Ahhh, the Maine-iacs. I spent two years in Winter Harbor. Now, THAT is a genuine dialect.
But, maybe you missed my point about dialects half a century or more ago. They were MUCH more pronounced than they are today, to the point that people actually had difficulty understanding each other. Even the dialect that I grew up with is watered down today. A smaller percentage of the people use those odd words that mark them as Western Pennsylvania, and the odd inflections of words is less apparent. Television, radio, and music have eroded all of our many dialects. Oh, you'll still hear it, from time to time, if you sit with the old men in the community centers while they play checkers or something like that. You have to go looking for it, though.
Ahhhh - you miss the point. All those wonderful "dialects" which you seem to think we should take pride in, are little more than mutilations of the English language. There were three terms that marked a Western Pennsylvania person as exactly that, because NO ONE in the world used them. Worse that the common "y'all" - at least that one can be called a contraction of "you" and "all".
If you did some research, you could find a number of words and terms that were unique to ignorant little pockets of humanity, from the coal fields to Boston, to Brooklyn - to where ever you care to wander. Some of the people in Old England had their own little pockets, prior to television. And few of them signified anything more, or less, than ignorance.
Television has largely cured that ignorance. And, that was the real point I was making above. No longer can an American go to another state, town, or region where he has genuine difficulty understanding the people.
In my entire life, the most difficulty I have encountered with a people who claimed to speak English, was on the Isle of Man. But, THAT was a genuine accent, rather than the mutilation of a language by uneducated, ignorant people.
I could ask where you are from, and what idioms you use, that are not found in any dictionary - but I doubt you'll post them here. Feeling brave? Come on, show some pride, alright? You can make fun of my kinfolk after you read some of this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pittsburgh_English
40, 50, or 60 years ago, there were indeed pronounced accents in the United States. Sometimes, crossing a state line meant everyone sounded quite different. Today? Come on - damned near no one speaks with a pronounced accent. Just a bit of a drawl here, some slurring there - nothing that accounts for nuke-you-lar physics.
I always liked this song - especially the line, "Learned to talk like the man on the six o'clock news" at about 2:40
When I was in junior high school, a teacher from out of state told us, "No matter how far from home you go, people will know that you're from Western Pennsylvania as soon as you open your mouth, and they'll dismiss you as an ignorant hillbilly." Like the song says, I learned to talk like the guy on the news, and I simply don't use those three terms the teacher was telling us about.
Well, the all red stuff would suit me just fine. I can't see it. Back in the days of Dos, I fiddled around with the screen colors, and found a combination that looked kinda cool, then made it flash. The wife took one look at the screen and told me that there are epileptics in the family who would fall over if they saw that.
Bearing in mind that it would be myself who had care for those epileptics until they recovered, I stopped tinkering with color schemes . . . .
Maybe he has the same credibility that we have when we start telling the world how to live. I mean, we often judge other systems as bug-fucking-crazy, then meddle with their systems. Sometimes, if meddling doesn't satisfy us, we invade, and completely break their systems. Credibility. Yeah, we have lots of it. We turn murderers and rapists out into the streets to strike again, but a "three time loser" can pull a life sentence for possessing one to many grams of lawn mower clippings. And, retarded teens can be hit with multi-million dollar settlements for sharing a couple songs. Fail to report your total earnings properly, and the IRS can make you homeless and destitute. Credibility, right?
Sorry - any outsider looking in can spot some of our very worst inconsistencies. We aren't all that credible ourselves.
If you think that you have "friends" in the corporate world, you are quite naive. The only friends that corporate executives have, go by names like "Dollar", "Yen", and "Euro".
The previous owners thought that their "generous" licensing to fan groups might net some money in the long run, the current owners feel that locking things up will make more money. There's the story in a single sentence.
"Intellectual" property isn't property. That's the whole problem today - those people who lay claim to this or that "IP" are trying to change the very definition of property.
The fact that many slashdotters benefit from the corporation's definition of "property" has little bearing on the fact that it is wrong.
What has fallen into the public domain, this year? Anything? Any songs written and performed since 1950? Can you name any?
I have nothing but utter contempt for today's copyright laws, and less than contempt for the people who bribe our representatives to pass new "law" to protect them. As for the judges - they've forgotten who they are supposed to serve, as well. They are PUBLIC servants, not corporate servants. It's past time that all branches of government stopped whoring themselves to the corporations.
Cynical? Who, me? Of course I'm cynical. When you've spent 9 months of your life, listening to the cannon speaking across the miles, claiming it's fodder each and every night, then you might be cynical as well. Since you have already judged me, is it fair that I speculate that you are still young and idealistic? That you've never heard a cannon roar, even once?
At no point did I see that this conversation was restricted to the United States. But, since you seem to be American, and you seem to have this ethnocentric view - I'll remind you that while "most" soldiers in the Continental Army were volunteers, there were conscripts. See, things were done a lot differently back then. Each state supplied it's own militia. If/when they fell short of volunteers, they did draft men. The "federal" government had no need of conscription, because the states were each obligated to supply "x" number of men, equipped for war.
Back to my comments - I claim that people who weren't active in politics are irrelevant. There were a LOT of people who were active, prior to, and during the war for independence. That Boston Tea Party wasn't staged by men and women who were to apathetic to cast a vote. The Tories who departed the US for Canada certainly weren't apathetic. Those eaten up by apathy almost certainly were the very conscripts that the individual states drafted. People who don't care, people who take no initiative, people who wait for events to catch them, rather than trying to influence events, are the first to be fed to the cannons.
Note that being "active" in politics doesn't mean running for office. Being informed, and holding an opinion, and being willing to voice that opinion passes for reasonable activity. Taking yourself down to the polls, and expressing that opinion amounts to reasonable activity. Failing to have an opinion, and failing to express that opinion, either informally or at the polls does indeed make a man irrelevant. Simple as that.
If you say so. I might interpret that bit of data (if correct) differently. The activists tend to kill off anyone who doesn't agree with them. Better to be an activist on one side or the other, than to die just for being suspect.
Again, I say, people who aren't interested enough to cast an anonymous vote won't care enough to become part of the rebellion, or to oppose the rebellion. Instead, they'll become draftees to whichever warlord has the manpower to round them up, and make them into cannon fodder.
Oh - maybe that's what you meant, the cannon fodder? Hmmmpph. Darwin might have a comment or two on that subject.
You obviously have no technical background at all. It's a well known fact that Al Gore single handedly invented, subsidized, and created the internet. WTF are you doing on slashdot?
Alright, when you're done spluttering, YOU try telling such bald faced lies with a straight face. Not as easy as it looks, huh?
You're mostly right. But, the guy who can't be bothered to vote, won't be bothered to use the various other boxes you mention, either. If/when revolution rolls around, he'll hide in the cellar with the women and children. He is irrelevant.
In Penna, I worked at a McDonald's clone at age 15. 20 hours per week, max, I had to be OUT OF THE STORE before 11:00 PM, no grill work, but I did drop fries into the deep fryer. Child labor is legal here, but it's strictly regulated. Oh yeah, as I recall, I had to take some form to school to be signed.
I eventually quit that job, because I made more money at age 14 mowing lawns. In today's world, a 14 year old kid mowing lawns would probably call some guy name "Juan" his boss.
Yes, it is BS to turn down the radio in that monster SUV, in the hopes of saving some small amount of energy. Now, outlawing those monsters would save a meaningful amount of energy. My son has this stupid freaking Dodge, that gets about 12 mpg. It's massive, it's shiny, it's powerful, it's really really macho. He can't even afford to keep it on the road, FFS. But, he's macho because he has that huge monster 4x4 with a hemi. Really macho - sitting in the yard, looking cool, running the engine for a half hour so that he has electricity to play his DVD player.
Me? I drive this ugly little Mazda that gets 29.9 mpg. It IS ugly, rides rough, doesn't have enough room to really get comfortable, no stereo, wind noise is terrible. But, I can afford to drive it. The wife just bought a little Hyundai - 33 mpg. It's slightly better than the Mazda - the ride is a little better, the wind noise isn't so bad, there is less road noise. And, she can afford to keep the gas tank full.
Back to the kid - he doesn't want to take girls out in some stupid little Mazda or Hyundai. So, he sits in the yard, listening to his stereo, while some other kid is taking the girls out in their little rice burning cars. Mostly, SPORTY little rice burning cars. Makes a lot of sense, doesn't it?
Do you think he might be able to get the girls, if he turns down the stereo?
Personally, I think he needs to re-think his priorities. I told the kid not to buy that huge ass gas guzzling piece of shit, but do kids listen to their parents?
Your imaginary "Wild West" is only imaginary. Not everyone had a gun. A firearm was a pretty major investment back then, and many people never had the money to purchase one. Many more people couldn't justify the investment, if they did have the money. Then, as now, many honest people had no weapons, but EVERY SINGLE CRIMINAL had one or more weapons.
Further, the "Wild West" had few law men, fewer judges and courts, almost no police forces at all, unless you moved into one of the major cities. Of course, by the time a city became a real "city", the surrounding countryside wasn't so very wild anymore.
Perhaps you should look up some of the myths of the Wild West. Many of the people credited with killing dozens, or scores of men, simply did not. That era of sensationalist reporters tended to blow the facts far beyond reality. Even the famed Dodge City never had all the killings that it is credited with. Go ahead, google around if you're interested. Much of my reading and "study" predated the internet - and I'm not interested in finding citations for the things I've learned over the years.
The US murder rate is awfully hard to break down. It includes areas like the communistic Washington D.C, where pistols have been completely illegal for decades. It also includes Texas and other states, where everyone owns a weapon. Those who are really interested in statistics might want to compare Washington D.C, New York City, Boston, or Maryland to a more gun friendly, western city.
Those of you in Europe who want to lump US crime statistics all together might want to remember that the US is almost as large as Europe. Do you lump crime statistics for Copenhagen together with those for Danzig, or Rome?
Vermont has the least restrictive gun-control law. It recognizes the right of any Vermonter who has not otherwise been prohibited from owning a firearm to carry concealed weapons without a permit or license. Yet Vermont has one of the lowest crime rates in America, ranking 49 out of 50 in all crimes and 47th in murders.
The proponents of gun control do not publish these sort of facts. They cherry pick very select statistics that seem to say what they mean for them to say. The published statistics never go into any meaningful history of the laws, or follow up on them.
*sigh*
Human nature rules here. Even scumbags have some degree of self preservation interest. They are FAR MORE likely to rape, rob, and/or kill a woman they KNOW is unarmed, rather than risk tangling with a woman who MIGHT have a Baretta in her purse. Think about it. The next time you're at a shopping center, try to imagine walking around slapping adults. Target your victims. Do you pick them based on their apparent ability and willingness to fight back?
When everyone is armed, people behave in a different manner. Rape, robbery, and assaults tend to go down in areas which relax gun laws - while the same crimes increase in areas where more restrictive gun laws are enacted.
And, don't forget: "We're from the gubbermint, and we're here to help you." For best effect, talk with a John Wayne drawl, and tack a "Pilgrim" to the end of the sentence.;^)
We're on slashdot, right? Emulators? Think about it. We should take a poll to see how many members keep an emulated woman in their bottom dresser drawer, under the socks, where they don't think Mommy will find it. I hear that some people actually prefer fake over real.
I'll second the need for RAM. I like virtual machines, use them a lot. I wouldn't consider building VM's on a machine with less than two full gig of memory, and really consider 3 gig to be minimum. 4 gig or more are in order if you're going to run multiple machines at the same time. Even if the individual VM's are only allocated a half gig of memory, there is overhead involved.
You have a point - any system CAN BE rooted. The thing is - it isn't being done, right? And, there is no reason to think that it is going to be done any time soon. As I say - if/when Microsoft makes systems that are at least as secure as the most popular Unix derivative (Would that be Mac, or Ubuntu?) THEN MS will deserve a hooray. I'm not even suggesting that SEL be enabled. I'll accept Ubuntu's default security settings, or Mac's or Redhat's - it doesn't matter. Default.
Yes, Windows 7 is pretty good, out of the box with default settings. I'm not yet believing that it compares to any of the Unix derivatives. In a year or so, I may have to grudgingly admit that it really is, or I may not. That old "security through obscurity" thing has something going for it, after all. Just because you know that I'm using a *nix doesn't tell you what will work to break into my system. But, a Windows exploit is going to work on more than 50% of the computers in the world.
Look at the numbers. How much money has corporate and private America spent on 3rd party security systems that ultimately failed in the past decade? And, how much money has been stolen due to failed security? How much more money has been spent to pay off and/or clean up after security failures? Tally it up, then tell me what percentage of that is due to failed *nix distros. Admittedly, I'm asking you to do a lot of math - but go ahead. Do your best to walk through the numbers.
Those TCO numbers being thrown around by the industry are complete and utter bullshit.
Wait - Microsoft supplies the motive power to the botnets to start with - hooray, when they finally shut one down? Big deal - it will be replaced before the day is out, I'm sure.
Now, MS WOULD deserve an attaboy, if they managed to create a popular operating system that is as immune to botnets as the various Unix derivatives. Not a big hooray, just an "attaboy".
FOSS isn't exactly charity, you dipstick. Even nobodies like me contribute to the community. I've never authored a single line of code in my life, but I contribute. Charity? People who compare FOSS to communism at least have a little bit of a point. "Give what you can, and take what you need" is pretty much a way of life with FOSS. But, charity? Ehhh. SOMEONE has to do the work, test products, invest money, keep up the servers, etc ad nauseum.
BTW - unrestrained capitalism, especially as envisioned by the New American Century, is far more scary than anything that the communists or the FOSS people could ever dream up.
I'd have to google around to find citations, and I'm lazy. But, yes, MS itself is on record, with statements to the effect, "Yes, we'd rather see poor people pirating our products, than using the competition." The explanation for that position falls neatly in line with donations and discounts to schools of Microsoft products. It's called "indoctrination". Far better to have generation x pirating our software, or using our software for free by some other means, because generation x will influence generations y and z to use our products. Eventually, the hammer will come down, and we'll be charging EVERYONE to use our product. And, when that happens, we want everyone to have forgotten that there ARE ALTERNATIVES!
So few people think in terms of generations, that blatant attempts to manipulate the future like this are just invisible to the world.
Think how different the world would be if politicians had the capacity to think in decades, generations, and centuries, rather than the span of single administrations.
Few people RTFA, why would they read a manpage? Come on, this is EARTH, the place with upright monkeys walking around, claiming to be intelligent. No one reads manpages!
Slashdot Mirror
Ahhh, the Maine-iacs. I spent two years in Winter Harbor. Now, THAT is a genuine dialect.
But, maybe you missed my point about dialects half a century or more ago. They were MUCH more pronounced than they are today, to the point that people actually had difficulty understanding each other. Even the dialect that I grew up with is watered down today. A smaller percentage of the people use those odd words that mark them as Western Pennsylvania, and the odd inflections of words is less apparent. Television, radio, and music have eroded all of our many dialects. Oh, you'll still hear it, from time to time, if you sit with the old men in the community centers while they play checkers or something like that. You have to go looking for it, though.
Ahhhh - you miss the point. All those wonderful "dialects" which you seem to think we should take pride in, are little more than mutilations of the English language. There were three terms that marked a Western Pennsylvania person as exactly that, because NO ONE in the world used them. Worse that the common "y'all" - at least that one can be called a contraction of "you" and "all".
If you did some research, you could find a number of words and terms that were unique to ignorant little pockets of humanity, from the coal fields to Boston, to Brooklyn - to where ever you care to wander. Some of the people in Old England had their own little pockets, prior to television. And few of them signified anything more, or less, than ignorance.
Television has largely cured that ignorance. And, that was the real point I was making above. No longer can an American go to another state, town, or region where he has genuine difficulty understanding the people.
In my entire life, the most difficulty I have encountered with a people who claimed to speak English, was on the Isle of Man. But, THAT was a genuine accent, rather than the mutilation of a language by uneducated, ignorant people.
I could ask where you are from, and what idioms you use, that are not found in any dictionary - but I doubt you'll post them here. Feeling brave? Come on, show some pride, alright? You can make fun of my kinfolk after you read some of this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pittsburgh_English
Ooops. Forgot the link to the song:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uzGx_XzxDeM#
40, 50, or 60 years ago, there were indeed pronounced accents in the United States. Sometimes, crossing a state line meant everyone sounded quite different. Today? Come on - damned near no one speaks with a pronounced accent. Just a bit of a drawl here, some slurring there - nothing that accounts for nuke-you-lar physics.
I always liked this song - especially the line, "Learned to talk like the man on the six o'clock news" at about 2:40
When I was in junior high school, a teacher from out of state told us, "No matter how far from home you go, people will know that you're from Western Pennsylvania as soon as you open your mouth, and they'll dismiss you as an ignorant hillbilly." Like the song says, I learned to talk like the guy on the news, and I simply don't use those three terms the teacher was telling us about.
Bottom line? Ignorant is as ignorant does.
Well, the all red stuff would suit me just fine. I can't see it. Back in the days of Dos, I fiddled around with the screen colors, and found a combination that looked kinda cool, then made it flash. The wife took one look at the screen and told me that there are epileptics in the family who would fall over if they saw that.
Bearing in mind that it would be myself who had care for those epileptics until they recovered, I stopped tinkering with color schemes . . . .
Maybe he has the same credibility that we have when we start telling the world how to live. I mean, we often judge other systems as bug-fucking-crazy, then meddle with their systems. Sometimes, if meddling doesn't satisfy us, we invade, and completely break their systems. Credibility. Yeah, we have lots of it. We turn murderers and rapists out into the streets to strike again, but a "three time loser" can pull a life sentence for possessing one to many grams of lawn mower clippings. And, retarded teens can be hit with multi-million dollar settlements for sharing a couple songs. Fail to report your total earnings properly, and the IRS can make you homeless and destitute. Credibility, right?
Sorry - any outsider looking in can spot some of our very worst inconsistencies. We aren't all that credible ourselves.
If you think that you have "friends" in the corporate world, you are quite naive. The only friends that corporate executives have, go by names like "Dollar", "Yen", and "Euro".
The previous owners thought that their "generous" licensing to fan groups might net some money in the long run, the current owners feel that locking things up will make more money. There's the story in a single sentence.
"Intellectual" property isn't property. That's the whole problem today - those people who lay claim to this or that "IP" are trying to change the very definition of property.
The fact that many slashdotters benefit from the corporation's definition of "property" has little bearing on the fact that it is wrong.
What has fallen into the public domain, this year? Anything? Any songs written and performed since 1950? Can you name any?
I have nothing but utter contempt for today's copyright laws, and less than contempt for the people who bribe our representatives to pass new "law" to protect them. As for the judges - they've forgotten who they are supposed to serve, as well. They are PUBLIC servants, not corporate servants. It's past time that all branches of government stopped whoring themselves to the corporations.
Cynical? Who, me? Of course I'm cynical. When you've spent 9 months of your life, listening to the cannon speaking across the miles, claiming it's fodder each and every night, then you might be cynical as well. Since you have already judged me, is it fair that I speculate that you are still young and idealistic? That you've never heard a cannon roar, even once?
At no point did I see that this conversation was restricted to the United States. But, since you seem to be American, and you seem to have this ethnocentric view - I'll remind you that while "most" soldiers in the Continental Army were volunteers, there were conscripts. See, things were done a lot differently back then. Each state supplied it's own militia. If/when they fell short of volunteers, they did draft men. The "federal" government had no need of conscription, because the states were each obligated to supply "x" number of men, equipped for war.
Back to my comments - I claim that people who weren't active in politics are irrelevant. There were a LOT of people who were active, prior to, and during the war for independence. That Boston Tea Party wasn't staged by men and women who were to apathetic to cast a vote. The Tories who departed the US for Canada certainly weren't apathetic. Those eaten up by apathy almost certainly were the very conscripts that the individual states drafted. People who don't care, people who take no initiative, people who wait for events to catch them, rather than trying to influence events, are the first to be fed to the cannons.
Note that being "active" in politics doesn't mean running for office. Being informed, and holding an opinion, and being willing to voice that opinion passes for reasonable activity. Taking yourself down to the polls, and expressing that opinion amounts to reasonable activity. Failing to have an opinion, and failing to express that opinion, either informally or at the polls does indeed make a man irrelevant. Simple as that.
If you say so. I might interpret that bit of data (if correct) differently. The activists tend to kill off anyone who doesn't agree with them. Better to be an activist on one side or the other, than to die just for being suspect.
Again, I say, people who aren't interested enough to cast an anonymous vote won't care enough to become part of the rebellion, or to oppose the rebellion. Instead, they'll become draftees to whichever warlord has the manpower to round them up, and make them into cannon fodder.
Oh - maybe that's what you meant, the cannon fodder? Hmmmpph. Darwin might have a comment or two on that subject.
You obviously have no technical background at all. It's a well known fact that Al Gore single handedly invented, subsidized, and created the internet. WTF are you doing on slashdot?
Alright, when you're done spluttering, YOU try telling such bald faced lies with a straight face. Not as easy as it looks, huh?
You're mostly right. But, the guy who can't be bothered to vote, won't be bothered to use the various other boxes you mention, either. If/when revolution rolls around, he'll hide in the cellar with the women and children. He is irrelevant.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ep7W89I_V_g#
In Penna, I worked at a McDonald's clone at age 15. 20 hours per week, max, I had to be OUT OF THE STORE before 11:00 PM, no grill work, but I did drop fries into the deep fryer. Child labor is legal here, but it's strictly regulated. Oh yeah, as I recall, I had to take some form to school to be signed.
I eventually quit that job, because I made more money at age 14 mowing lawns. In today's world, a 14 year old kid mowing lawns would probably call some guy name "Juan" his boss.
Yes, it is BS to turn down the radio in that monster SUV, in the hopes of saving some small amount of energy. Now, outlawing those monsters would save a meaningful amount of energy. My son has this stupid freaking Dodge, that gets about 12 mpg. It's massive, it's shiny, it's powerful, it's really really macho. He can't even afford to keep it on the road, FFS. But, he's macho because he has that huge monster 4x4 with a hemi. Really macho - sitting in the yard, looking cool, running the engine for a half hour so that he has electricity to play his DVD player.
Me? I drive this ugly little Mazda that gets 29.9 mpg. It IS ugly, rides rough, doesn't have enough room to really get comfortable, no stereo, wind noise is terrible. But, I can afford to drive it. The wife just bought a little Hyundai - 33 mpg. It's slightly better than the Mazda - the ride is a little better, the wind noise isn't so bad, there is less road noise. And, she can afford to keep the gas tank full.
Back to the kid - he doesn't want to take girls out in some stupid little Mazda or Hyundai. So, he sits in the yard, listening to his stereo, while some other kid is taking the girls out in their little rice burning cars. Mostly, SPORTY little rice burning cars. Makes a lot of sense, doesn't it?
Do you think he might be able to get the girls, if he turns down the stereo?
Personally, I think he needs to re-think his priorities. I told the kid not to buy that huge ass gas guzzling piece of shit, but do kids listen to their parents?
Your imaginary "Wild West" is only imaginary. Not everyone had a gun. A firearm was a pretty major investment back then, and many people never had the money to purchase one. Many more people couldn't justify the investment, if they did have the money. Then, as now, many honest people had no weapons, but EVERY SINGLE CRIMINAL had one or more weapons.
Further, the "Wild West" had few law men, fewer judges and courts, almost no police forces at all, unless you moved into one of the major cities. Of course, by the time a city became a real "city", the surrounding countryside wasn't so very wild anymore.
Perhaps you should look up some of the myths of the Wild West. Many of the people credited with killing dozens, or scores of men, simply did not. That era of sensationalist reporters tended to blow the facts far beyond reality. Even the famed Dodge City never had all the killings that it is credited with. Go ahead, google around if you're interested. Much of my reading and "study" predated the internet - and I'm not interested in finding citations for the things I've learned over the years.
The US murder rate is awfully hard to break down. It includes areas like the communistic Washington D.C, where pistols have been completely illegal for decades. It also includes Texas and other states, where everyone owns a weapon. Those who are really interested in statistics might want to compare Washington D.C, New York City, Boston, or Maryland to a more gun friendly, western city.
Those of you in Europe who want to lump US crime statistics all together might want to remember that the US is almost as large as Europe. Do you lump crime statistics for Copenhagen together with those for Danzig, or Rome?
http://www.fff.org/freedom/fd0210e.asp
Vermont has the least restrictive gun-control law. It recognizes the right of any Vermonter who has not otherwise been prohibited from owning a firearm to carry concealed weapons without a permit or license. Yet Vermont has one of the lowest crime rates in America, ranking 49 out of 50 in all crimes and 47th in murders.
The proponents of gun control do not publish these sort of facts. They cherry pick very select statistics that seem to say what they mean for them to say. The published statistics never go into any meaningful history of the laws, or follow up on them.
*sigh*
Human nature rules here. Even scumbags have some degree of self preservation interest. They are FAR MORE likely to rape, rob, and/or kill a woman they KNOW is unarmed, rather than risk tangling with a woman who MIGHT have a Baretta in her purse. Think about it. The next time you're at a shopping center, try to imagine walking around slapping adults. Target your victims. Do you pick them based on their apparent ability and willingness to fight back?
Criminals do the same.
When everyone is armed, people behave in a different manner. Rape, robbery, and assaults tend to go down in areas which relax gun laws - while the same crimes increase in areas where more restrictive gun laws are enacted.
It's in your best interest to arm every citizen.
And, don't forget: ;^)
"We're from the gubbermint, and we're here to help you." For best effect, talk with a John Wayne drawl, and tack a "Pilgrim" to the end of the sentence.
We're on slashdot, right? Emulators? Think about it. We should take a poll to see how many members keep an emulated woman in their bottom dresser drawer, under the socks, where they don't think Mommy will find it. I hear that some people actually prefer fake over real.
I'll second the need for RAM. I like virtual machines, use them a lot. I wouldn't consider building VM's on a machine with less than two full gig of memory, and really consider 3 gig to be minimum. 4 gig or more are in order if you're going to run multiple machines at the same time. Even if the individual VM's are only allocated a half gig of memory, there is overhead involved.
You have a point - any system CAN BE rooted. The thing is - it isn't being done, right? And, there is no reason to think that it is going to be done any time soon. As I say - if/when Microsoft makes systems that are at least as secure as the most popular Unix derivative (Would that be Mac, or Ubuntu?) THEN MS will deserve a hooray. I'm not even suggesting that SEL be enabled. I'll accept Ubuntu's default security settings, or Mac's or Redhat's - it doesn't matter. Default.
Yes, Windows 7 is pretty good, out of the box with default settings. I'm not yet believing that it compares to any of the Unix derivatives. In a year or so, I may have to grudgingly admit that it really is, or I may not. That old "security through obscurity" thing has something going for it, after all. Just because you know that I'm using a *nix doesn't tell you what will work to break into my system. But, a Windows exploit is going to work on more than 50% of the computers in the world.
Look at the numbers. How much money has corporate and private America spent on 3rd party security systems that ultimately failed in the past decade? And, how much money has been stolen due to failed security? How much more money has been spent to pay off and/or clean up after security failures? Tally it up, then tell me what percentage of that is due to failed *nix distros. Admittedly, I'm asking you to do a lot of math - but go ahead. Do your best to walk through the numbers.
Those TCO numbers being thrown around by the industry are complete and utter bullshit.
Wait - Microsoft supplies the motive power to the botnets to start with - hooray, when they finally shut one down? Big deal - it will be replaced before the day is out, I'm sure.
Now, MS WOULD deserve an attaboy, if they managed to create a popular operating system that is as immune to botnets as the various Unix derivatives. Not a big hooray, just an "attaboy".
FOSS isn't exactly charity, you dipstick. Even nobodies like me contribute to the community. I've never authored a single line of code in my life, but I contribute. Charity? People who compare FOSS to communism at least have a little bit of a point. "Give what you can, and take what you need" is pretty much a way of life with FOSS. But, charity? Ehhh. SOMEONE has to do the work, test products, invest money, keep up the servers, etc ad nauseum.
BTW - unrestrained capitalism, especially as envisioned by the New American Century, is far more scary than anything that the communists or the FOSS people could ever dream up.
I'd have to google around to find citations, and I'm lazy. But, yes, MS itself is on record, with statements to the effect, "Yes, we'd rather see poor people pirating our products, than using the competition." The explanation for that position falls neatly in line with donations and discounts to schools of Microsoft products. It's called "indoctrination". Far better to have generation x pirating our software, or using our software for free by some other means, because generation x will influence generations y and z to use our products. Eventually, the hammer will come down, and we'll be charging EVERYONE to use our product. And, when that happens, we want everyone to have forgotten that there ARE ALTERNATIVES!
So few people think in terms of generations, that blatant attempts to manipulate the future like this are just invisible to the world.
Think how different the world would be if politicians had the capacity to think in decades, generations, and centuries, rather than the span of single administrations.
Few people RTFA, why would they read a manpage? Come on, this is EARTH, the place with upright monkeys walking around, claiming to be intelligent. No one reads manpages!