Y'know, statistically, entering somebody's home is one of the most dangerous things a law enforcement officer can do. (I forget which is first and which is second, but the other is stopping a car.) And when you figure that a lot of hackers -- crackers, even more so -- are also gun enthusiasts, you're damn right I'd want a bullet proof vest and something heavier than a Glock.
Inside houses is the first: A widely-respected officer-survival text gives disturbance and burglary calls as accounting for 26% of officer fatalities, with robberies accounting for 18% and other arrests being 21%. Traffic stops accounted for about 12% of felonious slayings, and probably around half of all line-of-duty deaths total.[1]
There's a reason why high-risk warrant services are called "high-risk." By tracing paper, the FBI could know that he didn't have any registered guns. Problem: Not all guns are registered. Hell, in my state we don't register them at all. So they couldn't know if he had guns or not. He did have bomb-making instructions. Ingredients for explosives aren't THAT hard to find, unless California hardware stores are that much different from Colorado hardware stores. The risk of pipe bombs and homemade grenades was too large to ignore. Nor was his mental state known: White suburban wanna-be gangsters and so-called activists are often a higher risk than real gangbangers. The real gangbangers know that they'll lose a fight with us, and they don't pick them. They also know that the cop they try to fight may be the one out of twenty who isn't adverse to alley rides or playing "catch-up." White suburban loudmouths, OTOH, don't have the sense to not fight armed men twice their size. And that's something a raid team has to take into account: If this guy doesn't see an overwhelming show of force right away, he could easily try something and someone will likely get hurt if he does.
As for busting ESR, well, I don't want to. He hasn't given me any stress lately. Now, that GNU/Richard GNU/M. GNU/Stallman GNU/pain in the GNU/ass, OTOH...
Regarding the FBI raid, they must be high on something themself. 2 officers with handguns and a solid kick on the door would probably have been more appropriate.
Ever been through raid school, or even a basic police academy? I have. We use four to six officers with AR-15's and shotguns to clear a house in response to burglar alarms. And that's houses that are usually empty when we get there.
When there's substantial reason to believe that the occupants of the house are violent and armed, that number goes way the hell up. We need to keep a perimeter, to keep the subject from fleeing and to keep other people from wandering into the controlled zone.
And we have an issue of safety. An overwhelming show of force is intimidating: It's meant to be. Someone might try to take on two our four cops. If that happens, a cop might get wounded or killed and the subject will have a few dozen holes in him. A dozen cops, OTOH, and he'll know better than to try shooting at us.
From how he describes the raid, it's not that far out of line from how my department handles drug labs.
I have a problem with this. The U.S. government is, once again, lying. People need to be able to trust their government, but the government engages in every kind of behavior that it calls criminal.
So, the government can't pretend to be a non-existent company for the purpose of educating people?
Do you also oppose sting operations? Reverse stings? Should I not be allowed to bluff confessions out of rape suspects? ("We found a beer bottle at the scene with a very interesting fingerprint...")
So object lessons aren't to be allowed anymore?
And lying isn't necessarily criminal. Not all statements fall under perjury/false swearing statutes, truth-in-advertising laws, or mandated-disclosure. It's not like the SEC is accepting money at this site, gundecking an Environmental Impact Statement, issuing a buy advisory for Enron, or claiming to be Marie of Rumania under oath.
Yeah, I know it's not exactly accurate, but it always struck me as a funny/messed up rule anyway.
Not exactly accurate? How about "more miss than hit."
It depends upon the source of the information. If the information is publically-available (and a one-column-inch blurb in the Boulder, CO, Daily Camera business section is public enough) then it's perfectly legal.
The idea is to keep the market fair by (theoretically) giving all investors the same chance at the same information. Now, I don't have the time to read the Wall Street Journal, the Economist, Newspeak, and the Denver Rocky Mountain News every day like my broker does, but that's life. He's a broker and I have no desire to be. And we both have the same access, even if I don't use it.
Now, let's say that my department were to consider finally buying computers for all 60-odd of our patrol cars. If I knew who the vendor was and bought their stock, it may or may not be legal. If I bought the stock before there was a public announcement, then it wouldn't be legal. If the information was already public, then well and good.
You're SUPPOSED to use asymmetrical information. You're supposed to know more than the other person. It just can't be insider asymmetrical information.
Note: IANA(Securities)L. Nor am I an SEC inspector. I don't think I'm actually qualified to be either.
Unfortunately cows are not particularly efficient calorie-producing machines. It takes about 100 times less water and nutrients to produce edible grains than it does to feed those grains to a cow and then eat the cow.
And you don't get the same nutrition from eating the rabbit food.
1) Humans need about 20-30% of their calories from fat. It's hard to do that on a strict vegetarian diet. Otherwise they lose a dense energy source AND something necessary for proper hormonal function.
2) Plants are a questionable source of protein for humans. Soybeans, for instance, are incomplete.
3) There's at least one B-vitamin which are flatly not available from plant sources.
4) Who the hell else is going to eat those soybeans? Some of us don't LIKE TVP.
3. Give it to those that actually know better (sounds nice, we just haven't found a way to separate them from 2., because if we knew that, we'd know what actually was better too, and so we wouldn't need them in the first place.)
Oh, yeah we do know how to separate them. The guy who actually knows better is some guy on Slashdot named Happy go Lucky, uid 127somethingorother.
Maybe if the rest of you good people could recognize that and just accept me as Supreme Benevolent Dictator, I'd break up Microsoft, put little refrigerators full of Dew in every office, eliminate the editorial bitchslap, and be an even cooler poll option than CowboyNeal.
No, it isn't. At least in my state, you can't be charged with a crime merely on planning. Conspiracy requires at least one conspirator to make an overt act, and criminal attempt requires a substantial step towards completion of the crime. (c.f. article two of Title 18, Colo. Revised Statutes.) Merely sitting around and bullshitting about knocking over liquor stores doesn't qualify. Nor does having a system called "passport" which leads slashdot reads to think that you might sell their personal information someday.
As for your way of upgrading...it doesn't make sense. "It's called downloading stuff, compiling it yourself... ". If you're going to go to that extent, why bother with Mandrake? Just go to www.linuxfromscratch.com and forget about Mandrake.
For most stuff, I do use MandrakeUpdate and RPM. However, I'm a little twitchy about backdoors. If something involves crypto or backdoor-prevention (SSH, SSL, GPG, iptables, etc.) I figure that the source is going to be a little more trustworthy.
And I'm not going to use an RPM-binary kernel.
Life with a computer is all about balancing convenience vs. security. If something doesn't have obvious security implications, I'll take the convenience. If there's a clear reason to prefer the code, I'll take the code instead. IMHO it beats the snot out of a one-size-fits-all approach of RPM for everything or apt for everything or the Slackware method (Package management is for the weak!)
Your second option simply doesn't make sense at all: buy a cheap CD...okay, and then...? How does that solve the fact that Mandrake doesn't make it easy to upgrade from point-releases? In fact, how do either of your choices make it easier?
Spend two bucks. Put the CD in the drive. Click on "Upgrade" instead of "Install."
And frankly, the only thing that's still 8.0 about my system are the message at login and the version of Netscape that I never use. I'm only on dialup, but you can download a lot of stuff when you let it go overnight.
I have never heard a better car-computer similie; NT/2000 are just like Caprices in that the (civilian model) Caprice is a whale of a car: huge, tons of body roll, probably the latest (and last) example of a "boat on wheels" manufactured...
Problem: The Caprices I drove were fast and utterly dependable and could take no end of abuse.
Now, the W2K installs I've used have been better than the run of the MS OSes, but they're not magical.
There was also a B-body Impala; I think it was only available in '96 (maybe '95 too). Same body and frame as the Caprice, but with more power and more of a sportscar look-and-feel.
I stand very corrected.
My department played with the Impalas, but dropped them. Plenty of power, but FWD and low ground clearance didn't help. Now we're just nursing our Crown Vics and our very last few Caprices.
EOT, before this thread gets bitchslapped with me in it.
Linux is a segway. It claims it will change the world; some people try it out;
Don't call my OS a stupid-looking scooter.
Windows 2000 is an Automatic Transmission Ford. Good enough for the average person, they don't have to worry about it too terribly much. Most mechanics know how to fix them.
I've worked on Fords. That's exactly why I'm a Chevrolet man. And I agree: W2K is just as easy to fix and keep running as my girlfriend's 1991 Taurus POS or the 1996 Crown Vic Interceptor I drive at work.
We really need the Caprice of operating systems. Fast as hell, stable in the turns, survives crashes and protects the occupants, and plenty of room to haul stuff around.
1) kill bugs, kill bugs, kill bugs...then release it.
2) don't you dare ship 8.2 without KDE 3.x.
Seems to me these are just a little mutually-exclusive.
When KDE 3.0.0 comes out, it'll probably be buggy as all hell. Huge-assed packages with version number x.0.0 usually are. And it'll take half of forever for all of them to be stomped on.
How long should they wait before releasing 8.2? And shouldn't 8.2 just be the bugfixed version of 8.2 beta?
I seem to remember that Linus et al. got their nuts jumped on last fall for deviating from that path and including new code in the 2.4 kernels instead of just fixes.
4) how about a way to upgrade from previous versions of Mandy that works?
Two ways to do it:
1) My way. MDK 8.0, with kernel 2.4.17, KDE 2.2.2, OpenSSH 3.0.2, gcc 3.0.3, et cetera. It's called downloading stuff, compiling it yourself (if it involves crypto, you'd be a fool not to compile it yourself or to take source from an untrusted supplier).
RPM -Uvvvv to get the dependencies that need to be installed. For something like KDE where you need a new kdebase to install kdebase-devel, and vice-versa, add the --nodeps flag and get them both. But it can be done. I'm religious about "latest stable version of everything that plays nice with the rest of my system."
I don't know about these, but I'm using win4lin [netraverse.com] here and it's rock solid. It mainly gets used for Dreamweaver and the occasional site that requires IE (urrgh).
Now I want you to visualize something: Seventy cops, fifteen dispatchers, five records clerks. The average records clerk or dispatcher has an associates, probably in "Business Technology." The average of the cops has an associates from back before junior colleges had end-user computer classes. Going to ANY kind of computer records system from handwritten reports and typewriters took a leap of faith.
The only real linux geeks we have are the Admin. captain and the financial crimes detective. One of them is too busy chasing bad checks and the other one is a captain and therefore is forbidden to do anything useful at all. It took Mandrake 6.0 before there was a distro simple enough for me, so I can't admin a bunch of working boxen. Not without dumping the job they actually ired me to do.
That kind of solution would allow linux desktops to be phased in whilst the custom software was recoded. There would be short-term expenses, but as part of a long term strategy of replacing MS software, probably quite practical.
Amazingly enough, Win2K actually sometimes does meet our needs. More so than any previous Windows, anyway. But the short-term expenses are prohibitive for us. $100,000 to write custom software is also $100,000 that could fill in a lot of holes in our training budget, or pay the overtime to put an extra two people at the high school in the afternoon, etc. Windows stuff is expensive, but it's the already-paid-for-it-so-we-might-as-well-get-our-mo ney's-worth kind of expensive.
Now, if this stuff were written for linux then I'd recommend a switch in a heartbeat. But it's not there yet.
So I wouldn't be surprised at all if they were the second-to-last sector to switch to Linux (government being the one organization I would expect to see running Windows longer; if they buy $400 hammers they'll think.NET is secure).
First of all, the $400 hammer wasn't so much a cost overrun. It was a special hammer (made from beryllium?) which was intended for hazardous environments and therefore absolutely HAD to be non-sparking.
Second: I work for municipal government. The reason we don't switch to linux is because the software we need is not available for linux and we don't have the budget for custom development.
We're a police department. That means we need:
Records tracking and report-writing software. It's 90% database and the other 10% Word. We can't afford retraining costs or downtime, when we have to have about 50 or so reports, plus over a hundred field interview cards, citations, etc. per day.
CADrafting software for diagramming-our traffic accident team is the big user here. We pretty much have to use whatever the city planner and county surveyor use, since we often import their work. I've never seen AutoCAD for Linux.
CADispatch software. Exists only for Windows. Police and fire departments large enough to have dispatch centers are the only users of this class of software-it's really a niche market.
Software to access the Colo. Bureau of Investigation computers. So far, there's only one client for those that I've seen, and it's written for DOS.
And dosemu, wine, and VMWare are not nearly stable enough.
I like linux. I use it at home. But it doesn't meet our needs at work.
A whole bunch of people, a few days ago, seemed to think that Billy's statement only made sense in the context of the settlement. He and MS wouldn't be required to give out so much information if they claimed a security concern.
I mostly think it's advertising. XP didn't sell nearly as well as they had hoped, and a bunch of people flying around with Madonna playing in the background didn't seem to send their message. And I'd be willing to bet that security concerns were most of the reason-they WERE the reason with my employer.
The tech world is full of reviewers and publishers who will publish Gates' statements as thought they were spoken from the burning bush. God only knows, they shill for advertisers just as bad as gun magazines.
I noticed. In the last week, KOffice has crashed on me three times, toasting my documents. Konquerer twice. KNotify (IIRC, the crash handler!) has crashed twice!
And two of those seven crashes locked up the entire machine.
In other words, I heartily agree. I hope like hell KDE 3 is more stable.
If the Enron or Arthur Andersen execs walk, I wouldn't be surprised to see a legal presumption of guilt when documents are shredded prematurely or despite an explicit and lawful order to retain them.
To some extent, that already exists. At least in my state, in employment discrimination cases, if ANY relevant documents are destroyed after a notice of intent to sue is properly served, then whoever destroyed them may or may not face contempt proceedings. In addition, the jury will be instructed that they can assume that the destroyed documents would have been detrimental to the interests of whoever destroyed them.
We've been using a similar procedure in criminal law as well. The classic example is the driver, arrested for DUI, who's told that he needs to take a chemical test-an Intoxylizer or blood draw. The 2-3 liters of breath or 2-3 cc's of blood are physical evidence, and refusing to surrender them for examination before your liver destroys them is grounds for a jury to assume that, because you hid means you had something to hide.
I expect similar case law with regard to encryption in the next year or so. After all, the Fifth Amendment (in the US) applies only to testimony, and the judges know it even if a bunch of people on/. don't.
The theory is simple and precedence is well-established - if a cop sees you see him then bolt, that's grounds for a reasonable presumption that you're guilty of *something* and the cops can stop and question you.
Used to be. Not anymore. The legal standard is "reasonable suspicion." If I have RS, I can briefly[1] detain someone, require him to identify himself, check him for warrants, and[2] frisk him for weapons. If I have RS and someone runs, I chase him.
Getting back to the point, there was a case in Chicago a few years ago which said that a running subject did not constitute reasonable suspicion. If the officers already had RS when they first tried to contact the subject, then they could legally chase and restrain him. If they did not, then they couldn't detain him just because he ran.
Obviously, if he ran and there were other factors present, that changes things.
(Sorry about the rant. I'm just really into Terry stops. They're at the heart of deterring gang crime in this country.)
[1] If it goes beyond fifteen or twenty minutes, I need a really good reason to satisfy the judge that my detention was reasonable. The legal rule is that we must be dilligently pursuing an investigation and not just keeping the subject there for the sake of keeping the subject from going about his business. Basically, I need to satisfy a judge that the detention and any delays or other impositions were reasonable in light of the circumstances and my purpose for making the stop.
[2] I just need to articulate why I thought he was armed or otherwise likely to become combative. It doesn't take absolute proof to legally frisk for weapons, but the law does require more than a whim.
I'm sitting in front of a 17" monitor, with a CD player going and the BBC World Service on shortwave, getting ready for work. I'm wearing a pager, a cellphone, a wireless microphone for my car's dash-camera, and an 800MHz transceiver.
With all of that RF floating around the den, I'm going to die. I'll probably have a stroke before I finish this and click "submit."
Time for the cops to give up their big-brother fantasies, and realize that they're going to have to do some good, old-fashioned police work.
Okay. They forgot to mention how to do "good old-fashioned police work" at the academy. They were so busy teaching us how to not offend people or get sued that the crime-solving stuff went out the window.
You're right, I'm joking-a little. However, I want you to do me a favor and define "good old-fashioned police work" for me and provide an outline of techniques that constitute "go-fpw." And before you start:
Beating confessions out of people is illegal in the US. Japan is really the only G-8 nation that allows that anymore. (Sure, talk about Amadou Diallo. Try also talking about what happened to the cops who were involved.)
Offering suspects some sort of deal in exchange for confessions is one thing. However, we don't pile a stack of offense reports in front of an arrestee and tell him "Read through those and let us know which ones are yours." That's called "clearing paper" and went out of fashion when I was in grade school.
Searches in violation of the Fourth Amendment are out the window. Specifically, don't suggest consent searches without consent. The courts take a rather dim view of that.
Racial profiling is illegal in the US and has been since 1868-see the Fourteenth Amendment.
So, got any suggestions? So far, all I've come up with is field interrogations on suspicious people, getting consent and searching vehicles whenever drivers show certain behavioral indicators (no, I'm not going to say what they are), doing wants/warrants checks on everybody if I talk to them enough to ask to see their ID, doing lots of interviews under circumstances under which _Miranda_ doesn't apply, and lifting weights and running and shooting every week just to be sure that I'm still alive at the end of each watch. And that only goes so far. Those are also what get us in a lot of trouble because the public doesn't know what we're doing but definitely doesn't like it. ("Those lousy pigs! They have no right to arrest me on outstanding warrants after pulling me over for expired tags! And even less right to ask my son his name and age when they see him behind the Seven-Eleven at midnight!" True story, from one night where a father went for a warrant for restraining order violations after I stopped him since his tags were six months expired. Two hours later, his 15-y.o. son was found behind a convenience store with a home-made slimjim, screwdrivers, and other neat little toys. And we get that kind of "They had no right!" gripe monthly.)
As for the California study, the citations seemed a little vague. How many of the non-convicted were cooperating witnesses or informants? And how many of them were simply docketed for trial in 2001 instead of 2000? Come to think of it, was that seventeed defendants convicted or seventeed trials resulting in conviction? I don't know about California, but in much of the US it's not unheard of to have multiple defendants in the same trial. Not common, but not impossible.
IF Apple, who has far less money than AOL, could produce OSX which destroys WindowsXP in ease of use.
But not in market share. And market share and profit are what amount to business success, not the fact that Apple managed to make an idiot-proof extension to FreeBSD.
In a year I think AOL could have a Linux that destroys WindowsXP in terms of ease of use, and that runs windows programs
Maybe if they got the API's that microsoft uses. I wouldn't hold my breath.
With a few billion dollars to develop KDE 4.0 and Xfree we could have thousands of paid programmers writing open source code
How much money is AOL going to dump into this?
Let's be realistic. I doubt that AOL is going to spend a billion or so to acquire Red Hat, and THEN spend a few billion more on rewriting a window manager in order to compete with the 800 pound gorilla of desktop OS'es. Not many people are going to buy a new OS and completely reinstall just to use the latest AOL.
When companies flush large amounts of money down the toilet, that's how shareholder revolts start. And something tells me that AOL-TW's current board of directors doesn't want to be deposed in a shareholder revolt because they flushed three billion bucks in a pie-in-the-sky bid to take over the desktop.
Falun Gong is an organisation trying to peacefully over throw the Chinese government, masked as religious cult.
Peaceful overthrow? Sounds like an opposition political party- Democrats/Libertarians/Greens/Natural Law/Taxpayer in the US, Conservatives in the UK, Christian Democrats in Germany, et cetera. You know, the kind of peaceful assemblage which is legal throughout the civilized world.
They are a real force. Their persecution is disappointing to say the least, but under similar circumstances if the Natural Law Party [natural-law.org] Raliens, Scientologoy, Etc, ever gained enough momentum to actually be in a position to replace the United States Government, most people would be unsuportive and frightened.
If the Elronnites ever managed to put together 50%+1
of the US' population, then they would BY DEFINITION would have the majority support. And if they got elected, that means that either they had majority support or the other minorities and pluralities didn't care enough to get their lazy asses out from in front of the TV on election day.
Freedom of religion is one thing, freedom of non-traditional religious cults to over throw the government is another; and would be met with the same kind of treatement anywhere.
Yeah, I know the US government burned a bunch of cultists to death in Texas, not quite ten years ago. You may also have noticed that the administration which did so is arguably the most disgraced one that the US had in a lifetime , and that Waco was one contributing factor in that disgrace. You may have also noticed that the current administration's efforts towards Constitutionally-questionable security measures have been weakened, diluted, and very loudly critcised throughout our society and government. Would the PRC's government allow such opposition to exist?
Tell me, which Chinese leader will be disgraced during his lifetime for ordering the death of 80-90 cultists? Or do they rule by divine right over there?
Slashdot Mirror
Inside houses is the first: A widely-respected officer-survival text gives disturbance and burglary calls as accounting for 26% of officer fatalities, with robberies accounting for 18% and other arrests being 21%. Traffic stops accounted for about 12% of felonious slayings, and probably around half of all line-of-duty deaths total.[1] There's a reason why high-risk warrant services are called "high-risk." By tracing paper, the FBI could know that he didn't have any registered guns. Problem: Not all guns are registered. Hell, in my state we don't register them at all. So they couldn't know if he had guns or not. He did have bomb-making instructions. Ingredients for explosives aren't THAT hard to find, unless California hardware stores are that much different from Colorado hardware stores. The risk of pipe bombs and homemade grenades was too large to ignore. Nor was his mental state known: White suburban wanna-be gangsters and so-called activists are often a higher risk than real gangbangers. The real gangbangers know that they'll lose a fight with us, and they don't pick them. They also know that the cop they try to fight may be the one out of twenty who isn't adverse to alley rides or playing "catch-up." White suburban loudmouths, OTOH, don't have the sense to not fight armed men twice their size. And that's something a raid team has to take into account: If this guy doesn't see an overwhelming show of force right away, he could easily try something and someone will likely get hurt if he does.
As for busting ESR, well, I don't want to. He hasn't given me any stress lately. Now, that GNU/Richard GNU/M. GNU/Stallman GNU/pain in the GNU/ass, OTOH...
Ever been through raid school, or even a basic police academy? I have. We use four to six officers with AR-15's and shotguns to clear a house in response to burglar alarms. And that's houses that are usually empty when we get there.
When there's substantial reason to believe that the occupants of the house are violent and armed, that number goes way the hell up. We need to keep a perimeter, to keep the subject from fleeing and to keep other people from wandering into the controlled zone.
And we have an issue of safety. An overwhelming show of force is intimidating: It's meant to be. Someone might try to take on two our four cops. If that happens, a cop might get wounded or killed and the subject will have a few dozen holes in him. A dozen cops, OTOH, and he'll know better than to try shooting at us.
From how he describes the raid, it's not that far out of line from how my department handles drug labs.
So, the government can't pretend to be a non-existent company for the purpose of educating people?
Do you also oppose sting operations? Reverse stings? Should I not be allowed to bluff confessions out of rape suspects? ("We found a beer bottle at the scene with a very interesting fingerprint...")
So object lessons aren't to be allowed anymore?
And lying isn't necessarily criminal. Not all statements fall under perjury/false swearing statutes, truth-in-advertising laws, or mandated-disclosure. It's not like the SEC is accepting money at this site, gundecking an Environmental Impact Statement, issuing a buy advisory for Enron, or claiming to be Marie of Rumania under oath.
Not exactly accurate? How about "more miss than hit."
It depends upon the source of the information. If the information is publically-available (and a one-column-inch blurb in the Boulder, CO, Daily Camera business section is public enough) then it's perfectly legal.
The idea is to keep the market fair by (theoretically) giving all investors the same chance at the same information. Now, I don't have the time to read the Wall Street Journal, the Economist, Newspeak, and the Denver Rocky Mountain News every day like my broker does, but that's life. He's a broker and I have no desire to be. And we both have the same access, even if I don't use it.
Now, let's say that my department were to consider finally buying computers for all 60-odd of our patrol cars. If I knew who the vendor was and bought their stock, it may or may not be legal. If I bought the stock before there was a public announcement, then it wouldn't be legal. If the information was already public, then well and good.
You're SUPPOSED to use asymmetrical information. You're supposed to know more than the other person. It just can't be insider asymmetrical information.
Note: IANA(Securities)L. Nor am I an SEC inspector. I don't think I'm actually qualified to be either.
And you don't get the same nutrition from eating the rabbit food.
1) Humans need about 20-30% of their calories from fat. It's hard to do that on a strict vegetarian diet. Otherwise they lose a dense energy source AND something necessary for proper hormonal function.
2) Plants are a questionable source of protein for humans. Soybeans, for instance, are incomplete.
3) There's at least one B-vitamin which are flatly not available from plant sources.
4) Who the hell else is going to eat those soybeans? Some of us don't LIKE TVP.
Oh, yeah we do know how to separate them. The guy who actually knows better is some guy on Slashdot named Happy go Lucky, uid 127somethingorother.
Maybe if the rest of you good people could recognize that and just accept me as Supreme Benevolent Dictator, I'd break up Microsoft, put little refrigerators full of Dew in every office, eliminate the editorial bitchslap, and be an even cooler poll option than CowboyNeal.
See? Problem solved.
No, it isn't. At least in my state, you can't be charged with a crime merely on planning. Conspiracy requires at least one conspirator to make an overt act, and criminal attempt requires a substantial step towards completion of the crime. (c.f. article two of Title 18, Colo. Revised Statutes.) Merely sitting around and bullshitting about knocking over liquor stores doesn't qualify. Nor does having a system called "passport" which leads slashdot reads to think that you might sell their personal information someday.
For most stuff, I do use MandrakeUpdate and RPM. However, I'm a little twitchy about backdoors. If something involves crypto or backdoor-prevention (SSH, SSL, GPG, iptables, etc.) I figure that the source is going to be a little more trustworthy.
And I'm not going to use an RPM-binary kernel.
Life with a computer is all about balancing convenience vs. security. If something doesn't have obvious security implications, I'll take the convenience. If there's a clear reason to prefer the code, I'll take the code instead. IMHO it beats the snot out of a one-size-fits-all approach of RPM for everything or apt for everything or the Slackware method (Package management is for the weak!)
Your second option simply doesn't make sense at all: buy a cheap CD...okay, and then...? How does that solve the fact that Mandrake doesn't make it easy to upgrade from point-releases? In fact, how do either of your choices make it easier?
Spend two bucks. Put the CD in the drive. Click on "Upgrade" instead of "Install."
And frankly, the only thing that's still 8.0 about my system are the message at login and the version of Netscape that I never use. I'm only on dialup, but you can download a lot of stuff when you let it go overnight.
Problem: The Caprices I drove were fast and utterly dependable and could take no end of abuse.
Now, the W2K installs I've used have been better than the run of the MS OSes, but they're not magical.
I stand very corrected.
My department played with the Impalas, but dropped them. Plenty of power, but FWD and low ground clearance didn't help. Now we're just nursing our Crown Vics and our very last few Caprices.
EOT, before this thread gets bitchslapped with me in it.
No. I mean the Chevy Caprice, the B-body. Same body as the Buick Roadmaster. I don't think Chevy's made any since 1996 or 1997.
The police-package model was a real scream. Hard suspension and the Corvette engine.
Full-size four-door sedan, rear-wheel-drive. The Impalas are front-wheel drive and a size down from the B-body Caprice.
Don't call my OS a stupid-looking scooter.
Windows 2000 is an Automatic Transmission Ford. Good enough for the average person, they don't have to worry about it too terribly much. Most mechanics know how to fix them.
I've worked on Fords. That's exactly why I'm a Chevrolet man. And I agree: W2K is just as easy to fix and keep running as my girlfriend's 1991 Taurus POS or the 1996 Crown Vic Interceptor I drive at work.
We really need the Caprice of operating systems. Fast as hell, stable in the turns, survives crashes and protects the occupants, and plenty of room to haul stuff around.
2) don't you dare ship 8.2 without KDE 3.x.
Seems to me these are just a little mutually-exclusive.
When KDE 3.0.0 comes out, it'll probably be buggy as all hell. Huge-assed packages with version number x.0.0 usually are. And it'll take half of forever for all of them to be stomped on.
How long should they wait before releasing 8.2? And shouldn't 8.2 just be the bugfixed version of 8.2 beta?
I seem to remember that Linus et al. got their nuts jumped on last fall for deviating from that path and including new code in the 2.4 kernels instead of just fixes.
4) how about a way to upgrade from previous versions of Mandy that works?
Two ways to do it:
1) My way. MDK 8.0, with kernel 2.4.17, KDE 2.2.2, OpenSSH 3.0.2, gcc 3.0.3, et cetera. It's called downloading stuff, compiling it yourself (if it involves crypto, you'd be a fool not to compile it yourself or to take source from an untrusted supplier).
RPM -Uvvvv to get the dependencies that need to be installed. For something like KDE where you need a new kdebase to install kdebase-devel, and vice-versa, add the --nodeps flag and get them both. But it can be done. I'm religious about "latest stable version of everything that plays nice with the rest of my system."
2) Buy a CD for $2-3 from cheapbytes.
Not that I'm holding my breath...
Now I want you to visualize something: Seventy cops, fifteen dispatchers, five records clerks. The average records clerk or dispatcher has an associates, probably in "Business Technology." The average of the cops has an associates from back before junior colleges had end-user computer classes. Going to ANY kind of computer records system from handwritten reports and typewriters took a leap of faith.
The only real linux geeks we have are the Admin. captain and the financial crimes detective. One of them is too busy chasing bad checks and the other one is a captain and therefore is forbidden to do anything useful at all. It took Mandrake 6.0 before there was a distro simple enough for me, so I can't admin a bunch of working boxen. Not without dumping the job they actually ired me to do.
That kind of solution would allow linux desktops to be phased in whilst the custom software was recoded. There would be short-term expenses, but as part of a long term strategy of replacing MS software, probably quite practical.
Amazingly enough, Win2K actually sometimes does meet our needs. More so than any previous Windows, anyway. But the short-term expenses are prohibitive for us. $100,000 to write custom software is also $100,000 that could fill in a lot of holes in our training budget, or pay the overtime to put an extra two people at the high school in the afternoon, etc. Windows stuff is expensive, but it's the already-paid-for-it-so-we-might-as-well-get-our-mo ney's-worth kind of expensive.
Now, if this stuff were written for linux then I'd recommend a switch in a heartbeat. But it's not there yet.
What was the message with the song they used for windows 95 ? Oh yea "she makes a grown man cryyy"
Truth in advertising my ass. That song also includes the lines "If you start me up, start me up and I'll never stop."
Just for clarification...
First of all, the $400 hammer wasn't so much a cost overrun. It was a special hammer (made from beryllium?) which was intended for hazardous environments and therefore absolutely HAD to be non-sparking.
Second: I work for municipal government. The reason we don't switch to linux is because the software we need is not available for linux and we don't have the budget for custom development.
We're a police department. That means we need:
Records tracking and report-writing software. It's 90% database and the other 10% Word. We can't afford retraining costs or downtime, when we have to have about 50 or so reports, plus over a hundred field interview cards, citations, etc. per day.
CADrafting software for diagramming-our traffic accident team is the big user here. We pretty much have to use whatever the city planner and county surveyor use, since we often import their work. I've never seen AutoCAD for Linux.
CADispatch software. Exists only for Windows. Police and fire departments large enough to have dispatch centers are the only users of this class of software-it's really a niche market.
Software to access the Colo. Bureau of Investigation computers. So far, there's only one client for those that I've seen, and it's written for DOS.
And dosemu, wine, and VMWare are not nearly stable enough.
I like linux. I use it at home. But it doesn't meet our needs at work.
I mostly think it's advertising. XP didn't sell nearly as well as they had hoped, and a bunch of people flying around with Madonna playing in the background didn't seem to send their message. And I'd be willing to bet that security concerns were most of the reason-they WERE the reason with my employer.
The tech world is full of reviewers and publishers who will publish Gates' statements as thought they were spoken from the burning bush. God only knows, they shill for advertisers just as bad as gun magazines.
I noticed. In the last week, KOffice has crashed on me three times, toasting my documents. Konquerer twice. KNotify (IIRC, the crash handler!) has crashed twice!
And two of those seven crashes locked up the entire machine.
In other words, I heartily agree. I hope like hell KDE 3 is more stable.
To some extent, that already exists. At least in my state, in employment discrimination cases, if ANY relevant documents are destroyed after a notice of intent to sue is properly served, then whoever destroyed them may or may not face contempt proceedings. In addition, the jury will be instructed that they can assume that the destroyed documents would have been detrimental to the interests of whoever destroyed them.
We've been using a similar procedure in criminal law as well. The classic example is the driver, arrested for DUI, who's told that he needs to take a chemical test-an Intoxylizer or blood draw. The 2-3 liters of breath or 2-3 cc's of blood are physical evidence, and refusing to surrender them for examination before your liver destroys them is grounds for a jury to assume that, because you hid means you had something to hide.
I expect similar case law with regard to encryption in the next year or so. After all, the Fifth Amendment (in the US) applies only to testimony, and the judges know it even if a bunch of people on /. don't.
The theory is simple and precedence is well-established - if a cop sees you see him then bolt, that's grounds for a reasonable presumption that you're guilty of *something* and the cops can stop and question you.
Used to be. Not anymore. The legal standard is "reasonable suspicion." If I have RS, I can briefly[1] detain someone, require him to identify himself, check him for warrants, and[2] frisk him for weapons. If I have RS and someone runs, I chase him.
Getting back to the point, there was a case in Chicago a few years ago which said that a running subject did not constitute reasonable suspicion. If the officers already had RS when they first tried to contact the subject, then they could legally chase and restrain him. If they did not, then they couldn't detain him just because he ran.
Obviously, if he ran and there were other factors present, that changes things.
(Sorry about the rant. I'm just really into Terry stops. They're at the heart of deterring gang crime in this country.)
[1] If it goes beyond fifteen or twenty minutes, I need a really good reason to satisfy the judge that my detention was reasonable. The legal rule is that we must be dilligently pursuing an investigation and not just keeping the subject there for the sake of keeping the subject from going about his business. Basically, I need to satisfy a judge that the detention and any delays or other impositions were reasonable in light of the circumstances and my purpose for making the stop.
[2] I just need to articulate why I thought he was armed or otherwise likely to become combative. It doesn't take absolute proof to legally frisk for weapons, but the law does require more than a whim.
With all of that RF floating around the den, I'm going to die. I'll probably have a stroke before I finish this and click "submit."
Goodbye, cruel microwaved worl...NO CARRIER
Okay. They forgot to mention how to do "good old-fashioned police work" at the academy. They were so busy teaching us how to not offend people or get sued that the crime-solving stuff went out the window.
You're right, I'm joking-a little. However, I want you to do me a favor and define "good old-fashioned police work" for me and provide an outline of techniques that constitute "go-fpw." And before you start:
Beating confessions out of people is illegal in the US. Japan is really the only G-8 nation that allows that anymore. (Sure, talk about Amadou Diallo. Try also talking about what happened to the cops who were involved.)
Offering suspects some sort of deal in exchange for confessions is one thing. However, we don't pile a stack of offense reports in front of an arrestee and tell him "Read through those and let us know which ones are yours." That's called "clearing paper" and went out of fashion when I was in grade school.
Searches in violation of the Fourth Amendment are out the window. Specifically, don't suggest consent searches without consent. The courts take a rather dim view of that.
Racial profiling is illegal in the US and has been since 1868-see the Fourteenth Amendment.
So, got any suggestions? So far, all I've come up with is field interrogations on suspicious people, getting consent and searching vehicles whenever drivers show certain behavioral indicators (no, I'm not going to say what they are), doing wants/warrants checks on everybody if I talk to them enough to ask to see their ID, doing lots of interviews under circumstances under which _Miranda_ doesn't apply, and lifting weights and running and shooting every week just to be sure that I'm still alive at the end of each watch. And that only goes so far. Those are also what get us in a lot of trouble because the public doesn't know what we're doing but definitely doesn't like it. ("Those lousy pigs! They have no right to arrest me on outstanding warrants after pulling me over for expired tags! And even less right to ask my son his name and age when they see him behind the Seven-Eleven at midnight!" True story, from one night where a father went for a warrant for restraining order violations after I stopped him since his tags were six months expired. Two hours later, his 15-y.o. son was found behind a convenience store with a home-made slimjim, screwdrivers, and other neat little toys. And we get that kind of "They had no right!" gripe monthly.)
As for the California study, the citations seemed a little vague. How many of the non-convicted were cooperating witnesses or informants? And how many of them were simply docketed for trial in 2001 instead of 2000? Come to think of it, was that seventeed defendants convicted or seventeed trials resulting in conviction? I don't know about California, but in much of the US it's not unheard of to have multiple defendants in the same trial. Not common, but not impossible.
But not in market share. And market share and profit are what amount to business success, not the fact that Apple managed to make an idiot-proof extension to FreeBSD.
In a year I think AOL could have a Linux that destroys WindowsXP in terms of ease of use, and that runs windows programs
Maybe if they got the API's that microsoft uses. I wouldn't hold my breath.
With a few billion dollars to develop KDE 4.0 and Xfree we could have thousands of paid programmers writing open source code
How much money is AOL going to dump into this?
Let's be realistic. I doubt that AOL is going to spend a billion or so to acquire Red Hat, and THEN spend a few billion more on rewriting a window manager in order to compete with the 800 pound gorilla of desktop OS'es. Not many people are going to buy a new OS and completely reinstall just to use the latest AOL.
When companies flush large amounts of money down the toilet, that's how shareholder revolts start. And something tells me that AOL-TW's current board of directors doesn't want to be deposed in a shareholder revolt because they flushed three billion bucks in a pie-in-the-sky bid to take over the desktop.
Peaceful overthrow? Sounds like an opposition political party- Democrats/Libertarians/Greens/Natural Law/Taxpayer in the US, Conservatives in the UK, Christian Democrats in Germany, et cetera. You know, the kind of peaceful assemblage which is legal throughout the civilized world.
They are a real force. Their persecution is disappointing to say the least, but under similar circumstances if the Natural Law Party [natural-law.org] Raliens, Scientologoy, Etc, ever gained enough momentum to actually be in a position to replace the United States Government, most people would be unsuportive and frightened.
If the Elronnites ever managed to put together 50%+1 of the US' population, then they would BY DEFINITION would have the majority support. And if they got elected, that means that either they had majority support or the other minorities and pluralities didn't care enough to get their lazy asses out from in front of the TV on election day.
Freedom of religion is one thing, freedom of non-traditional religious cults to over throw the government is another; and would be met with the same kind of treatement anywhere.
Yeah, I know the US government burned a bunch of cultists to death in Texas, not quite ten years ago. You may also have noticed that the administration which did so is arguably the most disgraced one that the US had in a lifetime , and that Waco was one contributing factor in that disgrace. You may have also noticed that the current administration's efforts towards Constitutionally-questionable security measures have been weakened, diluted, and very loudly critcised throughout our society and government. Would the PRC's government allow such opposition to exist?
Tell me, which Chinese leader will be disgraced during his lifetime for ordering the death of 80-90 cultists? Or do they rule by divine right over there?
You came in THAT thing? You're braver than I thought.