So's ASCII. So are internal combustion engines. Way older than mp3, as it so happens. Being "old" is not a reason for something to be discarded.
too lossy
All recording methods are lossy to some degree. "Too" lossy is a matter of individual taste.
sounds bad
Again, that's a matter of taste.
and has way too many legal messes surrounding it
Surrounding the format as a whole? Come off it. Most of the legal trouble is about copyrights, not the format itself.
Look, you're free to like and use whatever you want, but please don't flog it on the rest of us. Your assignment for today is to go look up the term "marginal utility". It's a useful thing to know, especially in format holy wars and the like.
To make matters worse, the datacenter has windows, and you can see their gear from across the street. That's extremely discomforting.
What the heck Globix NY facility are you talking about? The customer floors have the windows blocked, and even before they put the screens up, all you could see were the cages, which are solid enough that you can't tell what's in them. As for the GNOC, it doesn't have any windows.
So, who wants to go in on buying the hardware (and possibly the launch costs) to start the.space TLD? At least there's a tacit agreement that governments can't lay jurisdiction.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but there's a whole body of law dealing with this sort of thing, and yes, governments most certainly will claim jurisdiction. Remember, this sort of issue has really been around ever since ships sailed out of sight of land. WRT spacecraft, the general principle is that they carry with them the jurisdiction of the country that owns them. Then again, IANASpaceL, but these guys are.
Much truth in what you say, DranoK, but I would argue that plaintext password-passing isn't really the worst security sin that most places commit. After all, most people don't log in across strange networks, and it's unlikely that any given communication will be sniffed.
IMHO, the biggest security problem most places face is poor password choice. The password is your first line of defense, and yet I'm sure almost all of you have seen organizations that give everyone the same initial password (which of course users will never change), or the username as the password, or something else easily guessable. At my workplace, I've been running John the Ripper on the mailserver's password file, and the results have been scary - about 1/3 of the accounts are 'joe' accounts (username=password) and more than half the accounts were cracked by John within two weeks.
Firstly, exactly what version are you talking about? You say "anything but 7", then you talk about what you get on v7.
Anyway, this behavior is perfectly understandable if you know how 'su' works. You're giving su the arguments in the wrong order. Let's look at it step-by-step...
suI want to become another user (root, by default)... -cand run a command... "/usr/bin/id"which is "/usr/bin/id"... nobodyand this is an extra argument.
So you just said that you want to run 'id' as root. And you got root's id string. Why are you surprised by this? You can't stick the username after the command string and expect it to work - this is documented in the 'su' manpage - so the only thing I can see as a problem here is that su doesn't gripe if you give it too many arguments.
$20 per month, plus the $700 equipment cost for 272k, not 768k - it's $1200 for 768k, which is not a negligible cost. And, as others have pointed out, it's not an Internet connection, just a point-to-point connection between him and one other location. And it has absolutely zero QoS guarantee. It's pretty nice for what it is, but let's not confuse it with a regular high-bandwidth Internet connection.
That said, there were some things in the article that really made me wonder - like the sentence (regarding crossover cabling), "I asked the tech why in the world they would do such a ridiculous thing and he said that they were designed to be used on a switch and that would require different cabling, does this sound right?" And this guy runs the ISP? Ye gods...
How about turning the slackware site into an open NFS server or else adding FTP install to Slackware. Isn't it a little inconsistant to have Slack available only by FTP yet have only an NFS option for network installation?
No, it's not a good idea, and the current situation is not inconsistent. Why? Because NFS is slow. I mean SLOOOOOOW. Oh, it's not bad when you're doing NFS over one hop on 10Mbit Ethernet, but much beyond that, it can be pretty painful. For speed reasons, you're better off FTPing stuff to a local machine, then doing an NFS install from there, if you must do NFS installs. Furthermore, NFS has been the source of more than a few security holes, and I doubt they want to deal with the hassle of letting the entire world mount their partitions remotely. Plus, NFS installations would very likely take longer than people just sucking down the distribution via FTP, so it would add extra load to their network.
Re:GPL too entrenched to subvert in court?
on
Hole in GNU GPL?
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· Score: 1
sgml4kids wrote:
There are plenty of examples where the words of a contract were disgarded because they didn't reflect what the parties actually meant.
Law isn't about documents -- its about the way people live.
In common law countries (ie. not France) the law has a knack for accepting the way people live... as law.
This may be slightly OT, but I wanted to respond to these points anyway. I'm sure there are lots of cases in which a contract has been thrown out because it was held not to reflect the actual intent of the parties, but IMHO it sets a very dangerous precedent. How, after all, do you know what they intended at all, if not for what they wrote? If they did not intend it, why did they write it? Arguing that intent is more important than explicit words is dangerous because it opens a path for people to try and escape from their sworn contracts - "Yes, Your Honor, I might have written bar, but surely everyone can see we didn't mean bar, we meant foo..."
Law must be about documents - if it is not about documents, it isn't about anything, except perhaps trying to guess the contents of people's minds. People's minds are inconstant, impermanent, and subject to much interpretation; only documents are a constant. (Not perfect, but better than arguing over intent absent any documentation.) Yes, you're right about common law, but we're not discussing common law, we're discussing contract law, which is a different field. IANAL, but fields of law and jurisdiction are one of my interests.
Re: technology flipping sides - not so far from the truth, actually. When canned food was first released, it was a luxury item for the rich: "Look! Now you no longer have to eat only what's in season! Now you can enjoy $FOOD at any time of year!" But when it became cheaper and ubiquitous, it became a status symbol to eat what _was_ in season. I've always suspected that when/if we develop robots that can do everything for us (eg, anyone can shout, "Robot! Bring me a gold ring!" and you will be brought one, mined, smelted, forged and shipped by autonomous machines), people will begin to fetishize things made by humans. It's already started to happen, actually; witness specialty catalogs that make a point of how their stuff is made by "craftsmen", and not mass-produced.
Who's going to buy the burgers? Who's going to buy our software? When all the burger flippers etc. are out of work, we can sell our nice shiny software to each other, but we're doing that already. With the burger flippers dropping out, you're talking about a shrinking economy. (Okay, now some libertarian will rear up and burn me at the stake for heretically questioning the Grace of the Holy Market:)
No, just for questioning reality.;^) Seriously, though, people have been putting forth the same "the machines will take all of the jobs! or at least the poor people's jobs, anyway" argument for about 200 years now. It hasn't happened, but that doesn't seem to lessen the fears that it's about to happen.
When things get that bad for a large segment of the population, I have a feeling that all the freedom-loving affluent geeks of the world will get real fond of police states real quick. As they've done in NYC already.
?! There are a huge number of assumptions implicit in those two sentences. -things could get "that bad" for a lot of people -said "real bad"ness will make other people change their beliefs about things like freedom -New York is already "real bad", and is already a police state, and this meets with the approval of "freedom-loving affluent geeks" #1 is unlikely, as I pointed out before; #2...well, that's kind of a matter of opinion; #3, even here in NYC, the Burger Kings have "help wanted" signs in the window, the police-state-ness of the city doesn't seem to have much to do with economics (except insofar as it helps keep tourists and businesses depending on a clean'n'wholesome image happy), and the "freedom-loving affluent geeks" I know don't like the city government very much. Hey, if you want, I can put you in touch with the NY libertarian mailing list, and you can ask the "affluent geeks" yourself how much they like the police state in NYC...
The key word here is "point-and-click" - meaning the user is in control.
We already have that; it's called "xconfig". I use it myself. What I take exception to is the suggestion that it "autodetect" your "optimal configuration", which would probably work about as well as Microsoft's Plug-and-Play and "Detect New Hardware". It's an attempt to replace human intelligence with automated procedures, which doesn't work very well, especially when we're trying to tell the machine how it should be working in the first place.
*I suppose it would be a good idea to block porn in libraries, but where would it stop? It would just move on to internet cafes, and so on, until it started affecting home users. and would the block stop with porn? Sooner or later more subjects would be blocked, some of which genuinely help people with sexuality difficulties. *
#bzzzzzt# wrong.. my "cybercafe" is a privately run business, which I fund myself, and through the money from my patrons.
That's not a very good reason not to be afraid! You really think that just because you run a private business, they wouldn't like to tell you what you can do? In many states, you can't decide your own smoking arrangements in your "private" business. Why would cybercafes be treated any differently than libraries, once the precedent is established? After all, the motivation is the same - to protect the chilllllllllldren. After all, chilllllllllllllldren might see pooooooooorn in your cybercafe, and that would be baaaaaaad, because...because, well, the politicians know better than you, and you shouldn't worry your little head about it...
That's why 90+% of the world uses Microsoft, right? Clearly the market picked the best product.
There are two ways I could answer this. One is to say, no, not best; but rather good enough. Take your car as an example. Does it get the best fuel mileage and the best acceleration and the best cornering, and...etc., etc., of any car out there? Almost certainly not. So did you make a bad decision? Not necessarily. You got one that was good enough - one which you felt was a good trade for the money you spent.
This brings us to the second answer - yes, it was the best - the best decision that they could have made. That last part makes clear something I think you're forgetting; people make choices based on a whole lot of factors, and they have to choose from what's available, based on the plusses and minuses of each; "Utopia is not an option", as they say. People don't need a perfect OS; they need something good enough for their purposes. Choosing something else would very likely involve small marginal gains for large marginal costs. (Terms I wish more people knew, and considered more often!)
Asserting that 90+% of the world chooses the wrong thing is essentially asserting that you're smarter than 90+% of the world and know what they need better than they do. While this is gratifying to think, it's probably not true (for any of us!) Asserting that is asserting that the rest of the world is irrational in what it does - again, gratifying, but hard to believe when you look at what the rest of the world accomplishes.
Both plurals are used, viruses is more common, but in scientific circles virii is used.
Bull. I'm calling you on this one. Firstly, it's not even clear that it is a Latin word (M-W says it's of Latin origin but gives 1599 as the first usage); secondly, even if it is Latin, "virii" is not a correct Latin pluralization! ("Viri" would be.) The standard correct plural of "virus" in English is "viruses". And you're trying that the most egregiously incorrect one is the one that scientists use? (Not that scientists are infallible or anything!) So put up or shut up - show some proof of this.
Furthermore, your Japanese seems as odd as your English. "Watakushi" doesn't mean "I" in the Japanese I learned. It's "watashi", and the plural is "watashitachi" - Watashi no namae wa "RFC959" desu; watashitachi wa kohii nominagara - unless you speak some dialect unlike the Tokyo Japanese I learned.
What surprises me most is that there wasn't a mass exodus from the tech companies who were forcing people to work NYE. Shows you how much the bosses still have us by the short and curlies.
Dunno about you, but where I work, we got a $1000 bonus for working 6-hour Y2K shifts. For $166/hour, who's got who by the short and curlies?
This is probably flamebait, so I shouldn't even bother responding, but...
...screw X altogether (it's old, tired, and needs to be retired) and redo the whole GUI system using Apple's source.
X is old? I think not. The MacOS dates to roughly 1984; the first commercial release of X was in 1986. Tired? The latest commercial release of X was less than a year ago, and Xfree86 was updated less than a month ago.
As for "redo[ing] the whole GUI system using Apple's source", that's a laugh. I don't know what graphics system OSX uses, but I suspect it's either X-like or MacOS-like. We're talking about multi-user machines here, remember? X is what you wanted to get rid of, and MacOS is built with the assumption that you've got one machine, one framebuffer, and one user (and one GUI!) in your "computing environment", none of which is necessarily true anymore, making it an unsuitable starting point.
iPuke when iHear these cutesy neologisms taking over. Seriously, what's next? "iClick on the iIcon to iStart the iProgram..." Why can't Apple concentrate on actually improving its stuff instead of making up cute names?
The US has a list of things you are ALLOWED to do (a constition)...The UK has a list of things you are NOT allowed to do (laws). It is presumed that anything that there is not a LAW against, you are allowed to do.
Think of it like this: in the USA, you do not have a constitutional right to eat a pickled onion sandwich. So are you allowed to eat a pickled onion sandwich or not? If you are allowed to do something regardless of whether or not it's in the constitution, what is the point of the constitution? The whole document is pointless.
But in the UK, there is no law against eating a pickled onion sandwich. So you specifically have permission to eat a pickled onion sandwich.
You have this bassackwards, as they say. The US Constitution tells the federal government (and to some degree the states) what it can and cannot do. It says nothing about what the people cannot do, and specifically says that any right not delegated to the states or the federal government is retained by the people. The Constitution does say that the federal government may not do certain things, and may only make laws regarding certain things. (That's the theory, anyway...)
So, to use your example, in the US you certainly do have the right to eat a pickled onion sandwich, because A) the eating of pickled onion sandwiches is not specifically mentioned in the Constitution and hence is retained by the people, and B) the regulation of the eating of pickled onion sandwiches is not given to the federal government by the Constitution, so any (federal) law regarding said sandwiches would be invalid.
Please, try actually reading the US Constitution before you go and say silly things about it, OK? Frankly, one of the biggest problems we - both the US and the world - have is people who think that rights come from being written on a piece of paper, and if it isn't written down, it isn't OK for you to do it. Our rights are born with us. Governmental authority - now, that comes from a piece of paper...
Children should never ever be put in the front seat, ever, airbags or otherwise. That rule has been around since the 70's if I recall. Airbags just gave you a very graphic reason as to why this is so.
Airbags don't "give you a graphic reason as to why [children should not be riding in the front seat]"; they make it unsafe. Since the mandation of passenger-side airbags in the USA, about 100 children have been killed by expanding airbags. That doesn't illustrate that sitting in the front seat is hazardous, only that airbags are hazardous. Besides, what if your vehicle only has front seats? Most pickup trucks and many two-door cars don't have back seats to put a child in.
There was a real incident in the US a couple years back, in which a man (Dwight Childs? Dwayne Childs? something like that) had his young son in a child seat in the passenger seat of his pickup truck. He ran a red light and was in a low-speed collision; the collision itself injured no one, but the airbag killed the child. The father was held responsible for the child's death, even though the law mandated an airbag in the vehicle and it would also have been a crime for him to have disabled the airbag or not used a child seat! (Source for all this is Reason magazine - sorry, I don't remember the exact issue. Summer or Fall of '99, I think.)
My point, anyway, is this: we're moving towards a society/societies in which the role of personal responsibility is greatly diminished. Government takes an increasing role in making important decisions for citizens (like whether the risks of an airbag are worth the benefits!) This encourages people not to think for themselves and not to consider the consequences of their actions. But when people don't worry about the consequences of their actions, they're more likely to act foolishly - thereby "necessitating" even more intervention to "save" people from themselves.
This would be like talking to someone over the phone, and having them record it - isn't this what Linda Tripp did?
That was exactly the example I'd thought of when I read about this. You can't record something that someone says directly to you, but the police can record things that people say to each other? I suppose we should have just applied the most useful heuristic there is for legal cases: would decision 'A' hamper the ability of the police to do anything they like? If so, the decision will surely be '~A'.
ADSL is everywhere, and getting cheaper every month.
Hmph. Yeah, getting cheaper like Ferraris are getting cheaper. Perhaps it's true, but in absolute terms, it's still way overpriced. Supply and demand, I suppose.
the subways are safe
Pretty much. A lot better than they used to be. Still depends a lot on just what part of the system you're in.
clean
What kind of crack are you smoking? They're still filthy and filled with rats and mice. The graffiti is gone, but now we have "scratchiti" instead. And, of course, there's the MTA's lovely idea of painting: "Strip the old paint? Who needs to strip the old paint? Thick, lumpy, chipped paint showing strata of black, yellow, red, orange, and brown is so much better..."
and a lot cheaper than in most cities
Not even close! More expensive than Boston or Phoenix, I'll tell you. You're right about going from Mt. Vernon to Coney Island for $1.50, but the problem is that going from 50th Street to 59th also costs you $1.50. The weekly/monthly passes are a good thing, though. But you forgot the single most important thing about the NYC subway system: it's open 24 hours. No other system in the world is, and it makes all the difference.
Hope you enjoy Phoenix! I recently moved (back) to NYC after about two years in Phoenix. From my experiences, here are the good points:
lots of high-tech companies: Motorola, Honeywell, Intel...
good AND cheap living ($405/mo for a studio in a complex with green fields, swimming pools, and hot tubs, in a quiet neighborhood.)
good internet access (DSL and cablemodem AND microwave... Even the telco, USWest, is reasonably clued.)
great weather (Assuming you like it hot.)
great nature (Miles of empty desert are only 45 minutes from the heart of Phoenix, and the flora and fauna are fascinating.)
loose gun control laws (OK, it's a matter of taste.:-) If you like heading out to the desert to pour lead downrange...)
But there are some bad points:
poor social scene (Not that most geeks probably care! But sitting in bars seems to be about all there is to do. At least there's a 2600 meeting.)
little to no "tech culture" (There are a lot of tech companies, but the pay's not that good, and the consulting agencies in Phoenix blow dead weasels.)
generally un-clued-in populace (I know it sounds elitist, but to someone raised in a big Eastern city, Phoenix people can be weird and intolerant. I mean, people look at you funny if you go anywhere on foot, because EVERYONE must ride a car, everywhere, and if you don't, you're obviously some sort of retarded freak. And you will encounter people who insist that being gay is a sign of severe mental illness.)
So best of luck - I had fun there and got a great start to my career...
I just wandered through the selector's briefs on all of the candidates, and I was a little shocked when I came across David McReynolds page, read through his views, and then noticed that he's the candidate from the Socialist Party. Now I knew that the political spectrum in the USA was a little skewed, but after reading his brief, he strikes me as the poster boy of moderate liberals, ie. just left of centre. And in the US, he's a socialist. That would be really funny if it weren't such a frightening statement about American politics.
What's scary to many USAans (well, this USAan, anyway) is that these views are considered "only moderate(ly) liberal" by much of the world. If this is "moderately liberal", what the heck would "strongly liberal" be? Everyone makes the same wage, set by the government? All companies are owned by the government? (That is, if you don't recognize it, out-and-out Communism, and if you don't recognize it, go read some Marx and Lenin.)
I mean, really. It's "frightening" to you that the guy who says that health care should be solely the responsibility of the government, there should be only public schools, and government should set both a maximum and minimum wage (and very close ones!) is considered on the fringe? What the heck country do you live in, the DPRK?
(My favorite part of his page was the bit where he says government should not legislate moral issues. And setting a maximum wage of 4x minimum wage isn't a moral issue?)
When non-programmers approach a computer system, they don't care about how it's put together; they care about doing something with it. The division of tasks that can be done with a computer system is mostly orthogonal to the division of modules in it.
Yes-but. It's true that most people just want to get stuff done - they don't care about filesystems, file permissions, shebang lines, etc. However, without at least some understanding of what's going on behind the scenes, they're little more than monkeys that know how to push a button to get a reward. I can give you a few examples.
My girlfriend - not a heavy Unix user but no fool - recently wanted to use my Linux box to dial up. So she logged in and tried to get online, but couldn't figure out how. When I looked through her command history, I saw that she'd been typing "ppp-on", "pppon", "ppp -on", and so forth. Good ideas, but not the right commands. You can argue that using "locate", "ls -l", and "less" are not central to the task of getting online, and you'd be right, but they're extremely valuable secondary skills that might well have made her successful in this case.
Likewise, the users I support at work are quite capable of using their shiny GUI front ends to do their work, and most of the time it goes just fine. But when something breaks, they know so little about the structure behind what they do that they can't give an explanation of their problem any more meaningful than "it doesn't work", even though they have all the access they would need to precisely diagnose the problem and give me the exact command line that would fix the problem. Not that I necessarily expect them to do that; it's not their job. But if they, or anyone else, really wants to use a computer as the powerful and general-purpose tool that it is, they need to know more, much more, than just being able to accomplish the task at hand.
It's the difference between giving a man a fish and teaching him how to fish, as the saying goes. Sure, the newbie wants a fish - he doesn't care about all this nonsense about lines and reels and bait. But what you need to do is teach him how to fish, not hand him a ready-made solution no matter how much he thinks that's what he needs.
I was semi-seriously talking to a friend a while back about making cheap secure (ie, encrypting!) phones - after all, what do you need? A 486, soundcard, and modem? I would love to see a secure phone in every house in America, not least because it would really piss off the FBI. Problem is, most of the secure phones now available cost big bucks. (I worked at the Circle-M Ranch for a while, and got to venture into the division that made and sold secure phones. Seriously big bucks, but then, their target market is governments and Fortune 500 companies, not individuals.)
I'm not the engineer I'd have to be to actually build one myself, but it seems to me it shouldn't be hard. The bit I got stuck on was how it would interoperate with regular phones - it might have to be able to understand what kind of device was on the other end of the line, and I think Joe Consumer probably won't like a phone that starts off every conversation with a burst of static as the secure phone tries to figure out if there's a modem on the other end of the line. Nonetheless, I'm sure it's possible. A coworker just mentioned the possibility of building a switchable-mode phone - if you know the other person has a secure phone, you turn the "secure switch" on before calling. Comments?
Slashdot Mirror
Look, you're free to like and use whatever you want, but please don't flog it on the rest of us. Your assignment for today is to go look up the term "marginal utility". It's a useful thing to know, especially in format holy wars and the like.
IMHO, the biggest security problem most places face is poor password choice. The password is your first line of defense, and yet I'm sure almost all of you have seen organizations that give everyone the same initial password (which of course users will never change), or the username as the password, or something else easily guessable. At my workplace, I've been running John the Ripper on the mailserver's password file, and the results have been scary - about 1/3 of the accounts are 'joe' accounts (username=password) and more than half the accounts were cracked by John within two weeks.
Anyway, this behavior is perfectly understandable if you know how 'su' works. You're giving su the arguments in the wrong order. Let's look at it step-by-step...
su I want to become another user (root, by default)...
-c and run a command...
"/usr/bin/id" which is "/usr/bin/id"...
nobody and this is an extra argument.
So you just said that you want to run 'id' as root. And you got root's id string. Why are you surprised by this? You can't stick the username after the command string and expect it to work - this is documented in the 'su' manpage - so the only thing I can see as a problem here is that su doesn't gripe if you give it too many arguments.
That said, there were some things in the article that really made me wonder - like the sentence (regarding crossover cabling), "I asked the tech why in the world they would do such a ridiculous thing and he said that they were designed to be used on a switch and that would require different cabling, does this sound right?" And this guy runs the ISP? Ye gods...
Law must be about documents - if it is not about documents, it isn't about anything, except perhaps trying to guess the contents of people's minds. People's minds are inconstant, impermanent, and subject to much interpretation; only documents are a constant. (Not perfect, but better than arguing over intent absent any documentation.) Yes, you're right about common law, but we're not discussing common law, we're discussing contract law, which is a different field. IANAL, but fields of law and jurisdiction are one of my interests.
Re: technology flipping sides - not so far from the truth, actually. When canned food was first released, it was a luxury item for the rich: "Look! Now you no longer have to eat only what's in season! Now you can enjoy $FOOD at any time of year!" But when it became cheaper and ubiquitous, it became a status symbol to eat what _was_ in season. I've always suspected that when/if we develop robots that can do everything for us (eg, anyone can shout, "Robot! Bring me a gold ring!" and you will be brought one, mined, smelted, forged and shipped by autonomous machines), people will begin to fetishize things made by humans. It's already started to happen, actually; witness specialty catalogs that make a point of how their stuff is made by "craftsmen", and not mass-produced.
-things could get "that bad" for a lot of people
-said "real bad"ness will make other people change their beliefs about things like freedom
-New York is already "real bad", and is already a police state, and this meets with the approval of "freedom-loving affluent geeks"
#1 is unlikely, as I pointed out before; #2...well, that's kind of a matter of opinion; #3, even here in NYC, the Burger Kings have "help wanted" signs in the window, the police-state-ness of the city doesn't seem to have much to do with economics (except insofar as it helps keep tourists and businesses depending on a clean'n'wholesome image happy), and the "freedom-loving affluent geeks" I know don't like the city government very much. Hey, if you want, I can put you in touch with the NY libertarian mailing list, and you can ask the "affluent geeks" yourself how much they like the police state in NYC...
We already have that; it's called "xconfig". I use it myself. What I take exception to is the suggestion that it "autodetect" your "optimal configuration", which would probably work about as well as Microsoft's Plug-and-Play and "Detect New Hardware". It's an attempt to replace human intelligence with automated procedures, which doesn't work very well, especially when we're trying to tell the machine how it should be working in the first place.
This brings us to the second answer - yes, it was the best - the best decision that they could have made. That last part makes clear something I think you're forgetting; people make choices based on a whole lot of factors, and they have to choose from what's available, based on the plusses and minuses of each; "Utopia is not an option", as they say. People don't need a perfect OS; they need something good enough for their purposes. Choosing something else would very likely involve small marginal gains for large marginal costs. (Terms I wish more people knew, and considered more often!)
Asserting that 90+% of the world chooses the wrong thing is essentially asserting that you're smarter than 90+% of the world and know what they need better than they do. While this is gratifying to think, it's probably not true (for any of us!) Asserting that is asserting that the rest of the world is irrational in what it does - again, gratifying, but hard to believe when you look at what the rest of the world accomplishes.
Furthermore, your Japanese seems as odd as your English. "Watakushi" doesn't mean "I" in the Japanese I learned. It's "watashi", and the plural is "watashitachi" - Watashi no namae wa "RFC959" desu; watashitachi wa kohii nominagara - unless you speak some dialect unlike the Tokyo Japanese I learned.
As for "redo[ing] the whole GUI system using Apple's source", that's a laugh. I don't know what graphics system OSX uses, but I suspect it's either X-like or MacOS-like. We're talking about multi-user machines here, remember? X is what you wanted to get rid of, and MacOS is built with the assumption that you've got one machine, one framebuffer, and one user (and one GUI!) in your "computing environment", none of which is necessarily true anymore, making it an unsuitable starting point.
iPuke when iHear these cutesy neologisms taking over. Seriously, what's next? "iClick on the iIcon to iStart the iProgram..." Why can't Apple concentrate on actually improving its stuff instead of making up cute names?
So, to use your example, in the US you certainly do have the right to eat a pickled onion sandwich, because
A) the eating of pickled onion sandwiches is not specifically mentioned in the Constitution and hence is retained by the people, and
B) the regulation of the eating of pickled onion sandwiches is not given to the federal government by the Constitution, so any (federal) law regarding said sandwiches would be invalid.
Please, try actually reading the US Constitution before you go and say silly things about it, OK? Frankly, one of the biggest problems we - both the US and the world - have is people who think that rights come from being written on a piece of paper, and if it isn't written down, it isn't OK for you to do it. Our rights are born with us. Governmental authority - now, that comes from a piece of paper...
There was a real incident in the US a couple years back, in which a man (Dwight Childs? Dwayne Childs? something like that) had his young son in a child seat in the passenger seat of his pickup truck. He ran a red light and was in a low-speed collision; the collision itself injured no one, but the airbag killed the child. The father was held responsible for the child's death, even though the law mandated an airbag in the vehicle and it would also have been a crime for him to have disabled the airbag or not used a child seat! (Source for all this is Reason magazine - sorry, I don't remember the exact issue. Summer or Fall of '99, I think.)
My point, anyway, is this: we're moving towards a society/societies in which the role of personal responsibility is greatly diminished. Government takes an increasing role in making important decisions for citizens (like whether the risks of an airbag are worth the benefits!) This encourages people not to think for themselves and not to consider the consequences of their actions. But when people don't worry about the consequences of their actions, they're more likely to act foolishly - thereby "necessitating" even more intervention to "save" people from themselves.
But there are some bad points:
So best of luck - I had fun there and got a great start to my career...
I mean, really. It's "frightening" to you that the guy who says that health care should be solely the responsibility of the government, there should be only public schools, and government should set both a maximum and minimum wage (and very close ones!) is considered on the fringe? What the heck country do you live in, the DPRK?
(My favorite part of his page was the bit where he says government should not legislate moral issues. And setting a maximum wage of 4x minimum wage isn't a moral issue?)
My girlfriend - not a heavy Unix user but no fool - recently wanted to use my Linux box to dial up. So she logged in and tried to get online, but couldn't figure out how. When I looked through her command history, I saw that she'd been typing "ppp-on", "pppon", "ppp -on", and so forth. Good ideas, but not the right commands. You can argue that using "locate", "ls -l", and "less" are not central to the task of getting online, and you'd be right, but they're extremely valuable secondary skills that might well have made her successful in this case.
Likewise, the users I support at work are quite capable of using their shiny GUI front ends to do their work, and most of the time it goes just fine. But when something breaks, they know so little about the structure behind what they do that they can't give an explanation of their problem any more meaningful than "it doesn't work", even though they have all the access they would need to precisely diagnose the problem and give me the exact command line that would fix the problem. Not that I necessarily expect them to do that; it's not their job. But if they, or anyone else, really wants to use a computer as the powerful and general-purpose tool that it is, they need to know more, much more, than just being able to accomplish the task at hand.
It's the difference between giving a man a fish and teaching him how to fish, as the saying goes. Sure, the newbie wants a fish - he doesn't care about all this nonsense about lines and reels and bait. But what you need to do is teach him how to fish, not hand him a ready-made solution no matter how much he thinks that's what he needs.
I'm not the engineer I'd have to be to actually build one myself, but it seems to me it shouldn't be hard. The bit I got stuck on was how it would interoperate with regular phones - it might have to be able to understand what kind of device was on the other end of the line, and I think Joe Consumer probably won't like a phone that starts off every conversation with a burst of static as the secure phone tries to figure out if there's a modem on the other end of the line. Nonetheless, I'm sure it's possible. A coworker just mentioned the possibility of building a switchable-mode phone - if you know the other person has a secure phone, you turn the "secure switch" on before calling. Comments?