also ant 1.4 was released recently (couple weeks ago). ant is a great build tool, i don't want to get into its features here (java and xml based build, replaces makefiles for my java builds, integrates with some IDEs and build verification/unit test tools (JUnit)). the reason i post here is because ant started out as a little tool with which tomcat developers build tomcat, and grew into its own tool. ant home page on jakarta.
it's all about what you value. as for me, i would gladly trade in being surveiled every moment i am outside my house, having every keystroke logged from both home and work computers, all my phones tapped, all my mail opened and read, for something of value, because those privacies are not things that i personally value. sure, i don't want cameras watching me scratch my ass walking naked from the kitchen back to bed, but i'd even trade that privacy for the right price.
the point is that these kind of laws do not allow the existance of other points of view - namely, the people who value their privacy more than whatever value is being added (if any) by the erosion of their privacy.
we have freedom of religion, freedom of press, etc. and of course the 4th amendment protections against searches, etc. but remember that the 4th amendment says 'unreasonable' and that is one of the adjectives which most sways from person to person. it is like 'immoral', because the things which are unreasonable to me may be perfectly okay with you, and other things which might be immoral to you are my everyday habits. what it comes down to is a group of people are going to decide what 'unreasonable' is - and these people are not elected.
but anyway... like i said. as for me, privacy is not now nor has ever been much of an issue. i don't do anything illegal, and the software i write is open source anyway so people sniffing my wires for my bits doesn't get them anything. i've probably only posted once or twice anonymously. sure, i've said tons of things i'm not proud to have said, but anonymity and privacy are just not very important to me.
not nearly as important as being able to fly home to see the family and not worry about if my plane is going to be crashed into the Sears tower.
blah. i'm just tired of seeing all these 'trade your freedoms for security' posts. sure, i support those people's right to keep their privacy, but if they feel that strongly about it they can stop flying or going to any place which requires surveiled citizens with their brain-implanted ID chip. it's like the mark of the beast, eventually you won't be able to buy bread without joining the majority of people who really just want to be able to walk down the street without being shot at.
i wish i had taken pictures, similar story here. i had an external SUN drive enclosure with 4 scsi drives in it. one of the drive's power cables got caught in the enclosure's fan... not too long before explosion and CHAR marks all along the back of the enclosure. luckily only lost 2 drives...
... downloaded the binaries--slightly over 11MB--...
how big is MS Office? more than 20 times that size. How much cheaper are embedded devices suitable for running KOffice than MSOffice? How much cheaper are 32 MB flash chips than 256 MB flash chips - a LOT. obviously the WinCE versions of MS Office are smaller than MSOffice pro... but they also lack a lot of the features. perhaps a better comparison is WinCE Office vs. KOffice...
WASHINGTON: The Senate and the the ACLU came to terms on a groundbreaking new law which sets to forge a compromise on personal freedoms against Congressional needs for cryptographical backdoors to protect the innocent citizens of the United States.
"The solution," said Senator Hilary Clinton, "was so simple, we should have thought of it in the first place. Why force this crypto backdoor upon law-abiding citizens? The obvious solutions was to write a new law which only applies to lawbreakers."
The new law, Senate Resolution 11241, is expected to pass overwhelmingly in the House and be signed into law as early as Monday.
"What a bunch of morons," said Rev. Jesse Jackson, speaking on behalf of the ACLU, the NAACP, Greenpeace, and the Republics of Kuhanmar, Bhuganda, and Jabooti. "Do they even realise how stupid they look?"
The new law has language heretofore unseen in the legal ranks. It clearly spells out that the law "only applies to terrorists, anarchists, and communists", leaving areas such as pornagraphy and 'warez' clearly allowed to do whatever the hell they want.
my router for a long time was a 486 laptop with a sandisk flash IDE drive (128 MB, plenty of space). no fan, no hard drive noise, and build in power backup (battery). the gateway 2000 handbook 486. i have 2 now, mail/dns/etc runs great on them, usually get 'em for under $50 on ebay.
my PC clock always goes to 2094 after y2k (mobo manuf. out of business, award bios doesn't care about end users). i actually had shipped to me a credit card which expired in '49' which leads me to believe they had some problem also.
most operating systems (okay i've only tried windows, freebsd, qnx, beos, dos, and linux) report this date as '1994' (probably my BIOS reports it wrong). so this would make these mothers' ages VERY young indeed:)
yes, the government of Iraq deserve to be punished. However if you look at the historical view (this is a map of countries under sanction) of the effects of sanctions, the bottom line is that they never work, and the only thing which happens is the PEOPLE of the country are starved and bleed to death and routine infectious diseases are catastrohpic due to lack of medical facility and aid. (note that afghanistan cannot claim as much as other countries as they have done much of this to themselves: 40 percent of their doctors were women, who found themselves beggars when the Taliban gained control). people are starving and dying in Iraq. YES THIS IS SADDAM'S FAULT if that makes you feel better. but PEOPLE ARE STARVING AND DYING in Iraq. Over half a million CHILDREN have DIED who WOULD NOT HAVE DIED if these sanctions had not taken place. wake the FNK up.
i do NOT know what the US/UN/NATO/whomever is thinking. either go in and shoot saddam in the head and drop the FNKING embargo so the people can eat and have vaccinations. yes, saddam denies his people the offered aid and turns and tells them we do are denying it to them but what is the POINT is that the people (human beings, homo sapiens, you remember them?) are dying because we have our heads so FAR UP OUR ASSES we don't have a clue.
sorry, the events of the past few days have been building an anger in me which i cannot placate by yelling, screaming, sleeping, coding, punching, or typing, and i don't know what to do either.
one of the many tales of heroism yesterday were reports of the disabled employees being carried down the stairs by their coworkers and strangers alike. i am not sure what sort of provision there COULD be for disabled persons in a 100-story evacuation, other than mechanical lift elevators on the OUTSIDE of the building (but even then fire and ash and debris were raining down there). any elevator system would simply be impossible, other than a floor-to-floor mechanical crank type elevator.
-sam
Re:What we must NOT do
on
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· Score: 1
i do not like 'anti-american' even though it does roughly state what is happening. if we could have something like 'anti US-government-from-ww2-to-present' that would be even better.
Re:What we must do
on
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· Score: 3, Interesting
maybe you should read yahoo finance's report on afghanistan, particularly the section labeled 'Energy':
In January 1998, the Taliban signed an agreement that would allow a proposed 890-mile, $2-billion, 2-billion-cubic-feet-per-day natural gas pipeline project led by Unocal to proceed. Unocal subsequently estimated that construction on the line, which would transport gas from Turkmenistan's 45-Tcf Dauletabad gas field to Pakistan, would begin in late 1998. The proposed $2-billion pipeline tentatively would run from Dauletabad south to the Afghan border and through Herat and Kandahar in Afghanistan, to Quetta, Pakistan. The line would then link with Pakistan's gas grid at Sui. Gas shipments had been projected to start at 700 Mmcf/d in 1999 and to rise to 1.4 Bcf/d or higher by 2002. In March 1998, however, Unocal announced a delay in finalizing project details due to Afghanistan's continuing civil war. In June 1998, Gazprom announced that it was relinquishing its 10 percent stake in the gas pipeline project consortium (known as the Central Asian Gas Pipeline Ltd., or Centgas), which was formed in August 1996. Unocal and Saudi Arabia's Delta Oil hold a combined 85 percent stake in the consortium, while Turkmenrusgas owns 5 percent. Other participants in the project include Hyundai Engineering & Construction Company of South Korea, Itochu Corporation of Japan, and Indonesia Petroleum Ltd.
yes they are not buliding right now, but for mid-east to pakistan (and india) oil pipelines, afghanistan is a prime location. if it wasn't for their fascist government and current long-running civil wars.
what on earth did your comment allude to in my statement? yes i am not thinking straight, not many are right now. but what are you talking about?
-sam
Re:What we must do
on
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· Score: 3, Funny
actually they were building, and training afghanistan (men only, of course) to continue construction. but...
The CentGas consortium was cancelled after UNOCAL, the biggest shareholder in the project pulled out due to the public pressure. The Feminist women groups in the United States alleged that UNOCAL was helping the Taliban regime that has been ruthlessly killing the minorities in the Afghanistan, and have barred women from every facet of life. The mounting public pressure forced UNOCAL to withdraw from this project in 1998.
you are right, the region is far too unstable NOW. but companies are chomping at the bit for this. part of the US funding of the Taliban was to create stability by helping the Taliban eliminate rivals. way to go. this is what happens when the people are not given the choice of what to do, powerful corporate interests dictate the actions of american foreign policy and will presumably continue to do so because no one realy seems to give a damn, even after all this.
the only excuse for civilian targets to be attacked is when your own civilians are dying by the hundred thousands and everything you have ever known tells you that the US is directly responsible. true or not, this is what they believe.
maybe you should check YOUR facts. afghanistan is absolutely a central player in oil production, this is why multi-billion dollar corporations are building oil pipelines across it. maybe afghanistan does NOT produce oil (actually their NUMBER ONE export is HEROIN, much of which ends up in the streets of NYC) but they are definitely a player in transport and stability in the region. not to mention my generalization was directed at the entire middle east, not afghanistan...
What we must NOT do
on
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is to once again terrorize our own citizens. from anti-communist witch-hunts to asian-american ww2 camps to the generally accepted anti-Arab anti-Islamic trends of America for more than a decade, we still have a lot to learn, it seems.
Re:What we must do
on
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· Score: 2, Insightful
maybe we should stop being so dependent upon middle east oil instead, so when we destroy the taliban, it will be for better reasons than our own financial interest to pollute our own environment.
if you read brian's story, you'll see that he mentions that the 'emergency staircase' was only two persons wide. it took him (a reasonably fit man, i'll assume) 20 minutes to descend from the 38th floor, and this was by leaving IMMEDIATELY after the crash. this was also mostly before smoke, water, and darkness took over the staircases (according to other accounts).
i've had a lot of fun opening my old gateway handbook 486. from this guy's page i got all the info i needed. i've upgraded the RAM (from 8 MB to 20!), and gone from a 120 MB hard drive to a 1.7 GB to a 2.5 GB, and now to a 128 MB IDE Flash disk from Sandisk (no noise whatsoever). plenty of room for a minimal linux distribution. and a lot of fun to hack around on:) i highly suggest grabbing a handbook from ebay, probably several for sale. great little servers, and i used it as my only computer through much of college. can be used with orinoco wireless cards, too! hide the little server in the corner of the closet, makes no noise.
i'm still using my gateway 2000 handbook 486 as a server. with a sandisk flash IDE drive, the whole thing makes 0 noise and serves fantastically (web/dns/mail). the 0 noise makes my wife happy, the serving makes me happy. when i upgraded from 8 MB RAM to 20 MB, i could actually use PHP:)
but the problem is that hundreds of thousands HAVE died, and regardless of who brought this on the people (Saddam) obviously our sanctions are NOT having the right effect.
how bad have the sanctions been? read this from a seattle news source.
yes the government of Iraq should suffer, but the people should NOT, and right now they ARE SUFFERING. we need to do SOMETHING.
Re:there's an argument to be made....
on
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· Score: 2
except that the REASON these terrorist acts were commited is nearly guaranteed to be this 'number one export' issue. they didn't use arms exported to israel to hijack the planes, they hijacked the planes because we export arms to israel, and israel uses those arms in ways even we disagree with.
the discussions on these pages has been eye opening. i hope that if anything i have learned to trust even less the american media and the actions of our government. from responses of anonymous cowards (no disrespect intended) to my own searches for information, i compiled this short list of links detailing some of the things our government does which gets VERY little attention by our media.
please note i in no way whatsoever condone these attacks or terrorist acts of any kind. i just hope americans can wake up to the wool over their eyes when in comes to our foreign policies.
i actually hadn't considered that, a very good point. but obviously their own food, medicine, etc, producers are not doing well as it is widely believe that the Iraqi people are generally very underfed and generally without medical care?
Slashdot Mirror
there are lies...
damned lies...
and statistics.
anyway...
-sam
also ant 1.4 was released recently (couple weeks ago). ant is a great build tool, i don't want to get into its features here (java and xml based build, replaces makefiles for my java builds, integrates with some IDEs and build verification/unit test tools (JUnit)). the reason i post here is because ant started out as a little tool with which tomcat developers build tomcat, and grew into its own tool. ant home page on jakarta.
it's all about what you value. as for me, i would gladly trade in being surveiled every moment i am outside my house, having every keystroke logged from both home and work computers, all my phones tapped, all my mail opened and read, for something of value, because those privacies are not things that i personally value. sure, i don't want cameras watching me scratch my ass walking naked from the kitchen back to bed, but i'd even trade that privacy for the right price.
the point is that these kind of laws do not allow the existance of other points of view - namely, the people who value their privacy more than whatever value is being added (if any) by the erosion of their privacy.
we have freedom of religion, freedom of press, etc. and of course the 4th amendment protections against searches, etc. but remember that the 4th amendment says 'unreasonable' and that is one of the adjectives which most sways from person to person. it is like 'immoral', because the things which are unreasonable to me may be perfectly okay with you, and other things which might be immoral to you are my everyday habits. what it comes down to is a group of people are going to decide what 'unreasonable' is - and these people are not elected.
but anyway... like i said. as for me, privacy is not now nor has ever been much of an issue. i don't do anything illegal, and the software i write is open source anyway so people sniffing my wires for my bits doesn't get them anything. i've probably only posted once or twice anonymously. sure, i've said tons of things i'm not proud to have said, but anonymity and privacy are just not very important to me.
not nearly as important as being able to fly home to see the family and not worry about if my plane is going to be crashed into the Sears tower.
blah. i'm just tired of seeing all these 'trade your freedoms for security' posts. sure, i support those people's right to keep their privacy, but if they feel that strongly about it they can stop flying or going to any place which requires surveiled citizens with their brain-implanted ID chip. it's like the mark of the beast, eventually you won't be able to buy bread without joining the majority of people who really just want to be able to walk down the street without being shot at.
-sam
i wish i had taken pictures, similar story here. i had an external SUN drive enclosure with 4 scsi drives in it. one of the drive's power cables got caught in the enclosure's fan... not too long before explosion and CHAR marks all along the back of the enclosure. luckily only lost 2 drives...
how big is MS Office? more than 20 times that size. How much cheaper are embedded devices suitable for running KOffice than MSOffice? How much cheaper are 32 MB flash chips than 256 MB flash chips - a LOT. obviously the WinCE versions of MS Office are smaller than MSOffice pro... but they also lack a lot of the features. perhaps a better comparison is WinCE Office vs. KOffice...
-sam
14 September 2001
WASHINGTON: The Senate and the the ACLU came to terms on a groundbreaking new law which sets to forge a compromise on personal freedoms against Congressional needs for cryptographical backdoors to protect the innocent citizens of the United States.
"The solution," said Senator Hilary Clinton, "was so simple, we should have thought of it in the first place. Why force this crypto backdoor upon law-abiding citizens? The obvious solutions was to write a new law which only applies to lawbreakers."
The new law, Senate Resolution 11241, is expected to pass overwhelmingly in the House and be signed into law as early as Monday.
"What a bunch of morons," said Rev. Jesse Jackson, speaking on behalf of the ACLU, the NAACP, Greenpeace, and the Republics of Kuhanmar, Bhuganda, and Jabooti. "Do they even realise how stupid they look?"
The new law has language heretofore unseen in the legal ranks. It clearly spells out that the law "only applies to terrorists, anarchists, and communists", leaving areas such as pornagraphy and 'warez' clearly allowed to do whatever the hell they want.
-sam
my router for a long time was a 486 laptop with a sandisk flash IDE drive (128 MB, plenty of space). no fan, no hard drive noise, and build in power backup (battery). the gateway 2000 handbook 486. i have 2 now, mail/dns/etc runs great on them, usually get 'em for under $50 on ebay.
my PC clock always goes to 2094 after y2k (mobo manuf. out of business, award bios doesn't care about end users). i actually had shipped to me a credit card which expired in '49' which leads me to believe they had some problem also.
:)
most operating systems (okay i've only tried windows, freebsd, qnx, beos, dos, and linux) report this date as '1994' (probably my BIOS reports it wrong). so this would make these mothers' ages VERY young indeed
-sam
yes, the government of Iraq deserve to be punished. However if you look at the historical view (this is a map of countries under sanction) of the effects of sanctions, the bottom line is that they never work, and the only thing which happens is the PEOPLE of the country are starved and bleed to death and routine infectious diseases are catastrohpic due to lack of medical facility and aid. (note that afghanistan cannot claim as much as other countries as they have done much of this to themselves: 40 percent of their doctors were women, who found themselves beggars when the Taliban gained control). people are starving and dying in Iraq. YES THIS IS SADDAM'S FAULT if that makes you feel better. but PEOPLE ARE STARVING AND DYING in Iraq. Over half a million CHILDREN have DIED who WOULD NOT HAVE DIED if these sanctions had not taken place. wake the FNK up.
i do NOT know what the US/UN/NATO/whomever is thinking. either go in and shoot saddam in the head and drop the FNKING embargo so the people can eat and have vaccinations. yes, saddam denies his people the offered aid and turns and tells them we do are denying it to them but what is the POINT is that the people (human beings, homo sapiens, you remember them?) are dying because we have our heads so FAR UP OUR ASSES we don't have a clue.
sorry, the events of the past few days have been building an anger in me which i cannot placate by yelling, screaming, sleeping, coding, punching, or typing, and i don't know what to do either.
-sam
one of the many tales of heroism yesterday were reports of the disabled employees being carried down the stairs by their coworkers and strangers alike. i am not sure what sort of provision there COULD be for disabled persons in a 100-story evacuation, other than mechanical lift elevators on the OUTSIDE of the building (but even then fire and ash and debris were raining down there). any elevator system would simply be impossible, other than a floor-to-floor mechanical crank type elevator.
-sam
i do not like 'anti-american' even though it does roughly state what is happening. if we could have something like 'anti US-government-from-ww2-to-present' that would be even better.
yes they are not buliding right now, but for mid-east to pakistan (and india) oil pipelines, afghanistan is a prime location. if it wasn't for their fascist government and current long-running civil wars.
-sam
what on earth did your comment allude to in my statement? yes i am not thinking straight, not many are right now. but what are you talking about?
-sam
you are right, the region is far too unstable NOW. but companies are chomping at the bit for this. part of the US funding of the Taliban was to create stability by helping the Taliban eliminate rivals. way to go. this is what happens when the people are not given the choice of what to do, powerful corporate interests dictate the actions of american foreign policy and will presumably continue to do so because no one realy seems to give a damn, even after all this.
the only excuse for civilian targets to be attacked is when your own civilians are dying by the hundred thousands and everything you have ever known tells you that the US is directly responsible. true or not, this is what they believe.
maybe you should check YOUR facts. afghanistan is absolutely a central player in oil production, this is why multi-billion dollar corporations are building oil pipelines across it. maybe afghanistan does NOT produce oil (actually their NUMBER ONE export is HEROIN, much of which ends up in the streets of NYC) but they are definitely a player in transport and stability in the region. not to mention my generalization was directed at the entire middle east, not afghanistan...
is to once again terrorize our own citizens. from anti-communist witch-hunts to asian-american ww2 camps to the generally accepted anti-Arab anti-Islamic trends of America for more than a decade, we still have a lot to learn, it seems.
maybe we should stop being so dependent upon middle east oil instead, so when we destroy the taliban, it will be for better reasons than our own financial interest to pollute our own environment.
if you read brian's story, you'll see that he mentions that the 'emergency staircase' was only two persons wide. it took him (a reasonably fit man, i'll assume) 20 minutes to descend from the 38th floor, and this was by leaving IMMEDIATELY after the crash. this was also mostly before smoke, water, and darkness took over the staircases (according to other accounts).
-sam
i've had a lot of fun opening my old gateway handbook 486. from this guy's page i got all the info i needed. i've upgraded the RAM (from 8 MB to 20!), and gone from a 120 MB hard drive to a 1.7 GB to a 2.5 GB, and now to a 128 MB IDE Flash disk from Sandisk (no noise whatsoever). plenty of room for a minimal linux distribution. and a lot of fun to hack around on :) i highly suggest grabbing a handbook from ebay, probably several for sale. great little servers, and i used it as my only computer through much of college. can be used with orinoco wireless cards, too! hide the little server in the corner of the closet, makes no noise.
i'm still using my gateway 2000 handbook 486 as a server. with a sandisk flash IDE drive, the whole thing makes 0 noise and serves fantastically (web/dns/mail). the 0 noise makes my wife happy, the serving makes me happy. when i upgraded from 8 MB RAM to 20 MB, i could actually use PHP :)
but the problem is that hundreds of thousands HAVE died, and regardless of who brought this on the people (Saddam) obviously our sanctions are NOT having the right effect.
how bad have the sanctions been? read this from a seattle news source.
yes the government of Iraq should suffer, but the people should NOT, and right now they ARE SUFFERING. we need to do SOMETHING.
except that the REASON these terrorist acts were commited is nearly guaranteed to be this 'number one export' issue. they didn't use arms exported to israel to hijack the planes, they hijacked the planes because we export arms to israel, and israel uses those arms in ways even we disagree with.
the discussions on these pages has been eye opening. i hope that if anything i have learned to trust even less the american media and the actions of our government. from responses of anonymous cowards (no disrespect intended) to my own searches for information, i compiled this short list of links detailing some of the things our government does which gets VERY little attention by our media.
the effects of the iraqi embargo
two page bio of bin Laden from pbs.org
one discussion thread on this page discussing increasing American globalization
another thread on this page discussing US export of arms
please note i in no way whatsoever condone these attacks or terrorist acts of any kind. i just hope americans can wake up to the wool over their eyes when in comes to our foreign policies.
-sam
i actually hadn't considered that, a very good point. but obviously their own food, medicine, etc, producers are not doing well as it is widely believe that the Iraqi people are generally very underfed and generally without medical care?