A few years ago, Wired (before they lost their edge) ran a pseudo-retrospect issue from the future, in which they reviewed the turn of the millenium from a few decades ahead. It was a prety neat diversion. Anyhoo...
One of the main articles dealt with 'The Plague', a super-flu/AIDS/Ebola mutation that threatened to wipe out humanity. (It's striking how biologically apropos the computer virus analogy is, and how well it tracks with real life problems, solutions and latest computer development) The article was written in retrospect, like the whole issue, and in the form of interview with one of the top researchers involved in stopping the disease.
The truly neat thing about the story, and what keeps me remembering it, was that the disease was cracked not by medically traditional means but by a mathematician who found a way of attacking the geometric form of the virus. I don't know how unconventional this approach is in virology, but the cross-polination of medicine and math really struck me.
I'm a very strong believer in gestalt thinking, and in the fact that laws of nature from one field map remarkably well onto seemingly unrelated fields. Take Newton's Laws of Motion, abstract a bit and apply to sociology. Action-reaction. The Law of Entropy seems to hold true when placed in the context of politics.:) Somehow it all ties in to Asimov's Psychohistory too.
This is why the article resonated with me, and why the topic of evolving virii triggered me to go OT about memetic cross-breeding.
That's what you're suggesting, right? An anti-virus system which goes after valid code? Interesting. So if you have one of these AV systems in place, and apply a binary patch to some code (a'la Id DOOM patches), your changes will get clobbered. Makes sense, and I can see why it would - the checksums and size changed after all. But what you're saying is that this AV system could one day decide (or be prodded into) going after stable, unmodified code - having seen it as infected?
As for CyberAIDS, I recall something from circa MS-DOS 5.0/6.0. I'd heard of a virus, aptly named CyberAIDS, which would do nothin more than disable your antivirus software. I don't know specifics, but it was interesting to me that it would trash NortonAV, CentralPoint, whatever, leaving you wide open to conventional bugs. I think (IIRC) that it would leave the TRS running, but disabled. Cold.
On the off-topic side though, I wonder what the result of the slashdot effect would be when applied to charitable donations... Say, $10 from everyone who visits the site. Maybe even less.
Has anyone out there done any work with electronic cash? Say: putting an amount into an online account, and then clicking on a URL to have a certain amount transfered to the cause..
I know, the fraud potential is huge, so security comes up, but consider... Something a'la/. voting box on a secure and validated site. You select the amount to donate, click the donate button, and your contribution is added to the fund.
Even contributions of e-pennies per person would amount to considerable funds when coupled with the slashdot effect.
Now we just need the motherboard vendors to jump on the bandwagon. We're off to a decent start but more choices, and easier availability of systems and parts is needed.
Maybe someone should tell the military about @Stake and save taxpayers millions of dollars? After all, why should Uncle Sam feed, clothe and pay hackers, if they can just sub-contract them like they do everything that doesn't require dying?
Then again, do we really want our firewalls to be made by the lowest bidder?
I'm not surprised that after all the money and effort went into 'saving' our computer systems from Y2K nothing happened. It's as it should be.
But what troubles me, ever so slightly, is that nothing happened anywhere. Not in Russia, not in China. Not in Pakistan. Not in East Bumfsck.
We sank a huge amount of effort and cash into side-stepping a problem. Other, less capable areas of the world, had fewer resources to throw at the problem - and it didn't materialize there either.
Now, I know. The level of computer dependence in less developed nations is less than here. Duh! But there are computers there too. They are airports, and power grids, and telephone systems and hospitals - and I'm sure that at this point, it's all computerized to a good extent.
Nothing happenned anywhere. No blackouts in rural India. No telephone faults in Albania. No stray nukes in Azerbaijan. No Saudi oil refineries ground to a halt. In fact, all I heard about was a U.S. spy satellite that went fruity for a few hours (y2k related) and a Polish gas turbine burned up (not y2k related) on Jan. 1st... Now the Scandinavian train wreck (unrelated) and a bug in HotMail (hmmm)....
$200 to $500 billion spent on remediation. Did we over-react? No doubt that we worked hard. I know I did. But was it needed? To this extent? Worth working the roll-over shift? Worth showing up at 6 or 7am on the Monday after?
In 20/20 hindsight, we could have partied like it WAS 1999, and slept in. Hell, taken the week off! Did we over-work the problem? Or did we just make it under the wire?
I'm sure I'm not the only one who would love to hear of the glitches that we fended off.
It's about money. If you want something done right, or at least done so that you do not complain, then you'd better be prepared to do it yourself. Otherwise, you get what you pay for.
Web hosting is big business, and to make the price competitive, corners get cut. The problem is when failures occur, you see the underbelly of your cost savings. It costs money to hire good staff. It costs money to make (frequent) backups. It costs money to provide redundant equipment.
Now, an out of the box solution may run great for a while, giving all involved a sense of security. A smoothly running computer needs little more than a baby-sitter in terms of administration and tech support. It's when all hell breaks loose that you find out where your money has been going. A trained staff costs more, but will get you back up and will keep you there. The cheap and untrained baby-sitter will, at best, be on-hold with someone elses tech support.
The mettle of your staff and contracted hosting company is tested and proven during a crisis. How they handle that crisis is what you pay for. Their response to this matter tells much of their commitment to their customers.
Would our California and Oregon bretheren be willing to buy the rest of us cheap computers and upgrades? There's a $100 a piece in it for ya, and we'll pay shipping.
Hmmm, it's getting very interesting. First we had to buy our computers and ISP subscriptions. Now we can get free computers for ISP subscriptions and free Internet access with the purchase of a computer. Dare I speculate that free PCs and free access are next? Well, at the cost of personal information. Hmm.
It's almost like we're doing Windows users a favor by charging them money for something they could get for free, because they get confused otherwise. --LW
It's free-based Wall.
I nominate the above quote as the new open-source motto. Ha!
And in related news, Uri Geller has filled an injunction against the Wachowski brothers, to prevent them from making any Matrix sequels.
Apparently, the sci-fi hit sequels were rumored to involve reviving stopped watches and taking photographs without first taking off the lens cover. Slinky Carrie Ann Moss was also to be featured wearing a skin-tight aura of bio-energy.
Most readers here already know this, but I ask you to make the point clear to those coworkers, friends and faily who do not...
The only reason that Y2K was such a huge non-event was because $500,000,000 and hundreds of thousands of man-years of effort were invested into making it exactly that. A non-event. We won, it was a successful non-failure. We averted the potential (POTENTIAL since we'll never truly know the alternative outcome) disaster of the rollover.
We'll never know what the consequences of inaction might have been, or wether or not we over-zealously attacked the problem. Maybe we overspent and overworked it. Maybe we nailed it just right. Perhaps it was overkill. We'll never know. And a good thing too. The planes stayed up, the lights stayed on, and no one was hurt.
I find it strangely disturbing that the ISO would resort to year version numbers. Aren't they supposed to be one of the few non-commercial, 'above the hype', good-of-the-state-of-the-art entities out there?
Geeks are usually more tolerant of lifestyle and just about all things (except OS issues) than the general population. We are reared on sci-fi and istant global communication, so culture, race, gender, et al do not matter much to us.
However we react poorly to environments in which a repressive indigenous culture would pressure us to comforn to its ideology. We accept the lifestyles of those around us readily, but don't like being told how we should live our own lives. Live and let live.
So, an open-minded environment which offers opportunity equally, without prejudice, is a must. Geeks despise intolerance and authoritarianism. That's what makes us able to do what we do. Freedom to think and act is important to us.
Well, that and the ability to freely express ourselves. This is key for the pierced, tatooed and dyed minority of geeks.
Tolerance of the minority is key for the majority.
Using Alpha processors let's Compaq try out an industrial strength B cluster, something that could run an enterprise, serve as a superserver or predict the weather.
Beowulf was originally conceived of as a way to crank out supercomputer performance out of cheap, old PCs. This ups the ante, since Compaq is putting it together out of supercomputers to begin with. Interesting indeed.
Further, by openning it up to the general public gratis, I'd be interested what it is that they're REALLY testing. The performance of the cluster, or the security of their OS tweaks... Hmmm...
Where do you get off calling this piece, a 'review' of "Man On The Moon"? You've said NOTHING about the movie, except that it stars Jim Carey and Danny DeVito, and is about Andy Kaufman. ANYONE who has seen an advert for the film already knows that.
Instead, you should have called your article "The Jon Katz Opinion of Andy Kaufman". And even as that, it wasn't a very good, or well thought out, one.
Jon, if you haven't got anything to say, don't say anything. If you must spew, at least give your rant a suitable headline. Some journalist you're turning out to be.
I haven't the foggiest. IANAchemist, and it's been a while since I've cracked a book on the subject, or had the original conversation for that matter.
From the description he gave, the iron particles are moved around by the magnetic field, acting much as a filter. They end up clumping together with the filtrate, sink and (I presume) hold the crud in place as the water flows by. When the field is shut down, there's your contaminant/iron sludge, and much cleaner water.
Rinse, lather, repeat. After several iterations (or a long enough pipe), the water is equivalently clean as with traditional filtration methods. The sludge is processed to recover iron and contaminants. Being a ChemE, I'd imagine he's most involved with sludge processing, since the rest sounds like a purely physical process. Anyhoo, it's supposed be be really great for oils, biologicals (sewage) and all sorts of particulate pollution.
Don't know what use the process is for dissolved compounds and toxins. Except that if the iron is somehow coated or serves as a catalyst of some sort... But now I'm completely guessing, so I'll leave it at that.
Neat thing is that there are very few moving parts in the system, and no filters to clean/replace per se. I'd imagine that water flowing at a gentle decline, with the occasional magnetic pulse sent in the opposite direction via wire wound around the pipe or some elaboration on that theme.
Heh, interesting mental picture. Bacteria eating radioactive compounds, and crapping out same, contained in Boron-infused buckyballs. Possibly bonded with Iron, or some other compound that would make it easier to separate from soil|liquid, and physically contain.
A ChemE friend of mine is working on a method of purifying chemically contaminated water by mixing fine Iron fillings into it, and running it through a variable magnetic field. Apparently this works extremely well for many contaminants, and is quite cheap to do (once you've got a site built, that is). Hence the above Iron idea.
What the oil eating bacteria die after they eat all of their only source of food.
Though I agree with your 'paranoia' that freak mutations could develop to do some unexpected things. I doubt that a petrol-eating critter will suddenly change it's fundamental means of nutrition, but a strain might develop to eat other, related, materials. Instead of crude oil in the presence of salt water, such a strain might consume gasoline or plastics, possibly without needed salt or water. Brief flashback to Andromeda Strain. Or it might munch on fish-oil.;)
But then again, odds are that the mutation(s) needed to make an impact on 'US' would never paddle back to shore. If anything, I'm sure that the bacteria we release into 'the wild' would not be of the radiation resistant variety. More likely, they'd be highly sensitive to UV, so that once the spill is cleared, the sunlight bakes whatever didn't starve. Maybe salt is the poison.
Interesting point nonetheless, but so speculative, that except for the usual could vs should argument, we have no input or insight into how it is.
The business of the Army is to protect your rights to anonymity (posting as an AC), and free speach (posting as an AC), and liberal technology use (posting as an AC), and maintaining the US in a position that allows you to have an enjoyable standard of living (posting as an AC).
Their presence, and successful killing of people who would otherwise be running your life, is what provides for your right to choose to be a pacifist. Their existence is also what provides for your right to not contribute to their efforts. Were it not for someone standing guard, you might be tortured into providing the desired information against your will.
Being an immigrant, I fully support and appreciate the US armed forces. Thanks to them, dissidents and people with unpopular (non-state-sponsored) views have a chance to be heard. They even have an opportunity to spew their self-righteous opinions without spending more than two seconds thinking about their validity. Their only fear of retribution being that of someone else exercising their own God and Country assured right to free speach and a differing opinion.
Slashdot Mirror
I know it's OT, but I thought it was cool..
:) Somehow it all ties in to Asimov's Psychohistory too.
A few years ago, Wired (before they lost their edge) ran a pseudo-retrospect issue from the future, in which they reviewed the turn of the millenium from a few decades ahead. It was a prety neat diversion. Anyhoo...
One of the main articles dealt with 'The Plague', a super-flu/AIDS/Ebola mutation that threatened to wipe out humanity. (It's striking how biologically apropos the computer virus analogy is, and how well it tracks with real life problems, solutions and latest computer development) The article was written in retrospect, like the whole issue, and in the form of interview with one of the top researchers involved in stopping the disease.
The truly neat thing about the story, and what keeps me remembering it, was that the disease was cracked not by medically traditional means but by a mathematician who found a way of attacking the geometric form of the virus. I don't know how unconventional this approach is in virology, but the cross-polination of medicine and math really struck me.
I'm a very strong believer in gestalt thinking, and in the fact that laws of nature from one field map remarkably well onto seemingly unrelated fields. Take Newton's Laws of Motion, abstract a bit and apply to sociology. Action-reaction. The Law of Entropy seems to hold true when placed in the context of politics.
This is why the article resonated with me, and why the topic of evolving virii triggered me to go OT about memetic cross-breeding.
That's what you're suggesting, right? An anti-virus system which goes after valid code?
Interesting. So if you have one of these AV systems in place, and apply a binary patch to some code (a'la Id DOOM patches), your changes will get clobbered. Makes sense, and I can see why it would - the checksums and size changed after all. But what you're saying is that this AV system could one day decide (or be prodded into) going after stable, unmodified code - having seen it as infected?
As for CyberAIDS, I recall something from circa MS-DOS 5.0/6.0. I'd heard of a virus, aptly named CyberAIDS, which would do nothin more than disable your antivirus software. I don't know specifics, but it was interesting to me that it would trash NortonAV, CentralPoint, whatever, leaving you wide open to conventional bugs. I think (IIRC) that it would leave the TRS running, but disabled. Cold.
Poor little guys. And a cause as worthy as any.
/. voting box on a secure and validated site. You select the amount to donate, click the donate button, and your contribution is added to the fund.
On the off-topic side though, I wonder what the result of the slashdot effect would be when applied to charitable donations... Say, $10 from everyone who visits the site. Maybe even less.
Has anyone out there done any work with electronic cash? Say: putting an amount into an online account, and then clicking on a URL to have a certain amount transfered to the cause..
I know, the fraud potential is huge, so security comes up, but consider... Something a'la
Even contributions of e-pennies per person would amount to considerable funds when coupled with the slashdot effect.
Now we just need the motherboard vendors to jump on the bandwagon. We're off to a decent start but more choices, and easier availability of systems and parts is needed.
Maybe someone should tell the military about @Stake and save taxpayers millions of dollars? After all, why should Uncle Sam feed, clothe and pay hackers, if they can just sub-contract them like they do everything that doesn't require dying?
Then again, do we really want our firewalls to be made by the lowest bidder?
QNX
:)
Now there's a *nix for chips. And it scales too.
Nice GUI, and pretty *nix for a *nix.
Not as friendly as Linux, IMO, but the OS fits into what (?) 300K or something ridiculous like that. Oh, and it's real-time too boot. (no pun int)
I will be damned, bitter and resentful, if as a result of work...
...I miss the birth of my childern.
...I don't make my son's little league game.
...I am late for my wedding.
...I let down a loved one who depends on me.
...I put off a holiday with my parents.
...I forget my mother's birthday.
...I neglect a friend.
...I don't stop to smell the first flower of spring.
...I drive by a 'just happened' accident without stopping to help.
...I don't return the smile of a stranger's child.
...I trade my morals for stock options.
...I allow money to set my heart's priorities.
Work New Year's? If I've nothing better to do, sure.
I'm not surprised that after all the money and effort went into 'saving' our computer systems from Y2K nothing happened. It's as it should be.
But what troubles me, ever so slightly, is that nothing happened anywhere. Not in Russia, not in China. Not in Pakistan. Not in East Bumfsck.
We sank a huge amount of effort and cash into side-stepping a problem. Other, less capable areas of the world, had fewer resources to throw at the problem - and it didn't materialize there either.
Now, I know. The level of computer dependence in less developed nations is less than here. Duh! But there are computers there too. They are airports, and power grids, and telephone systems and hospitals - and I'm sure that at this point, it's all computerized to a good extent.
Nothing happenned anywhere. No blackouts in rural India. No telephone faults in Albania. No stray nukes in Azerbaijan. No Saudi oil refineries ground to a halt. In fact, all I heard about was a U.S. spy satellite that went fruity for a few hours (y2k related) and a Polish gas turbine burned up (not y2k related) on Jan. 1st... Now the Scandinavian train wreck (unrelated) and a bug in HotMail (hmmm)....
$200 to $500 billion spent on remediation. Did we over-react? No doubt that we worked hard. I know I did. But was it needed? To this extent? Worth working the roll-over shift? Worth showing up at 6 or 7am on the Monday after?
In 20/20 hindsight, we could have partied like it WAS 1999, and slept in. Hell, taken the week off! Did we over-work the problem? Or did we just make it under the wire?
I'm sure I'm not the only one who would love to hear of the glitches that we fended off.
It's about money. If you want something done right, or at least done so that you do not complain, then you'd better be prepared to do it yourself. Otherwise, you get what you pay for.
Web hosting is big business, and to make the price competitive, corners get cut. The problem is when failures occur, you see the underbelly of your cost savings. It costs money to hire good staff. It costs money to make (frequent) backups. It costs money to provide redundant equipment.
Now, an out of the box solution may run great for a while, giving all involved a sense of security. A smoothly running computer needs little more than a baby-sitter in terms of administration and tech support. It's when all hell breaks loose that you find out where your money has been going. A trained staff costs more, but will get you back up and will keep you there. The cheap and untrained baby-sitter will, at best, be on-hold with someone elses tech support.
The mettle of your staff and contracted hosting company is tested and proven during a crisis. How they handle that crisis is what you pay for. Their response to this matter tells much of their commitment to their customers.
Would our California and Oregon bretheren be willing to buy the rest of us cheap computers and upgrades? There's a $100 a piece in it for ya, and we'll pay shipping.
Hmmm, it's getting very interesting. First we had to buy our computers and ISP subscriptions. Now we can get free computers for ISP subscriptions and free Internet access with the purchase of a computer. Dare I speculate that free PCs and free access are next? Well, at the cost of personal information. Hmm.
It's almost like we're doing Windows users a favor by charging them money for something they could get for free, because they get confused otherwise. --LW
It's free-based Wall.
I nominate the above quote as the new open-source motto. Ha!
And in related news, Uri Geller has filled an injunction against the Wachowski brothers, to prevent them from making any Matrix sequels.
Apparently, the sci-fi hit sequels were rumored to involve reviving stopped watches and taking photographs without first taking off the lens cover. Slinky Carrie Ann Moss was also to be featured wearing a skin-tight aura of bio-energy.
Actor Keanu Reeves was quoted as saying: "Whoa.."
Most readers here already know this, but I ask you to make the point clear to those coworkers, friends and faily who do not...
The only reason that Y2K was such a huge non-event was because $500,000,000 and hundreds of thousands of man-years of effort were invested into making it exactly that. A non-event. We won, it was a successful non-failure. We averted the potential (POTENTIAL since we'll never truly know the alternative outcome) disaster of the rollover.
We'll never know what the consequences of inaction might have been, or wether or not we over-zealously attacked the problem. Maybe we overspent and overworked it. Maybe we nailed it just right. Perhaps it was overkill. We'll never know. And a good thing too. The planes stayed up, the lights stayed on, and no one was hurt.
We did our job.
I find it strangely disturbing that the ISO would resort to year version numbers. Aren't they supposed to be one of the few non-commercial, 'above the hype', good-of-the-state-of-the-art entities out there?
Now, now.. We have a few more days before we rip into TransMeta. ;)
Good point, and one I was just about to raise.
Geeks are usually more tolerant of lifestyle and just about all things (except OS issues) than the general population. We are reared on sci-fi and istant global communication, so culture, race, gender, et al do not matter much to us.
However we react poorly to environments in which a repressive indigenous culture would pressure us to comforn to its ideology. We accept the lifestyles of those around us readily, but don't like being told how we should live our own lives. Live and let live.
So, an open-minded environment which offers opportunity equally, without prejudice, is a must. Geeks despise intolerance and authoritarianism. That's what makes us able to do what we do. Freedom to think and act is important to us.
Well, that and the ability to freely express ourselves. This is key for the pierced, tatooed and dyed minority of geeks.
Tolerance of the minority is key for the majority.
Compaq is the only major PC manufacturer I've seen, that offers the Athlon chip in their desktops.
Anyone out there running Linux on the K7?? How's it stack up? How about for Beowulf?
It's actually a very interesting experiment.
Using Alpha processors let's Compaq try out an industrial strength B cluster, something that could run an enterprise, serve as a superserver or predict the weather.
Beowulf was originally conceived of as a way to crank out supercomputer performance out of cheap, old PCs. This ups the ante, since Compaq is putting it together out of supercomputers to begin with. Interesting indeed.
Further, by openning it up to the general public gratis, I'd be interested what it is that they're REALLY testing. The performance of the cluster, or the security of their OS tweaks... Hmmm...
Where do you get off calling this piece, a 'review' of "Man On The Moon"? You've said NOTHING about the movie, except that it stars Jim Carey and Danny DeVito, and is about Andy Kaufman. ANYONE who has seen an advert for the film already knows that.
Instead, you should have called your article "The Jon Katz Opinion of Andy Kaufman". And even as that, it wasn't a very good, or well thought out, one.
Jon, if you haven't got anything to say, don't say anything. If you must spew, at least give your rant a suitable headline. Some journalist you're turning out to be.
I haven't the foggiest. IANAchemist, and it's been a while since I've cracked a book on the subject, or had the original conversation for that matter.
From the description he gave, the iron particles are moved around by the magnetic field, acting much as a filter. They end up clumping together with the filtrate, sink and (I presume) hold the crud in place as the water flows by. When the field is shut down, there's your contaminant/iron sludge, and much cleaner water.
Rinse, lather, repeat. After several iterations (or a long enough pipe), the water is equivalently clean as with traditional filtration methods. The sludge is processed to recover iron and contaminants. Being a ChemE, I'd imagine he's most involved with sludge processing, since the rest sounds like a purely physical process. Anyhoo, it's supposed be be really great for oils, biologicals (sewage) and all sorts of particulate pollution.
Don't know what use the process is for dissolved compounds and toxins. Except that if the iron is somehow coated or serves as a catalyst of some sort... But now I'm completely guessing, so I'll leave it at that.
Neat thing is that there are very few moving parts in the system, and no filters to clean/replace per se. I'd imagine that water flowing at a gentle decline, with the occasional magnetic pulse sent in the opposite direction via wire wound around the pipe or some elaboration on that theme.
Heh, interesting mental picture. Bacteria eating radioactive compounds, and crapping out same, contained in Boron-infused buckyballs. Possibly bonded with Iron, or some other compound that would make it easier to separate from soil|liquid, and physically contain.
A ChemE friend of mine is working on a method of purifying chemically contaminated water by mixing fine Iron fillings into it, and running it through a variable magnetic field. Apparently this works extremely well for many contaminants, and is quite cheap to do (once you've got a site built, that is). Hence the above Iron idea.
What the oil eating bacteria die after they eat all of their only source of food.
;)
Though I agree with your 'paranoia' that freak mutations could develop to do some unexpected things. I doubt that a petrol-eating critter will suddenly change it's fundamental means of nutrition, but a strain might develop to eat other, related, materials. Instead of crude oil in the presence of salt water, such a strain might consume gasoline or plastics, possibly without needed salt or water. Brief flashback to Andromeda Strain. Or it might munch on fish-oil.
But then again, odds are that the mutation(s) needed to make an impact on 'US' would never paddle back to shore. If anything, I'm sure that the bacteria we release into 'the wild' would not be of the radiation resistant variety. More likely, they'd be highly sensitive to UV, so that once the spill is cleared, the sunlight bakes whatever didn't starve. Maybe salt is the poison.
Interesting point nonetheless, but so speculative, that except for the usual could vs should argument, we have no input or insight into how it is.
How is this 'supposed' new DoS attack different from what we've already seen?
Sounds simple in principle:
Pretend to be your target (IP spoof)
Ping a bunch of Macs
Watch real target fall over as all the Macs respond to the ping
How and why is this different? The 1500b packet? Is MacOS 9 unique in this?
Pardon my ignorance, just really curious.
The business of the Army is to protect your rights to anonymity (posting as an AC), and free speach (posting as an AC), and liberal technology use (posting as an AC), and maintaining the US in a position that allows you to have an enjoyable standard of living (posting as an AC).
Their presence, and successful killing of people who would otherwise be running your life, is what provides for your right to choose to be a pacifist. Their existence is also what provides for your right to not contribute to their efforts. Were it not for someone standing guard, you might be tortured into providing the desired information against your will.
Being an immigrant, I fully support and appreciate the US armed forces. Thanks to them, dissidents and people with unpopular (non-state-sponsored) views have a chance to be heard. They even have an opportunity to spew their self-righteous opinions without spending more than two seconds thinking about their validity. Their only fear of retribution being that of someone else exercising their own God and Country assured right to free speach and a differing opinion.
And now, with Linux, so can your hardware. Whatever it is.
Impressive system BTW. I wonder if my local Army Surplus store has any of these badboys for cheap.