Been using Mandrake 8.2 for dev work for the last few months and I'm *very* impressed. Most of the traditional Linux pain has gone: stuff 'just works'. Like the IBM geezer said earlier, I can configure XFree86, I'd just much rather not have to bother...
what's needed, then, is a/distributed/ modeeration system - perhaps a bolt-on to the Gnutella protocol? RIAA/MPAA can't sue Gnutella, Inc., cos they don't exist - there are just people writing code and people running code. Yes?
hey... I was pissed. Er, drunk. Memo to self: do not post to slashdot when you've just got back from the pub. Beer good, slashdot good, beer plus slashdot BAD
Whatever the cause, temperatures in Alaska have risen by seven degrees in the last 30 years.
Why, isn't it obvious?
The sun's natural variations in output cause fluctuating temperatures here on earth;
Temperatures have gone up and down many times in the last few thousand years, regardless;
Scientists said we were heading for a mini-ice age opnly fifty years ago!
It's within the bounds of natural variation
It's all the fault of those pesky Indians and Chinese. Goddam those anti-american creeps!
It's a conspiracy by the World Bank / the interantional Jewish rulers / the freemasons/the Euro-weenies/ economic competitors to the United States / the UN / the World Bank
Don't you idiots pay attention to those well-informed Slashdot posters? They have all the answers as to why I don't need to worry about changing my lifestyle. Hey, a badly-reasoned ill-informed load of Ayn Rand bullshit posted on Slashdot by a complete nobody in Butt-Phuck, Nebraska, is good enough to get moderated up to +5, Informative -- so it must be true!!
Or I could pay attention to real scientists who, like, know what they're talking about. But that would just be falling into the trap prepared by ${evil_people}!
Disclaimer: I work for McAfee, on our VirusScan anti-virus product. I've read various internal discussions about this thing, and the threat it poses. I've met, and spoken with, Vinny (Gullotto), the AV expert quoted in the/. story.
This is NOT a hoax, or FUD. There IS FUD in the A/V industry, but this isn't it. The press release does a bad job of explaining why the JPEG virus is a big deal. However it DOES say (clearly) that this virus is not a danger in itself - it's a proof of concept. Without going into more detail than would be prudent, *please* believe me when I say that there are significant reasons (a) why this PoC virus is significant, and (b) why virus writers will be exploiting concepts from this virus to make Very Bad Malware. Hey , why should it bother me, I run Linux! Well *i* run Linux too, in fact I develop my code on Linux; it will affect us when the world's NSP backbones are choked with worm scans, ARP requests and buffer-overflowing HTTP requests. This IS going to happen. And, whatever Sophos would like you to believe, this is NOT a case of NAI/McAfee whipping up a hype over nothing. I can't say anything more, but I'm going to take the chance of losing my job by not posting anonymously in order to emphasise how much I mean this.
It's sooooooo frustrating knowing things about this and not being able to talk about it...
> This is America, and everyone has a right to a fair > trial
LOL... sure, and you're all equal in the eyes of the law, whether you're a white male millionaire with three houses, a helicopter, who belongs to the same clubs (and went to the same schools) as the bloatocracy of the state's machinery, or an unemployed black man living in poverty in an inner-city. Suuuurrrreeee... and the easter bunny comes and leaves you chocolate eggs. Give me a break!
This was always inevitable. Small ISPs buy transit from larger upstreams who (usually) bill at the 95th percentile - ie., if only 4% of your users are P2P obsessives sharing 40 gigs of mp3z etc, you may get away lightly. But if 30% of your users are permanently up- and down-loading tons of ffuts, it's going to hurt someone's bottom line.
Incidentally... I imagine P2P usage would severely impact peering arrangements. Suppose ISP A supplies eyeballs to ISP B, who carries lots of content, peering arrangements have to take account of that ratio. If the eyeballs suddenly become servers - well aggregate 250 128Kbps streams and you can bet the little dials on the front of people's routers are going to start spinning very fast. Anyone from a real network care to comment?
This is a little late in the game for a book that discusses ways to fork off a separate process for each hit on your dynamic pages. I'm sure the authors are studs and all, but if you're programming web applications in Perl, how about using mod_perl, and if you're going to do that, why not bite the bullet and buy Lincoln Stein and Doug Eachern's book from O'Reilly? It is a classic.
Not reading the article - bad; not reading the writeup at the top of the page before commenting -- very bad; -1 redundant post moderated up to 5: mind-blowing. Moderators, if you can't be arsed to read the article, don't moderate! Sheesh...
There's a bug with large background images slowing page rendering; I haven't checked for a few weeks, it may be fixed now. Otherwise, perhaps it takes a long time because it's, like, a big file? Have you tried saving it off locally and reloading? (clear the cache if you want to be really anal about it;)
* "IE compatability mode" -- if you do View / Page info, you'll see that pages without a DTD at the top are rendered in "quirks" mode. This tries to cope with broken HTML of the sort that litters the web.
Tobe honest, I don't see the other problems you mention. When you say "mozilla is often the first app to lose its icons and its interface starts falling to pieces..." -- well this just never happens to me, on NT4 or Linux. Are you trying to use win9x or something? If so, I suggest you nuke that PoS first, install a real operating system (I'd count NT as "real", others may disagree;) and a pound gets a penny most of your issues will clear up.
The other major cause of issues is installing over a previous version. Try nuking your ~/mozilla (on Windows: %SYSTEMROOT%/profiles/[username]/Application Data/Mozilla ) and reinstalling.
OK this is going to be a bit of an incoherent ramble but... WTF...
Enormous thanks and my congratulations to everyone involved with Mozilla! And to all those doubters and cynics who've been whining about bloat, performance, features,... or indeed anything at all: you can stop it now. Mozilla is the best web browser in existence today (looking only at the browser component): it supports FAR more standards than anything else, AND it copes with old broken non-compliant HTML, AND it renders pages fast, AND it (the browser) starts up like greased lightning in -turbo mode... in fact, it's faster than Internet Explorer on this Windows box. It's also running on the nearby Linux machine. Name me ONE browser that compiles and runs on more platforms? I think moz even gives lynx a run for it's money on that front... and tabbed browsing.... tab groups... *sigh* it just gfoes on and on... threaded news/mail reader... XUL, the coolest cross-platform GUI tools and component set EVER (that I am aware of: I'm going to be the front end to my employer's anti-virus software build and test rigs using XUL, now that the APIs are frozen XULBuilder will blossom into life once more...
Not only is it a category killer browser - irtonically hte individual apps are themselves (pretty much) category killers. mail/news easily trounces Outlook for me - apart from the secuirty stuff, it does threading. Yep, no threading in Outlook! And what's more --- no ads (Opera), no security holes (IE), and best of all, Mozilla is Free (Libre) Software.
Many thanks also to those of the rest of us who kept the faith, spending long expensive nights downloading another flakey nightly build, who never hit EXIT on a moz process until it had crashed...
Personally I feel more involved with Moz than any other Free Software project, I've been testing, logging bugs in Bugzilla, reading the docs, status reports and mozillazine ever since the news was first announced here on Slashdot. Anyone else out there coming to the London party? Gervase?
A million thanks to everyone who hacked code or helped out on the project in any way. Mozilla is the most enjoyable software I've ever used, apart from Perl that is. Oh frabjous day! Calloo, callay!!! =) *does a little dance*
PS: and a special thanks to Asa and the rest of the evangelist types who turn up here reliably and calmy refuting the FUD and bollocks that have come from Slahdotters over the years. Go back a couple of years and pick out a Slashdot moz story -- you lot/hated/ it and it sometimes seemed no-one else believed it would ever work...)
the same chunk of legislation also contains some truly dreadful provisions regarding retention of ISP traffic and logs - seven years, I believe, and I'm not sure if they've yet backed down from the original hilarious requirement that ISPs maintain archives of *all data* they transit for the same seven years. See extensive coverage from the last year or so at The Register and the BBC plus of course numerous issues of Need To Know. What I don't understand is why "they" (gub'mint's everywhere) seem to think that the answer to the failures that lead to 9/11 is more of the same. Unless... but that would just be paranoia.
They'd better correct THIS, too. From the FAQ page:
Will users be able to download free versions of UnitedLinux for non-commercial uses, similar to how Linux is freely available today?
Yes, UnitedLinux sources will be made available for free download as soon as version 1 is released.
(emphasis mine.)
Er... I really hope that's some sort of typo by the dweebs in marketing...? Since when did the GPL distinguish 'commercial' from 'non-commerical' usage? (or any other Free software license, come to that!) As we know, Caldera has been pioneering the seemingly impossible task of distributing a restricted version of linux (per seat licensing...) Is there a Bruce Perens in the house?;)
I have now officially lost any respect I ever had for US legislative bodies. That anyone could even SUGGEST such a ludicrous idea and get it floated this high in the media shows that the very concept of Law as a construct of civil society is dead and buried. How ironic it is that the *AA seem to have read Gibson, Stephenson et al, and decided that they're happy to be the bad guys. Well fine, if that's what you want, that's what you get. I am going to do anything I can legally do to destroy those companies and their businesses. It's a shame to have to expend valuable cycles on destruction but it's going to be destruction through the creation of something better, which is what I will be trying to help with. Cos these bandits, these crooked, thieving, coniving, hypocritical, moronic, flabby, complacent, lazy, arrogant, greedy BASTARDS have decided that they want to do this the hard way. Well, *AA lawyers -- (you know they're out there, scouring these comments for more posts to try to damage the name of the Free Software community, as Seth thingumebob of the FSF pointed out eleswhere, they've already done this with deCSS in New York - read the court docs, there are quotes lifted straight from Slashdot!) -- to those lawyers I say, enjoy your fees, folks, and I hope you can sleep at night.
I became strangely obsessed with that whole incident a year or so back. I ended up grovelling through various NASA archives trying to find the pics (which of course I've lost the URIs for... so now guess I just HAVE to go back to the Project Apollo site and look for them again;)
what fascinated me was that they'd landed an Apollo mission close enough to the old Surveyor to go looking for, and find, it. Of course the Surveyor didn't do take a Pathfinder like "picture of me on the moon" (not having a rover to take it with), so the two pics I found are I think the only ones of a robotic craft that's completed it's mission and gone to sleep. I can't really articulate why this fascinates me -- it's something like the reason divers explore shipwrecks. An historical artefact washed up on the shores of time (maaaan...) er, or something.
1. Yes, the guy's a fucker. Are the US now in the business of turfing out repressive dictatorships? Cos there are a lot more closer to home than Iraq.
2. The US forced out the head of the UN chemical weapons inspectorate because he was about to negotiate their way back into the country (which obviously wouldn't have suited the US' desire to find a pretext to bomb the crap out of them.) Oh, and did you know that the US has a unique opt-out clause -- they can deny inspections of any facility,at any time, without giving a reason.
3. ATTACKS ON ISRAELI CIVILIANS?! Oh, the horror. What about the US killing >5000 civilians in Afghanistan? Guess you'd better start bombing yourselves then.
And he might have nukes... so what? So do India and Pakistan, both countries seem to be prepared to use them, and they're coming VERY close to war right now. You do know about that, right? Guess that must be why Bush is threatening to bomb Karachi... NOT
It's an attempt to stamp out the perception of a soldier being a mindless automaton, a concept well overdue.
Yeah, sure. That's why the first 12 weeks of basic training are about beating out the slightest tendency to do anything but obey orders, immediately, without question. All armies do this, for a very good reason: if soldiers were to stop and think about what they were doing, the majority -- well, the smart ones anyway - would be over the hills and far away. Otherwise, who'd blow civilians to bits when Gee Bubblehead wants to look noble & patriotic on the 9o'clock news?
This sort of thing is the answer to that constant refrain when one tries to protest or object to the ever-increasing government surveillance, information and data interception and storage. "I've done nothing wrong, so I've got nothing to hide." You may not have broken the law, but mebbe your husband would be interested to know about that drunken fling a couple of years ago at the office christmas party, and say, aren't these expenses claims a bit... creative? And tell me, why ARE you browsing gay porn from home, what with you being married with kids? and so on, and on. Humans are of course the weakness in all these systems promoted by clue-lite technocrats - those politicians who advocate technological solutions to everything, but who don't read the RISKS digest, or CryptoGram, or Incidents, Bugtraq, "Crash!" (the Tonty Collins book, not the Ballard one...) and so on.
But this is definitely one of the few areas where NT/2K still scores over (most) Unices (as far as I know, please cluestick me if I'm wrong...) , namely it's trivially easy to enforce finely grained password policies. On NT, it's a case of find the dialog, check the options you want to apply , enter some numbers (length to time to remember old passwords and reject them, how often to force changes), minimum length, whether to force uppercase/ digits / alpha-numericals etc. I've been using Linux, BSD and Solaris for three years professionally, and tinkering at home for several years before that, and I frankly wouldn't know where to start to enforce password policies. (Well, OK, I'd use Google, the LDP, how-tos etc, but you see my point.)
That said, I just installed Mandrkae 8.3 out of curiousity to see what a Windows-friendly distro looks like, and I'm VERY impressed. Bob Young is wrong - IMHO - I think Linux/IS/ going to take over the desktop. I just made a 50 quid bet with my manager on the subject anyway...
My employer pays a fat bonus for coming up with a patentable idea (and supplies lawyers to rewrite it into the proper language, file it, etc.) You then get another fat bonus (ten times bigger, and about one third of my total salary) if it's ever licensed. The carpark is full of TVRs, Porsche, and Lotus sports cars; there's a "no mortgage" club of employees who've paid theirs off. In this atmosphere, trying to explain why software patents are evil is HARD, and frankkly, it HURTS to be refusing free money because I consider it unethical. It would be a lot easier to feel smug about my principles if I wasn't living in a shithole with no chance of (eg) buying my own place to live (this is the UK, house prices are astronomical), hell, even of going somewhere on holiday. I don't even have a stereo or TV. Why am I doing this perverse thing?! Am I mad?? *shrug* The only positive reinforcement I ever get for doing this crazy thing comes from reminding myself that you folks (slashdotters, and the community in general) would presumably thank me for not going to the dark side. I just wish there was more money in doing the Right Thing:\
Re:Your review is inaccurate as well...
on
Review: U-571
·
· Score: 2
Oooh scarey, this EXCELLENT review has pissed off one of the war nuts...*yawn*. I'm sorry, but obsessive war fans freak me out almost as much as they bore me. "The average American soldier carried over 50lbs of equipement..." yeah, and I'm sure you could tell us the calibre of every bullet, the model & manufacturer of every gun. Here's a free clue, check out the meaning of the words "sad", "obsessive" and "gun-nut". Er, in the rest of the world that is, not Buttfuck Nebraska.
The only thing wrong with this review of this PIECE OF SHIT movie is that it should have been out the week the film came out. But it's good to see slashdot not afraid to carry opinionated reviews. 10/10 to chrisd (whoever je may be.) Oh, right, he doesn't write like a professional reviewer... listen if I wanted a professional review I'd real the Guardian, Obs or Indie... I cmoe here for the nerd-eye view. And the canonical nerd eye view of that PIECE OF SHIT movie is that it stank, even if one were to suspend suspicion of the "fuck reality, let's make Our Boys the heroes!" motivations of Hollywood.
What was the director's name again - Mastow? I'll be looking out for that name on the nextPIECE OF SHIT movie to clog my local cinema.
Slashdot Mirror
Been using Mandrake 8.2 for dev work for the last few months and I'm *very* impressed. Most of the traditional Linux pain has gone: stuff 'just works'. Like the IBM geezer said earlier, I can configure XFree86, I'd just much rather not have to bother...
what's needed, then, is a /distributed/ modeeration system - perhaps a bolt-on to the Gnutella protocol? RIAA/MPAA can't sue Gnutella, Inc., cos they don't exist - there are just people writing code and people running code. Yes?
hey... I was pissed. Er, drunk. Memo to self: do not post to slashdot when you've just got back from the pub. Beer good, slashdot good, beer plus slashdot BAD
Why, isn't it obvious?
Don't you idiots pay attention to those well-informed Slashdot posters? They have all the answers as to why I don't need to worry about changing my lifestyle. Hey, a badly-reasoned ill-informed load of Ayn Rand bullshit posted on Slashdot by a complete nobody in Butt-Phuck, Nebraska, is good enough to get moderated up to +5, Informative -- so it must be true!!
Or I could pay attention to real scientists who, like, know what they're talking about. But that would just be falling into the trap prepared by ${evil_people}!
*double* disclaimer: in the above comment, I am (of course) speaking only for myself, not for McAfee or NAI. Apologies for replying to my own post.
This is NOT a hoax, or FUD. There IS FUD in the A/V industry, but this isn't it. The press release does a bad job of explaining why the JPEG virus is a big deal. However it DOES say (clearly) that this virus is not a danger in itself - it's a proof of concept. Without going into more detail than would be prudent, *please* believe me when I say that there are significant reasons (a) why this PoC virus is significant, and (b) why virus writers will be exploiting concepts from this virus to make Very Bad Malware. Hey , why should it bother me, I run Linux! Well *i* run Linux too, in fact I develop my code on Linux; it will affect us when the world's NSP backbones are choked with worm scans, ARP requests and buffer-overflowing HTTP requests. This IS going to happen. And, whatever Sophos would like you to believe, this is NOT a case of NAI/McAfee whipping up a hype over nothing. I can't say anything more, but I'm going to take the chance of losing my job by not posting anonymously in order to emphasise how much I mean this.
It's sooooooo frustrating knowing things about this and not being able to talk about it...
> This is America, and everyone has a right to a fair > trial
LOL... sure, and you're all equal in the eyes of the law, whether you're a white male millionaire with three houses, a helicopter, who belongs to the same clubs (and went to the same schools) as the bloatocracy of the state's machinery, or an unemployed black man living in poverty in an inner-city. Suuuurrrreeee... and the easter bunny comes and leaves you chocolate eggs. Give me a break!
This was always inevitable. Small ISPs buy transit from larger upstreams who (usually) bill at the 95th percentile - ie., if only 4% of your users are P2P obsessives sharing 40 gigs of mp3z etc, you may get away lightly. But if 30% of your users are permanently up- and down-loading tons of ffuts, it's going to hurt someone's bottom line.
Incidentally... I imagine P2P usage would severely impact peering arrangements. Suppose ISP A supplies eyeballs to ISP B, who carries lots of content, peering arrangements have to take account of that ratio. If the eyeballs suddenly become servers - well aggregate 250 128Kbps streams and you can bet the little dials on the front of people's routers are going to start spinning very fast. Anyone from a real network care to comment?
Right click on the img, do "view image". I get a screenful of garbage as moz renders the PNG as text. How amusing
This is a little late in the game for a book that discusses ways to fork off a separate process for each hit on your dynamic pages. I'm sure the authors are studs and all, but if you're programming web applications in Perl, how about using mod_perl, and if you're going to do that, why not bite the bullet and buy Lincoln Stein and Doug Eachern's book from O'Reilly? It is a classic.
Not reading the article - bad; not reading the writeup at the top of the page before commenting -- very bad; -1 redundant post moderated up to 5: mind-blowing. Moderators, if you can't be arsed to read the article, don't moderate! Sheesh...
> dhtml... takes forever to load those
There's a bug with large background images slowing page rendering; I haven't checked for a few weeks, it may be fixed now. Otherwise, perhaps it takes a long time because it's, like, a big file? Have you tried saving it off locally and reloading? (clear the cache if you want to be really anal about it ;)
Tobe honest, I don't see the other problems you mention. When you say "mozilla is often the first app to lose its icons and its interface starts falling to pieces..." -- well this just never happens to me, on NT4 or Linux. Are you trying to use win9x or something? If so, I suggest you nuke that PoS first, install a real operating system (I'd count NT as "real", others may disagree ;) and a pound gets a penny most of your issues will clear up.
The other major cause of issues is installing over a previous version. Try nuking your ~/mozilla (on Windows: %SYSTEMROOT%/profiles/[username]/Application Data/Mozilla ) and reinstalling.
"Score:0, Insightful"
/fun/."
Freeeowww! it was a joke!! Tchuh!
"Organic lifeforms have *no* sense of
OpenBSD - the most secure Linux there never was ;)
Enormous thanks and my congratulations to everyone involved with Mozilla! And to all those doubters and cynics who've been whining about bloat, performance, features,... or indeed anything at all: you can stop it now. Mozilla is the best web browser in existence today (looking only at the browser component): it supports FAR more standards than anything else, AND it copes with old broken non-compliant HTML, AND it renders pages fast, AND it (the browser) starts up like greased lightning in -turbo mode
Not only is it a category killer browser - irtonically hte individual apps are themselves (pretty much) category killers. mail/news easily trounces Outlook for me - apart from the secuirty stuff, it does threading. Yep, no threading in Outlook! And what's more --- no ads (Opera), no security holes (IE), and best of all, Mozilla is Free (Libre) Software.
Many thanks also to those of the rest of us who kept the faith, spending long expensive nights downloading another flakey nightly build, who never hit EXIT on a moz process until it had crashed...
Personally I feel more involved with Moz than any other Free Software project, I've been testing, logging bugs in Bugzilla, reading the docs, status reports and mozillazine ever since the news was first announced here on Slashdot. Anyone else out there coming to the London party? Gervase?
A million thanks to everyone who hacked code or helped out on the project in any way. Mozilla is the most enjoyable software I've ever used, apart from Perl that is. Oh frabjous day! Calloo, callay!!! =) *does a little dance*
PS: and a special thanks to Asa and the rest of the evangelist types who turn up here reliably and calmy refuting the FUD and bollocks that have come from Slahdotters over the years. Go back a couple of years and pick out a Slashdot moz story -- you lot /hated/ it and it sometimes seemed no-one else believed it would ever work...)
the same chunk of legislation also contains some truly dreadful provisions regarding retention of ISP traffic and logs - seven years, I believe, and I'm not sure if they've yet backed down from the original hilarious requirement that ISPs maintain archives of *all data* they transit for the same seven years. See extensive coverage from the last year or so at The Register and the BBC plus of course numerous issues of Need To Know.
What I don't understand is why "they" (gub'mint's everywhere) seem to think that the answer to the failures that lead to 9/11 is more of the same. Unless... but that would just be paranoia.
(emphasis mine.)
Er... I really hope that's some sort of typo by the dweebs in marketing...? Since when did the GPL distinguish 'commercial' from 'non-commerical' usage? (or any other Free software license, come to that!) As we know, Caldera has been pioneering the seemingly impossible task of distributing a restricted version of linux (per seat licensing...)
Is there a Bruce Perens in the house?
I have now officially lost any respect I ever had for US legislative bodies. That anyone could even SUGGEST such a ludicrous idea and get it floated this high in the media shows that the very concept of Law as a construct of civil society is dead and buried. How ironic it is that the *AA seem to have read Gibson, Stephenson et al, and decided that they're happy to be the bad guys. Well fine, if that's what you want, that's what you get. I am going to do anything I can legally do to destroy those companies and their businesses. It's a shame to have to expend valuable cycles on destruction but it's going to be destruction through the creation of something better, which is what I will be trying to help with. Cos these bandits, these crooked, thieving, coniving, hypocritical, moronic, flabby, complacent, lazy, arrogant, greedy BASTARDS have decided that they want to do this the hard way. Well, *AA lawyers -- (you know they're out there, scouring these comments for more posts to try to damage the name of the Free Software community, as Seth thingumebob of the FSF pointed out eleswhere, they've already done this with deCSS in New York - read the court docs, there are quotes lifted straight from Slashdot!) -- to those lawyers I say, enjoy your fees, folks, and I hope you can sleep at night.
what fascinated me was that they'd landed an Apollo mission close enough to the old Surveyor to go looking for, and find, it. Of course the Surveyor didn't do take a Pathfinder like "picture of me on the moon" (not having a rover to take it with), so the two pics I found are I think the only ones of a robotic craft that's completed it's mission and gone to sleep. I can't really articulate why this fascinates me -- it's something like the reason divers explore shipwrecks. An historical artefact washed up on the shores of time (maaaan...) er, or something.
Anyway, I found the pics; warning, these are the hi-res images. to see the thumbnails go to http://www.apolloarchive.com/apollo_gallery.html
hit the Apollo 12 link, search for "surv".
Middle distance shot
closeup view
Closeup of landing pad
Pete Conrad and Surveyor
Alan Bean and Surveyor
1. Yes, the guy's a fucker. Are the US now in the business of turfing out repressive dictatorships? Cos there are a lot more closer to home than Iraq.
... NOT
2. The US forced out the head of the UN chemical weapons inspectorate because he was about to negotiate their way back into the country (which obviously wouldn't have suited the US' desire to find a pretext to bomb the crap out of them.) Oh, and did you know that the US has a unique opt-out clause -- they can deny inspections of any facility,at any time, without giving a reason.
3. ATTACKS ON ISRAELI CIVILIANS?! Oh, the horror. What about the US killing >5000 civilians in Afghanistan? Guess you'd better start bombing yourselves then.
And he might have nukes... so what? So do India and Pakistan, both countries seem to be prepared to use them, and they're coming VERY close to war right now. You do know about that, right? Guess that must be why Bush is threatening to bomb Karachi
Yeah, sure. That's why the first 12 weeks of basic training are about beating out the slightest tendency to do anything but obey orders, immediately, without question. All armies do this, for a very good reason: if soldiers were to stop and think about what they were doing, the majority -- well, the smart ones anyway - would be over the hills and far away. Otherwise, who'd blow civilians to bits when Gee Bubblehead wants to look noble & patriotic on the 9o'clock news?
This sort of thing is the answer to that constant refrain when one tries to protest or object to the ever-increasing government surveillance, information and data interception and storage. "I've done nothing wrong, so I've got nothing to hide." You may not have broken the law, but mebbe your husband would be interested to know about that drunken fling a couple of years ago at the office christmas party, and say, aren't these expenses claims a bit... creative? And tell me, why ARE you browsing gay porn from home, what with you being married with kids? and so on, and on. Humans are of course the weakness in all these systems promoted by clue-lite technocrats - those politicians who advocate technological solutions to everything, but who don't read the RISKS digest, or CryptoGram, or Incidents, Bugtraq, "Crash!" (the Tonty Collins book, not the Ballard one...) and so on.
But this is definitely one of the few areas where NT/2K still scores over (most) Unices (as far as I know, please cluestick me if I'm wrong...) , namely it's trivially easy to enforce finely grained password policies. On NT, it's a case of find the dialog, check the options you want to apply , enter some numbers (length to time to remember old passwords and reject them, how often to force changes), minimum length, whether to force uppercase/ digits / alpha-numericals etc. I've been using Linux, BSD and Solaris for three years professionally, and tinkering at home for several years before that, and I frankly wouldn't know where to start to enforce password policies. (Well, OK, I'd use Google, the LDP, how-tos etc, but you see my point.)
That said, I just installed Mandrkae 8.3 out of curiousity to see what a Windows-friendly distro looks like, and I'm VERY impressed. Bob Young is wrong - IMHO - I think Linux
My employer pays a fat bonus for coming up with a patentable idea (and supplies lawyers to rewrite it into the proper language, file it, etc.) You then get another fat bonus (ten times bigger, and about one third of my total salary) if it's ever licensed. The carpark is full of TVRs, Porsche, and Lotus sports cars; there's a "no mortgage" club of employees who've paid theirs off. In this atmosphere, trying to explain why software patents are evil is HARD, and frankkly, it HURTS to be refusing free money because I consider it unethical. It would be a lot easier to feel smug about my principles if I wasn't living in a shithole with no chance of (eg) buying my own place to live (this is the UK, house prices are astronomical), hell, even of going somewhere on holiday. I don't even have a stereo or TV. Why am I doing this perverse thing?! Am I mad?? *shrug* The only positive reinforcement I ever get for doing this crazy thing comes from reminding myself that you folks (slashdotters, and the community in general) would presumably thank me for not going to the dark side. I just wish there was more money in doing the Right Thing :\
The only thing wrong with this review of this PIECE OF SHIT movie is that it should have been out the week the film came out. But it's good to see slashdot not afraid to carry opinionated reviews. 10/10 to chrisd (whoever je may be.) Oh, right, he doesn't write like a professional reviewer... listen if I wanted a professional review I'd real the Guardian, Obs or Indie... I cmoe here for the nerd-eye view. And the canonical nerd eye view of that PIECE OF SHIT movie is that it stank, even if one were to suspend suspicion of the "fuck reality, let's make Our Boys the heroes!" motivations of Hollywood.
What was the director's name again - Mastow? I'll be looking out for that name on the nextPIECE OF SHIT movie to clog my local cinema.