Let's make asses of ourselves, and assume that the percentages would hold in larger samples. What would that tell us? Hmmmmmm. Maybe hackers know that FF and Opera are safer browsers than IE? Well, one has to ask, "Who would know better than a hacker?"
Alright, we've been asses long enough. Shitcan the silly assumption....
I am unsure how much MS wants this crackdown. I think the government wants to clean up the piracy, because they can see clearly how invasive and pervasive Windows is. Red Flag Linux is the official operating system of Red Flagged China.
And, the crackdown WILL benefit China. No money being sent to the western Capitalist Pigs, for starters - not even for legal copies. People who are forced away from MS holding their hands (Hail, Clippy!) will be forced to learn how an operating system works - thereby creating more potential hackers to attack the Pentagon. China gains in their own security - there just aren't a lot of virus and trojan infections running on Linux.
What a loser. You know that laptops come with lock down cables, right? So, get one for your phone, FFS. Now, you're going to ask me, "What do I lock it down to?" Oh ye of little imagination. You've heard of body piercing, right? Take your lame ass down to the local piercing shop, lay your tallywhacker on the counter, and have a ring put into it. (Yes, they make rings small enough to fit your equipment.) Take all of your jeans, cut a little hole in the bottom of the pocket so you can pass that cable through. Attach one end of the cable to your ring, attach the other end to the phone. Problem solved. And, just THINK of what you and your girlfriend can do with that cable at night!! Oh, one last thought. Turn the ringer off on your phone, and just let the thing vibrate.
The Hitchhiker's Guide was meant to be funny? No one told me that all those decades ago. I read it like any good student - as if it were a history book!!
Next thing, you'll be telling me that L. Ron Hubbard made up his religion.
Whiney pusses and crybabies. "Oh, I missed the train by a minute and a half, now I'll have to wait for FIFTEEN MINUTES for the next train!!"
Oh boo hoo. He should have pulled his pecker out of - wherever - a few minutes earlier, so that he could have some TIME to catch the train. If his source of information was faulty, well, he had an opportunity to use another source. Why didn't he pick up a dead-tree version of the schedule last month? Finally, I'm forced to ask - who gives a damn if this inept dilrod is late for some stupid appointment, anyway? He's been riding trains most of his life, and hasn't figured out how things work yet? Screw him.
"allocation of medical care based on "how valuable you are to the government"
I've got news for you - we already have that. The insurance company won't cover you, or you simply can't afford the rates they set, or the insurance company simply denies claims. In short, you only survive if you are valuable to some corporate headquarters, ie, they can see how to make a profit off your lame ass.
The article says that rich people may see room for improvement, while po' folks are slipping. No surprises there, right?
Now, look around and check out the stats for the poverty level. More and more of America is being pushed into the po' folks category, while fewer and fewer people manage to claw their way into the country clubs.
It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that poor kids growing up in the ghettos can't afford to have heart surgery, a kidney replacement, chemotherapy, etc etc like the kid who went to an Ivy League college.
LOL, thanks for the chuckle. In my post, I admitted ignorance, and asked about ripping. That of course leaves the question open to any and all explanations. Korin43 posts right after you with a damn good answer: people are working on emulators, but they haven't achieved a good emulator yet.
The PC and PPC bit has been solved by other people. VirtualBox and VMWare both permit OSX to run on PC's. Obviously, XBox and OSX aren't the same, but at least one hurdle has been cleared.
I remember when Wine couldn't run much of anything - today, it runs almost everything that can run on Windows. Motivated people will figure this XBox thing out sooner or later, I'm sure.
As for obsoleted hardware - well, yeah. I don't have much use for my 386 or my P1 anymore, but I can dust them off anytime I want, and install any of a variety of *nix distros. Not the full-fledged full-featured GUI's maybe, but those machines are still quite useful depending on how I wish to use them.
Why is it that every single nobody in the world thinks that this or that bit or trivia is "epic". Star Wars, the original movie, was probably epic. It ranks up there with ancient epics, like the Hercules stories. (The originals, I mean) But, every booger picking zit faced fool on the planet thinks that he has something "epic" when he writes a blog.
Come on. The author isn't even an epic failure. He's a nobody, who will be forgotten 30 seconds after I close this window. Not even the Star Wars sequels and ripoffs are epic. Star Wars failures? Oh well - Hercules had some flaws in his universe too, but he managed to entertain people for millenia. THAT is truly epic.
Not a gamer, so I'm ignorant. Haven't they figured out a way to rip the stupid games to a PC yet? Or, to another console? Yeah, I can understand that if you have $5,000 worth of games, and you CAN'T rip them, you might invest in another console.
BTW - I still think it's stupid to buy a console. When they stopped making Atari consoles, and Atari games became hard to find, I abandoned the whole idea of game consoles.
"claim that they only use bittorrent for sharing Linux distros"
Delete the word "only" and I fit that description. I grab a song now and then, I pirate a Windows-centric software now and then, I'll pull down something that just looks interesting now and then. But, at least 80% of my (limited) bandwidth is used for Linux distros and other legal downloads via torrents. My usage may not be "normal", but I'm sure that it isn't "unusual" either. P2P is an important distribution mechanism, and not just for illegal content.
Seems a lot of people don't know squat about Canonical. Some rich guy invested a good bit of his fortune into making Linux widely known and acceptable on the laptop. So far, he's done a pretty good job. If he contributes nothing else back into the upstream system, he attracts some pretty bright people to the Linux community - SOME of whom go on to contribute something. Reality check: Ubuntu does contribute, whether they actually work on the kernel or not.
Errrr - that depends on how one defines "acceptable risks". They built something along those lines in the '40's. "Hot" exhaust tends to be bad for the environment - a fact recognized decades before the green movement. Solve that problem, and there are dozens more problems to solve. How about the problem of a crash? Do we really want a nuclear engine to miss the runway at LAX, or La Guardia? Just imagine the joy of New Yorkers if presented with the concept of another 9/11, but with nuclear engines. Here's one (relatively shallow) article on the subject: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=nuclear-powered-aircraft
Nuclear powered spacecraft make sense, because a catastrophe won't add poison to a biosphere. Nuclear powered aircraft will never make sense.
I think you give the broad to much credit. Buzzwords throughout the article, but those really catch my eye. I see from real life experience a construction site. Bunch of ditzy broads and a couple old bastids who have never had a callous in thier life pick up a bunch of golden shovels for a "ground breaking ceremony". Oh, they look so rugged (in their own minds, at least), everyone gets their media exposure - Phhht. Disgusting creatures. If the author is getting her hands dirty with software, she probably grew up in a cave and missed out on education. Roasting a CD/DVD or floppy over an open fire doesn't do anyone any good.
Mmmmm-kay. Yeah, you sound like a combat veteran who knows what he's talking about. NOT!!
What you actually sound like, is a middle aged has-been who watches to much television and assumes that Hollywood knows combat.
Challenge: Define "shelter" and "cover". Watch a dozen or even a gross of Hollywood productions. Watch carefully for every instance in which the concepts are accurately conveyed, and realistically used.
BTW - you might have RTFA. It's the MARINES who want this 10-poung-or-less-robot, not the National Guard. No one who has ever worn a uniform can possibly confuse the two.
Errr, you misunderstand. Military courts observe due process. And they believe in innocence until proven guilty. But, I think that most people will readily admit that our current court system has been eviscerated. As evidenced by the corporate trials especially, the biggest bankroll often buys the slickest lawyers, thereby deciding the trial. There are dozens of loopholes in the legal system, commonly taken advantage of by real scum. At the same time, it isn't uncommon to find "guilty" men exonerated by modern DNA evidence.
All things considered, if I were charged with a serious crime, I would rather take my own chances in a military court. The rules are different, but if anything they are more rational.
First, they probably don't have your work phone. Second, if they call work, you inform the boss what is going on. Provide the paperwork that has been supplied to you - the boss most likely knows that you weren't in Micronesia during that time, because you were WORKING for him. Third - get the boss to threaten legal action against the "creditors" for interfering with his place of business. It's almost certain the mere threat will scare them away - if not, get a lawyer to summon their asses to court in your home state. When they fail to show, the judge finds against them, and suddenly they owe YOU AND YOUR BOSS!!
This sounds like easier money than patent trolling. Think I'll switch my SSN to 000-oh-baby
Primarily because their actions took place in combat zones, thereby placing them under the jurisdiction of the UCMJ and martial law. As pointed out, mutiny and sedition are viable charges under the UCMJ, with penalty of death, or other penalty determined by the court. And, of course, being charged with sedition doesn't preclude charging them with lesser charges, such as aiding and abetting, conspiracy, etc.
Trial by a military court doesn't allow for very many of the silly technicalities that frequently get bad guys off the hook in civilian courts. For example, there are comparatively few examples of inadmissable evidence. Another advantage of a military court is, almost anyone eligible to serve on such a court has top secret clearance, so no worry about some sensitive information making it into the press.
That is NOT the open source way. I think that all open source advocates will agree (no matter which version of open source they advocate) that the strength of open source is CHOICE.
No code is perfect. Windows users know as well as anyone that aggressively pushing updates can break applications, and even the OS. Remember XP SP2 and SP3? The SP2 issues never affected me, but one of my XP machines totally barfed when SP3 was installed.
There is nothing to guarantee that pushing an update for Pidgin onto your machine, without even asking you first, won't make YOUR machine barf. Much better to allow you to find the update, download it, MAKE A BACKUP, then install it yourself. OK, so your machine didn't barf, but some little obscure feature that you just LOVE has stopped working. Do a restore, and you've got your feature back, no problem.
See? Choice, and control over your own machine. Don't ask an open source operation to push updates.
Laura Berg, a nurse at a United States Department of Veterans Affairs-run hospital in New Mexico was investigated for sedition in September 2005[13] after writing a letter[14][15] to the editor of a local newspaper, accusing several national leaders of criminal negligence. Though their action was later deemed unwarranted by the director of Veteran Affairs, local human resources personnel took it upon themselves to request an FBI investigation. Ms Berg was represented by the ACLU[16]. Charges were dropped in 2006[1].
I did read a page dealing with US Code, and the final entry said something about being repealed, but it wasn't clear if a subsection, or the entire section dealing with sedition had been repealed.
I strongly suspect that it can be rolled out if the government chooses to use it. I also feel that sedition should have been used against US citizens who went to Afghanistan to fight against US forces, rather than creating some damnfool "illegal combatant" laws to cover them.
"I wasn't aware that somebody other than MS was claiming they developed Word"
As tiny a bit as you seem to think this feature is, it wasn't developed by MS. It was stolen. Steal a bit here, steal a bit there - doesn't that sound familiar? What was that suit about JVM?
Informative, for sure. Not an electrician, but I've been around big motors and big generators. I couldn't picture the "hydraulic shock". AC did a good job of painting the picture, at least.
Oh yeah. "looks a lot like poor procedures". That is spelled C H E R N O B Y L?
Good point, security through obscurity. Place a Linux (or any) gateway machine behind a rather cheap router, with default paranoia settings. Someone wants to run some services from the LAN to the intartubez, but he's not discoverable. Since the cheap router is very limited in it's configuration, one might spend days trying to get everything to their liking.
Alternatively, one can do wan --disable firewall then configure everything on the Linux gateway machine. Firestarter does exactly what we ask it to do, with no limit to the number of rules.
Beating my head against a wall was the price for using the ISP supplied router, commonly found with a price tag of less than $60.
Slashdot Mirror
Let's make asses of ourselves, and assume that the percentages would hold in larger samples. What would that tell us? Hmmmmmm. Maybe hackers know that FF and Opera are safer browsers than IE? Well, one has to ask, "Who would know better than a hacker?"
Alright, we've been asses long enough. Shitcan the silly assumption....
I am unsure how much MS wants this crackdown. I think the government wants to clean up the piracy, because they can see clearly how invasive and pervasive Windows is. Red Flag Linux is the official operating system of Red Flagged China.
And, the crackdown WILL benefit China. No money being sent to the western Capitalist Pigs, for starters - not even for legal copies. People who are forced away from MS holding their hands (Hail, Clippy!) will be forced to learn how an operating system works - thereby creating more potential hackers to attack the Pentagon. China gains in their own security - there just aren't a lot of virus and trojan infections running on Linux.
Gates is on record, favoring piracy of MS Products over legal acquisitions of *nix: http://articles.latimes.com/2006/apr/09/business/fi-micropiracy9
Javascript Born to be wild!
What a loser. You know that laptops come with lock down cables, right? So, get one for your phone, FFS. Now, you're going to ask me, "What do I lock it down to?" Oh ye of little imagination. You've heard of body piercing, right? Take your lame ass down to the local piercing shop, lay your tallywhacker on the counter, and have a ring put into it. (Yes, they make rings small enough to fit your equipment.) Take all of your jeans, cut a little hole in the bottom of the pocket so you can pass that cable through. Attach one end of the cable to your ring, attach the other end to the phone. Problem solved. And, just THINK of what you and your girlfriend can do with that cable at night!! Oh, one last thought. Turn the ringer off on your phone, and just let the thing vibrate.
The Hitchhiker's Guide was meant to be funny? No one told me that all those decades ago. I read it like any good student - as if it were a history book!!
Next thing, you'll be telling me that L. Ron Hubbard made up his religion.
Man, you slashdotters have a lot of nerve......
Whiney pusses and crybabies. "Oh, I missed the train by a minute and a half, now I'll have to wait for FIFTEEN MINUTES for the next train!!"
Oh boo hoo. He should have pulled his pecker out of - wherever - a few minutes earlier, so that he could have some TIME to catch the train. If his source of information was faulty, well, he had an opportunity to use another source. Why didn't he pick up a dead-tree version of the schedule last month? Finally, I'm forced to ask - who gives a damn if this inept dilrod is late for some stupid appointment, anyway? He's been riding trains most of his life, and hasn't figured out how things work yet? Screw him.
"allocation of medical care based on "how valuable you are to the government"
I've got news for you - we already have that. The insurance company won't cover you, or you simply can't afford the rates they set, or the insurance company simply denies claims. In short, you only survive if you are valuable to some corporate headquarters, ie, they can see how to make a profit off your lame ass.
Reading comprehension - what a concept.
The article says that rich people may see room for improvement, while po' folks are slipping. No surprises there, right?
Now, look around and check out the stats for the poverty level. More and more of America is being pushed into the po' folks category, while fewer and fewer people manage to claw their way into the country clubs.
It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that poor kids growing up in the ghettos can't afford to have heart surgery, a kidney replacement, chemotherapy, etc etc like the kid who went to an Ivy League college.
LOL, thanks for the chuckle. In my post, I admitted ignorance, and asked about ripping. That of course leaves the question open to any and all explanations. Korin43 posts right after you with a damn good answer: people are working on emulators, but they haven't achieved a good emulator yet.
The PC and PPC bit has been solved by other people. VirtualBox and VMWare both permit OSX to run on PC's. Obviously, XBox and OSX aren't the same, but at least one hurdle has been cleared.
I remember when Wine couldn't run much of anything - today, it runs almost everything that can run on Windows. Motivated people will figure this XBox thing out sooner or later, I'm sure.
As for obsoleted hardware - well, yeah. I don't have much use for my 386 or my P1 anymore, but I can dust them off anytime I want, and install any of a variety of *nix distros. Not the full-fledged full-featured GUI's maybe, but those machines are still quite useful depending on how I wish to use them.
"most epic FAILs"
Why is it that every single nobody in the world thinks that this or that bit or trivia is "epic". Star Wars, the original movie, was probably epic. It ranks up there with ancient epics, like the Hercules stories. (The originals, I mean) But, every booger picking zit faced fool on the planet thinks that he has something "epic" when he writes a blog.
Come on. The author isn't even an epic failure. He's a nobody, who will be forgotten 30 seconds after I close this window. Not even the Star Wars sequels and ripoffs are epic. Star Wars failures? Oh well - Hercules had some flaws in his universe too, but he managed to entertain people for millenia. THAT is truly epic.
Not a gamer, so I'm ignorant. Haven't they figured out a way to rip the stupid games to a PC yet? Or, to another console? Yeah, I can understand that if you have $5,000 worth of games, and you CAN'T rip them, you might invest in another console.
BTW - I still think it's stupid to buy a console. When they stopped making Atari consoles, and Atari games became hard to find, I abandoned the whole idea of game consoles.
"claim that they only use bittorrent for sharing Linux distros"
Delete the word "only" and I fit that description. I grab a song now and then, I pirate a Windows-centric software now and then, I'll pull down something that just looks interesting now and then. But, at least 80% of my (limited) bandwidth is used for Linux distros and other legal downloads via torrents. My usage may not be "normal", but I'm sure that it isn't "unusual" either. P2P is an important distribution mechanism, and not just for illegal content.
Seems a lot of people don't know squat about Canonical. Some rich guy invested a good bit of his fortune into making Linux widely known and acceptable on the laptop. So far, he's done a pretty good job. If he contributes nothing else back into the upstream system, he attracts some pretty bright people to the Linux community - SOME of whom go on to contribute something. Reality check: Ubuntu does contribute, whether they actually work on the kernel or not.
Errrr - that depends on how one defines "acceptable risks". They built something along those lines in the '40's. "Hot" exhaust tends to be bad for the environment - a fact recognized decades before the green movement. Solve that problem, and there are dozens more problems to solve. How about the problem of a crash? Do we really want a nuclear engine to miss the runway at LAX, or La Guardia? Just imagine the joy of New Yorkers if presented with the concept of another 9/11, but with nuclear engines. Here's one (relatively shallow) article on the subject: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=nuclear-powered-aircraft
Nuclear powered spacecraft make sense, because a catastrophe won't add poison to a biosphere. Nuclear powered aircraft will never make sense.
"get our hands dirty with this stuff"
I think you give the broad to much credit. Buzzwords throughout the article, but those really catch my eye. I see from real life experience a construction site. Bunch of ditzy broads and a couple old bastids who have never had a callous in thier life pick up a bunch of golden shovels for a "ground breaking ceremony". Oh, they look so rugged (in their own minds, at least), everyone gets their media exposure - Phhht. Disgusting creatures. If the author is getting her hands dirty with software, she probably grew up in a cave and missed out on education. Roasting a CD/DVD or floppy over an open fire doesn't do anyone any good.
Mmmmm-kay. Yeah, you sound like a combat veteran who knows what he's talking about. NOT!!
What you actually sound like, is a middle aged has-been who watches to much television and assumes that Hollywood knows combat.
Challenge: Define "shelter" and "cover". Watch a dozen or even a gross of Hollywood productions. Watch carefully for every instance in which the concepts are accurately conveyed, and realistically used.
BTW - you might have RTFA. It's the MARINES who want this 10-poung-or-less-robot, not the National Guard. No one who has ever worn a uniform can possibly confuse the two.
Errr, you misunderstand. Military courts observe due process. And they believe in innocence until proven guilty. But, I think that most people will readily admit that our current court system has been eviscerated. As evidenced by the corporate trials especially, the biggest bankroll often buys the slickest lawyers, thereby deciding the trial. There are dozens of loopholes in the legal system, commonly taken advantage of by real scum. At the same time, it isn't uncommon to find "guilty" men exonerated by modern DNA evidence.
All things considered, if I were charged with a serious crime, I would rather take my own chances in a military court. The rules are different, but if anything they are more rational.
First, they probably don't have your work phone. Second, if they call work, you inform the boss what is going on. Provide the paperwork that has been supplied to you - the boss most likely knows that you weren't in Micronesia during that time, because you were WORKING for him. Third - get the boss to threaten legal action against the "creditors" for interfering with his place of business. It's almost certain the mere threat will scare them away - if not, get a lawyer to summon their asses to court in your home state. When they fail to show, the judge finds against them, and suddenly they owe YOU AND YOUR BOSS!!
This sounds like easier money than patent trolling. Think I'll switch my SSN to 000-oh-baby
Primarily because their actions took place in combat zones, thereby placing them under the jurisdiction of the UCMJ and martial law. As pointed out, mutiny and sedition are viable charges under the UCMJ, with penalty of death, or other penalty determined by the court. And, of course, being charged with sedition doesn't preclude charging them with lesser charges, such as aiding and abetting, conspiracy, etc.
Trial by a military court doesn't allow for very many of the silly technicalities that frequently get bad guys off the hook in civilian courts. For example, there are comparatively few examples of inadmissable evidence. Another advantage of a military court is, almost anyone eligible to serve on such a court has top secret clearance, so no worry about some sensitive information making it into the press.
"you should be pushing updates"
That is NOT the open source way. I think that all open source advocates will agree (no matter which version of open source they advocate) that the strength of open source is CHOICE.
No code is perfect. Windows users know as well as anyone that aggressively pushing updates can break applications, and even the OS. Remember XP SP2 and SP3? The SP2 issues never affected me, but one of my XP machines totally barfed when SP3 was installed.
There is nothing to guarantee that pushing an update for Pidgin onto your machine, without even asking you first, won't make YOUR machine barf. Much better to allow you to find the update, download it, MAKE A BACKUP, then install it yourself. OK, so your machine didn't barf, but some little obscure feature that you just LOVE has stopped working. Do a restore, and you've got your feature back, no problem.
See? Choice, and control over your own machine. Don't ask an open source operation to push updates.
Not a lawyer by any means, but I'm more familiar with the UCMJ than I am with civilian law.
http://usmilitary.about.com/od/punitivearticles/a/mcm94.htm
Also found this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sedition
Laura Berg, a nurse at a United States Department of Veterans Affairs-run hospital in New Mexico was investigated for sedition in September 2005[13] after writing a letter[14][15] to the editor of a local newspaper, accusing several national leaders of criminal negligence. Though their action was later deemed unwarranted by the director of Veteran Affairs, local human resources personnel took it upon themselves to request an FBI investigation. Ms Berg was represented by the ACLU[16]. Charges were dropped in 2006[1].
I did read a page dealing with US Code, and the final entry said something about being repealed, but it wasn't clear if a subsection, or the entire section dealing with sedition had been repealed.
I strongly suspect that it can be rolled out if the government chooses to use it. I also feel that sedition should have been used against US citizens who went to Afghanistan to fight against US forces, rather than creating some damnfool "illegal combatant" laws to cover them.
When were mutiny and sedition laws repealed? Aren't they like the draft - always in effect, but no one notices them until they are invoked?
"I wasn't aware that somebody other than MS was claiming they developed Word"
As tiny a bit as you seem to think this feature is, it wasn't developed by MS. It was stolen. Steal a bit here, steal a bit there - doesn't that sound familiar? What was that suit about JVM?
"Those who want to (use OOo) do it already."
That may not be entirely true. Read "lock-in".
Informative, for sure. Not an electrician, but I've been around big motors and big generators. I couldn't picture the "hydraulic shock". AC did a good job of painting the picture, at least.
Oh yeah. "looks a lot like poor procedures". That is spelled C H E R N O B Y L?
Good point, security through obscurity. Place a Linux (or any) gateway machine behind a rather cheap router, with default paranoia settings. Someone wants to run some services from the LAN to the intartubez, but he's not discoverable. Since the cheap router is very limited in it's configuration, one might spend days trying to get everything to their liking.
Alternatively, one can do wan --disable firewall then configure everything on the Linux gateway machine. Firestarter does exactly what we ask it to do, with no limit to the number of rules.
Beating my head against a wall was the price for using the ISP supplied router, commonly found with a price tag of less than $60.