Also you have to remember that the American flying public was trained to go along with the hijackers since most hijackers at that time wanted a free trip to Cuba or Libya or Lebanon.
That is why the plane was brought down in PA. The passengers realized that the hijackers were doing something different than wanting free travel.
So now that the Cockpit doors are locked the Government swoops in and uses the TSA as a front for their war on drugs.
Sounds bizarre? Think of why Napolitano wants to use the scanners and the 4th Amendment violating pat-down (as defined by most reasonable people, not SCOTUS) and not use the Israeli model of airport security. They are not looking for explosives. Any terrorist can get explosives to the checkpoint and detonate them inside the scanner causing terror and fear in the flying public the likes not seen in 10 years. They are really looking for drug mules. That 95 yr old is no terrorist and they know it. No explosive that would practically work would be in her diaper. Her underwear could've been used to carry drugs very easily. Imagine how much meth and weed she could've smuggled on board!
It is all about the war on drugs, both legal and illegal that is driving the expansion of Government control over us. It appears to be more profitable and easier to control the public via the "War on drugs" instead of preventing abuse and treating drug abusers.
The next logical step for TSA will be true strip searches and body cavity checks. It looks like the terrorists are winning by giving out Federal Government the ammo to strip away our rights. I foresee the end of this republic and going into a Roman style empire, with modern hi-tech, within 10-50 years if we keep following this path.
I would likely start a beginner not in VB but maybe Perl or Python or VBScript and C. Why not C++? You can program C in C++.
I think the older BASIC should be taught if the student wants to go into microcontroller technology, which some of it still requires a knowledge of assembler to program.
I would teach them how to use the goto in a way that does not create spaghetti code (like when exiting a loop or simulating a control structure that doesn't exist in the programming language).
Here's another scenario. I'm a designated driver and my friend gets wasted. No problem then, right? Wrong! My friend wants to go home and if we get stopped at a checkpoint I will have to do "the song and dance" to a police officer that says "I detect the presence of alcohol" and has an unofficial quota to fill while my friend gets arrested for public drunkenness.
You don't believe that can happen? It happened to me and my friend. It was ridiculous and I will never have that happen again. Why have a designated driver when your wasted friend stinks up the car and you, the sober driver, is treated like a DUI candidate unless you can prove to the officer beyond a shadow of a doubt that you are sober?
That is when I need that DUI app. If I can't get him home without a checkpoint I'll get him a cab anyway and not have him stinking up my car. It defeats the purpose of a designated driver but it avoid lots of hassles and saves me bail money.
'We either allow collapse to overtake us or develop a new sustainable economic model. We will choose the latter. We may be slow, but we're not stupid.'"
Yes, we are stupid, as least in America. Because short-sighted moneyed lobbyists have all but hijacked our federal government we are being discouraged or prevented from coming up with solutions to prevent the collapse. Also most Americans don't believe the collapse will happen in our backyard. Every attempt for the informed public to take back the government has been resisted the entire way by large news organizations backing their point of view, which is in part motivated and/or delusion thinking on the news bureaus' part. For this most of the blame is on Fox News and MSNBC but the internet has allowed people to find out "news" that fits their personal views, even if their personal views are extremist.
By the time these issues will be addressed it will be too late to do simple fixes. Reducing our carbon footprint and replanting trees where forests used to grow now will be easier than more extreme measures later. Raising MPGs by 15% now is easier than having to raise it by 200% later to get the same effect.
It really depends on what you want to do. In your case being in a university is the only way. For others it is not.
I think we are at a crossroads in education in America. The "high school-college-job" track is applying less to a growing number of students, especially the student that need to pursue something outside of college.
Colleges need to be more open to student of all ages since some of us will not and cannot follow the "BS-MS-PHD" track for a myriad of reasons, economics being one. I feel the need to learn for the sake of learning is something more young adults do not appreciate until they are older.
Why do we have to force a decision on a post-teenager about education when they don't have the life experience to understand their decisions? Why not get the college education when you need it?
You realized that you had no alternatives than to go to a university to get the education you want. There is no good reason for any university to keep you from doing that. Since you realize that you will have an appreciation of the education process than some of the younger students. You will appreciate your education more.
Not when it costs you hundreds of thousands of dollars to get "the perfect degree from the perfect university", and for what?
Community colleges and state schools are usually the better bet for getting a degree with less debt and/or for the sake of learning. Many communities have community sponsored continuing education programs that give you a better educational experience for less cost.
But if people want to learn for the sake of learning why push them to get a Bachelor's degree and saddle students with hundreds of thousands of debt?
In many American communities you can take a few classes here and there to learn for the sake of learning without the massive debt. You can even do that online now without breaking the the bank.
Colleges and community schools are for learning but a college degree is mostly a tool for employment in America.
Well, college CAN make you a more well-rounded person, but I can't see spending a king ransom on getting a degree from an ivy league school to accomplish that goal. Since most colleges are horribly expensive now the reason for the "don't go to college" argument is economic not educational.
I think that a freshman year, and possibly a sophomore year, at a community college is a good thing to help you find out what you want to study or to generate new ideas to push to the market if you don't have one already.
If you want to be a more well-rounded person I think that by your sophomore year that goal is mostly achieved.
Once you hit your junior year (or post associate degree work) you should have a goal and you should determine if college is the right path. Also if you generate an idea that you want to run with that would be the time to drop out and try it.
If your goal requires a Bachelor's or Master's degree then college will be worth it.
At least you have a better chance at retirement when you will be unable or unwilling to work in IT. All the advice I can give you is save your money as if you will never see a dime from Social Security.
I agree that the certs themselves are worthless. The value in the certs is that it forces you to study topics that you should know even if you "never" use them. For example: a Tier 1 Network Engineer should know the topics covered is the CCNA or other Tier 1 level certs, a Tier 2 Network Engineer should know more topics and have a better handle of the lower level topics.
Just like seeking a degree in CS seems to be a waste of time the same can be said for certs...until you realize you are using a topic covered in the degree program or cert in work. Suddenly you realize that you are working on a QOS issue with your VoIP phone system or that you were the only one that understood why the VPN tunnels would not initialize. That moment tells you the worth of your cert because the cert program forced you to learn that skill.
I agree. Fortunately when I went through my CS degree program I took the Cooperative (work-study) program. The school gave me the theory and practice to learn the programming language and then the work part allowed me to read and modify code in different languages.
Because I believe in getting fluent in a programming language the process is always a painful process of 'immersion' . This is where you essentially bring in every book you have on the language and lock yourself into a room 18 hours a day for 6-8 weekends to bang out code for that language in a way that covers each of the common features of the language. After that process I have a basic level of fluency for that language and I will be able to create and modify code in that language. With the market wanting the "language of the day" coders I dropped out of the market. Keeping up with the "language of the day" was becoming too painful for the temporary gain I would acquire from my efforts.
To add, many people now look to fix problems via GUI instead of a physical inspection or, in Larry the Cable Guy language, "just look at the darn thing for something that ain't right".
I know it happens to IT people all of the time. They will try to fix things on their desktops by trying different drivers and reloading Windows instead of checking the card or motherboard for blown capacitors or scorch marks (power hit) or checking the power supply for the right wattage. Sorry a 90W power supply is not powerful enough to power your new 1 Tb HD and your new Uber-powerful 4D Graphics Card AND the tons of USB devices to like to plug into your desktop.
If the supposedly trained IT people make that simple mistake imagine the minimum wage plus flunky trying to fix a 3D projector to show a 2D movie. Solving such a problem is beyond their pay grade. The solution is to hire a contractor to train the projectionists. It is a cheaper solution in the long run assuming anyone cares to solve this problem.
A more scary thought is:What if the trolls actually 100% believed in what they post?
An even more scary thought is: What if the trolls are right about some things?
Remember that even a broken Grandfather Clock is right twice a day. Somedays even I am not right twice that day. In some circumstances it is the troll that is right and we are wrong.
When I was younger I used to say "such and such" was impossible, no longer do I say that phrase often for the committed often find a way. With a sufficiently motivated and funded organization full of vengeful lawyers (RIAA for example) it can happen. They will find a way to submit the global lawsuit as a reverse class action and find a judge that is corrupt enough to make it stick. This is exactly what is happening with the copyright cases except they are targeting and ambiguous group of what the RIAA's suspect are copyright infringers so the courts are OK with this The whole situation is absolutely ridiculous with lawyers running amok extorting money from the average citizen, who doesn't have a lawyer in his back pocket, who may or may not have done anything wrong.
Before or after the defendant must hire a lawyer and take off of work, to defend himself/herself dozen or hundreds of times over from a vexatious litigant? Usually it is after. This does NOT count when the vexatious litigant files dozens of ridiculously frivolous lawsuits and the court system ALLOWS him/her to withdraw the lawsuits before going forward.
If we followed your rules I would be allowed to sue everyone on Earth a dozen times each for a million of dollars for no good reason, clearly a mountain of frivolous lawsuits. Do you realize that the court system grinds to a halt while this mountain of lawsuits has to be processed by everyone in the system just to be denied? That would takes years to do that. Then I could do this strategically and repeatedly to impede any and every legitimate lawsuit. Now imagine a hundred people doing this to a civil court system in a major city. The entire civil court system would crash and blue screen just like Windows when it has rampant processes chewing up every bit of CPU time.
We do NOT have a Constitutional right to sue everyone and anyone with frivolous lawsuits indefinitely. "Righthaven" has gone full nuts and filed a lawsuit that doesn't have a snowballs' chance in H*LL given the previous ruling, which, by my definition, is frivolous. When this lawsuit is shutdown and another even more grandiose lawsuit, not appeal, is filed by "Righthaven" comes to this court he should be slapped with a lifetime ban on filling ALL lawsuits in this court.
And yes, when the courts allow such frivolous lawsuits and SLAPP lawsuits to be filed (which are just as annoying), without challenge, these are indications that that specific court system is completely broken.
Onto the next stories of the Ric Romero News Update Show....
- Troops that have the high ground tend to win battles.
- Babies like Milk.
- News Organizations tend to have short attention spans.
- Gravity still works, video at 11.
- Computers tend to crash at the exact wrong time, usually when you next task is to start a backup job.
- Virtually nothing man-made today will survive 10 million years, video in year 10,002,011A.D.or C.E. (hopefully we will have flying cars by then).
Well I personally like the FFF (Furlong/Firkin/Fortnight) system the best.
Who doesn't like it when they can say "I can run 10,000 furlongs per fortnight" or saying "my car is so fast that I drive at 150,000 furlongs per fortnight" or "I'm a 1 firkin weakling!"?
Actually I sometimes like a game with a little bit of moral ambiguity. Not a lot, but I have grown to understand that life itself has more moral ambiguity than we see on the surface. Unlike most people that discover this fact I find sometimes myself taking a harder stance in spite of, or because, of the moral ambiguity of the situation.
In the situation you describe I can understand why she was a target and she does have a little responsibly in prevent herself from being an easy target but if I was in a position to judge the punk that did the crime I would be more inclined to give him the maximum time in prison because he is predator on society.
At some point he chose to be a predator instead of following the rules. He says to us "you will follow the laws but I chose to be your dictator and predator because I want to be". I understand that if we all did that there wouldn't be a functional society. He may have been bullied, disadvantaged, and he may have believed that he must be a predator instead of being prey but we can't have predators like him running amok in society so they need to be separated from us for as long as possible.
Mankind seems to have a natural hatred of predators. We seem to be hardwired to destroy them if we have the means to do it. If we give into that instinct completely then, again, we could not have a functional society. This fact seems to spontaneously create justice systems in societies, systems that enforce rules that allow societies to function.
Given that, what is just? Is justice for one the same as justice for all? What do we want as justice? What is justice after all? Why must we all have a world view of the just if it rarely exists in the real world?
- Mr. Copyright Holder to his Copyright Lawyer: "Well you see, I've come up with this great idea that is so crazy it might work but no executive or lawyer could ever understand!"
- Mr. Copyright Lawyer: "That'll never work. Pay me more money."
The End
And yet many of my neighbors don't believe in science or technology. They just take technology for granted so much that if you ask them if they use technology they will deny it. They believe in any fool thing their pastor says, or as they say their pastor "A Man of God". Yes, there are people that still use the coded language of their particular brand of Protestant Evangelical Christianity, even in most Metro areas of America.
I and my friends call these people "wind up toys" because such people seem to need a weekly or twice weekly winding and they just parrot whatever their pastor says in his rambling and disorganized (at least from my point of view) 2+ hour sermons. As someone that has nearly memorized Aesop, The Book of Solomon, and Aristotle, I can't imagine living is such a tiny simple world as they do.
I think science started to be too complex for one person to truly understand it all completely at about 100-150 years ago. I have to take it on the word of experts who do understand it enough to produce and reproduce results based on scientific theories while I may thoroughly understand one tiny scientific area of study and can prove it with experimentation. In essence the scientists must take the works of their colleagues in other fields of study as truth, on faith, while these same colleagues must rely on the scientists in your area of study to find the truth as well.
Remember that the really successful scientists became really successful by finding an alternate scientific theories to an event or system and they are able to conduct, experiments that are reproduced elsewhere, that proves his/her alternate scientific theory. Thus science is quickly self-correcting.
Faith does virtually none of this. Faith, in its most radical form, requires you to suspend all disbelief and accept a bunch a rules and stories that some religious figure says is true. Religions are self correcting in the sense that if the religion is no longer relevant to a society, or is harmful to the community somehow, is it allowed to slowly die out generation by generation, but not in the immediate way that science tends to self -correct. Does anyone worship Ishtar or Apollo or Jupiter today? Does any one worship the ancient pre-Islamic gods of Saudi Arabia? Are there any Shakers alive today? The answer is practically NO. These religions/sects/denominations died off and new ones formed and spread to meet the needs of the society.
From a Security device perspective I find that the CLI is more flexible and less "you can't get there from here" problems than the GUI.
The GUI is wonderful if the Ethernet jack is setup correctly. If not, then you are screwed.
The CLI can always be accessed via a Console port and it is usually more flexible than the GUI for the "aw crap I totally messed up the IP addresses and hosed the device configuration and now the bloody firewall will not connect to anything" situations.
When the device is working I still find the CLI easier to deal with remotely since I have an SSH client on my IPad and Android phone. I found the CLI via SSH a simpler and more reliable process than with the GUI. Also the GUI drain the batteries faster for some reason. I could tether my laptop to the Android phone but the GUI still eats up batteries on both the laptop and phone plus I burn through my phone's data limit faster, assuming the device's GUI is even working correctly.
I have seen device's GUI interface lock up solid due to a rampant process or DDOS attack while the CLI still works, albeit at a snail's pace.
Now I do like the GUI to guide me through setup procedures I rarely use. Multiple choice is always better than having to totally recall arcane CLI commands for rare situations but to eliminate the CLI option makes as little sense as eliminating the GUI option.
Slashdot Mirror
Also you have to remember that the American flying public was trained to go along with the hijackers since most hijackers at that time wanted a free trip to Cuba or Libya or Lebanon.
That is why the plane was brought down in PA. The passengers realized that the hijackers were doing something different than wanting free travel.
So now that the Cockpit doors are locked the Government swoops in and uses the TSA as a front for their war on drugs.
Sounds bizarre? Think of why Napolitano wants to use the scanners and the 4th Amendment violating pat-down (as defined by most reasonable people, not SCOTUS) and not use the Israeli model of airport security. They are not looking for explosives. Any terrorist can get explosives to the checkpoint and detonate them inside the scanner causing terror and fear in the flying public the likes not seen in 10 years. They are really looking for drug mules. That 95 yr old is no terrorist and they know it. No explosive that would practically work would be in her diaper. Her underwear could've been used to carry drugs very easily. Imagine how much meth and weed she could've smuggled on board!
It is all about the war on drugs, both legal and illegal that is driving the expansion of Government control over us. It appears to be more profitable and easier to control the public via the "War on drugs" instead of preventing abuse and treating drug abusers.
The next logical step for TSA will be true strip searches and body cavity checks. It looks like the terrorists are winning by giving out Federal Government the ammo to strip away our rights. I foresee the end of this republic and going into a Roman style empire, with modern hi-tech, within 10-50 years if we keep following this path.
I would likely start a beginner not in VB but maybe Perl or Python or VBScript and C. Why not C++? You can program C in C++.
I think the older BASIC should be taught if the student wants to go into microcontroller technology, which some of it still requires a knowledge of assembler to program.
I would teach them how to use the goto in a way that does not create spaghetti code (like when exiting a loop or simulating a control structure that doesn't exist in the programming language).
I am MORDAC! The preventer of Information Services! What other feeble IT requests do you have that I can deny you today?
Here's another scenario. I'm a designated driver and my friend gets wasted. No problem then, right? Wrong! My friend wants to go home and if we get stopped at a checkpoint I will have to do "the song and dance" to a police officer that says "I detect the presence of alcohol" and has an unofficial quota to fill while my friend gets arrested for public drunkenness.
You don't believe that can happen? It happened to me and my friend. It was ridiculous and I will never have that happen again. Why have a designated driver when your wasted friend stinks up the car and you, the sober driver, is treated like a DUI candidate unless you can prove to the officer beyond a shadow of a doubt that you are sober?
That is when I need that DUI app. If I can't get him home without a checkpoint I'll get him a cab anyway and not have him stinking up my car. It defeats the purpose of a designated driver but it avoid lots of hassles and saves me bail money.
'We either allow collapse to overtake us or develop a new sustainable economic model. We will choose the latter. We may be slow, but we're not stupid.'"
Yes, we are stupid, as least in America. Because short-sighted moneyed lobbyists have all but hijacked our federal government we are being discouraged or prevented from coming up with solutions to prevent the collapse. Also most Americans don't believe the collapse will happen in our backyard. Every attempt for the informed public to take back the government has been resisted the entire way by large news organizations backing their point of view, which is in part motivated and/or delusion thinking on the news bureaus' part. For this most of the blame is on Fox News and MSNBC but the internet has allowed people to find out "news" that fits their personal views, even if their personal views are extremist.
By the time these issues will be addressed it will be too late to do simple fixes. Reducing our carbon footprint and replanting trees where forests used to grow now will be easier than more extreme measures later. Raising MPGs by 15% now is easier than having to raise it by 200% later to get the same effect.
It really depends on what you want to do. In your case being in a university is the only way. For others it is not.
I think we are at a crossroads in education in America. The "high school-college-job" track is applying less to a growing number of students, especially the student that need to pursue something outside of college.
Colleges need to be more open to student of all ages since some of us will not and cannot follow the "BS-MS-PHD" track for a myriad of reasons, economics being one. I feel the need to learn for the sake of learning is something more young adults do not appreciate until they are older.
Why do we have to force a decision on a post-teenager about education when they don't have the life experience to understand their decisions? Why not get the college education when you need it?
You realized that you had no alternatives than to go to a university to get the education you want. There is no good reason for any university to keep you from doing that. Since you realize that you will have an appreciation of the education process than some of the younger students. You will appreciate your education more.
Not when it costs you hundreds of thousands of dollars to get "the perfect degree from the perfect university", and for what?
Community colleges and state schools are usually the better bet for getting a degree with less debt and/or for the sake of learning. Many communities have community sponsored continuing education programs that give you a better educational experience for less cost.
But if people want to learn for the sake of learning why push them to get a Bachelor's degree and saddle students with hundreds of thousands of debt?
In many American communities you can take a few classes here and there to learn for the sake of learning without the massive debt. You can even do that online now without breaking the the bank.
Colleges and community schools are for learning but a college degree is mostly a tool for employment in America.
Well, college CAN make you a more well-rounded person, but I can't see spending a king ransom on getting a degree from an ivy league school to accomplish that goal. Since most colleges are horribly expensive now the reason for the "don't go to college" argument is economic not educational.
I think that a freshman year, and possibly a sophomore year, at a community college is a good thing to help you find out what you want to study or to generate new ideas to push to the market if you don't have one already.
If you want to be a more well-rounded person I think that by your sophomore year that goal is mostly achieved.
Once you hit your junior year (or post associate degree work) you should have a goal and you should determine if college is the right path. Also if you generate an idea that you want to run with that would be the time to drop out and try it.
If your goal requires a Bachelor's or Master's degree then college will be worth it.
At least you have a better chance at retirement when you will be unable or unwilling to work in IT. All the advice I can give you is save your money as if you will never see a dime from Social Security.
I agree that the certs themselves are worthless. The value in the certs is that it forces you to study topics that you should know even if you "never" use them. For example: a Tier 1 Network Engineer should know the topics covered is the CCNA or other Tier 1 level certs, a Tier 2 Network Engineer should know more topics and have a better handle of the lower level topics.
Just like seeking a degree in CS seems to be a waste of time the same can be said for certs...until you realize you are using a topic covered in the degree program or cert in work. Suddenly you realize that you are working on a QOS issue with your VoIP phone system or that you were the only one that understood why the VPN tunnels would not initialize. That moment tells you the worth of your cert because the cert program forced you to learn that skill.
I agree. Fortunately when I went through my CS degree program I took the Cooperative (work-study) program. The school gave me the theory and practice to learn the programming language and then the work part allowed me to read and modify code in different languages.
Because I believe in getting fluent in a programming language the process is always a painful process of 'immersion' . This is where you essentially bring in every book you have on the language and lock yourself into a room 18 hours a day for 6-8 weekends to bang out code for that language in a way that covers each of the common features of the language. After that process I have a basic level of fluency for that language and I will be able to create and modify code in that language. With the market wanting the "language of the day" coders I dropped out of the market. Keeping up with the "language of the day" was becoming too painful for the temporary gain I would acquire from my efforts.
To add, many people now look to fix problems via GUI instead of a physical inspection or, in Larry the Cable Guy language, "just look at the darn thing for something that ain't right".
I know it happens to IT people all of the time. They will try to fix things on their desktops by trying different drivers and reloading Windows instead of checking the card or motherboard for blown capacitors or scorch marks (power hit) or checking the power supply for the right wattage. Sorry a 90W power supply is not powerful enough to power your new 1 Tb HD and your new Uber-powerful 4D Graphics Card AND the tons of USB devices to like to plug into your desktop.
If the supposedly trained IT people make that simple mistake imagine the minimum wage plus flunky trying to fix a 3D projector to show a 2D movie. Solving such a problem is beyond their pay grade. The solution is to hire a contractor to train the projectionists. It is a cheaper solution in the long run assuming anyone cares to solve this problem.
A more scary thought is :What if the trolls actually 100% believed in what they post?
An even more scary thought is: What if the trolls are right about some things?
Remember that even a broken Grandfather Clock is right twice a day. Somedays even I am not right twice that day. In some circumstances it is the troll that is right and we are wrong.
Nahhhh... That cannot be right.
When I was younger I used to say "such and such" was impossible, no longer do I say that phrase often for the committed often find a way. With a sufficiently motivated and funded organization full of vengeful lawyers (RIAA for example) it can happen. They will find a way to submit the global lawsuit as a reverse class action and find a judge that is corrupt enough to make it stick. This is exactly what is happening with the copyright cases except they are targeting and ambiguous group of what the RIAA's suspect are copyright infringers so the courts are OK with this The whole situation is absolutely ridiculous with lawyers running amok extorting money from the average citizen, who doesn't have a lawyer in his back pocket, who may or may not have done anything wrong.
Before or after the defendant must hire a lawyer and take off of work, to defend himself/herself dozen or hundreds of times over from a vexatious litigant? Usually it is after. This does NOT count when the vexatious litigant files dozens of ridiculously frivolous lawsuits and the court system ALLOWS him/her to withdraw the lawsuits before going forward.
If we followed your rules I would be allowed to sue everyone on Earth a dozen times each for a million of dollars for no good reason, clearly a mountain of frivolous lawsuits. Do you realize that the court system grinds to a halt while this mountain of lawsuits has to be processed by everyone in the system just to be denied? That would takes years to do that. Then I could do this strategically and repeatedly to impede any and every legitimate lawsuit. Now imagine a hundred people doing this to a civil court system in a major city. The entire civil court system would crash and blue screen just like Windows when it has rampant processes chewing up every bit of CPU time.
We do NOT have a Constitutional right to sue everyone and anyone with frivolous lawsuits indefinitely. "Righthaven" has gone full nuts and filed a lawsuit that doesn't have a snowballs' chance in H*LL given the previous ruling, which, by my definition, is frivolous. When this lawsuit is shutdown and another even more grandiose lawsuit, not appeal, is filed by "Righthaven" comes to this court he should be slapped with a lifetime ban on filling ALL lawsuits in this court.
And yes, when the courts allow such frivolous lawsuits and SLAPP lawsuits to be filed (which are just as annoying), without challenge, these are indications that that specific court system is completely broken.
Onto the next stories of the Ric Romero News Update Show....
- Troops that have the high ground tend to win battles.
- Babies like Milk.
- News Organizations tend to have short attention spans.
- Gravity still works, video at 11.
- Computers tend to crash at the exact wrong time, usually when you next task is to start a backup job.
- Virtually nothing man-made today will survive 10 million years, video in year 10,002,011A.D.or C.E. (hopefully we will have flying cars by then).
Well I personally like the FFF (Furlong/Firkin/Fortnight) system the best.
Who doesn't like it when they can say "I can run 10,000 furlongs per fortnight" or saying "my car is so fast that I drive at 150,000 furlongs per fortnight" or "I'm a 1 firkin weakling!"?
Actually I sometimes like a game with a little bit of moral ambiguity. Not a lot, but I have grown to understand that life itself has more moral ambiguity than we see on the surface. Unlike most people that discover this fact I find sometimes myself taking a harder stance in spite of, or because, of the moral ambiguity of the situation.
In the situation you describe I can understand why she was a target and she does have a little responsibly in prevent herself from being an easy target but if I was in a position to judge the punk that did the crime I would be more inclined to give him the maximum time in prison because he is predator on society.
At some point he chose to be a predator instead of following the rules. He says to us "you will follow the laws but I chose to be your dictator and predator because I want to be". I understand that if we all did that there wouldn't be a functional society. He may have been bullied, disadvantaged, and he may have believed that he must be a predator instead of being prey but we can't have predators like him running amok in society so they need to be separated from us for as long as possible.
Mankind seems to have a natural hatred of predators. We seem to be hardwired to destroy them if we have the means to do it. If we give into that instinct completely then, again, we could not have a functional society. This fact seems to spontaneously create justice systems in societies, systems that enforce rules that allow societies to function.
Given that, what is just? Is justice for one the same as justice for all? What do we want as justice? What is justice after all? Why must we all have a world view of the just if it rarely exists in the real world?
- Mr. Copyright Holder to his Copyright Lawyer: "Well you see, I've come up with this great idea that is so crazy it might work but no executive or lawyer could ever understand!"
- Mr. Copyright Lawyer: "That'll never work. Pay me more money." The End
Well, Big Brother says:
War Is Peace
Freedom Is Slavery
Ignorance Is Strength
And yet many of my neighbors don't believe in science or technology. They just take technology for granted so much that if you ask them if they use technology they will deny it. They believe in any fool thing their pastor says, or as they say their pastor "A Man of God". Yes, there are people that still use the coded language of their particular brand of Protestant Evangelical Christianity, even in most Metro areas of America.
I and my friends call these people "wind up toys" because such people seem to need a weekly or twice weekly winding and they just parrot whatever their pastor says in his rambling and disorganized (at least from my point of view) 2+ hour sermons. As someone that has nearly memorized Aesop, The Book of Solomon, and Aristotle, I can't imagine living is such a tiny simple world as they do.
I think science started to be too complex for one person to truly understand it all completely at about 100-150 years ago. I have to take it on the word of experts who do understand it enough to produce and reproduce results based on scientific theories while I may thoroughly understand one tiny scientific area of study and can prove it with experimentation. In essence the scientists must take the works of their colleagues in other fields of study as truth, on faith, while these same colleagues must rely on the scientists in your area of study to find the truth as well.
Remember that the really successful scientists became really successful by finding an alternate scientific theories to an event or system and they are able to conduct, experiments that are reproduced elsewhere, that proves his/her alternate scientific theory. Thus science is quickly self-correcting.
Faith does virtually none of this. Faith, in its most radical form, requires you to suspend all disbelief and accept a bunch a rules and stories that some religious figure says is true. Religions are self correcting in the sense that if the religion is no longer relevant to a society, or is harmful to the community somehow, is it allowed to slowly die out generation by generation, but not in the immediate way that science tends to self -correct. Does anyone worship Ishtar or Apollo or Jupiter today? Does any one worship the ancient pre-Islamic gods of Saudi Arabia? Are there any Shakers alive today? The answer is practically NO. These religions/sects/denominations died off and new ones formed and spread to meet the needs of the society.
From a Security device perspective I find that the CLI is more flexible and less "you can't get there from here" problems than the GUI.
The GUI is wonderful if the Ethernet jack is setup correctly. If not, then you are screwed.
The CLI can always be accessed via a Console port and it is usually more flexible than the GUI for the "aw crap I totally messed up the IP addresses and hosed the device configuration and now the bloody firewall will not connect to anything" situations.
When the device is working I still find the CLI easier to deal with remotely since I have an SSH client on my IPad and Android phone. I found the CLI via SSH a simpler and more reliable process than with the GUI. Also the GUI drain the batteries faster for some reason. I could tether my laptop to the Android phone but the GUI still eats up batteries on both the laptop and phone plus I burn through my phone's data limit faster, assuming the device's GUI is even working correctly.
I have seen device's GUI interface lock up solid due to a rampant process or DDOS attack while the CLI still works, albeit at a snail's pace.
Now I do like the GUI to guide me through setup procedures I rarely use. Multiple choice is always better than having to totally recall arcane CLI commands for rare situations but to eliminate the CLI option makes as little sense as eliminating the GUI option.