How is a large number of sysadmins co-operating in response to a common threat in a way formalised by the relevant newsgroups and FAQs an example of functioning anarchy?
Because each individual [company sysadmin] has the option to evaluate each threatened UDP independently, and act or not as they choose, with no coersion. There is no government authority involved.
Apple choosing BSD over Linux is a superscrew to the GNU Community. This is going to hurt us for a long time.
Mark my words.
Apple didn't "choose" BSD over Linux. MacOS X is a direct descendent of NeXT, and NeXT used the Mach/BSD combo before Linus even thought about creating his own Unix Clone.
It was a case of "don't fix what ain't broke" rather than screw Richard Stallman
I'm no authoritarianist, but it seems to me that the level of paranoia exhibited and liberty desired amongst those who responded to my post is only a step or two removed from full-fledged anarchy!
You say that like it's a bad thing.
Some of us are a lot closer than "A step or two removed".
There are three kinds of people in the world, Facists, Socialists, and Anarchists. Everyone, when you take their ideological positions to the extreme falls in one of those three. Of course as in all things, not all people will fall at the same point on the line, these are continum, not singularities.
Sometimes you just have to hoist the black flag and start cutting throats. With apologies to H.L. Menklen
There was another graphic on the web somewhere that I cannot seem to find that shows a rise in violent crime in England over time. It is interesting when you compare that graph against the increase in anti-gun laws. The more draconian the restrictions, the higher the violent crime rates.
Typical attitude. Give me my gun. I have a right to shoot people. Give me an example of where murder is necessary.
This is a very tricky question because it's only murder if the courts judge it so. Murder is essentially "killing in violation of the law", and as such is decided after the event.
Now, to what you are really asking is "Give me an example of when you need to make the decesion to kill someone".
It's 2 a.m., and someone has just entered your home through a window. They are threatening you with a knife, you've already given them all your money and jewelry. They've cut you several times already, and are demanding "your diamonds". You don't have any diamonds. They threaten to kill you if you don't turn over your diamonds.
This isn't something I made up. This is something that happened to a Florida woman some years back. She was severely beaten, and cut so bad that one eye was hanging out of the socket.
The bottom feeder that did this? 4 rounds from a.25 automatic eventually bleed him out, not before he had brutalized this woman, but she won in the end.
That is but one of the many examples that occur every year where someone needs to make the decesion to potentially take someones life in order to save their own, or the life of someone else
a definition that goes further (in this case closer definition) takes into account that freedom means choice. choice to do something. where the beggar on the street would have in principle the right to eat at an expensive restaurant he does not really have that choice because he has not enough money to do so maybe he has not even enough money to eat at all. so his only choice is to starve. that is not very much of "freedom".
You have severly restricted the scope of "choice" in the example you give. Yes, that "beggar" most likely cannot pay the dosh to eat at an expensive restraunt, that choice is at that specific point in time not open to him. Of course, that beggar is just (largely, chance plays a big part in our lives) seeing the result of choices made previously.
You are right that people--those in power, and those not--choose varying definitions of what "freedom" is according to their goals and desires.
Of course, you are just as guilty--in your desire to frame "freedom" as the ability to make any given choice at any given time, you are also trying to make choices free from results, so you can make a choice, exercise your freedom, and at any time in the future choose a different way independent of your previous choice.
Welcome to a causal universe, we don't play that shit here. Actions and choices have consequences, intended or otherwise, and your future choices, your future freedoms are alternately constricted and expanded based on the choices you make at any given time.
To make a lame attempt to refocus this on the debate at hand--The people who hacked DeCSS (or reverse engineered it) opened up choices previously unavailable. They opened up to each and every one of us the ability to--should we choose it--to use DVD media on whatever OS we can either get a player for, or write a player for. The DVD CCA folks wish to restrict those choices, as having an "open source" player restricts their choices as to what they can do with the medium.
Freedom is about choices, but you cannot escape the past, choices of yours, and of others in times previous restrict or enlarge what you can choose today.
There was no Linux IPO, there was deadrat...I mean RedHat, and there was VA Linux.
There is NO WAY that either RedHat or VA Linux can POSSIBLY be worth anywhere near their market caps. Their main products are largely built by other companies and are either essentially commodities, or are available elsewhere for the same or lower cost.
Correct me if I'm wrong ( I've never written in Python, so there's a good chance of that), but isn't Python an interpreted language where the source is always available? Java is compiled into bytecode, and many tools exist to obfuscate the bytecode to the point where it cannot be usefully decompiled.
Python, like lisp can be compiled to bytecode and distributed as such--just like java. They both run in a "vm", although I don't know how different the vm design is.
Go ahead and do what you like. The military cannot arrest, kill, or harass ordinary citizens. Only if I take the Oath of the soldier can any military type legally do anything of the sort.
Study up on the difference between can and may.
The military most certainly maynot kill civilians in times if peace, unless certain conditions are met, however that in no way makes the military incapable (as in cannot) if killing. After all, accidents happen.
No, paranoia is NOT a mental condition, it's a lifestyle.
The overreaction is because there is no good reason not to let the kid have parental consent to make the contract legal...This is ridiculous because what harm is a kid going to do with a Draw program? Unlike those damned CD clubs, this WILL NOT rack up a 40$-or more-bill that the parents then have to pay off...
If someone reformatted your hard drive, how much financial damage would it cause you? Now, pretend you are, for instance, a Writer, or an Architect working out of your home. Now how much financial damage could a reformatted hard drive cost?
And don't give me any moronic drivel about backups--yes. people *should* do them, no, people *don't* do them. and it's the people who *don'* do them who will sue when little Sara nukes their hard drive uprgading them to Linux.
Yeah, it's a dumb clause. Yeah, it's going to provide them about as much protection as a newspaper in a Nuclear Blast, but it's the lawyers and the business men who put it in there.
AOL is a private company, and they can do whatever they want with their computers, their network, and their property.
If someone doesn't like it, they can get their own account on a real Internet Service Provider. One that doesn't care what it's patrons do as long as they don't violate the law in a way that will cause more work for the ISP.
If AOL wants to rate the games, and prevent an 8 year old from playing the newest version So Many Bodies, So Few Bullets, let'em. They've never gotten a nickel of my money, and never will. Vote with your dollar.
Kids should be taught how to kill. However, they should be taught how to determine when the time is right to kill, and when they are justified.
In my opinion, this is a very insightful, if tersely worded post--it deserves more than a score of zero.
We live in a complex and dangerous world--the author--who isn't well versed enough at what he is doing to distinguish between "reeks havoc" (smells havok?) and "wrecks havoc"--seems to find in Ok for people to indulge in "escapist, cathartic fantasies" of the Science Fiction kind, but not to engage in the same sort of fantasies of a simpler world, a world where there is a good, and evil, and you can tell which is which by the uniform.
Another big difference between the First person shoot-em ups and the simulations is the realism. You get hit, you die, or you loose functionality. No magic powerups, no super first aid packs. What you start with is what you get. Further more, these simulations try to simulate reality as closely as possible rather than imbue the individual with a sense of power and invernerability beyond that which one normally gets when one sits in a modern fighting machine.
The author also misses what is most likely the biggest reason that first person games are getting a bad rap, while the more realistic ones aren't. From my experience, the Doom Style games tend to attract a younger average audience (not that Quake et. al. don't attract older folks, it's just that the sims don't attract as many younger kids)--while the simulation players are more "mature" (note the quotes). Thus the first person shoot'em ups are more likely to used as a scapegoat
Further more, the "writer" (and I use the term only in it's most technical sense) of that article really, really needs to learn a bit about what racism is. The two phrases he uses to justify his puerile attack on these games are in NO WAY racist. Vietnam--large parts of it at least--IS humid, and there IS quite a bit of rice there.
No, those comments aren't racist. Maybe a little derogatory or boisterious, but not racist.
All in all, I think it's a rather badly written peice, a vapid and shallow attempt to justify one kind of escapist violence as Ok, while condeming another kind as bad.
Anybody with a relatively healthy mind can tell the difference between the fantasy world inside a computer, and the real world outside it. They can make that adjustment, and we don't need to worry about them. Anyone who cannot tell the difference, or for whom the difference starts to blur is unhealthy, and we need to worry about them irregardless of what's loaded on their computer.
Violence is a part of this world. It occurs everywhere. It's not a question of whether violence is good or bad--any more than radiation or rain can be good or bad. It's the uses you put that violence to, how and when it's applied that matters. The poster to which I am applying is correct, children need to be taught how to deal with violence--including how to deal violence, but even more importantly they need to learn when to do so.
While I cannot but agree with the position that "But to state that a war could not be won without using the Net is garbage." is accurate, take the following into account:
One squadron of B2 stealth bombers could completely obliterate most small countries before their populace new they were there. How the hell does this kind of aggresive, decisive action involve the internet?
Most small countries have supporters in other countries. Most small countries have parts of "their" population in other countries. The US bombs <small country>, and the next day four hospitals and the pentagon loose power. 2 days later, the planes that flew the mission get another set of orders. This set flies them at night by coordinates, and instead of dropping bombs on <small country>, it's on a Russia chemical factory--do you think that Russia will beleive it was hackers?
Another example is the air war fought against Iraq in 1990. That operation could be repeated again, with even greater success, tomorrow. In exactly the same fashion. Hell, the bombing raids could probably use the same flight patterns. Denial of service would be far easier to achieve using a physical attack. Why not just airburst a small nuke over Wall Street? EMP is far more effective, more direct, then DoS attacks over the internet.
You use the Internet, and other forms of electronic warfare before the fighting breaks out to totally screw up the othersides Command and Control, muck up their logistics, and generally sow as much confusion as possible.
Imagine those bombers that flew over Iraq. Now imagine how completely screwed up their orders could have been if Sadam could have hacked the U.Ss C&C infrastrure *or* if the pilots weren't sure their orders were "correct". In the former, you could have bombers dropping bombs on their own side. In the latter, you've got ever set of orders being questioned as to it's authenticity, and slowing everthing down.
Of course, strong, well applied Crypto, and the will and education to use it would make this all moot.
If the Democrats take down the economy by attacking Microsoft, we'll make sure they're booted out of office.
As big as Microsoft is, even eliminating them from the economy wouldn't do anything worse than Greenspan sneezing. Our economy is much more robust than that, and you are way over estimating microsofts share in it.
I know a lot of geeks are going to hate Gore for his constant use of the term "Information Superhighway"
Well, I don't claim to speak for anyone but myself, but I don't hate Gore for his use of "Information Superhighway". I hate him because he is--at the root--philosophically a facist (before you jump down my throat learn a bit about facism. Contrary to popular belief it has nothing to do with racism. It is an economic and political philosophy whereby the State works fist-in-glove with big companies, and has strong nationalist overtones). He is a strong believer, as most in Government, that Government should work with, and have strong control over big business. He (as one other poster mentioned) was a supporter of the Clipper Chip, and opposes export of strong crypto.
I hate him, and his (likely) opponent for their political positions, and their drive to control as much of my life as they can possibly get away with.
Look at what the disingenious little pecker talks about in his article:
I cannot comprehend how some can argue that hate crimes are no different from all other crimes.
Do you really want someone this mentally unflexible as president? Do you really want someone who is willing to prosecute you for what you think to be president?
No, Bush isn't any better. They are both lying little worms. At least Bush has an excuse, as a drug addict, the drugs burnt his brain, and the lying was just part of day to day existence.
Read his next paragraph:
Another person asked me how we can make our schools safer in the aftermath of tragedies such as Columbine. I said that I believe the solutions range from tough measures to get guns away from kids and criminals, to more discipline and values in our schools, to more self-restraint in the use of gratuitous violence in the entertainment media, to more parental involvement in the lives of our children--which of course means we need to give working parents more help in balancing work and family.
Want to bet what will happen when the entertainment industry doesn't show self restraint? And just how are you going to keep guns out of the hands of Criminals and Kids without taking them away from honest citizens?
Just how many of the Ten Barriers to Effecient Government(now 26, but the first ten are the most important) are you willing to give up? How many do you think they want to do away with?
I'm sure there are a host of sound reasons not to vote for Mr. Gore, but please don't let offhand remarks be the reason. Dig in before you decide!
Are you willing to give the same benefit of the doubt to Dan Quayle
Don't let them pull the wool over your eyes, (do it yourself) the only difference between Bush and Gore is that Gore peddled Tobacco and Bush Cocaine.
There are other choice out there. As H.L. Mencken said:"Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.". Got your knife ready?
The Slashdotters that do work in the real world are usually Admin types who are so proud that they open sourced their perl script to calculate to the last decimal the last time they had sex.
I use Python, and a script isn't necessary. Tell you Mom I'll give her 5 bucks next time, she was that good.
Slashdot Mirror
Because each individual [company sysadmin] has the option to evaluate each threatened UDP independently, and act or not as they choose, with no coersion. There is no government authority involved.
Apple didn't "choose" BSD over Linux. MacOS X is a direct descendent of NeXT, and NeXT used the Mach/BSD combo before Linus even thought about creating his own Unix Clone.
It was a case of "don't fix what ain't broke" rather than screw Richard Stallman
You say that like it's a bad thing.
Some of us are a lot closer than "A step or two removed".
There are three kinds of people in the world, Facists, Socialists, and Anarchists. Everyone, when you take their ideological positions to the extreme falls in one of those three. Of course as in all things, not all people will fall at the same point on the line, these are continum, not singularities.
Sometimes you just have to hoist the black flag and start cutting throats.
With apologies to H.L. Menklen
Drug Prohibition makes it harder to get Drugs
In otherwords, no it doesn't, it just makes it harder to get legally.
Here is what happens when you take guns OUT of the hands of law abiding citizens:
There was another graphic on the web somewhere that I cannot seem to find that shows a rise in violent crime in England over time. It is interesting when you compare that graph against the increase in anti-gun laws. The more draconian the restrictions, the higher the violent crime rates.
This is a very tricky question because it's only murder if the courts judge it so. Murder is essentially "killing in violation of the law", and as such is decided after the event.
Now, to what you are really asking is "Give me an example of when you need to make the decesion to kill someone".
It's 2 a.m., and someone has just entered your home through a window. They are threatening you with a knife, you've already given them all your money and jewelry. They've cut you several times already, and are demanding "your diamonds". You don't have any diamonds. They threaten to kill you if you don't turn over your diamonds.
This isn't something I made up. This is something that happened to a Florida woman some years back. She was severely beaten, and cut so bad that one eye was hanging out of the socket.
The bottom feeder that did this? 4 rounds from a .25 automatic eventually bleed him out, not before he had brutalized this woman, but she won in the end.
That is but one of the many examples that occur every year where someone needs to make the decesion to potentially take someones life in order to save their own, or the life of someone else
I can't, there's no Zero.
You have severly restricted the scope of "choice" in the example you give. Yes, that "beggar" most likely cannot pay the dosh to eat at an expensive restraunt, that choice is at that specific point in time not open to him. Of course, that beggar is just (largely, chance plays a big part in our lives) seeing the result of choices made previously.
You are right that people--those in power, and those not--choose varying definitions of what "freedom" is according to their goals and desires.
Of course, you are just as guilty--in your desire to frame "freedom" as the ability to make any given choice at any given time, you are also trying to make choices free from results, so you can make a choice, exercise your freedom, and at any time in the future choose a different way independent of your previous choice.
Welcome to a causal universe, we don't play that shit here. Actions and choices have consequences, intended or otherwise, and your future choices, your future freedoms are alternately constricted and expanded based on the choices you make at any given time.
To make a lame attempt to refocus this on the debate at hand--The people who hacked DeCSS (or reverse engineered it) opened up choices previously unavailable. They opened up to each and every one of us the ability to--should we choose it--to use DVD media on whatever OS we can either get a player for, or write a player for. The DVD CCA folks wish to restrict those choices, as having an "open source" player restricts their choices as to what they can do with the medium.
Freedom is about choices, but you cannot escape the past, choices of yours, and of others in times previous restrict or enlarge what you can choose today.
As is:
- Chicago
- New York
- Boston
- San Francisco
- St. Louis
- Lost Angels
- Washington D.C.
- ...
Well, maybe not "backwaters", but there is corruption everywhere to one degree or another.Interesting thing about coal, you put enough pressure on it for long enough, and you get diamonds.
A tool that came/comes with Slackware to edit your /etc/lilo.conf file. It's marginally easier than vi /etc/lilo.conf.
Baloney, Americans *do* know how to handle sex, that's why p0rn sites are so popular...
There was no Linux IPO, there was deadrat...I mean RedHat, and there was VA Linux.
There is NO WAY that either RedHat or VA Linux can POSSIBLY be worth anywhere near their market caps. Their main products are largely built by other companies and are either essentially commodities, or are available elsewhere for the same or lower cost.
So, did you duck deliberately, or did that just go completely over your head?
I bet "A Modest Proposal" by (iirc) J. Swift left you completely enraged didn't it?
Guns.
Lots of guns...
Python, like lisp can be compiled to bytecode and distributed as such--just like java. They both run in a "vm", although I don't know how different the vm design is.
But I thought OS/2 was about to be declared dead. Again.
Study up on the difference between can and may.
The military most certainly maynot kill civilians in times if peace, unless certain conditions are met, however that in no way makes the military incapable (as in cannot) if killing. After all, accidents happen.
No, paranoia is NOT a mental condition, it's a lifestyle.
If someone reformatted your hard drive, how much financial damage would it cause you? Now, pretend you are, for instance, a Writer, or an Architect working out of your home. Now how much financial damage could a reformatted hard drive cost?
And don't give me any moronic drivel about backups--yes. people *should* do them, no, people *don't* do them. and it's the people who *don'* do them who will sue when little Sara nukes their hard drive uprgading them to Linux.
Yeah, it's a dumb clause. Yeah, it's going to provide them about as much protection as a newspaper in a Nuclear Blast, but it's the lawyers and the business men who put it in there.
AOL is a private company, and they can do whatever they want with their computers, their network, and their property.
If someone doesn't like it, they can get their own account on a real Internet Service Provider. One that doesn't care what it's patrons do as long as they don't violate the law in a way that will cause more work for the ISP.
If AOL wants to rate the games, and prevent an 8 year old from playing the newest version So Many Bodies, So Few Bullets, let'em. They've never gotten a nickel of my money, and never will. Vote with your dollar.
In my opinion, this is a very insightful, if tersely worded post--it deserves more than a score of zero.
We live in a complex and dangerous world--the author--who isn't well versed enough at what he is doing to distinguish between "reeks havoc" (smells havok?) and "wrecks havoc"--seems to find in Ok for people to indulge in "escapist, cathartic fantasies" of the Science Fiction kind, but not to engage in the same sort of fantasies of a simpler world, a world where there is a good, and evil, and you can tell which is which by the uniform.
Another big difference between the First person shoot-em ups and the simulations is the realism. You get hit, you die, or you loose functionality. No magic powerups, no super first aid packs. What you start with is what you get. Further more, these simulations try to simulate reality as closely as possible rather than imbue the individual with a sense of power and invernerability beyond that which one normally gets when one sits in a modern fighting machine.
The author also misses what is most likely the biggest reason that first person games are getting a bad rap, while the more realistic ones aren't. From my experience, the Doom Style games tend to attract a younger average audience (not that Quake et. al. don't attract older folks, it's just that the sims don't attract as many younger kids)--while the simulation players are more "mature" (note the quotes). Thus the first person shoot'em ups are more likely to used as a scapegoat
Further more, the "writer" (and I use the term only in it's most technical sense) of that article really, really needs to learn a bit about what racism is. The two phrases he uses to justify his puerile attack on these games are in NO WAY racist. Vietnam--large parts of it at least--IS humid, and there IS quite a bit of rice there.
No, those comments aren't racist. Maybe a little derogatory or boisterious, but not racist.
All in all, I think it's a rather badly written peice, a vapid and shallow attempt to justify one kind of escapist violence as Ok, while condeming another kind as bad.
Anybody with a relatively healthy mind can tell the difference between the fantasy world inside a computer, and the real world outside it. They can make that adjustment, and we don't need to worry about them. Anyone who cannot tell the difference, or for whom the difference starts to blur is unhealthy, and we need to worry about them irregardless of what's loaded on their computer.
Violence is a part of this world. It occurs everywhere. It's not a question of whether violence is good or bad--any more than radiation or rain can be good or bad. It's the uses you put that violence to, how and when it's applied that matters. The poster to which I am applying is correct, children need to be taught how to deal with violence--including how to deal violence, but even more importantly they need to learn when to do so.
While I cannot but agree with the position that "But to state that a war could not be won without using the Net is garbage." is accurate, take the following into account:
Most small countries have supporters in other countries. Most small countries have parts of "their" population in other countries. The US bombs <small country>, and the next day four hospitals and the pentagon loose power. 2 days later, the planes that flew the mission get another set of orders. This set flies them at night by coordinates, and instead of dropping bombs on <small country>, it's on a Russia chemical factory--do you think that Russia will beleive it was hackers?
You use the Internet, and other forms of electronic warfare before the fighting breaks out to totally screw up the othersides Command and Control, muck up their logistics, and generally sow as much confusion as possible.
Imagine those bombers that flew over Iraq. Now imagine how completely screwed up their orders could have been if Sadam could have hacked the U.Ss C&C infrastrure *or* if the pilots weren't sure their orders were "correct". In the former, you could have bombers dropping bombs on their own side. In the latter, you've got ever set of orders being questioned as to it's authenticity, and slowing everthing down.
Of course, strong, well applied Crypto, and the will and education to use it would make this all moot.
As big as Microsoft is, even eliminating them from the economy wouldn't do anything worse than Greenspan sneezing. Our economy is much more robust than that, and you are way over estimating microsofts share in it.
Well, I don't claim to speak for anyone but myself, but I don't hate Gore for his use of "Information Superhighway". I hate him because he is--at the root--philosophically a facist (before you jump down my throat learn a bit about facism. Contrary to popular belief it has nothing to do with racism. It is an economic and political philosophy whereby the State works fist-in-glove with big companies, and has strong nationalist overtones). He is a strong believer, as most in Government, that Government should work with, and have strong control over big business. He (as one other poster mentioned) was a supporter of the Clipper Chip, and opposes export of strong crypto.
I hate him, and his (likely) opponent for their political positions, and their drive to control as much of my life as they can possibly get away with.
Look at what the disingenious little pecker talks about in his article:
Do you really want someone this mentally unflexible as president? Do you really want someone who is willing to prosecute you for what you think to be president?
No, Bush isn't any better. They are both lying little worms. At least Bush has an excuse, as a drug addict, the drugs burnt his brain, and the lying was just part of day to day existence.
Read his next paragraph:
Want to bet what will happen when the entertainment industry doesn't show self restraint? And just how are you going to keep guns out of the hands of Criminals and Kids without taking them away from honest citizens?
Just how many of the Ten Barriers to Effecient Government(now 26, but the first ten are the most important) are you willing to give up? How many do you think they want to do away with?
Are you willing to give the same benefit of the doubt to Dan Quayle
Don't let them pull the wool over your eyes, (do it yourself) the only difference between Bush and Gore is that Gore peddled Tobacco and Bush Cocaine.
There are other choice out there. As H.L. Mencken said:"Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.". Got your knife ready?
So they'll beet the y2k bug, does that mean we will relish the results?
Is this going to seriously degrade my posting karma, or yam I chest nuts?
I use Python, and a script isn't necessary. Tell you Mom I'll give her 5 bucks next time, she was that good.
And yeah, I'll take the Karma Hit for this one.