that's what I thought, too. I don't think the government is the real danger.
look at the way yahoo! auctions caved. why didn't they put nazi auctions in a private area where you have to agree to some kind of EULA to get in?
the government does not work in a vacuum. no one in the government just got up one day and said "hey, i know, let's make all the schools and libraries put filtering s/w on their machines"
instead, it was a mob of parents and special interests who decided to lobby the government to create these laws.
unless people use education, and unless the web puts content behind EULAs, the blunt instrument of government regulation will fall.
let's face it -- a fifteen year old is seconds away from porn when they sit at the net right now. That's what's killing the net -- providers failing to adequately filter their content.
i was at office depot the other day, and they had a display of filtering software surrounded by fat, angry looking women. that pretty much says it all.
so what. companies develop things all the time, it doesn't mean anyone will buy or use it.
the paper machines are awfully cheap...and a lot of rural counties are poor and have elderly or non-technical people manning the voting stations.
personally, i think the study currently under progress at MIT and cernegie mellon (as i recall) will be more fruitful.
my opinion? just standardize the voting machines and ballot layout to the most accurate system in use. once that is done, come up with a validation system that the voter slides their ballot through.
such a validator should also print a slip. that way, the voter knows the ballot is punched properly, and they have a "grocery style" receipt showing what they voted for -- for instant review.
computers for voting is asinine, at least at this point in time.
the pge and sce (http://www.pge.com http://www.sce.com) both have tips and pamphlets on how you can save engery in your home, as well as rebate programs for energy efficient appliances.
It's the geeky thing to do -- follow the tips and lower california's energy needs.
Even though the blackouts have been called off for now, it's pretty tough to look at all the facts and not realize that energy corporations in Texas and Oklahoma have set this whole thing up to rape California.
Granted, California's idiot policies opened the door for them, but just cuz your neighbor is bending over doesn't mean it's an invitation for the humpty dance.
Wholesale energy costs up 25%, California's cost to buy electricity (from the plants it built and once owned) up 700%, and the corporations in Oklahoma and Texas have skyrocketing stock prices and profits.
Well, piss on them. When my state of california gets on top of this, your gonna pay, bastards.
Public infrastructure cannot be properly served by this ridiculous sham of a "free market".
wonderful responses, but...
the last question asked what we can do, but Andre basically said "you can vent all you want...but..."
i don't think this is the case. earlier in the piece, it is mentioned that a law passed about two years ago spawned this demon crap.
i strongly recommend that anyone interesting in countering some of these horrid laws PLEASE JOIN the eff right away...i wish andre had answered the last question this way.
finally, the one comment about "give the dog a dooly"...the question and answer were great. anyone not sure they understand all this stuff should look that one over.
My dad is a ww2 vet and lost many friends (he fought for America in the pacific) I suppose they died for "freedom" (don't they always?) But the end result? It's stunning how easily yahoo! cratered to this french stupidity.
I enjoy books such as "Kursk", "Stuka Pilot", "Zero Fighter", "U Boat Commander" -- all of which tell the stories of officers, soldiers, battles and engineering feats of all the combatants of ww2.
The leadership of Japan and Germany was awful. But the troops (and officers) -- for the most part -- did their job with pride and pain.
One of my pals in college had a uncle who was an SS officer...the Uncle knew nothing of the death camps til near the end of the war, and was horrified by it. He was also 1/4 jewish (kept it hidden, of course). Pal still has the uniform and medals in a chest and is very proud of his uncle. My pal also served in the US Air Force.
Soldiers fight, feel pain, and sometimes die. That is their job. It is an ugly thing to see ignorance and stupidity on an upward trend in the world...it is this type of flawed logic (that of the french government) that leads to war.
I've struggled with dystopia (the core belief that things will get worse rather than better) and it is quite painful.
the recent laws protecting monopolies, IP, and copyrights have basically stripped us of the hard fought "fair use" clauses we had -- not good.
now add corporate welfare (american corporations are VERY well taken care of by law), a country that worships greed, power money and sex...
well, it's ugly. my personal belief is that things should get better for all people over time. But the current crop of laws, and the large corporations who serve greed and shareholder over customer...its just a bummer.
10-15 years ago I was positive cancer would be gone by 2000, that fusion energy would be up and running, homelessness and the stigmata of mental illness would be largely gone...but two aquantainces killed themselves before xmas...such a waste.
but what do we have? a fairly strong economy, yet an incoming president with little care for humanitarian, ethical or social concerns, a supreme court hanging on the edge of radical conservatism, a nation nearly evenly divided between liberal and conservatism.
I still hope for the emergence of a humanitarian/social ethos somewhere on the planet, at some point in my lifetime (which will work its way to world utopia) but the last two years, as well as the election, have dampened my hopes.
The greed, anger, ignorance, hate and indifference of the average american (particularly males) continues to horrify me. sigh.
Bump yourself up by another factor of 10 and go into engineering...Electrical, Mechanical, Aerospace.
Nearly all of those programs will make you do programming, plus you'll get deep immersion into statics and dynamics -- the whole reason you had to learn calculus.
1) For a given drive size, a "Media Consortium" offers huge rebates for your old drive, or choosing a new "copy protected" drive.
Who is going to buy a 70 GB. RMS-approved drive for $150 when you can turn in your old 8 GB. drive and get the copy protect version for $50? Not many people.
2) The second way is to just make it the only thing available. Given that 250 GB. drives are on the horizon, if it's the only way they're made, you don't have a lot of choice.
I'm actually quite happy about all this. I've always had a bit of the problem with dystopia, and now that the rats are coming out of their holes and passing flurries of hardcore legislation w/ the politician's help, I can rest much easier.
There really is a small group of ultra powerful, ultra wealthy a-holes that control the government and technology in ways such that they become incredibly wealthy, while the average Joe suffers.
Even if it exists, AFAIK SGI is switching over to Linux "soon" anyway, so a "Trusted Linux" is a natural progression.
This is great news for Linux...we've had a hard time getting Linux taken seriously where I work because there has been little "solid" government interest outside of clusters.
But being able to use "NSA" and "Linux" in the same sentence (and in print) will ease a lot of fears 'round these parts.
I hope someone out in slashdot land, with the requsite graphics skills, does a spoof of a "NSA Linux" distro.
Maybe a spoof of Austin Powers or something? Yeah Baby! Trusted Linux!
ah yes, moderated down to oblivion by the mindless herd of shitheads known as "moderators".
Fact: We had a MVC app with a blank form that (on user interaction) open shared libraries over NFS and reparented widget trees...not a line of code was altered in the MVC app, and the shared libs were all subclassed.
as i recall, there used to be a number of problems.
kids can't get info on (potentially lifesaving) condoms or sexual behavior;
women can't look for info on brest cancer;
problems finding chicken recipes (the alarm in the library goes off cuz you typed "chicken breast" into a search field);
Historical issues (searching for info on "the gay nineties", "Cock and Bull", "pussywillows", "The Owl and the Pussycat", "Wild Ass Images")
It's rather fascinating to watch our government doing so much to validate the all the concerns voiced in books like 1984. Things they said "would never happen here".
Technology Shift A) results in less employees needed. Employees are then terminated, since "America is not a social experiment".
Technology Shift B) results in the obsolescence of CD and DVD technology, and record/video companies are against the wall. Solution : pass protectionist legislation and villify the technology, because "The business of America is Business"
This reminds me of that old SNL skit where the moralists are removing the breasts/penises from marble and brass statues.
What a horribly sick society. Body parts are not bad, the horrid myths handed down through generations have made them bad.
Once again, America's Government is failing to think/consider its behavior. The larger issues will have negative ramifications for decades to come.
Unbeleivable that we have at least four more years of increasingly stupid legislation coming up as the right wingers crank up their religious propaganga/profit machines.
i've been playing q3a a bit recently and was suprised at what happened maybe two weeks ago.
i was moving stuff off a counter in my house, and it made a "swish-click" sound exactly like the one in quake you hear just before you get fragged from behind.
the fingers on my left hand twitched just so, and i felt my eyes dart.
then i blinked and realized i was just in the kitchen...it was actually a little scary there for a second.
i remember reading a paper that came out of USC (i think) bart kosko and the fuzzy logic people.
they were able to make vehicle sims behave more or less like a flock of birds -- weaving this way or that, without coming into contact.
there was also some mention of tiny low power solar powered chips that you could simply toss along the roads and program with positional data.
than any car traveling the road knows just where it is located.
driving can be very monotonous/dangerous...especially long trips. i hope someone can move technology fwd enough that (as a start) vehicles would at least come to a controlled stop if the driver were incapacitated.
And who is to say they are "promiscuous"? A sexually repressed homo sapiens sapiens?
I think KDE will fall...here is an example of a typical communication with a KDE supporter:
Q: How can KDE be truly free, if Qt isn't?
A: Qt is GPL'd, so its free now. ESR, RMS and Linus said so.
Q: When exactly does my company have to release source to avoid the $1550 (per developer/per year) that Qt charges?
A: It's an excellent toolkit. Stop whining you greedy company person. Pay us now.
Q: Developing professionally with a KDE box appears to cost 2-3 times that of the Microsoft solution, and is charged annually. How do you reconcile something that is clearly a commercial product with all the free code contributed by people for literally decades?
A: Obviously you have never used a quality development environment, or you wouldn't ask. You are a commie idiot who thinks making money is bad. We need to make money.
Q: Why not just LGPL it like the other system libraries?
hate to be pessimistic, but with all the failures, layoffs, share prices plummeting...i hope Sun has a big war chest.
Here's the plan : Sun makes their OS look like Linux, and sells all the hardware they can make, even though you pay roughly 5x the cost of a Lintel solution. Granted, some of the Sun clustering and services are mind-blowing, but they won't be selling many 1s/2s this way. Although I'm sure the entrenched solaris shops will welcome the changes.
But will it be "in time"? 3dfx? Gone. Aetna? Thousands laid off. GM? Thousands laid off, oldsmobile line ended.Sun, MS? share prices plummet. Son of a Bush (SOB) is not even in the oval office yet, and the economy is already cratering. Has the republican feeding frenzy begun, after 6 years of incredible prosperity?
At least IBM has pledged 1B. to Linux endeavours. With the loss of the dot com money, a lot of people might not be able to do free software work anymore.
> Compare an F-22 against an F-14. Your average F-14
> spends more than half of its operational lifetime
> on the ground being serviced. The average F-22
> doesn't. Manufacturing tolerances down,
> operational tolerances up.
Ahem, I'd like to know from whence you've compiled these statistics. There are no operational F-22s, and the few Raptors in testing have most certainly NOT reached anything close to a flight/maintenance parity!
Slashdot Mirror
Or possibly a web cam mounted to it? On pay-per-view, of course.
that's what I thought, too. I don't think the government is the real danger.
look at the way yahoo! auctions caved. why didn't they put nazi auctions in a private area where you have to agree to some kind of EULA to get in?
the government does not work in a vacuum. no one in the government just got up one day and said "hey, i know, let's make all the schools and libraries put filtering s/w on their machines"
instead, it was a mob of parents and special interests who decided to lobby the government to create these laws.
unless people use education, and unless the web puts content behind EULAs, the blunt instrument of government regulation will fall.
let's face it -- a fifteen year old is seconds away from porn when they sit at the net right now. That's what's killing the net -- providers failing to adequately filter their content.
i was at office depot the other day, and they had a display of filtering software surrounded by fat, angry looking women. that pretty much says it all.
that is so funny. it will be a month or so for 7.2.
I think I may consider switching to slack at some point, since i'm in that club "...you always remember your first".
but i'm hoping for a distro that has an ISO with:
--dependency checking pkg mgmt
--3dfx/nvidia/DRI/DRM/XFree4.0.2
--kernel 2.4
--ximian desktop
--nautilus
--mozilla
...tired of patching and running around to get all this working.
---
S.D.
so what. companies develop things all the time, it doesn't mean anyone will buy or use it.
the paper machines are awfully cheap...and a lot of rural counties are poor and have elderly or non-technical people manning the voting stations.
personally, i think the study currently under progress at MIT and cernegie mellon (as i recall) will be more fruitful.
my opinion? just standardize the voting machines and ballot layout to the most accurate system in use. once that is done, come up with a validation system that the voter slides their ballot through.
such a validator should also print a slip. that way, the voter knows the ballot is punched properly, and they have a "grocery style" receipt showing what they voted for -- for instant review.
computers for voting is asinine, at least at this point in time.
the pge and sce (http://www.pge.com http://www.sce.com) both have tips and pamphlets on how you can save engery in your home, as well as rebate programs for energy efficient appliances.
It's the geeky thing to do -- follow the tips and lower california's energy needs.
Even though the blackouts have been called off for now, it's pretty tough to look at all the facts and not realize that energy corporations in Texas and Oklahoma have set this whole thing up to rape California.
Granted, California's idiot policies opened the door for them, but just cuz your neighbor is bending over doesn't mean it's an invitation for the humpty dance.
Wholesale energy costs up 25%, California's cost to buy electricity (from the plants it built and once owned) up 700%, and the corporations in Oklahoma and Texas have skyrocketing stock prices and profits.
Well, piss on them. When my state of california gets on top of this, your gonna pay, bastards.
Public infrastructure cannot be properly served by this ridiculous sham of a "free market".
film at 11
sheesh.
wonderful responses, but... the last question asked what we can do, but Andre basically said "you can vent all you want...but..." i don't think this is the case. earlier in the piece, it is mentioned that a law passed about two years ago spawned this demon crap. i strongly recommend that anyone interesting in countering some of these horrid laws PLEASE JOIN the eff right away...i wish andre had answered the last question this way. finally, the one comment about "give the dog a dooly"...the question and answer were great. anyone not sure they understand all this stuff should look that one over.
My dad is a ww2 vet and lost many friends (he fought for America in the pacific) I suppose they died for "freedom" (don't they always?) But the end result? It's stunning how easily yahoo! cratered to this french stupidity.
I enjoy books such as "Kursk", "Stuka Pilot", "Zero Fighter", "U Boat Commander" -- all of which tell the stories of officers, soldiers, battles and engineering feats of all the combatants of ww2.
The leadership of Japan and Germany was awful. But the troops (and officers) -- for the most part -- did their job with pride and pain.
One of my pals in college had a uncle who was an SS officer...the Uncle knew nothing of the death camps til near the end of the war, and was horrified by it. He was also 1/4 jewish (kept it hidden, of course). Pal still has the uniform and medals in a chest and is very proud of his uncle. My pal also served in the US Air Force.
Soldiers fight, feel pain, and sometimes die. That is their job. It is an ugly thing to see ignorance and stupidity on an upward trend in the world...it is this type of flawed logic (that of the french government) that leads to war.
I've struggled with dystopia (the core belief that things will get worse rather than better) and it is quite painful.
the recent laws protecting monopolies, IP, and copyrights have basically stripped us of the hard fought "fair use" clauses we had -- not good.
now add corporate welfare (american corporations are VERY well taken care of by law), a country that worships greed, power money and sex...
well, it's ugly. my personal belief is that things should get better for all people over time. But the current crop of laws, and the large corporations who serve greed and shareholder over customer...its just a bummer.
10-15 years ago I was positive cancer would be gone by 2000, that fusion energy would be up and running, homelessness and the stigmata of mental illness would be largely gone...but two aquantainces killed themselves before xmas...such a waste.
but what do we have? a fairly strong economy, yet an incoming president with little care for humanitarian, ethical or social concerns, a supreme court hanging on the edge of radical conservatism, a nation nearly evenly divided between liberal and conservatism.
I still hope for the emergence of a humanitarian/social ethos somewhere on the planet, at some point in my lifetime (which will work its way to world utopia) but the last two years, as well as the election, have dampened my hopes.
The greed, anger, ignorance, hate and indifference of the average american (particularly males) continues to horrify me. sigh.
One has to wonder...I have yet to see a mpeg of a bunch of geeks in ape suits tossing bones around this thing.
In a more geeky locale, I bet we would have pics of such an event by now.
What? No costume shops in Seattle? Or just no geeks?
that's pretty cool. two people discussed issues about flavors 'o' linux without screaming "you suck" at each other.
linux really is going pro.
but it isn't. i really wish redhat would drop their distro and go with debian.
in fact, i wish all the distros would re-center around debian.
how much energy has been spent here, supposedly making "rpm as good as debian", when debian is already the standard of excellence?
imagine redhat's prowess at making Linux easier...applied to debian. really, all these offshoots seem to be a waste of creative energies.
Bump yourself up by another factor of 10 and go into engineering...Electrical, Mechanical, Aerospace.
Nearly all of those programs will make you do programming, plus you'll get deep immersion into statics and dynamics -- the whole reason you had to learn calculus.
It'll be hard, but worth more in the long run.
The only two ways I can see these selling are:
1) For a given drive size, a "Media Consortium" offers huge rebates for your old drive, or choosing a new "copy protected" drive.
Who is going to buy a 70 GB. RMS-approved drive for $150 when you can turn in your old 8 GB. drive and get the copy protect version for $50? Not many people.
2) The second way is to just make it the only thing available. Given that 250 GB. drives are on the horizon, if it's the only way they're made, you don't have a lot of choice.
I'm actually quite happy about all this. I've always had a bit of the problem with dystopia, and now that the rats are coming out of their holes and passing flurries of hardcore legislation w/ the politician's help, I can rest much easier.
There really is a small group of ultra powerful, ultra wealthy a-holes that control the government and technology in ways such that they become incredibly wealthy, while the average Joe suffers.
Dystopia? Ha, more like reality.
The XHTML Pascal working group will be crushed.
I was not aware of a "Trusted Irix".
Even if it exists, AFAIK SGI is switching over to Linux "soon" anyway, so a "Trusted Linux" is a natural progression.
This is great news for Linux...we've had a hard time getting Linux taken seriously where I work because there has been little "solid" government interest outside of clusters.
But being able to use "NSA" and "Linux" in the same sentence (and in print) will ease a lot of fears 'round these parts.
I hope someone out in slashdot land, with the requsite graphics skills, does a spoof of a "NSA Linux" distro.
Maybe a spoof of Austin Powers or something? Yeah Baby! Trusted Linux!
ah yes, moderated down to oblivion by the mindless herd of shitheads known as "moderators".
Fact: We had a MVC app with a blank form that (on user interaction) open shared libraries over NFS and reparented widget trees...not a line of code was altered in the MVC app, and the shared libs were all subclassed.
This was with Motif and X, five years ago.
Oh yes, such wonderous inovation, "people".
We used to take blank motif forms and reparent a bunch of children on them...like 12 years ago.
Didn't change any lines of code to do that.
Nice to see that Mcrosoft, KDE and Gnome are finally catching up to Motif.
as i recall, there used to be a number of problems.
kids can't get info on (potentially lifesaving) condoms or sexual behavior;
women can't look for info on brest cancer;
problems finding chicken recipes (the alarm in the library goes off cuz you typed "chicken breast" into a search field);
Historical issues (searching for info on "the gay nineties", "Cock and Bull", "pussywillows", "The Owl and the Pussycat", "Wild Ass Images")
It's rather fascinating to watch our government doing so much to validate the all the concerns voiced in books like 1984. Things they said "would never happen here".
Technology Shift A) results in less employees needed. Employees are then terminated, since "America is not a social experiment".
Technology Shift B) results in the obsolescence of CD and DVD technology, and record/video companies are against the wall. Solution : pass protectionist legislation and villify the technology, because "The business of America is Business"
This reminds me of that old SNL skit where the moralists are removing the breasts/penises from marble and brass statues.
What a horribly sick society. Body parts are not bad, the horrid myths handed down through generations have made them bad.
Once again, America's Government is failing to think/consider its behavior. The larger issues will have negative ramifications for decades to come.
Unbeleivable that we have at least four more years of increasingly stupid legislation coming up as the right wingers crank up their religious propaganga/profit machines.
i've been playing q3a a bit recently and was suprised at what happened maybe two weeks ago.
i was moving stuff off a counter in my house, and it made a "swish-click" sound exactly like the one in quake you hear just before you get fragged from behind.
the fingers on my left hand twitched just so, and i felt my eyes dart.
then i blinked and realized i was just in the kitchen...it was actually a little scary there for a second.
i remember reading a paper that came out of USC (i think) bart kosko and the fuzzy logic people.
they were able to make vehicle sims behave more or less like a flock of birds -- weaving this way or that, without coming into contact.
there was also some mention of tiny low power solar powered chips that you could simply toss along the roads and program with positional data.
than any car traveling the road knows just where it is located.
driving can be very monotonous/dangerous...especially long trips. i hope someone can move technology fwd enough that (as a start) vehicles would at least come to a controlled stop if the driver were incapacitated.
"(bonobo, named for promiscuous monkeys)"
Bonobos are Chimpanzees, not monkeys.
And who is to say they are "promiscuous"? A sexually repressed homo sapiens sapiens?
I think KDE will fall...here is an example of a typical communication with a KDE supporter:
Q: How can KDE be truly free, if Qt isn't?
A: Qt is GPL'd, so its free now. ESR, RMS and Linus said so.
Q: When exactly does my company have to release source to avoid the $1550 (per developer/per year) that Qt charges?
A: It's an excellent toolkit. Stop whining you greedy company person. Pay us now.
Q: Developing professionally with a KDE box appears to cost 2-3 times that of the Microsoft solution, and is charged annually. How do you reconcile something that is clearly a commercial product with all the free code contributed by people for literally decades?
A: Obviously you have never used a quality development environment, or you wouldn't ask. You are a commie idiot who thinks making money is bad. We need to make money.
Q: Why not just LGPL it like the other system libraries?
A: inlined header files are our friend (smirk)
hate to be pessimistic, but with all the failures, layoffs, share prices plummeting...i hope Sun has a big war chest.
Here's the plan : Sun makes their OS look like Linux, and sells all the hardware they can make, even though you pay roughly 5x the cost of a Lintel solution. Granted, some of the Sun clustering and services are mind-blowing, but they won't be selling many 1s/2s this way. Although I'm sure the entrenched solaris shops will welcome the changes.
But will it be "in time"? 3dfx? Gone. Aetna? Thousands laid off. GM? Thousands laid off, oldsmobile line ended.Sun, MS? share prices plummet. Son of a Bush (SOB) is not even in the oval office yet, and the economy is already cratering. Has the republican feeding frenzy begun, after 6 years of incredible prosperity?
At least IBM has pledged 1B. to Linux endeavours. With the loss of the dot com money, a lot of people might not be able to do free software work anymore.
Or perhaps they will be doing a lot more?
> Compare an F-22 against an F-14. Your average F-14
> spends more than half of its operational lifetime
> on the ground being serviced. The average F-22
> doesn't. Manufacturing tolerances down,
> operational tolerances up.
Ahem, I'd like to know from whence you've compiled these statistics. There are no operational F-22s, and the few Raptors in testing have most certainly NOT reached anything close to a flight/maintenance parity!