into the interesting story line! About 30 minutes later, the credits came up.
I've always described it as the worst movie I'd love to see the sequel to.
1024x768 in 24bit color (8 for the low-end Personal Irises) made these machines the cat's meow back then.
The worst bug on the sim was that that the guy who did the aerodynamics equations didn't know how to handle stalls, so he just turned it into a uncontrollable spin. This made landing without crashing really difficult. The correct way to land (as I understand it) is get above the runway and go into a controlled stall. (spin - splat!). Unfortunately, a decent (touch) landing was the only way to refill your missiles, so you had to learn how to do hot touch landings (often while under fire).
I wasted hours on that game!
The early version of dog also had a watcher program that gave you an AWACS type view of a dogfight. I don't know why they got rid of it. (perhaps the military convinced them that it might give 'the enemy' some ideas -- the cold war was still on back then).
Back around 1996, I had an opportunity to interview at Microsoft, but I ultimately declined. Although it would have probably been interesting and a nice addition to my resume, I'm quite clear that I would have been uncomfortable the whole time I was there. I'd been in the Unix world for too long, and had very little respect for MS's solutions. Pushing that on unwary comsumers would have just felt too slimy for me.
Perhaps a similar unease finally settled on him too.
It may be that the 8 months is because he was having a hard time finding someone to hire him... ABC Coding Solutions (presuming that this is the proper company) seems like a rather pedestrian company for someone of his ability to move to.
I'm guessing that many Linux-based companies would just look at his resume, say "He's working at Microsoft?!" and put the resume in the circular file.
True, but at least the credit union now has a decent domain name (and the scammers have to do more work to repeat their trick -- and they will repeat their trick if you give them a chance.
In any case it's a good domain name for them to get, and I think they have a pretty good case (security/fraud) for taking it away.
My question is: Did these dogs give equifax enough information for the cops to have some hope of tracking them down? I'm guessing that at least some of this information is faked, but if there's nothing here that the cops can use, then the identity information in SSL certificates is less than worthless.