Ironically, I've been driving through rural sections of Pennsylvania. Once you get outside of the major metro areas, it's God's country out there. Trees, trees, more trees. I'm a city boy. I know I'm out in the wild when the trees don't have the species on a little sign. Seeing that much wilderness was eye openeing.
When we got around the Scranton area though, we could see a bunch of old strip mines. Imagine if someone blows off the top of a mountain. Now imagine they left it that way once they extracted the material they wanted. You see desolation for square miles at a time, broken up by 200-300 foot mounds of gravel. Mind you, many of these mines haven't been active for decades. This is just the leftovers.
When we passed Waymart we could see a bunch of huge windmills dotting the mountaintops. To talk to the locals though, someone apparently has environmental concerns about them. They get too loud when it's windy, and eagles might fly into the blades.
Clean power, and people still bitch. And out here, where the effects of coal mining are all too clear.
So the truth is obviously somewhere between allowing rampant destruction of the environment and coddlling the tree huggers.
And the problem is still ongoing. It's not like people are pulling these numbers out of their ass, in 30 years we have managed to take out 15% of all the rain forests in Brazil. That's not opinion, there were 2 million square miles of forest when we started, 85% of it remains. You can see deforestation from space. You can drive along and see where forest was and grazeland, farmland, or (more often) wasteland is today.
The problem is bad enough that Brazil's government is concerned. It is only active law enforcement that keeps commercial interests from denuding the forest at a faster rate. That again, is not opinion of the some nature head. This is from Brazil's own government. You know, the people that live there.
Well, about 90 minutes after your post, the FBI announced they are producing an "anti-piracy" seal for movies, music, and software.
Your tax money and mine paying for the RIAA, MPAA, and BSA's R&D. And of course, also reminding us all that it is a Federal offense to copy this stuff.
Needless repetition of the same sense in different words; redundancy. b. An instance of such repetition. 2. Logic An empty or vacuous statement composed of simpler statements in a fashion that makes it logically true whether the simpler statements are factually true or false; for example, the statement Either it will rain tomorrow or it will not rain tomorrow.
If we wreck the environment, we can't grow food. If we don't grow food we starve. That's pretty simple, and I don't even need an engineering degree to figure that one out.
Now, whether "wrecking" the environment includes over-developing the land with yuppie-houses, poisening it with industrial byproducts, or destroying the growing environment by becoming too hot, cold, dry, or wet, we are still screwed.
And here is a hint, we as taxpayers are not the ones who are profiting off this exploitation of the land. And it's not like these "interests" are going out of their way to keep a lot of us employed.
Sin, by it's very nature, is engaging in that which is not profitable. Addiction gains nothing. Self aggrandizing gains nothing. Lieing, hording, theft, murder, all of these things set you back in the long run even if they seem to benefit you immediately.
Pollution will probably be added some point as the 8th deadly sin.
Compare the amount of money spent on public radio to the amount government spends prosecuting copyright infringement and ask me who is subsidizing what.
Actually a lot of the folks studying global warming are climatologists. They really don't give a rats ass one way or another. They just want to know what to expect. In the process they discovered that the answer isn't pretty.
That's like saying they guy on the crow's nest looking for icebergs has a slant.
That is a great argument. History is full of them.
Now, however compelling that "answer" may be, it doesn't justify our rampantly altering the environment. Amoung your "background" data you have to also take into effect how deforestation (on a scale that can be seen from space mind you) affects CO2 production and absorbtion. You should also take into affect the sheer volume of carbon dioxide, not to mention waste heat, that is produced by cars, power production, and industry.
Even if it turns out we are wrong about CO2 being a cause of global warming, the fact of the matter is human beings are radically altering the world around us and climate change is all but inevitable.
Unfortunately many predictions of where we are headed point to a world in which our way of life can not be sustained. Whether CO2, or methane, or asphalt reflectivity are to blame, when you are in a hole the first rule is to stop digging.
Do you personally know anyone who died of gunshot wounds? Alright. Now compare that to the number of people you personally knew that died in a car wreck.
Unless you are a war veteren, I imagine cars seem a heck of a lot more dangerous than guns, don't they?
I'm being a little disengenuous with statistics. But just because you use something every day doesn't mean it's safe.
As a science fiction author, I read a lot of science fiction. That is technically reading other producer's source code. Other author's don't send me C&D letters (well unless I do something eregious like cut and paste chunks of their work and try to pass it off as mine.)
Source code is copyrighted like a manuscript. Only in it's entirety. Likewise, binaries are copyrighted like a musical recording. Again, only in its entirety. Unless you do something stupid like cut and paste verbatim.
Now there are cases where musicians get snagged, regularly, for "borrowing" other people's work. Like any form of infringement, A is compared to B, and if B is comprised mostly of A, or uses large chunks of A, it is considered infringment.
Copy and Paste is evil. So long as you stay away from it, you are in the clear.
Hey, this is the same company the shiped IIS enabled by default, MSSQL, Outlook, and Exchange. For most versions of their OS (until recently) you could use all 1's for a license code.
And you are taking anything they say about security why?
All right then, you please explain how laws designed to keep printing royalties going to authors is now being used to bankrupt college students. Keep in mind that when the copyright laws were designed, the concept of a corporation was unknown. It was designed so that a single person (the author) could stop another single person (a printer) from ripping off his work.
Mechanical recordings of music are considered sheet music, and films a series of photographs is you go back through the evolution of the copyright. It was certainly never intended that an oligopoly would control almost all music published.
And note the crime is copyright infringement, not theft. We have rights under the constitution to fair use of what we buy. Once sold, it doesn't matter what we do with a product. Corporations are trying to change that. Playing DVD's, DVD's that I've purchased, under Linux should not be a criminal offense.
Yes, copying files over the internet is a grey area. Then again, radio was a grey area. And here is a hint, consumers one the battle over radio. (Which is why we have compulsory licenses for music, BTW.)
Don't feel too bad. I was one of those yo-yos who went off and installed gentoo 2 years ago. Back when it WAS crazy to use on production machines. I'm just mad because whenever I do something it's off the wall, and by the time I get to brag about it it's "been there, done that."
Heck, people look at my resume and see that I've been using Linux professionally for 7 years. They think I'm exadurating. No, I really have been doing Linux since before Linux was cool. Heck, I even built linux boxes that ran a Dot-Com. A real "we can't pay you this week, take a block of RAM" dot-com. Of course back then a quarter gig of RAM was worth something.
I better stop before this turns into a "Back in my day we only had 128Kb of RAM. We didn't have hard drives, everything had to fit on a floppy disk. Not some 1.4mb disk that fits in your pocket. If we were lucky it was a 5 1/4" disk that held 360K. Games, bah, we had to write our own games, in BASIC, from listings in magazines!"
I think between OS/2 flopping and the near-miss with anti-trust tribunals, IBM doesn't want to be in the operating system business anymore. The real money is in software and hardware.
Besides, most hard-core users with a hard-core budget fall into one of 2 categories: those that use RedHat for established name recognition, or those that build their own distributions from scratch.
If I'm pitching a project to a doting customer who is on methadone treatment from Microsoft, it's door number 1. If I was building a banking system, or an OS for an appliance, it would be door number 2. There is no real market for any other big-dogs. You can't charge a fortune until you have been deployed for a few years. No one in their right mind is going to pay a heap of cash for an unproven OS.
As one of those Gentoo junkies, let me assure you that Gentoo is not a real distribution.
Its a tool to build your own distribution. The one I use at work and at home has been affectionately dubbed "Seanix." It's not really Gentoo. I regularly hack the portage tree to unmask packages I need the latest version of, I write my own ebuilds for stuff that isn't in the mainstream distro.
If you just want to comparison shop, Gentoo isn't for you. If you want a box that you build once and incrementally keep up to date for eons, Gentoo is a great starting point. Where you end up is a matter of taste.
Frankly, whichever distro I use ends up so tricked out that it might as well be called "Seanix." If you are using stock packages, you aren't really using the system.
What, KDE only takes me a few hours on a 3 year old machine? Sure that machine is a dual 900mhz rackmount, and it's running distcc that is splitting the task up amoung 8 identical computers...
Seriously though, invest in Ram. Compiling c++ apps blows out your memory. If you have anything less than 512MB, you are spending most of your life in the swapfile when you burn KDE or OpenOffice.
I work in a museum. We are in the process of amassing a pile of trinkets, junk mail, and discarded furnature. It just so happens that all of it was owned by some guy who lived 200 years ago by the name of Ben Franklin. It doesn't matter what it actually is, from a bedpan to an old sofa, so long as Franklin owned, used it, or built it himself it's priceless.
It's like in Antique road show where they say "well, normally this piece would be $40, but since it has that story to go with it..."
Well, according to the linguists at least. To everyone else computer science was driven by cretans like me who pervert its purity and use it to solve problems.
That's a bit like saying Escher solved the problem of how to manage space in a small apartment.
Manipulating symbols intelligently does not constitute understanding. This sentence is false is an illustration of how symbols and logic can produce a non-sense. Rather than devote your entire life to trying make sense of it, you are supposed to realize "oh", dust yourself off, and move on.
A bit like how you finally say "fuck it" at the end of Zeno's paradox and employ a limit to solve the equation.
Slashdot Mirror
Well if that's all...
Ironically, I've been driving through rural sections of Pennsylvania. Once you get outside of the major metro areas, it's God's country out there. Trees, trees, more trees. I'm a city boy. I know I'm out in the wild when the trees don't have the species on a little sign. Seeing that much wilderness was eye openeing.
When we got around the Scranton area though, we could see a bunch of old strip mines. Imagine if someone blows off the top of a mountain. Now imagine they left it that way once they extracted the material they wanted. You see desolation for square miles at a time, broken up by 200-300 foot mounds of gravel. Mind you, many of these mines haven't been active for decades. This is just the leftovers.
When we passed Waymart we could see a bunch of huge windmills dotting the mountaintops. To talk to the locals though, someone apparently has environmental concerns about them. They get too loud when it's windy, and eagles might fly into the blades.
Clean power, and people still bitch. And out here, where the effects of coal mining are all too clear.
So the truth is obviously somewhere between allowing rampant destruction of the environment and coddlling the tree huggers.
And the problem is still ongoing. It's not like people are pulling these numbers out of their ass, in 30 years we have managed to take out 15% of all the rain forests in Brazil. That's not opinion, there were 2 million square miles of forest when we started, 85% of it remains. You can see deforestation from space. You can drive along and see where forest was and grazeland, farmland, or (more often) wasteland is today.
The problem is bad enough that Brazil's government is concerned. It is only active law enforcement that keeps commercial interests from denuding the forest at a faster rate. That again, is not opinion of the some nature head. This is from Brazil's own government. You know, the people that live there.
Six of one, half dozen of the other.
As a taxpayer I can think of a hell of a lot of things the FBI should be spending it's time on WAY before jailing bootleggers.
Well, at least they are making a distinction between terrorists, spies, and copyright infringers.
Your tax money and mine paying for the RIAA, MPAA, and BSA's R&D. And of course, also reminding us all that it is a Federal offense to copy this stuff.
Ahem, Tautology is:
What you are describing is a fallicy.
If we wreck the environment, we can't grow food. If we don't grow food we starve. That's pretty simple, and I don't even need an engineering degree to figure that one out.
Now, whether "wrecking" the environment includes over-developing the land with yuppie-houses, poisening it with industrial byproducts, or destroying the growing environment by becoming too hot, cold, dry, or wet, we are still screwed.
And here is a hint, we as taxpayers are not the ones who are profiting off this exploitation of the land. And it's not like these "interests" are going out of their way to keep a lot of us employed.
Sin, by it's very nature, is engaging in that which is not profitable. Addiction gains nothing. Self aggrandizing gains nothing. Lieing, hording, theft, murder, all of these things set you back in the long run even if they seem to benefit you immediately.
Pollution will probably be added some point as the 8th deadly sin.
Compare the amount of money spent on public radio to the amount government spends prosecuting copyright infringement and ask me who is subsidizing what.
That's like saying they guy on the crow's nest looking for icebergs has a slant.
Now, however compelling that "answer" may be, it doesn't justify our rampantly altering the environment. Amoung your "background" data you have to also take into effect how deforestation (on a scale that can be seen from space mind you) affects CO2 production and absorbtion. You should also take into affect the sheer volume of carbon dioxide, not to mention waste heat, that is produced by cars, power production, and industry.
Even if it turns out we are wrong about CO2 being a cause of global warming, the fact of the matter is human beings are radically altering the world around us and climate change is all but inevitable.
Unfortunately many predictions of where we are headed point to a world in which our way of life can not be sustained. Whether CO2, or methane, or asphalt reflectivity are to blame, when you are in a hole the first rule is to stop digging.
They use those laws to bust car-theft rings, burglery fences, etc.
Do you personally know anyone who died of gunshot wounds? Alright. Now compare that to the number of people you personally knew that died in a car wreck.
Unless you are a war veteren, I imagine cars seem a heck of a lot more dangerous than guns, don't they?
I'm being a little disengenuous with statistics. But just because you use something every day doesn't mean it's safe.
Source code is copyrighted like a manuscript. Only in it's entirety. Likewise, binaries are copyrighted like a musical recording. Again, only in its entirety. Unless you do something stupid like cut and paste verbatim.
Now there are cases where musicians get snagged, regularly, for "borrowing" other people's work. Like any form of infringement, A is compared to B, and if B is comprised mostly of A, or uses large chunks of A, it is considered infringment.
Copy and Paste is evil. So long as you stay away from it, you are in the clear.
And you are taking anything they say about security why?
Mechanical recordings of music are considered sheet music, and films a series of photographs is you go back through the evolution of the copyright. It was certainly never intended that an oligopoly would control almost all music published.
And note the crime is copyright infringement, not theft. We have rights under the constitution to fair use of what we buy. Once sold, it doesn't matter what we do with a product. Corporations are trying to change that. Playing DVD's, DVD's that I've purchased, under Linux should not be a criminal offense.
Yes, copying files over the internet is a grey area. Then again, radio was a grey area. And here is a hint, consumers one the battle over radio. (Which is why we have compulsory licenses for music, BTW.)
Heck, people look at my resume and see that I've been using Linux professionally for 7 years. They think I'm exadurating. No, I really have been doing Linux since before Linux was cool. Heck, I even built linux boxes that ran a Dot-Com. A real "we can't pay you this week, take a block of RAM" dot-com. Of course back then a quarter gig of RAM was worth something.
I better stop before this turns into a "Back in my day we only had 128Kb of RAM. We didn't have hard drives, everything had to fit on a floppy disk. Not some 1.4mb disk that fits in your pocket. If we were lucky it was a 5 1/4" disk that held 360K. Games, bah, we had to write our own games, in BASIC, from listings in magazines!"
Besides, most hard-core users with a hard-core budget fall into one of 2 categories: those that use RedHat for established name recognition, or those that build their own distributions from scratch.
If I'm pitching a project to a doting customer who is on methadone treatment from Microsoft, it's door number 1. If I was building a banking system, or an OS for an appliance, it would be door number 2. There is no real market for any other big-dogs. You can't charge a fortune until you have been deployed for a few years. No one in their right mind is going to pay a heap of cash for an unproven OS.
Oh wait, nevermind.
Its a tool to build your own distribution. The one I use at work and at home has been affectionately dubbed "Seanix." It's not really Gentoo. I regularly hack the portage tree to unmask packages I need the latest version of, I write my own ebuilds for stuff that isn't in the mainstream distro.
If you just want to comparison shop, Gentoo isn't for you. If you want a box that you build once and incrementally keep up to date for eons, Gentoo is a great starting point. Where you end up is a matter of taste.
Muhahahahaha.
Seriously though, invest in Ram. Compiling c++ apps blows out your memory. If you have anything less than 512MB, you are spending most of your life in the swapfile when you burn KDE or OpenOffice.
It's like in Antique road show where they say "well, normally this piece would be $40, but since it has that story to go with it..."
Well, according to the linguists at least. To everyone else computer science was driven by cretans like me who pervert its purity and use it to solve problems.
Manipulating symbols intelligently does not constitute understanding. This sentence is false is an illustration of how symbols and logic can produce a non-sense. Rather than devote your entire life to trying make sense of it, you are supposed to realize "oh", dust yourself off, and move on.
A bit like how you finally say "fuck it" at the end of Zeno's paradox and employ a limit to solve the equation.
To boldly code what no man has coded before...