Ok, so you really don't know what the Supreme Court of the US does do you?
They destroy or cement laws, acts, statutes, etc. based on the Constitution. Now, they may have a conservative view of the constitution, they may have a liberal view, they may be a litteralist or they be a "living breathing document" type of justice. It doesn't really matter, they still have to work within the confines of the Constitution. It is the primary document they work with on anything related to the Bill of Rights. And, since you seemed to have had your head in the sand the last 200+ years, it comes up a LOT.
In fact, SCOTUS rulings are so powerful, the only way to over-turn them are with another SCOTUS ruling, or with an amendment to the Constitution. Those are so rare, only seventeen amendments have been made to the Constitution.
The Bill of Rights is powerful stuff, it protects us from government controlled news (though doesn't protect us from commercially controlled news, damnit), government mandated religion, the right to not incriminate yourself, etc.
That last one is the fifth amendment, and it would apply to the encryption case here directly. In the US, if law enforcement demands your encryption keys, you have only to plead the 5th and they can't touch you. You have the absolute right not to incriminate yourself, and it will hold up in any court in the land.
I guess the parent is saying that in the UK the idea was that such things were so basic, they did not need to be codified. Either that or we codified them to protect against such injustices. Well, now look what happened? They have no defense against that, but in the US it would be hell to take that all the way through the courts.
You were modded funny, but you should have been modded insightful. This happens all the time, and constantly, depending on the organization.
It also seems the bigger the company is, the more vulnerable they are to this kind of thing.
Though, I do prefer to think it happens because of smooth sales pitches and multi-thousand dollar "business trips" to Tahiti that do the trick. Mostly because I'd like to be there someday, though I probably never will. Heh.
Ok, first, you totally missed my point. My point was that by extrapolating your objections to having a database of information obtained via the web, you actually get the data indirectly from the source, in some form. I don't see your objections to the human players who have been crawling for data for their own databases for the last 40+ years. Some of them have been crawling the web for data for the last 20 years!
It's the same damn thing, data is data, half of Jeopardy is knowing shit. That's an area computers may shine. The other part is processing the context of the information and plumbing your data for the relevant piece of information in a fraction of a second. That's an area computers really, really suck at. Their data retrieval is slow compared to that of a human, and their ability to understand context sucks monkey balls.
Having a massive database of data is the only advantage the thing has against a human contestant.
Lastly, are not the questions being fed to the human players in the form of text as well? In fact the human players get auditory cues as well. I don't understand your objection here. It's not like the machine gets it before hand. Being fed in text form only is a disadvantage, not an advantage.
The buzzer may or may not prove to be a boon, it could spell disaster if the machine is too agressive. And I don't see the problem of no physical button, as long as it has to buzz in, and have the answer ready in a reasonable time (just like humans). If it can buzz faster but fails to parse the context correctly it is going to lose, and hard. Human players already do this, they buzz early before they have the answer, based on their confidence that they -will- have the answer in the next few seconds.
Nothing wrong with a machine doing the exact same thing, a physical button doesn't help or hinder that. Hello humans can already buzz before the question is finished if they want, they just had better have the answer.
Second, I have no clue why it was modded insightful, but whatever.
Third, no, phrasing answers in the form of a question is easy, have you evern watched Jeopardy before? That's the easiest part of the whole thing, "What is/are X" and "Who is/are X" are all you have to do the answers to phrase them as a question. No, the interesting thing will be if IBM's machine can parse the question in the correct context and come up with the correct answer faster than a human. It's an area that computers thus far have very much sucked at.
Fourth, wth are you smoking? Do you really take D. Adams that seriously? His whole series was a big joke! Literally!
And last, yes, the Earth was a planet in Adams' universe. Look up the definition of a planet man. Seriously. Being an organic computer would not negate its planet status. It is a planet because of its size and the fact that it is the largest object in its orbital path. Not being a planet because it was a giant computer doesn't even make sense. One of the questions we ask about whether an object was a planet was NOT "Well, is it a giant computer? Or no?"
Good night man, are you a professional buzz kill or something? Or is it just something you do as a hobby?
Google results are far from useful without context information, especially with Jeopardy where the context is usually hidden by a pun or a play on words.
You just don't notice it because most people are able to process this contextual information on the fly, but it is a huge challenge for a machine to do it. There are litterally thousands of little bits of information that we collect as the answer is being given, including the context of the category, i.e. whether said category was a joke or not, the particular round it takes place in and the general theme of that particular show, if there is one.
A lot of the information can be given to the machine before hand, but a lot more must be collected and processed on the fly - something human brains do with ease, but computers have yet to conquer that area.
Contextual stuff is tricky, and we deal with rather complex contextual issues constantly, continually learning from them, making it seem extremely simple to us but is infact some serious mental gymnastics that (so far) machines haven't been able to duplicate. Look at the plethora of useless answers Google often gives when you are looking at that one gem of useful info. Humans can easilly pick out the relevant info, where machines can't (as the google results themselves demonstrate). Maybe the point of the exercise is that the IBM software can? That would be a really neat trick.
So? Your point? It's not accessing the web live, is it? No? So it's not getting it from the web.
The web isn't some magical information generating device. That information did not originate on the web, somebody put it there either from their own mind or from an offline location. By your own reasoning accessing the web isn't even "getting it from the web", as the web is just a huge cache of information from people's homes, schools, and even just plain their own minds.
Which is actually, in a sense, correct, and why your whole complaint is nonsense. People store that information in their brains, the computer will store it in a database on a few hard drives. It's no advantage, and the thing has plenty of significant disadvantages in a contest like this, unless they rig the system or IBM has made some serioius frickin advances (which they may have done).
Wow, that's not even close to correct. No taxation without representation was English law, not US law. In the US, we eliminated the need for such a clause by eliminating the kingship and building the entire system around representation. We also did not put taxation in the hands of the executive (not sure if the English did or not, honestly), and territories of the US get non-voting representation in Congress. The clause is not required because it is built into the system.
Churches are tax-exempt because they have charity status. I'm not sure precisely how it is built into the law, but it does not apply to everything the church does, and the assumption is that the church is a net benefit for society.
The reasons religions don't get persecuted, and are in fact very difficult to prosecute for wrongdoing is because of the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States. In a nutshell, it says Congress can't make a law that prohibits or even negatively influences the free exercise of any religion. Cults in the US are on shaky ground, but once you achieve Religion status - i.e. have your own church and can be considered tax exempt - you are on very solid ground legally.
In theory, even cults are heavily protected by the first amendment, in practice they don't fare as well as those belief systems that are considered full blown religions.
WinXP to WinVista is definitely NOT the same as Ubuntu 8.10 to 9.04. Ubuntu 8.10 to 9.04 is a minor version upgrade, like a small service pack or large set of hotfixes in windows; whereas XP to Vista is a completely different OS. Because they are built around the same methodologies and base technologies an upgrade from XP to Vista is possible; it's basically a conversion. It's also not recommended, because maintaining the linkages between the OS and programs is a nightmare, and sometimes bad things happen. The registry helps, but it often ends up getting jacked in the process.
The equivalent, though I don't like using it because it's a lateral move instead of a vertical move (vista issues aside, it is, technologically at least, an upgrade), would be "upgrading" from Ubuntu to Gentoo. That's just not going to work well, if at all.
Linux usually works better with small, constant updates.
Windows usually works better with massive, all-at-once updates.
There are nearly as many horror stories of linux machines breaking on a major update as there are on windows machines, and there are a hell of a lot more windows machines out there. Giant updates of Windows - unless it is jumping to a completely new version (i.e. Win2000 to XP, XP to Vista) - are recommended even if you have been keeping up with the updates. In fact, aside from major version upgrades, windows updates seem to be more likely to resolve odd issues rather than perpetuate them.
Upgrading to a new minor version in Ubuntu is often like upgrading to a new major version of Windows - broken libraries, files all over the frickin place just hanging there, no longer utilized, etc. I made the mistake of upgrading to 9.04 from 8.04 - I actually had to do 8.10 and right after do 9.04, and all kinds of crap was broken (like wireless, after 8.04 fixed it, damnit!). I upgraded because I heard about all kinds of UI updates, which was one of the things that bugs me about ubuntu, and I found it was just some relatively minor tweaks and changes.(The wireless UI is a big improvement though)
The one thing I like about windows is how interconnected everything is. Most people know one or two ways of getting to certain aspects of the OS, but there are often dozens because such and such is related to such and such, etc. I suppose that is what having a registry does for you. Philosophical differences between the OS's means we'll likely never see that in linux, or at least not to the same level. The flip side for Linux is fixing a problem is often just a config file away, so they each have pros and cons.
Something that just popped into my head thinking of pros and cons of each OS there, but is there any kind of automated cleanup of files, old libraries, etc. for linux (or just Ubuntu, I don't care, it's what I use)? That would be handy.
I read the article quite carefully the first time, and I did not insult him by accident.
He wasn't just trying to be funny, he was trying to use comedy to skirt an issue and prove a point.
The point was offensive, and he suggests a very unethical way to win an argument. That's why it wasn't funny. By his logic, why don't we just call all life the same species? We've all got DNA, therefore evolution is true, right? Stick that in the creationists ear!
I'd wager the only people who found it very funny are the dogmatic evolutionists who don't really know what they are talking about, but look for every oportunity to sound smart and/or talk down to any creationists they may come across. You can tell because they are the ones saying "Haha! Hell yeah! Stick it in their eye!" I would hope nobody who knows a thing or two about evolution got more than a chuckle or two out of it, but humors vary I suppose.
This post had lots of sticking things in things, for which I appologize.
The problem with the article is not the semantics of species, it's the idea of changing the definition specifically to target creationists. That's unethical, and does not help biologists in any real way.
As I understand it, for your Liger example, females tend to be fertile while males are sterile. Same with Tigons. As far as I know there has never been a successful liger-liger mating, only liger-lion or liger-tiger. In this sense, they are still mules (IMO) because they cannot reproduce of their own kind. I.e. you cannot maintain a liger population with ligers, you need lions and tigers for that.
Most botonists regect the animal definition of species, as it doesn't fit at all with botony. That makes defining speciation even more difficult, as I was only focusing on issues within the animal kingdom.
I agree that separate definitions of species is probably needed.
I never made mention of any mythical beings in my post. I never even said evolution was wrong.
Your best counter to my post is an ad homonim straw-man attack on me?
Yeah, see, that's the problem. Your (I mean you, specifically) faith in evolution is no different than a "young earth" creationist if you believe it blindly, only looking at parts you like and ignoring potential problems.
Lack of evidence is lack of evidence. You proclaim christianity as mythology because of lack of evidence of a god, while at the same time defending your belief in evolution in spite of another person pointing out a lack of evidence.
It's people like you, who are no different than the creationists in your dogmatic belief in evolution, who set science back decades. You may even be worse than them, because you are willing to justify any potential issues with your pet theory. What will you do if a new, completely different theory for the origin of species comes out that is more substantiated by evidence than evolution is? What then?
(In case you didn't notice, that was my counter ad-hominem attack;) )
Other repliers had solid, informative responses to my post, and yet you steal their limelight with this bullshit logical fallacy that gets modded insightful.
People like you piss me off, seriously. Can't have a discussion, just have to be right, or put others down to win. Well, congrats, you did it.
As someone who has worked in both an obscenely huge monolithic government entity, and an obscenely huge private entity, I'd say private is larger on the whole, but government entities are certainly far from small.
The other boon for Red Hat is breaking into a new market. They are well respected in the private sector, but largely ignored in the public, and that is a lot of potential new customers.
You've got to balance business needs with security needs.
Do they need all the security you gave them? Can they function normally with it? Are they still able to work effectively? Et cetera, et cetera.
Not saying you did it wrong, and the security of that network was definitely trash.
Just saying you should be aware of business needs, and you need to phrase things in ways that describe how your changes will help them in the long run.
Right, so, what happens when you get fired, and you don't tell anybody what your user/sudo password is?
Same problem as before.
I've got news for you, if your user account can act as root, working with it can be just as insecure as working with root.
Sudo is there to help prevent you from breaking your own system, a cleverly written exploit could probably take advantage of sudo capabilities and compromise the system. If they can run a program as you, and you can run a program as root without entering a password, an attacker can effectively operate as root. It makes no difference.
Sudo lowers the barrier of entry for root access, it makes things easier. It is more secure than running as root, but it is less secure than running as a generic user and switching to a separate root account when necessary. It almost doesn't matter if you can get at the root password, once a user has sudo access. Sudo becomes the weakest point of entry on a system, and if that is poorly configured, then the user account becomes the weakest point of entry, as sudo is not secure enough to stop them.
The only way to make sudo really secure would make it hell to work with. It is a compromise, and it is better than running everything as root, but it is foolish to think it is impenetrable. The actual root password maybe, but the root password is no longer what you need for root access.
To put it another way: Your root password, for all intents and purposes may as well be your sudo password. They are effectively the same anyway, a constantly changing root password only marginally protects you from extreme outside attacks.
Or you could, you know, just cover your fingers with your other hand while you type the pin. It's what I do, and I believe it is what is recommended. It would take a camera sitting within about 4 inches of my fingers to read my password, which means it would have to be installed in the safe itself. Not likely.
For the router issue, it's more difficult but doable seemlessly - first you have to find out what that router is doing. This takes considering the type of router it is, examining the switches directly connected to it to see what how the traffic is moving through it, etc. Also to consider is what the nearest router is doing, what protocol it is using, etc.
It is definitely a lot of work but you can troubleshoot the basics of what the router is doing, and combined with the needs of the network you can re-build the routers to do the job, even if it's not done exactly the way it was before. Do your hard reset, drop in your config, troubleshoot, and you're good to go. Best not to do this at peak hours.
Sure, nothing is perfect, it -could- be broken into, but you do need a record of the passwords. The worst thing in the world is to have only one guy in the whole organization who either knows the passwords, or knows how to get to them.
Option #2 is to write them all down and store them in a safe, but that seems a little rediculous to me.
The agriculture sector very, very fucked up - even before ethanol.
Did you know that farmers in this country are actually paid to -not- grow food? Do you know why? It raises the price of foodstuffs overall when there is less of it to go around, which means instead of the market eliminating the 60-70% (totally made up numbers, but it's significant) of farmers who can't compete with modern agricultural techniques, we get stagnation while one portion of the market makes money on food, and another makes money for not doing shit.
Well, now they have a new prodoct, government mandated, and do the subsidies go away? Hell no! That means the corn for corn based ethanol is coming from those large producers who are already producing all the food anyway. More competition for the corn resource mean the corn resource gets more expensive. As producers see they can make more money with ethanol, they convert higher percentages of their business to corn specifically for ethanol, which means thanks to the subsidies still going on all the other foodstuffs become more expensive.
And for what? A higher polluting, less efficient fuel? Not to mention the mass engine conversions required.
And it -still- doesn't approach the petroleum problem, because something like 60% of oil is used for non-automotive uses.
"Organic" chemicals are not the same as that organic food in the grocery store. Organic chemicals are any chemical based on carbon. This includes all life on earth, and quite a bit of not-life on earth.
Except there is no (solid) evidence of that ever happening. We have a lot of variations within species, but we still haven't found any evidence of that n'th great grandpa that was father to both human and chimp lines.
The point of the article was to make up a classification and apply it to dogs, so that they can suddenly stick that in the face of creationists and say "Nyah! Told you so! Haha loser!!!111eleven". It still doesn't fix the problem.
In fact, it points out a further problem with using fossil records to identify ancestral links: palaentologists would probably classify different breeds of dog as different species, when in fact they are nothing more than minor variations (no matter how different they look, they are genetically minor variations) within the same species. Wolves and dogs would be a major variation, but even they are not as different as lions and tigers.
We actually do have inter-species mating, and they do produce offspring. However any time this occurs, the offspring cannot re-produce. They are mules. This is one good way to tell that horses and donkeys are close, but definitely different species despite their similarities. They can even reproduce naturally, but the offspring is not viable. Mules cannot mate and produce more mules. Same with ligers, probably the coolest cat ever, and despite being bred for their magical properties they are still mules that cannot reproduce.
Lastly, there are cases of chihuauas and mastifs reproducing. Just because it is highly unlikely, and very difficult, doesn't mean it is impossible or that it does not, in fact, happen. A better example would have been some sort of ring species that actually, you know, can't inter-breed except with close relatives. Dogs aint one 'o them, sorry.
Frankly, the author is an idiot. He reminded me of a dumbass in high school who's brain was so fried with pot he'd think his ideas were brilliant, while everybody else just did a face-palm at his dumb comment. He even had the Beevus and Butthead laugh: "Huh huh, huh huh huh, huh huh, huh."
Slashdot Mirror
Ok, so you really don't know what the Supreme Court of the US does do you?
They destroy or cement laws, acts, statutes, etc. based on the Constitution. Now, they may have a conservative view of the constitution, they may have a liberal view, they may be a litteralist or they be a "living breathing document" type of justice. It doesn't really matter, they still have to work within the confines of the Constitution. It is the primary document they work with on anything related to the Bill of Rights. And, since you seemed to have had your head in the sand the last 200+ years, it comes up a LOT.
In fact, SCOTUS rulings are so powerful, the only way to over-turn them are with another SCOTUS ruling, or with an amendment to the Constitution. Those are so rare, only seventeen amendments have been made to the Constitution.
The Bill of Rights is powerful stuff, it protects us from government controlled news (though doesn't protect us from commercially controlled news, damnit), government mandated religion, the right to not incriminate yourself, etc.
That last one is the fifth amendment, and it would apply to the encryption case here directly. In the US, if law enforcement demands your encryption keys, you have only to plead the 5th and they can't touch you. You have the absolute right not to incriminate yourself, and it will hold up in any court in the land.
I guess the parent is saying that in the UK the idea was that such things were so basic, they did not need to be codified. Either that or we codified them to protect against such injustices. Well, now look what happened? They have no defense against that, but in the US it would be hell to take that all the way through the courts.
You were modded funny, but you should have been modded insightful. This happens all the time, and constantly, depending on the organization.
It also seems the bigger the company is, the more vulnerable they are to this kind of thing.
Though, I do prefer to think it happens because of smooth sales pitches and multi-thousand dollar "business trips" to Tahiti that do the trick. Mostly because I'd like to be there someday, though I probably never will. Heh.
Ok, first, you totally missed my point. My point was that by extrapolating your objections to having a database of information obtained via the web, you actually get the data indirectly from the source, in some form. I don't see your objections to the human players who have been crawling for data for their own databases for the last 40+ years. Some of them have been crawling the web for data for the last 20 years!
It's the same damn thing, data is data, half of Jeopardy is knowing shit. That's an area computers may shine. The other part is processing the context of the information and plumbing your data for the relevant piece of information in a fraction of a second. That's an area computers really, really suck at. Their data retrieval is slow compared to that of a human, and their ability to understand context sucks monkey balls.
Having a massive database of data is the only advantage the thing has against a human contestant.
Lastly, are not the questions being fed to the human players in the form of text as well? In fact the human players get auditory cues as well. I don't understand your objection here. It's not like the machine gets it before hand. Being fed in text form only is a disadvantage, not an advantage.
The buzzer may or may not prove to be a boon, it could spell disaster if the machine is too agressive. And I don't see the problem of no physical button, as long as it has to buzz in, and have the answer ready in a reasonable time (just like humans). If it can buzz faster but fails to parse the context correctly it is going to lose, and hard. Human players already do this, they buzz early before they have the answer, based on their confidence that they -will- have the answer in the next few seconds.
Nothing wrong with a machine doing the exact same thing, a physical button doesn't help or hinder that. Hello humans can already buzz before the question is finished if they want, they just had better have the answer.
Wow. Seriously?
Ok, first, it was a joke, don't have a cow man.
Second, I have no clue why it was modded insightful, but whatever.
Third, no, phrasing answers in the form of a question is easy, have you evern watched Jeopardy before? That's the easiest part of the whole thing, "What is/are X" and "Who is/are X" are all you have to do the answers to phrase them as a question. No, the interesting thing will be if IBM's machine can parse the question in the correct context and come up with the correct answer faster than a human. It's an area that computers thus far have very much sucked at.
Fourth, wth are you smoking? Do you really take D. Adams that seriously? His whole series was a big joke! Literally!
And last, yes, the Earth was a planet in Adams' universe. Look up the definition of a planet man. Seriously. Being an organic computer would not negate its planet status. It is a planet because of its size and the fact that it is the largest object in its orbital path. Not being a planet because it was a giant computer doesn't even make sense. One of the questions we ask about whether an object was a planet was NOT "Well, is it a giant computer? Or no?"
Good night man, are you a professional buzz kill or something? Or is it just something you do as a hobby?
You would think so, but it's not so simple.
Google results are far from useful without context information, especially with Jeopardy where the context is usually hidden by a pun or a play on words.
You just don't notice it because most people are able to process this contextual information on the fly, but it is a huge challenge for a machine to do it. There are litterally thousands of little bits of information that we collect as the answer is being given, including the context of the category, i.e. whether said category was a joke or not, the particular round it takes place in and the general theme of that particular show, if there is one.
A lot of the information can be given to the machine before hand, but a lot more must be collected and processed on the fly - something human brains do with ease, but computers have yet to conquer that area.
Contextual stuff is tricky, and we deal with rather complex contextual issues constantly, continually learning from them, making it seem extremely simple to us but is infact some serious mental gymnastics that (so far) machines haven't been able to duplicate. Look at the plethora of useless answers Google often gives when you are looking at that one gem of useful info. Humans can easilly pick out the relevant info, where machines can't (as the google results themselves demonstrate). Maybe the point of the exercise is that the IBM software can? That would be a really neat trick.
Hey, anybody in the entire world can edit a wikipedia page, so you know you have the absolute best information possible!
So? Your point? It's not accessing the web live, is it? No? So it's not getting it from the web.
The web isn't some magical information generating device. That information did not originate on the web, somebody put it there either from their own mind or from an offline location. By your own reasoning accessing the web isn't even "getting it from the web", as the web is just a huge cache of information from people's homes, schools, and even just plain their own minds.
Which is actually, in a sense, correct, and why your whole complaint is nonsense. People store that information in their brains, the computer will store it in a database on a few hard drives. It's no advantage, and the thing has plenty of significant disadvantages in a contest like this, unless they rig the system or IBM has made some serioius frickin advances (which they may have done).
Quit whining.
Well, we already know that, it's 42.
The real question, is what is the real question for which 42 is the answer? That one is the tough one.
I suggest we build a planet, who's sole purpose is to calculate that question...
Xenu knows all!!
Wow, that's not even close to correct. No taxation without representation was English law, not US law. In the US, we eliminated the need for such a clause by eliminating the kingship and building the entire system around representation. We also did not put taxation in the hands of the executive (not sure if the English did or not, honestly), and territories of the US get non-voting representation in Congress. The clause is not required because it is built into the system.
Churches are tax-exempt because they have charity status. I'm not sure precisely how it is built into the law, but it does not apply to everything the church does, and the assumption is that the church is a net benefit for society.
The reasons religions don't get persecuted, and are in fact very difficult to prosecute for wrongdoing is because of the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States. In a nutshell, it says Congress can't make a law that prohibits or even negatively influences the free exercise of any religion. Cults in the US are on shaky ground, but once you achieve Religion status - i.e. have your own church and can be considered tax exempt - you are on very solid ground legally.
In theory, even cults are heavily protected by the first amendment, in practice they don't fare as well as those belief systems that are considered full blown religions.
WinXP to WinVista is definitely NOT the same as Ubuntu 8.10 to 9.04. Ubuntu 8.10 to 9.04 is a minor version upgrade, like a small service pack or large set of hotfixes in windows; whereas XP to Vista is a completely different OS. Because they are built around the same methodologies and base technologies an upgrade from XP to Vista is possible; it's basically a conversion. It's also not recommended, because maintaining the linkages between the OS and programs is a nightmare, and sometimes bad things happen. The registry helps, but it often ends up getting jacked in the process.
The equivalent, though I don't like using it because it's a lateral move instead of a vertical move (vista issues aside, it is, technologically at least, an upgrade), would be "upgrading" from Ubuntu to Gentoo. That's just not going to work well, if at all.
Linux usually works better with small, constant updates.
Windows usually works better with massive, all-at-once updates.
There are nearly as many horror stories of linux machines breaking on a major update as there are on windows machines, and there are a hell of a lot more windows machines out there. Giant updates of Windows - unless it is jumping to a completely new version (i.e. Win2000 to XP, XP to Vista) - are recommended even if you have been keeping up with the updates. In fact, aside from major version upgrades, windows updates seem to be more likely to resolve odd issues rather than perpetuate them.
Upgrading to a new minor version in Ubuntu is often like upgrading to a new major version of Windows - broken libraries, files all over the frickin place just hanging there, no longer utilized, etc. I made the mistake of upgrading to 9.04 from 8.04 - I actually had to do 8.10 and right after do 9.04, and all kinds of crap was broken (like wireless, after 8.04 fixed it, damnit!). I upgraded because I heard about all kinds of UI updates, which was one of the things that bugs me about ubuntu, and I found it was just some relatively minor tweaks and changes.(The wireless UI is a big improvement though)
The one thing I like about windows is how interconnected everything is. Most people know one or two ways of getting to certain aspects of the OS, but there are often dozens because such and such is related to such and such, etc. I suppose that is what having a registry does for you. Philosophical differences between the OS's means we'll likely never see that in linux, or at least not to the same level. The flip side for Linux is fixing a problem is often just a config file away, so they each have pros and cons.
Something that just popped into my head thinking of pros and cons of each OS there, but is there any kind of automated cleanup of files, old libraries, etc. for linux (or just Ubuntu, I don't care, it's what I use)? That would be handy.
I read the article quite carefully the first time, and I did not insult him by accident.
He wasn't just trying to be funny, he was trying to use comedy to skirt an issue and prove a point.
The point was offensive, and he suggests a very unethical way to win an argument. That's why it wasn't funny. By his logic, why don't we just call all life the same species? We've all got DNA, therefore evolution is true, right? Stick that in the creationists ear!
I'd wager the only people who found it very funny are the dogmatic evolutionists who don't really know what they are talking about, but look for every oportunity to sound smart and/or talk down to any creationists they may come across. You can tell because they are the ones saying "Haha! Hell yeah! Stick it in their eye!" I would hope nobody who knows a thing or two about evolution got more than a chuckle or two out of it, but humors vary I suppose.
This post had lots of sticking things in things, for which I appologize.
The problem with the article is not the semantics of species, it's the idea of changing the definition specifically to target creationists. That's unethical, and does not help biologists in any real way.
As I understand it, for your Liger example, females tend to be fertile while males are sterile. Same with Tigons. As far as I know there has never been a successful liger-liger mating, only liger-lion or liger-tiger. In this sense, they are still mules (IMO) because they cannot reproduce of their own kind. I.e. you cannot maintain a liger population with ligers, you need lions and tigers for that.
Most botonists regect the animal definition of species, as it doesn't fit at all with botony. That makes defining speciation even more difficult, as I was only focusing on issues within the animal kingdom.
I agree that separate definitions of species is probably needed.
Excuse me?
I never made mention of any mythical beings in my post. I never even said evolution was wrong.
Your best counter to my post is an ad homonim straw-man attack on me?
Yeah, see, that's the problem. Your (I mean you, specifically) faith in evolution is no different than a "young earth" creationist if you believe it blindly, only looking at parts you like and ignoring potential problems.
Lack of evidence is lack of evidence. You proclaim christianity as mythology because of lack of evidence of a god, while at the same time defending your belief in evolution in spite of another person pointing out a lack of evidence.
It's people like you, who are no different than the creationists in your dogmatic belief in evolution, who set science back decades. You may even be worse than them, because you are willing to justify any potential issues with your pet theory. What will you do if a new, completely different theory for the origin of species comes out that is more substantiated by evidence than evolution is? What then?
(In case you didn't notice, that was my counter ad-hominem attack ;) )
Other repliers had solid, informative responses to my post, and yet you steal their limelight with this bullshit logical fallacy that gets modded insightful.
People like you piss me off, seriously. Can't have a discussion, just have to be right, or put others down to win. Well, congrats, you did it.
As someone who has worked in both an obscenely huge monolithic government entity, and an obscenely huge private entity, I'd say private is larger on the whole, but government entities are certainly far from small.
The other boon for Red Hat is breaking into a new market. They are well respected in the private sector, but largely ignored in the public, and that is a lot of potential new customers.
You've got to balance business needs with security needs.
Do they need all the security you gave them? Can they function normally with it? Are they still able to work effectively? Et cetera, et cetera.
Not saying you did it wrong, and the security of that network was definitely trash.
Just saying you should be aware of business needs, and you need to phrase things in ways that describe how your changes will help them in the long run.
Right, so, what happens when you get fired, and you don't tell anybody what your user/sudo password is?
Same problem as before.
I've got news for you, if your user account can act as root, working with it can be just as insecure as working with root.
Sudo is there to help prevent you from breaking your own system, a cleverly written exploit could probably take advantage of sudo capabilities and compromise the system. If they can run a program as you, and you can run a program as root without entering a password, an attacker can effectively operate as root. It makes no difference.
Sudo lowers the barrier of entry for root access, it makes things easier. It is more secure than running as root, but it is less secure than running as a generic user and switching to a separate root account when necessary. It almost doesn't matter if you can get at the root password, once a user has sudo access. Sudo becomes the weakest point of entry on a system, and if that is poorly configured, then the user account becomes the weakest point of entry, as sudo is not secure enough to stop them.
The only way to make sudo really secure would make it hell to work with. It is a compromise, and it is better than running everything as root, but it is foolish to think it is impenetrable. The actual root password maybe, but the root password is no longer what you need for root access.
To put it another way: Your root password, for all intents and purposes may as well be your sudo password. They are effectively the same anyway, a constantly changing root password only marginally protects you from extreme outside attacks.
Or you could, you know, just cover your fingers with your other hand while you type the pin. It's what I do, and I believe it is what is recommended. It would take a camera sitting within about 4 inches of my fingers to read my password, which means it would have to be installed in the safe itself. Not likely.
For the router issue, it's more difficult but doable seemlessly - first you have to find out what that router is doing. This takes considering the type of router it is, examining the switches directly connected to it to see what how the traffic is moving through it, etc. Also to consider is what the nearest router is doing, what protocol it is using, etc.
It is definitely a lot of work but you can troubleshoot the basics of what the router is doing, and combined with the needs of the network you can re-build the routers to do the job, even if it's not done exactly the way it was before. Do your hard reset, drop in your config, troubleshoot, and you're good to go. Best not to do this at peak hours.
Oh dude, you're not using Novell are you?
Who would even -want- the passwords to that?
Just playin! But seriously...
It's called keepass?
Sure, nothing is perfect, it -could- be broken into, but you do need a record of the passwords. The worst thing in the world is to have only one guy in the whole organization who either knows the passwords, or knows how to get to them.
Option #2 is to write them all down and store them in a safe, but that seems a little rediculous to me.
The agriculture sector very, very fucked up - even before ethanol.
Did you know that farmers in this country are actually paid to -not- grow food? Do you know why? It raises the price of foodstuffs overall when there is less of it to go around, which means instead of the market eliminating the 60-70% (totally made up numbers, but it's significant) of farmers who can't compete with modern agricultural techniques, we get stagnation while one portion of the market makes money on food, and another makes money for not doing shit.
Well, now they have a new prodoct, government mandated, and do the subsidies go away? Hell no! That means the corn for corn based ethanol is coming from those large producers who are already producing all the food anyway. More competition for the corn resource mean the corn resource gets more expensive. As producers see they can make more money with ethanol, they convert higher percentages of their business to corn specifically for ethanol, which means thanks to the subsidies still going on all the other foodstuffs become more expensive.
And for what? A higher polluting, less efficient fuel? Not to mention the mass engine conversions required.
And it -still- doesn't approach the petroleum problem, because something like 60% of oil is used for non-automotive uses.
"Organic" chemicals are not the same as that organic food in the grocery store. Organic chemicals are any chemical based on carbon. This includes all life on earth, and quite a bit of not-life on earth.
Except there is no (solid) evidence of that ever happening. We have a lot of variations within species, but we still haven't found any evidence of that n'th great grandpa that was father to both human and chimp lines.
The point of the article was to make up a classification and apply it to dogs, so that they can suddenly stick that in the face of creationists and say "Nyah! Told you so! Haha loser!!!111eleven". It still doesn't fix the problem.
In fact, it points out a further problem with using fossil records to identify ancestral links: palaentologists would probably classify different breeds of dog as different species, when in fact they are nothing more than minor variations (no matter how different they look, they are genetically minor variations) within the same species. Wolves and dogs would be a major variation, but even they are not as different as lions and tigers.
We actually do have inter-species mating, and they do produce offspring. However any time this occurs, the offspring cannot re-produce. They are mules. This is one good way to tell that horses and donkeys are close, but definitely different species despite their similarities. They can even reproduce naturally, but the offspring is not viable. Mules cannot mate and produce more mules. Same with ligers, probably the coolest cat ever, and despite being bred for their magical properties they are still mules that cannot reproduce.
Lastly, there are cases of chihuauas and mastifs reproducing. Just because it is highly unlikely, and very difficult, doesn't mean it is impossible or that it does not, in fact, happen. A better example would have been some sort of ring species that actually, you know, can't inter-breed except with close relatives. Dogs aint one 'o them, sorry.
Frankly, the author is an idiot. He reminded me of a dumbass in high school who's brain was so fried with pot he'd think his ideas were brilliant, while everybody else just did a face-palm at his dumb comment. He even had the Beevus and Butthead laugh: "Huh huh, huh huh huh, huh huh, huh."