While I've already conceded that my actual understanding of 'thee', 'thy' et. al. is actually wrong , I can't help but notice you seem to have a rather vitriolic opinion of religion. While I am myself no true believer (nor even really a false believer:), I think you may want to rethink your apparent hatred.
I'm not sure what I could possibly have said that would be considered hateful of the religious. Dismissive of their beliefs, yes, but hateful? I have merely pointed out that their use of language, in particular their use of "thee" and "thy," is in the form of an honorific, not the "informal" form it once represented, and that therefor, given that tens of millions (at least) use it in that way, and virtually NO ONE uses it in the informal sense, the meaning of the words has in fact changed to that of a formalized honorific.
How any of that can be construed as hatred for the religious is beyond me. Perhaps because I am not fawningly "respectful" of demonstrably silly beliefs, as modern day political correctness has come to require?
P2P Merit Badge (sponsor: every tech-savvy person under the age of 40)
Why under the age of 40? What magical thing happens then? Or do you only tolerate gays and women until they wrinkle or sag.....?
Homor is obviously a difficult concept, and knee jerk enforcement of political correctness a widespread disease.
HINT: The entire notion of merit badges, be they P2P or "Suicide Bomber" merit badges, was a JOKE. C.f. Humor.
HINT 2: (though it shouldn't be necessary to qualify it, apparently to some microscopically minded PC-thought police, it is) I am over 40.
Even innocuous jokes like these can apparently offend the ultra-thin skinned (cue accusation of racism/agism here). Get over it, and grow a sense of humor.
But a lot of people prefer the idea of a remote god, and because of them we nowadays tend to think that 'thou' is formal.
People don't "prefer" it so much as they have been taught it by their religions. Whether it is the Pope in Rome, the mormon Prophet in Salt Lake, the Arch Bishop of Cantabury (spelling probably wrong), or INSERT YOUR FAVORITE CULT LEADER HERE in INSERT YOUR FAVORITE PLACE HERE, the message is almost universally "you get to God through being obedient to us," which often very explicity includes "You don't talk to God, you talk to us" and even when not, certainly implies implicitly "you're not qualified to talk to God without our guidance."
The zealots' God isn't remote because the zealots necessarilly want it that way, s/he's remote because they've been taught that that's the way it is, by organizations that profit directly from being the liaison between the believers and their God.
It's not a question of pedantry. Like I said, the familiar form is effectively dead, so if you're using it, you're trying to evoke an earlier version of the language, and so, you should use it correctly within that earlier version.
The point is, there are literally tens of millions (if not hundreds of millions) using "thee," "thy", etc. today (more's the pity), and virtually none of them are trying to "evoke an earlier version of the language." They are almost without exception using it as an honoric, to address, plead with, or grovel before their God. The meaning, as it is used by these millions, is in fact on honorific. I will concede that knowing the history is useful (and might take some of the edge off the usual toxicity that eminates from the religious right, though I'm skeptical of that), but the fact of the matter is that the terminology, used today, is an honorific and very formal version of "you."
You're right, the familiar form in English is dead. "Thee," "thy", et. al. in their day-to-day meaning among those who use the words today has become exactly the opposite of its historical meaning. Which is why when Lucas used the phrase "What is thy bidding, my master" it evoked a much more submissive, worshipful relationship between Vader and the Emporer than "what is your bidding, my master" would have. The language, as it is used by millions upon millions of people, has changed.
As an aside, I wish "thee," "thy," etc. truly were dead. I think we'd all be a lot better off without the engine of religion that has preserved and changed the meaning of those words over the centuries...but that's a topic of discussion for another day.
Here are several merit badges foreign powers could "suggest" (strong-arm) the Boy Scouts of America to include...in the interests of fair balance, cultural exchange, and all that:
4) Diplomacy Merit Badge (sponsor: the whole of the Earth outside of the USA, note attached reads "Please America, learn this one well!")
5) Cooperative and Free Culture Merit Badge (sponsor: the whole of the non-western world that still remembers a time when the people owned their culture, not the copyright cartels of faceless corporations).
6) P2P Merit Badge (sponsor: every tech-savvy person under the age of 40)
I'm sure there are others, like remedial courses in the separation of church and state, tolerance for women, tolerance for gays, and so on, but the list grows rather onerous quite quickly.
Of course if GL had known what he was doing, he would have known that 'thy' is the familiar form. 'You' is the honorific form in English. We just got rid of the familiar form, so 'thy' only sounds more formal...
I don't much care for Lucas, or the latest abominations he has foisted upon us in the last few years, but in his defense it should be pointed out that...
Languages are living, mutating things. They aren't static, and what was true in 1500 by and large isn't true today.
Thy may have been the more informal form in older English. However, it has only survived because of religious zealots grovelling before their god, using the form as an honorific.
So, the fact that it sounds more formal to our ears, and is used as a more formal form of the language by the only people who still use it, means that, in today's language, it in fact has become the more formal form of the pronoun. Linguistic pedants, as usual, lag far behind the actual state of the language.
It is an interesting bit of etemology and linguistic history that "thy" and "your" have reversed meanings, in that "thee," "thy," etc. have come to mean an honorific form of "you," "your," etc. while "you," "your," etc. have come to mean the more familiar, natural form. It is even more interesting that this change in the language has occurred because of the exclusive use of these pronouns by the religous. What is less interesting is the degree to which many linguistic pedants will ignore the linguistic reality of the last century and a half (in terms of how the language is used and understood by those who speak it) in favor of a historical fact that bears no relevance to modern colloquialisms, particularly modern religious colloquialisms.
George Lucas may be an idiot about many things, but using "thy" to elevate Darth's relationship with the Emporor to one of worship rather than mere subservience was both correct in terms of the modern day language, and in terms of the effect it achieved.
don't see this as being really practical for security. So you've got all of this quantum-encrypted video which is infinitely better than an SSH-encrypted stream and you're feeling pretty smug about how unbreakable it is. Meanwhile, the janitor has planted a bug under your desk and is eavesdropping on everything you say. Or someone else hid a pinhole camera in a plant and is recording it all.
I disagree. I think it is eminently practical (assuming, of course, the actual hardware is practical). Issues with people and places needing to be secured are as old as the first secret kept between two people.
However, ever since the passenger pigeon or courier mail, the issue of "man in the middle" attacks has been a problem...one that wax seals can no longer prevent thanks to the telegraph, telephone, and modern digital communications. Now, IN ADDITION to endpoint security, we have routine, trivial cracking of en-route communications, something that in the excesses of 20th century law enforcement and other big brotherisms has become so routine as to be encoded into law (requiring telecoms to give George W. Jackboot trivial access to any private conversation on demand). Plugging this hole, making such interceptions of personal communications difficult or impossible, is IMHO a huge plus and a massive improvement over the status quo vis-a-vis personal privacy.
Now, will it ensure perfectly safe communications? No. But at least the police/feds/whoever will have to gain physical access to your property, rather than simply throwing a switch in the main office to listen to your private conversations. This is an improvement for everybody other than flatfoots to lazy to plant a bug while the suspects are out of town...and if it makes their investigations more difficult, well, that's a shame, but frankly, my privacy and freedom are vastly more important than their convinience.
Like a $20 cover charge at a bar...it keeps the riff-raff out.
No, it doesn't. You assume that the "riff raff" is either poor or too tight to spend a little money for the privelege of harrassing their target forum. You also assume the same for bars and nightclubs.
In both cases that assumption is incorrect.
There are plenty of well-to-do jerks and "riff-raff", and plenty of excellent people of modest or little means, so while you may be creating a little club based on the exclusivity of daddy's wealth, you are not inherently enhancing dialogue, intellect, or ethics by using a financial filter. In fact, arguably, you're doing the opposite.
One thing is certain, you're losing a lot more interesting, worthwhile people than you are jerks when you start levying a cover charge for a discussion forum. This sort of thing reinforces the need to resurrect USENET (with decent SPAM filtering).
I say it's way past time Canada and the rest of the world told the US to go fuck itself.
I wholeheartedly agree. Our government has become a monster, and you'd be well advised to tell our corrupt, warmongering leaders to fuck off and die, preferably in "their own country" so as to spare the rest of the world the stench.
I frankly admire the Canadians' gumption in standing up for their freedoms against a waning superpower run amok who happens to surround them on two sides. It's a courageous stand to take, and will serve you well in sustaining your freedoms long after ours aren't even a distant memory, no matter the short term threats or economic "incentives" we try to strong-arm you with.
Good luck. The dwindling number of us Americans who remain free thinkers beneath the Bush regime applaud and support you--even if our own voices have been silenced by and large in the broader corporate right-wing media.
Personally, I think most of the hate directed at the previous two, Jar-Jar comments aside, was a media invention.
Absolutely right, it is a media invention, invented by none other than Lucas when he created the two abominations that are Star Wars Episodes I and II.
I own the Ep I DVD (stupid me for buying the thing sight-unseen despite the negative comments here and elsewhere). I was spared spending money on the second one by watching the first half hour or so on a friend's box (that person had downloaded it about a week before SW came out in theaters). It was so bad, that by the time we got to the wooden Natilie Portman talks to Annikan scene we quit watching and deleted the file.
Last night, after watching SW Revelations, I tried watching Episode I again just for the FX eye candy. Again, the writing, acting, and storyline were so bad, I couldn't finish it. I'd forgotten how truly awful it is.
I liked Star Wars--but not anymore. This isn't some "Liberal Media Conspiracy" any more than the exposure of Tom Delay's congressional corruption is. The hatred for the new Star Wars movies (Jar Jar included) is derived solely from the absolute feces George Lucas has chosen to foist upon his fans in place of an actual Star Wars movie. It's a shame so many fans are willing to accept such drivel, for that lowers the bar on any future SW creations (and truth be told, even at its best the bar was never THAT high to begin with)...which means we can only expect the same or worse. Fan Fiction films like Revelations excepted--that was truly remarkable: a low budget film with a better storyline, better acting, and better execution than the last two Lucas movies (FX excepted, and even there they did an excellent job).
This "truism" (which isn't) gets trotted out whenever the administration comes out and does something particularly heinous and unprecedented. It's appalling how many people mindlessly nod and agree with this nonsense. Yes, Democrats have been corrupt and have engaged in power politics. Yes, Republican have as well. But what is being done by the Bush administration transcends anything either of the parties have done in the past.
From TFA
The State Department has traditionally put together a list of industry representatives for these meetings, and anyone in the U.S. telecom industry who had the requisite expertise and wanted to go was generally given a slot, say past participants.
Only after the start of Bush's second term did a political litmus test emerge, industry sources say.
The message is clear to industry: If you donate to the Democrats, you will be frozen out of any participation in the formation of public policy. If any of your representatives do, they (and your company) will as well.
This is designed to foster an environment where companies and employees are frightened, even forbidden, from making political contributions to anyone other than the ruling party. In a system where funding drives politics more than anything else, it is the final death knell of democracy and effective dissent. The only well funded party will become the Republican party, which is the whole point. The result will be a one party system that doesn't call itself a one party system, with enough token Democrats to befuddle the American people into believing they still live in a representative republic (aka democracy).
This is unprecedented, terribly dangerous, and unsurprising that it would be the Bush administration presiding over this change in affairs.
Hillary will *never* win. There is no way Americans will elect a women to the Whitehouse.
That's (mostly) correct. Even Pakistan has had a female prime minister, but the "progressive" (it isn't) "liberal democracy" (it isn't) egalitarian (it isn't) United States will tear down and smear any woman who even gets close to the reigns of power unless she is sufficiently submissive to her male (husband/boss/whatever). Hilary Clinton is a prime example of a competent, strong woman who has been smeared worse the Oppenheimer for the crime of aspiring to power... the kind of power her husband (a man) could go after with impunity.
There is one scenerio in which a woman might be elected: the Republicans run Condasleaza Rice against a democratic woman (Hilary or whoever). Assuming the elections are free and fair (this is by no means a given) either Condasleaza will win, or (if people are fed up with Republican shenanigan's enough) the Dem will. Either way, we will (probably) finally have a female president. I say "probably" because this country has such an aversion to women with power (look at what happened to Martha Stewart vs. Bush's Enron buddies) that a male running for a third party might well be elected instead.
But let's assume that doesn't happen. The thing here is, be careful what you wish for. How easy would it be to criticize the Vatican's anti-woman agenda if they DID allow female clergy and had a female pope promoting the party line? This sort of thing tends to befuddle people, and that is true whether it is a Clerance Thomas voting consistently against blacks on important race issues, or Laura Bush supporting her husband's anti-woman agenda on a whole host of social issues (or Condasleaza Rice doing the same), be it abortion, family leave, healthcare, or education (the last is particularly disengenuous: make requirements of the state and local schools, and then refuse to fund them, then blame the failure on those same states and municipalities). About the only thing worse than a Bush presidency would be a Condasleaza presidency. Here you have a woman pushing for the retreat of women's issues and rights on a number of fronts, but one that is harder to criticize without being shouted down than Bush because people can label you a sexist or racist for daring question her authority, with the result that no one listens to the content of your criticism.
Hilary in contrast would probably make a pretty good president--better president than her husband--but she has been so deamonized there's no way in hell she'll get elected unless she's running against David Duke's sex slave (and even then, it would probably be close).
Clinton never would have been elected president if not for Perot. Perot stole 10% of the vote from Bush, giving Clinton the presidency.
You unwittingly make the point clear: Perot did not get Clinton elected. Perot got 20% of the vote, only half of whome supported Bush as their second choice. The other half supported Clinton as their second choice. Had he not run, the result of the election would have been the same: Clinton elected as president.
What Perot DID do, which was very important, was force both of the other parties to "walk-the-walk" with their rhetoric for balancing the budget. The Democrats weren't serious about balancing the budget, and neither were the Republicans. Bush senior wanted to pass a bill requiring congress to balance the budget, but only one that wouldn't take effect until long after he personally was out of office, even if he served a second term (which of course he did not). The Democrats weren't any better on that particular subject.
Enter Ross Perot with his "its time to pay the piper!" populist movement, and both parties fell over each other balancing the budget within the next three years. Deficits were reduced dramatically under an all democratic government (CLinton's first two years) and continued the trend under a split Republican-congress/Democratic-presidency, leading to the budget surplusses we enjoyed up until Bush Junior defrauded the electorate in 2000. After that all bets were off... with the boogeyman of Al Q'aida to blame for our own financial and strategic (Iraq) incompetence.
What Michel Rocard has done is specify that to be patentable, a software must be controlling the forces of nature. Thus simulations are out, software controlling a robotic arm is in.
Light is a force of nature. The process by which pixels are displayed (digital/electrical, or analog/chemical) are forces of nature. Hell, electricity is a force of nature, and the movement of electrons is what defines every action and calculation of a computer.
Seems to me it would be pretty easy to define any calculation as "controlling the forces of nature" and make every possible software algorithm patentable anyway.
It's a good idea, but an unwise comprimise IMHO. Keeping patent moghuls from privatizing and monopolizing knowledge is like trying to hold a flooding river within its banks. Open the dyke just a little as a comprimise and you'll find your town just as flooded as if there were no dyke to begin with. Ditto for making some software patentable. If some of it is patentable, then eventually all of it will be. It will only be a matter of how deep you look into the physics of nature before patents apply. Hell, taken to an extreme, there are even now tentative theories that suggest information itself may well be a basic force of nature... what then?
"Staff can make the three-mile voyage into town in their off hours by calling a water taxi."
I smell something rotten here. Specifically the usage of the word "staff".
I smell a number of things rotten here, including the fact that the "entrepreneur" (or article writer) hasn't a fucking clue about international waters, which extend twelve miles from shore, not 3. This is the 21st century, not the 19th, and maritime law may not have changed much, but the definition of "international waters" has.
Dependencies do exist, but config checks for you and gives you a nice list. The real problem is when your dependencies have dependencies...this is where Debian's apt-get can really shine (although I believe modern RPM systems can likewise deal with this...Mandrake's system pops up a window of the dependent additions and asks if it is ok to install them also.)
Exactly. Debian apt is excellent for binary packages and ok but not great for source packages, portage is amazing for source packages and comparable to apt-get for binary packages, and while RPMs have become adequate for dependency resolution of binary packages, they are absolutely atrocious at handling source package. I should mention that Source Mage does quite well with source packages, and ok with binary packages.
The point being that NO standard should impose the packaging management scheme on anyone. To do so will cripple innovation and marginalize the best distributions in favor of the biggest, which of course certain distributions' strategy in regards to the LSB.
A simple parsable file with dependencies, an install script/wizard included in the tarball, with standard filenames (e.g. PackageDependencies.txt and Install) are all that is needed. Leave resolving the dependencies and executing the installation script to those competent to do so, namely the various package management systems, be they Portage, apt-get, RPM package managers, or what have you.
The LSB is RPM-centric. It also has other flaws (in filesystem organization, to name one, although that is improving).
Different distributions use different package schemes. Debian uses.debs, Source Mages uses tarballs+spells, Gentoo uses portage, etc.
The "perfect container" is a tarball. Anything else you want to do (install wizard, compile script, install script, what have you) belongs outside of the package container. Need a one-click installation procedure? Include the script in the tarball, and provide a GUI that reads the contents of the tarball and lets you run a program from within the tarball (KDE has apps that can do this, for example).
RPMs are flawed in various ways, and centric to particular distributions who happened to have representation early enough in the LSB process to push through a standard favoring their way of doing things over the broader, more portable standars (tar.gz).
Until the LSB becomes a standard that is no longer Red Hat/Suse centric, its adoption by other distros will be lackluster at bets, and rightly so.
As to your 40+ workstations that have been switched to Windows... welcome to hell. If you think a little integration work in a heterogenous environment is hard, just wait for what Redmond's incompetence has in store for you. Your CEO won't be the one suffering, you (or the poor schmuck who replaces you after the next round of worms/trojans/viruses and other Microsoft goodies goes around) will be. *BSD and Linux aren't perfect, but their a damn sight better and easier to administer than Windows, and have the added benefit of working as well. Frankly, if you and your CEO were so hell bent on having something easy to integrate and use, and are obviously so willing to exchange flexibility to get it, you should have chosen to go with Apple for both your clients and servers. You would have traded less of your flexibility away, ended up with something much more solid and reliable than windows, and much easier to administer, and prevented a whole lot of heartache down the road. But then, I suspect your post is more of a dig at Linux and promotion of Windoze than it is a true history of some company actually being stupid enough to dump Linux for Windows.
Why is a Microsoft beta less credible than open source 0.87 alpha 'releases', which tend to find their way into many a Linux distribution.
Because OSS/FS alpha and beta releases typically work more reliably than Microsoft production releases, even after multiple "service pack" patches. In this case, past performance is a pretty good indicator of what to expect in the future.
Only for OS updates (logical) or applications installed into a folder other then your home directory (also logical). There are a ton of Mac OS X apps which don't have an "installer" per se you simply drag the item to your home folder and use it without having to know the root password.
Yes, and that would work under Linux as well. Perhaps you skimmed over it, but I did point out exactly what you said, namely that anyone in the administrator group (the default non-root user, and any others you add) also has write permissions to the/Applications directory, so you can drag and drop those applications to the Applications folder and make them available system-wide without typing a password. But that is limited to the/Applications directory (and your home directory, of course), and to applications which can be copied and don't use an install wizard.
The last season of Enterprise has been fairly strong. I think a lot of people built up some irrational hatred over the first couple seasons.
Having seen a number of episodes in the first seasons before giving up on the show, I would have to say there is nothing "irrational" about the hatred. Misguided, perhaps, if the show did indeed improve in the 4th season as some have said, but not irrational.
The first two seasons sucked so badly, decorum prevents me from using the necessary adjectives and nouns to accurately describe just how much.
Nobody said the US doesn't apply pressure to its "freinds" on a variety of issues.
No one said the US isn't the world's biggest bully.
What was said is that spineless politicians didn't stand up to that pressure, and those spineless politicians are to blame for not doing their jobs: leading their country and putting their own people's interests ahead of expediency and their own political well-being.
If you cave to our pressure, you have only yourselves to blame. You can go ahead and blame foreign powers for exerting pressure to get their way, but that won't do anything to solve your problems. Foreign pressure isn't going to go away, and when the USA begins to feel the consiquences of its poor leadership over the next couple of decades, and China rises to fill the vacuum, the pressure will remain. The only difference will be its origin (China instead of the US perhaps, or another world power maybe). The problem we all need to fix in our countries (and I include the USA in this, by the way) is leadership that caves to pressure, and puts its own short-term political agenda and well-being ahead of its people's interests. Fix that, and you fix this problem. Do nothing and blame foreigners for it, and you'll have these problems in perpetuity.
Oh, and by the way, with its military strength overextended and its economy stuttering, the US isn't in a position to make good on most of its threats, economic and otherwise. Elect leadership that tells our idiot regime to fuck off, and you'll probably be surprised at how mild, and few, the economic consiquences are. Likely they'll be more than made up for by the economic and social advantages of telling the Bush regime exactly what they can do with their demands.
He's full of shit. Even Mac OS X, the quintessentially "easy to use, just works" OS, requires you to type in the administrator (similiar but not the same as root) password before installing new software or OS updates. Granted, they do give "administrative users" access to the/Applications directory, so the default non-root user can copy apps to/Applications in those cases where drag-and-drop is all you need, rather than an install wizard.
The idea that everyone should "just run as root" is asinine and toxic. People like this, and the distributions they create implimenting this philosophy, will give Linux a bad name security wise, and probably become the Microsoft posterchild for how Linux doesn't measure up to its "hype." He'll give the disinformationists in Redmond something to hang their deceptive hats on, and damage the reputation of hundreds of distributions that are more secure than windows ever will be because they don't succumb to the least common denominator.
Consider your (very flawed) logic as applied to highways. In communications terms, WIFI/last-mile-copper/fiber is extremely analogous to highways, up to and including many of the delitarious effects of having private highways/tollways vs. publicly funded highways/tollways.
I do not want the goverment in controll of my access to transportation. If the govenment gives away highway access, the "for pay" services will not be able to compete and will go under. That will leave the government in full control of my access to transportation.
I have no problem with government agencies providing free access in libraries, parks, airports, schools, and government buildings. I consider this to be approprtiate and even usefull. I do not, however, want the government providing free streets to my home.
Can you even begin to fathom the kinds of monopolies and cartels that would form if our streets, highways, and expressways were privately owned (as some extremist libertarians advocate)? If you think the Microsoft monopoly is bad, imagine a Shell, Exxon, or Ford monopoly on the street to your driveway. Want to go to the store? Better make sure it's an Exxon affiliate. Want to go to work. Better hope to God you work for on Exxon affiliate (or pay treble). Want to compete with Exxon. God (or other mythological Dieity) help you.
That is exactly the current situation with telecommunications in the United States, and the FCC's efforts to mititage these monopolies through regulation will always be inadequate as long as the underlying infrastructure, which lends itself to natural monopolies in much the same way roads do (how many wires can you physically have running up to your doorstep, and how cost effective is it to have more than one?), remains privately owned.
Network infrastructure is for digital communicatons as basic as roads and highways are to transportation. It not only makes sense to have them administered as public works projects in the same way highways are, it is imperitive if you want to have any kind of effective competition with respect to the thousands of services that use that infrastructure. Otherwise, so hello to your local telco. They own access to your communications and, by implication, you, and you don't even have the power to elect someone new when (not if) they abuse their position.
Don't know about the rest of the world but we don't have to take systems down to backup them here.
Yeah, it's pretty pathetic. Contrast their approach with our simple "poor man's RAID" backup solution which has worked on Sun systems, *BSD systems, and GNU/Linux systems for over 10 years:
(install two identical hard drives)
dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdb bs=1048576
Run as frequently as you need a backup image. This has worked, as I said, for over a decade, and has allowed quick and easy recovery of every machine we've ever had a hard drive crash on. There are theoretical limitations, e.g. a gradual failure of the source drive that causes corrupt data to overwrite the backup, so "poor man's RAID" should only be one component of one's backup strategy, not the entire strategy, but it has worked wonderfully. Why not use RAID instead? Well, in some limited cases we do (including dual RAIDS that act as "poor man's RAID" to each other), but the problem with RAID alone is that you can't necessarily snatch the drive out of one machine and put it in another (hard drives aren't the only things in a computer that break) and because a RAID isn't a backup, it's a highly available drive, which means when you need to recover older data after, for example, human error damages the current copy, RAID does you no good while "poor man's RAID" gives you an instantly accessible copy of last night's backup.
That, coupled with more traditional backup to tape, or, as we've been doing lately, a tar archive of the entire system's filesystem to a central RAID repository across the net, is pretty damn bullet proof, easy, and trivial to recover with.
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While I've already conceded that my actual understanding of 'thee', 'thy' et. al. is actually wrong , I can't help but notice you seem to have a rather vitriolic opinion of religion. While I am myself no true believer (nor even really a false believer:), I think you may want to rethink your apparent hatred.
I'm not sure what I could possibly have said that would be considered hateful of the religious. Dismissive of their beliefs, yes, but hateful? I have merely pointed out that their use of language, in particular their use of "thee" and "thy," is in the form of an honorific, not the "informal" form it once represented, and that therefor, given that tens of millions (at least) use it in that way, and virtually NO ONE uses it in the informal sense, the meaning of the words has in fact changed to that of a formalized honorific.
How any of that can be construed as hatred for the religious is beyond me. Perhaps because I am not fawningly "respectful" of demonstrably silly beliefs, as modern day political correctness has come to require?
P2P Merit Badge (sponsor: every tech-savvy person under the age of 40)
Why under the age of 40? What magical thing happens then? Or do you only tolerate gays and women until they wrinkle or sag.....?
Homor is obviously a difficult concept, and knee jerk enforcement of political correctness a widespread disease.
HINT: The entire notion of merit badges, be they P2P or "Suicide Bomber" merit badges, was a JOKE. C.f. Humor.
HINT 2: (though it shouldn't be necessary to qualify it, apparently to some microscopically minded PC-thought police, it is) I am over 40.
Even innocuous jokes like these can apparently offend the ultra-thin skinned (cue accusation of racism/agism here). Get over it, and grow a sense of humor.
But a lot of people prefer the idea of a remote god, and because of them we nowadays tend to think that 'thou' is formal.
People don't "prefer" it so much as they have been taught it by their religions. Whether it is the Pope in Rome, the mormon Prophet in Salt Lake, the Arch Bishop of Cantabury (spelling probably wrong), or INSERT YOUR FAVORITE CULT LEADER HERE in INSERT YOUR FAVORITE PLACE HERE, the message is almost universally "you get to God through being obedient to us," which often very explicity includes "You don't talk to God, you talk to us" and even when not, certainly implies implicitly "you're not qualified to talk to God without our guidance."
The zealots' God isn't remote because the zealots necessarilly want it that way, s/he's remote because they've been taught that that's the way it is, by organizations that profit directly from being the liaison between the believers and their God.
It's not a question of pedantry. Like I said, the familiar form is effectively dead, so if you're using it, you're trying to evoke an earlier version of the language, and so, you should use it correctly within that earlier version.
The point is, there are literally tens of millions (if not hundreds of millions) using "thee," "thy", etc. today (more's the pity), and virtually none of them are trying to "evoke an earlier version of the language." They are almost without exception using it as an honoric, to address, plead with, or grovel before their God. The meaning, as it is used by these millions, is in fact on honorific. I will concede that knowing the history is useful (and might take some of the edge off the usual toxicity that eminates from the religious right, though I'm skeptical of that), but the fact of the matter is that the terminology, used today, is an honorific and very formal version of "you."
You're right, the familiar form in English is dead. "Thee," "thy", et. al. in their day-to-day meaning among those who use the words today has become exactly the opposite of its historical meaning. Which is why when Lucas used the phrase "What is thy bidding, my master" it evoked a much more submissive, worshipful relationship between Vader and the Emporer than "what is your bidding, my master" would have. The language, as it is used by millions upon millions of people, has changed.
As an aside, I wish "thee," "thy," etc. truly were dead. I think we'd all be a lot better off without the engine of religion that has preserved and changed the meaning of those words over the centuries...but that's a topic of discussion for another day.
Here are several merit badges foreign powers could "suggest" (strong-arm) the Boy Scouts of America to include...in the interests of fair balance, cultural exchange, and all that:
1) Suicide Bomber Merit Badge (sponsor: Saddam Hussein Regime in Exile)
2) Suicide Pilot Merit Badge (sponsor: Al Q'aida)
3) Cheese and Wine Merit Badge (sponsor: France)
4) Diplomacy Merit Badge (sponsor: the whole of the Earth outside of the USA, note attached reads "Please America, learn this one well!")
5) Cooperative and Free Culture Merit Badge (sponsor: the whole of the non-western world that still remembers a time when the people owned their culture, not the copyright cartels of faceless corporations).
6) P2P Merit Badge (sponsor: every tech-savvy person under the age of 40)
I'm sure there are others, like remedial courses in the separation of church and state, tolerance for women, tolerance for gays, and so on, but the list grows rather onerous quite quickly.
Of course if GL had known what he was doing, he would have known that 'thy' is the familiar form. 'You' is the honorific form in English. We just got rid of the familiar form, so 'thy' only sounds more formal...
...
I don't much care for Lucas, or the latest abominations he has foisted upon us in the last few years, but in his defense it should be pointed out that
Languages are living, mutating things. They aren't static, and what was true in 1500 by and large isn't true today.
Thy may have been the more informal form in older English. However, it has only survived because of religious zealots grovelling before their god, using the form as an honorific.
So, the fact that it sounds more formal to our ears, and is used as a more formal form of the language by the only people who still use it, means that, in today's language, it in fact has become the more formal form of the pronoun. Linguistic pedants, as usual, lag far behind the actual state of the language.
It is an interesting bit of etemology and linguistic history that "thy" and "your" have reversed meanings, in that "thee," "thy," etc. have come to mean an honorific form of "you," "your," etc. while "you," "your," etc. have come to mean the more familiar, natural form. It is even more interesting that this change in the language has occurred because of the exclusive use of these pronouns by the religous. What is less interesting is the degree to which many linguistic pedants will ignore the linguistic reality of the last century and a half (in terms of how the language is used and understood by those who speak it) in favor of a historical fact that bears no relevance to modern colloquialisms, particularly modern religious colloquialisms.
George Lucas may be an idiot about many things, but using "thy" to elevate Darth's relationship with the Emporor to one of worship rather than mere subservience was both correct in terms of the modern day language, and in terms of the effect it achieved.
don't see this as being really practical for security. So you've got all of this quantum-encrypted video which is infinitely better than an SSH-encrypted stream and you're feeling pretty smug about how unbreakable it is. Meanwhile, the janitor has planted a bug under your desk and is eavesdropping on everything you say. Or someone else hid a pinhole camera in a plant and is recording it all.
I disagree. I think it is eminently practical (assuming, of course, the actual hardware is practical). Issues with people and places needing to be secured are as old as the first secret kept between two people.
However, ever since the passenger pigeon or courier mail, the issue of "man in the middle" attacks has been a problem...one that wax seals can no longer prevent thanks to the telegraph, telephone, and modern digital communications. Now, IN ADDITION to endpoint security, we have routine, trivial cracking of en-route communications, something that in the excesses of 20th century law enforcement and other big brotherisms has become so routine as to be encoded into law (requiring telecoms to give George W. Jackboot trivial access to any private conversation on demand). Plugging this hole, making such interceptions of personal communications difficult or impossible, is IMHO a huge plus and a massive improvement over the status quo vis-a-vis personal privacy.
Now, will it ensure perfectly safe communications? No. But at least the police/feds/whoever will have to gain physical access to your property, rather than simply throwing a switch in the main office to listen to your private conversations. This is an improvement for everybody other than flatfoots to lazy to plant a bug while the suspects are out of town...and if it makes their investigations more difficult, well, that's a shame, but frankly, my privacy and freedom are vastly more important than their convinience.
Like a $20 cover charge at a bar...it keeps the riff-raff out.
No, it doesn't. You assume that the "riff raff" is either poor or too tight to spend a little money for the privelege of harrassing their target forum. You also assume the same for bars and nightclubs.
In both cases that assumption is incorrect.
There are plenty of well-to-do jerks and "riff-raff", and plenty of excellent people of modest or little means, so while you may be creating a little club based on the exclusivity of daddy's wealth, you are not inherently enhancing dialogue, intellect, or ethics by using a financial filter. In fact, arguably, you're doing the opposite.
One thing is certain, you're losing a lot more interesting, worthwhile people than you are jerks when you start levying a cover charge for a discussion forum. This sort of thing reinforces the need to resurrect USENET (with decent SPAM filtering).
I say it's way past time Canada and the rest of the world told the US to go fuck itself.
I wholeheartedly agree. Our government has become a monster, and you'd be well advised to tell our corrupt, warmongering leaders to fuck off and die, preferably in "their own country" so as to spare the rest of the world the stench.
I frankly admire the Canadians' gumption in standing up for their freedoms against a waning superpower run amok who happens to surround them on two sides. It's a courageous stand to take, and will serve you well in sustaining your freedoms long after ours aren't even a distant memory, no matter the short term threats or economic "incentives" we try to strong-arm you with.
Good luck. The dwindling number of us Americans who remain free thinkers beneath the Bush regime applaud and support you--even if our own voices have been silenced by and large in the broader corporate right-wing media.
Personally, I think most of the hate directed at the previous two, Jar-Jar comments aside, was a media invention.
Absolutely right, it is a media invention, invented by none other than Lucas when he created the two abominations that are Star Wars Episodes I and II.
I own the Ep I DVD (stupid me for buying the thing sight-unseen despite the negative comments here and elsewhere). I was spared spending money on the second one by watching the first half hour or so on a friend's box (that person had downloaded it about a week before SW came out in theaters). It was so bad, that by the time we got to the wooden Natilie Portman talks to Annikan scene we quit watching and deleted the file.
Last night, after watching SW Revelations, I tried watching Episode I again just for the FX eye candy. Again, the writing, acting, and storyline were so bad, I couldn't finish it. I'd forgotten how truly awful it is.
I liked Star Wars--but not anymore. This isn't some "Liberal Media Conspiracy" any more than the exposure of Tom Delay's congressional corruption is. The hatred for the new Star Wars movies (Jar Jar included) is derived solely from the absolute feces George Lucas has chosen to foist upon his fans in place of an actual Star Wars movie. It's a shame so many fans are willing to accept such drivel, for that lowers the bar on any future SW creations (and truth be told, even at its best the bar was never THAT high to begin with)...which means we can only expect the same or worse. Fan Fiction films like Revelations excepted--that was truly remarkable: a low budget film with a better storyline, better acting, and better execution than the last two Lucas movies (FX excepted, and even there they did an excellent job).
The 127.1 joke has been around for ages..
:-)
Which makes falling for it and deleting your own hard drive even more moronic.
From TFA
The message is clear to industry: If you donate to the Democrats, you will be frozen out of any participation in the formation of public policy. If any of your representatives do, they (and your company) will as well.
This is designed to foster an environment where companies and employees are frightened, even forbidden, from making political contributions to anyone other than the ruling party. In a system where funding drives politics more than anything else, it is the final death knell of democracy and effective dissent. The only well funded party will become the Republican party, which is the whole point. The result will be a one party system that doesn't call itself a one party system, with enough token Democrats to befuddle the American people into believing they still live in a representative republic (aka democracy).
This is unprecedented, terribly dangerous, and unsurprising that it would be the Bush administration presiding over this change in affairs.
Hillary will *never* win. There is no way Americans will elect a women to the Whitehouse.
... the kind of power her husband (a man) could go after with impunity.
That's (mostly) correct. Even Pakistan has had a female prime minister, but the "progressive" (it isn't) "liberal democracy" (it isn't) egalitarian (it isn't) United States will tear down and smear any woman who even gets close to the reigns of power unless she is sufficiently submissive to her male (husband/boss/whatever). Hilary Clinton is a prime example of a competent, strong woman who has been smeared worse the Oppenheimer for the crime of aspiring to power
There is one scenerio in which a woman might be elected: the Republicans run Condasleaza Rice against a democratic woman (Hilary or whoever). Assuming the elections are free and fair (this is by no means a given) either Condasleaza will win, or (if people are fed up with Republican shenanigan's enough) the Dem will. Either way, we will (probably) finally have a female president. I say "probably" because this country has such an aversion to women with power (look at what happened to Martha Stewart vs. Bush's Enron buddies) that a male running for a third party might well be elected instead.
But let's assume that doesn't happen. The thing here is, be careful what you wish for. How easy would it be to criticize the Vatican's anti-woman agenda if they DID allow female clergy and had a female pope promoting the party line? This sort of thing tends to befuddle people, and that is true whether it is a Clerance Thomas voting consistently against blacks on important race issues, or Laura Bush supporting her husband's anti-woman agenda on a whole host of social issues (or Condasleaza Rice doing the same), be it abortion, family leave, healthcare, or education (the last is particularly disengenuous: make requirements of the state and local schools, and then refuse to fund them, then blame the failure on those same states and municipalities). About the only thing worse than a Bush presidency would be a Condasleaza presidency. Here you have a woman pushing for the retreat of women's issues and rights on a number of fronts, but one that is harder to criticize without being shouted down than Bush because people can label you a sexist or racist for daring question her authority, with the result that no one listens to the content of your criticism.
Hilary in contrast would probably make a pretty good president--better president than her husband--but she has been so deamonized there's no way in hell she'll get elected unless she's running against David Duke's sex slave (and even then, it would probably be close).
Clinton never would have been elected president if not for Perot. Perot stole 10% of the vote from Bush, giving Clinton the presidency.
... with the boogeyman of Al Q'aida to blame for our own financial and strategic (Iraq) incompetence.
You unwittingly make the point clear: Perot did not get Clinton elected. Perot got 20% of the vote, only half of whome supported Bush as their second choice. The other half supported Clinton as their second choice. Had he not run, the result of the election would have been the same: Clinton elected as president.
What Perot DID do, which was very important, was force both of the other parties to "walk-the-walk" with their rhetoric for balancing the budget. The Democrats weren't serious about balancing the budget, and neither were the Republicans. Bush senior wanted to pass a bill requiring congress to balance the budget, but only one that wouldn't take effect until long after he personally was out of office, even if he served a second term (which of course he did not). The Democrats weren't any better on that particular subject.
Enter Ross Perot with his "its time to pay the piper!" populist movement, and both parties fell over each other balancing the budget within the next three years. Deficits were reduced dramatically under an all democratic government (CLinton's first two years) and continued the trend under a split Republican-congress/Democratic-presidency, leading to the budget surplusses we enjoyed up until Bush Junior defrauded the electorate in 2000. After that all bets were off
What Michel Rocard has done is specify that to be patentable, a software must be controlling the forces of nature. Thus simulations are out, software controlling a robotic arm is in.
... what then?
Light is a force of nature. The process by which pixels are displayed (digital/electrical, or analog/chemical) are forces of nature. Hell, electricity is a force of nature, and the movement of electrons is what defines every action and calculation of a computer.
Seems to me it would be pretty easy to define any calculation as "controlling the forces of nature" and make every possible software algorithm patentable anyway.
It's a good idea, but an unwise comprimise IMHO. Keeping patent moghuls from privatizing and monopolizing knowledge is like trying to hold a flooding river within its banks. Open the dyke just a little as a comprimise and you'll find your town just as flooded as if there were no dyke to begin with. Ditto for making some software patentable. If some of it is patentable, then eventually all of it will be. It will only be a matter of how deep you look into the physics of nature before patents apply. Hell, taken to an extreme, there are even now tentative theories that suggest information itself may well be a basic force of nature
"Staff can make the three-mile voyage into town in their off hours by calling a water taxi."
I smell something rotten here. Specifically the usage of the word "staff".
I smell a number of things rotten here, including the fact that the "entrepreneur" (or article writer) hasn't a fucking clue about international waters, which extend twelve miles from shore, not 3. This is the 21st century, not the 19th, and maritime law may not have changed much, but the definition of "international waters" has.
Dependencies do exist, but config checks for you and gives you a nice list. The real problem is when your dependencies have dependencies...this is where Debian's apt-get can really shine (although I believe modern RPM systems can likewise deal with this...Mandrake's system pops up a window of the dependent additions and asks if it is ok to install them also.)
Exactly. Debian apt is excellent for binary packages and ok but not great for source packages, portage is amazing for source packages and comparable to apt-get for binary packages, and while RPMs have become adequate for dependency resolution of binary packages, they are absolutely atrocious at handling source package. I should mention that Source Mage does quite well with source packages, and ok with binary packages.
The point being that NO standard should impose the packaging management scheme on anyone. To do so will cripple innovation and marginalize the best distributions in favor of the biggest, which of course certain distributions' strategy in regards to the LSB.
A simple parsable file with dependencies, an install script/wizard included in the tarball, with standard filenames (e.g. PackageDependencies.txt and Install) are all that is needed. Leave resolving the dependencies and executing the installation script to those competent to do so, namely the various package management systems, be they Portage, apt-get, RPM package managers, or what have you.
The LSB is RPM-centric. It also has other flaws (in filesystem organization, to name one, although that is improving).
.debs, Source Mages uses tarballs+spells, Gentoo uses portage, etc.
... welcome to hell. If you think a little integration work in a heterogenous environment is hard, just wait for what Redmond's incompetence has in store for you. Your CEO won't be the one suffering, you (or the poor schmuck who replaces you after the next round of worms/trojans/viruses and other Microsoft goodies goes around) will be. *BSD and Linux aren't perfect, but their a damn sight better and easier to administer than Windows, and have the added benefit of working as well. Frankly, if you and your CEO were so hell bent on having something easy to integrate and use, and are obviously so willing to exchange flexibility to get it, you should have chosen to go with Apple for both your clients and servers. You would have traded less of your flexibility away, ended up with something much more solid and reliable than windows, and much easier to administer, and prevented a whole lot of heartache down the road. But then, I suspect your post is more of a dig at Linux and promotion of Windoze than it is a true history of some company actually being stupid enough to dump Linux for Windows.
Different distributions use different package schemes. Debian uses
The "perfect container" is a tarball. Anything else you want to do (install wizard, compile script, install script, what have you) belongs outside of the package container. Need a one-click installation procedure? Include the script in the tarball, and provide a GUI that reads the contents of the tarball and lets you run a program from within the tarball (KDE has apps that can do this, for example).
RPMs are flawed in various ways, and centric to particular distributions who happened to have representation early enough in the LSB process to push through a standard favoring their way of doing things over the broader, more portable standars (tar.gz).
Until the LSB becomes a standard that is no longer Red Hat/Suse centric, its adoption by other distros will be lackluster at bets, and rightly so.
As to your 40+ workstations that have been switched to Windows
Why is a Microsoft beta less credible than open source 0.87 alpha 'releases', which tend to find their way into many a Linux distribution.
Because OSS/FS alpha and beta releases typically work more reliably than Microsoft production releases, even after multiple "service pack" patches. In this case, past performance is a pretty good indicator of what to expect in the future.
Only for OS updates (logical) or applications installed into a folder other then your home directory (also logical). There are a ton of Mac OS X apps which don't have an "installer" per se you simply drag the item to your home folder and use it without having to know the root password.
/Applications directory, so you can drag and drop those applications to the Applications folder and make them available system-wide without typing a password. But that is limited to the /Applications directory (and your home directory, of course), and to applications which can be copied and don't use an install wizard.
Yes, and that would work under Linux as well. Perhaps you skimmed over it, but I did point out exactly what you said, namely that anyone in the administrator group (the default non-root user, and any others you add) also has write permissions to the
The last season of Enterprise has been fairly strong. I think a lot of people built up some irrational hatred over the first couple seasons.
Having seen a number of episodes in the first seasons before giving up on the show, I would have to say there is nothing "irrational" about the hatred. Misguided, perhaps, if the show did indeed improve in the 4th season as some have said, but not irrational.
The first two seasons sucked so badly, decorum prevents me from using the necessary adjectives and nouns to accurately describe just how much.
Nobody said the US doesn't apply pressure to its "freinds" on a variety of issues.
No one said the US isn't the world's biggest bully.
What was said is that spineless politicians didn't stand up to that pressure, and those spineless politicians are to blame for not doing their jobs: leading their country and putting their own people's interests ahead of expediency and their own political well-being.
If you cave to our pressure, you have only yourselves to blame. You can go ahead and blame foreign powers for exerting pressure to get their way, but that won't do anything to solve your problems. Foreign pressure isn't going to go away, and when the USA begins to feel the consiquences of its poor leadership over the next couple of decades, and China rises to fill the vacuum, the pressure will remain. The only difference will be its origin (China instead of the US perhaps, or another world power maybe). The problem we all need to fix in our countries (and I include the USA in this, by the way) is leadership that caves to pressure, and puts its own short-term political agenda and well-being ahead of its people's interests. Fix that, and you fix this problem. Do nothing and blame foreigners for it, and you'll have these problems in perpetuity.
Oh, and by the way, with its military strength overextended and its economy stuttering, the US isn't in a position to make good on most of its threats, economic and otherwise. Elect leadership that tells our idiot regime to fuck off, and you'll probably be surprised at how mild, and few, the economic consiquences are. Likely they'll be more than made up for by the economic and social advantages of telling the Bush regime exactly what they can do with their demands.
He's full of shit. Even Mac OS X, the quintessentially "easy to use, just works" OS, requires you to type in the administrator (similiar but not the same as root) password before installing new software or OS updates. Granted, they do give "administrative users" access to the /Applications directory, so the default non-root user can copy apps to /Applications in those cases where drag-and-drop is all you need, rather than an install wizard.
The idea that everyone should "just run as root" is asinine and toxic. People like this, and the distributions they create implimenting this philosophy, will give Linux a bad name security wise, and probably become the Microsoft posterchild for how Linux doesn't measure up to its "hype." He'll give the disinformationists in Redmond something to hang their deceptive hats on, and damage the reputation of hundreds of distributions that are more secure than windows ever will be because they don't succumb to the least common denominator.
Can you even begin to fathom the kinds of monopolies and cartels that would form if our streets, highways, and expressways were privately owned (as some extremist libertarians advocate)? If you think the Microsoft monopoly is bad, imagine a Shell, Exxon, or Ford monopoly on the street to your driveway. Want to go to the store? Better make sure it's an Exxon affiliate. Want to go to work. Better hope to God you work for on Exxon affiliate (or pay treble). Want to compete with Exxon. God (or other mythological Dieity) help you.
That is exactly the current situation with telecommunications in the United States, and the FCC's efforts to mititage these monopolies through regulation will always be inadequate as long as the underlying infrastructure, which lends itself to natural monopolies in much the same way roads do (how many wires can you physically have running up to your doorstep, and how cost effective is it to have more than one?), remains privately owned.
Network infrastructure is for digital communicatons as basic as roads and highways are to transportation. It not only makes sense to have them administered as public works projects in the same way highways are, it is imperitive if you want to have any kind of effective competition with respect to the thousands of services that use that infrastructure. Otherwise, so hello to your local telco. They own access to your communications and, by implication, you, and you don't even have the power to elect someone new when (not if) they abuse their position.
Don't know about the rest of the world but we don't have to take systems down to backup them here.
Yeah, it's pretty pathetic. Contrast their approach with our simple "poor man's RAID" backup solution which has worked on Sun systems, *BSD systems, and GNU/Linux systems for over 10 years:
(install two identical hard drives)
dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdb bs=1048576
Run as frequently as you need a backup image. This has worked, as I said, for over a decade, and has allowed quick and easy recovery of every machine we've ever had a hard drive crash on. There are theoretical limitations, e.g. a gradual failure of the source drive that causes corrupt data to overwrite the backup, so "poor man's RAID" should only be one component of one's backup strategy, not the entire strategy, but it has worked wonderfully. Why not use RAID instead? Well, in some limited cases we do (including dual RAIDS that act as "poor man's RAID" to each other), but the problem with RAID alone is that you can't necessarily snatch the drive out of one machine and put it in another (hard drives aren't the only things in a computer that break) and because a RAID isn't a backup, it's a highly available drive, which means when you need to recover older data after, for example, human error damages the current copy, RAID does you no good while "poor man's RAID" gives you an instantly accessible copy of last night's backup.
That, coupled with more traditional backup to tape, or, as we've been doing lately, a tar archive of the entire system's filesystem to a central RAID repository across the net, is pretty damn bullet proof, easy, and trivial to recover with.