If you think that a policeman's purpose is to go home on Friday night, give his old lady some grocery money, watch television, and get laid before going to sleep, then a firearm is a far more effective weapon. ESPECIALLY when trying to get close enough to use a tazer on some fool wearing a bomb jacket or vest. The dumbass armed with a tazer ain't getting laid after that damned bomb goes off.
Why don't you stop at your local Walmart, and buy some anaesthetic bullets? You could donate them to your own local law enforcement. Tell them that you're helping them to be prepared for the next unscheduled bombing event in your hometown.
You may become a "person of interest", but it's all for a worthy cause!!
You were making sense, until you wrote that bit of drivel. Yes, child, there really IS good, and there really IS bad. I can agree with you that the US government often doesn't know the difference. I can agree that the US government is in no position to be the final arbiter of good and bad. But, there really are evil sumbitches in the world. A significant number of them occupy positions of power.
I was mildly surprised to find the story here on Slashdot. But - I'll bet a few nerds were involved, at least peripherally. Some nerd's brother may have been running . . .
Maybe I'm tired, or just having a slow day. The joke nearly went "whoosh" for me. Good one though!
The residents of Silicon Valley are more confused than usual after a billboard campaign by the National Multiple Sclerosis Society of America used this line in an ad slogan "MS, it's not a software company"... exploiting the fame of a certain company to draw attention to an altogether worthier cause. Requests to comment on the campaign have been met by a surly silence by Microsoft, which doesn't relish the association of ideas but is painfully aware that it can't afford to appear insensitive over such an issue. Seasoned information technology professionals will have no trouble telling the two MSs apart One is a debilitating and surprisingly widespread affliction that renders the sufferer barely able to perform the simplest task. The other is a disease.
AC says you've ruined all the fun. I don't think so. Just because you can't find a more recent fossil of a steggy, doesn't mean that the last few survivors didn't hang on, hidden away in a nice quiet valley somewhere. How many OTHER dinos had teachers and classrooms? (need the smiley here, sticking my tongue out at you)
I have to agree with you. My upgrade to an SSD gave me very noticeable faster boot times. But, since I don't use virtual memory, I never have stuff swapped to disk anyway. Yeah, some stuff seems to actually work a bit faster because of the SSD, but it's certainly not a mind blowing difference.
Your disk shouldn't double as memory, ever. I've ALWAYS had max memory installed, since the era of the P2. Prior to that time, memory really was prohibitively expensive, so I suffered with Virtual Memory.
When the shit hits the fan, there won't be any bean counters around. That 20 year old kid isn't going to remember which "button" sends which message either. Might as well let him ad lib it.
1/4 inch of aluminum? Aircraft skins are 1/4 inch of aluminum? That doesn't seem right - that's really a lot of weight. A quick Google finds a couple hits that suggest 3 to 4 mm thickness, another page says about.16 inch.
You might run into the old Linux problem. It's hard to port proprietary drivers if the proprietor isn't willing to cooperate. That was a real killer for a long time. Drivers defeated many a hopeful Linux user. Drivers defeated me, several times, before I finally got a working installation. Thankfully, that problem is less pervasive today, but it could be recreated in the Mobile Market.
What, exactly, is the cost of Android, per installation? As has been pointed out, it's an open source operating system. Much of the work on the OS was done before Google took over. They altered the Linux kernel, added some stuff, borrowed other stuff, and packaged it up, and gave it away. What's the cost? Has it cost Google as much as ten cents per phone to have their OS installed on phones? Maybe fifty cents? I really don't know, but I'll bet it can't be as high as ten dollars per phone.
I've never attempted to use a.deb file as a user. I was referring to the Sun Java installer specifically, and peripherally to source files. When I feel a need to install from a.deb repository, I just become root, then install from a trusted repository. Rarely, I'll go outside of "official" trusted repositories to install something.
A user can install and update applications into his own folder. Notably, I have two or more versions of Java installed on all of my systems.
Any user can visit Oracle, download the latest bin file to his own home folder, extract it into his own home folder, then point his browser to the plugin in that home folder. He can also set his default java to use that folder.
Updating Java does not put the system at risk, it doesn't require root access.
A generous person would call it "bloatware". A less generous person calls it malware.
A game icon was installed on the system, you click the icon, it connected to the internet, and offered you a bunch of games. The server that the games came from was a known advert and tracking server. I don't think ANYTHING that happened on that computer was NOT monitored.
Spyware, malware, trojan, whatever you want to call it - it was installed because someone paid Compaq to install it on end user's computers. It was such poorly crafted spyware that it consumed a tremendous amount of system resources even when it was apparently doing nothing.
You got source code, so that you can actually make fixes? Didn't think so. Maybe you can make an offer to Microsoft. They give you the source code, and you take over support for WinXP. Yeah - they'll go for that, I'm sure.
7 doesn't always run well on the same hardware. If the existing hardware performs satisfactorily, there is no real reason to upgrade. When the hardware craps out, then it's time to upgrade.
Ipso facto? You want an ipso facto? For a few years prior to, and after the release of XP, I tried to keep three sons and a wife on computers. It proved to be nearly impossible. There were constant problems with viruses. Tons of malware, some of it installed by the likes of Compaq.
I finally converted the wife to Linux. My "service calls" to her computer have been for things like failed hard drives, and "Where can I find an application to do blah blah?" Not a single virus. Not one malware. One scare involving Wine, but no lost or corrupted data, no infestations.
Did the wife suddenly grow technically savvy, overnight? Hardly.
Despite the claimed superiority of Windows security - only the tech savvy seem to maintain a healthy Windows environment. But, a housewife who doesn't understand the differences between file systems can keep a Linux installation running for years, with very little technical support from anyone else.
Ipso facto - Linux has done something better than Windows. I think it's due to diversity, as much as anything. You may believe it's due to relatively low numbers of users. Whatever - Windows is ultimately less secure than any Unix-like which I'm aware of.
When XP has become history, then we'll see how the numbers stack up.
Really? Can I be anonymous? I don't have to get someone's permission first? I don't need to apply for a permit, or a license? That's just awesome!
Oh - wait - What about that "trusted computing" crap? And government tracking? And, corporate tracking? And, don't forget the proposed laws that would have government and corporations sharing all that tracking information.
Maybe only the computer savvy minorities can be anonymous. Of the people that I know, I really don't think any of them see a real need for anonymity. And, only one of them seems to understand the mechanics of maintaining anonymity. For that matter, I understand a need for anonymity, and I pretty much understand the mechanics. Still - I'm rather careless. A committed investigator could connect a lot, if not all, of my online accounts and identities. Just because Google fails to do so doesn't mean it can't be done.
Oh-kay. I'm not going to argue real hard about any of that. I don't really agree with that position, but I don't really disagree.
I will note that there must be some symbiotes contributing back to BSD. Without ongoing contributions, the body of BSD licensed OS's and software would soon become obsolete, and forgotten. Maybe it's more fair to say that BSD is more tolerant of parasites than GPL is?
We need to consider a few things about the interstate, before we can compare it to train systems.
First - Eisenhower didn't give one flying fsck about commuters. The man was a military officer who saw the need to move troops and military equipment quickly. His dream of an interstate system revolved around military necessity. The interstate was built to pass conveniently near all major military installations. Coincidentally - major military installations are also conveniently located near major population centers, for the most part. So - some commuters benefited.
Second - as explained in my first point, the interstates do connect major population centers.
Third - businesses relocated to take advantage of the interstates, while new businesses located by default close to the interstates. People, individuals, followed suit, but to a lesser extent. People, by necessity, locate themselves closer to employment and business. We still have a lot of people who prefer to live way out in the boonies, and drive on dirt roads and tertiary paved roads to get to work.
Taking California as a primary example - the trains mostly seem to connect tourist traps together. I don't see a lot of spurs in Los Angeles, running out to East LA, enabling the poorer people to rapidly get to work in the mornings. California's trains don't seem to connect smaller communities, either. As mentioned - they connect tourist traps, and communities without spectacular views of the ocean or the mountains are left out in the cold.
Washington D.C. seems to be somewhat better, from what I've seen. But - obviously, the interstate is still choked with traffic. Apparently, D.C. doesn't have the spurs necessary to serve surrounding communities, existing spurs don't reach out far enough, and there are not enough trains. During the morning rush hour, I've seen D.C.'s trains zipping past the traffic jams, filled to half capacity or less. Something is wrong is such a picture. Why aren't my fellow travelers on the interstate driving five or ten miles to a train station, to avoid these multiples of ten miles of driving in congested traffic?
Chicago may be a little better. It seems that they might actually reach further, and get into more communities. I'm not asserting that as fact - it just seems that way, from what I've seen. Maybe if I bothered to research, I'd change my mind. I do know, for certain, that the interstate highway system in Chicago is choked with traffic. Whatever Chicago might be doing better than LA or D.C. is insufficient. The local streets are no better than the interstate. During rush hour, you can sit in traffic forever, and not move.
We really need to reconsider how we allocate resources. We need to study how other cities and nations do things, take the best they have to offer, and apply it to our own needs.
Bringing traffic to a screeching stop on the highway is a daily occurrence. Traffic being slowed by one person's stupidity and/or misfortune is an all day, every day happening.
Trains have the advantage, regarding disasters. For the most part, they can just keep on going. When they can't keep on going, it's one train involved, most often, not every train. The train can be put on a siding, and the rest of the city's train traffic can keep on moving.
Despite the fact that a train wreck will involve a lot of people - trains aren't wrecked often enough to compete with automotive deaths, pain, and suffering.
If we could make up our minds to build WORKING train systems, we could only benefit from them.
Slashdot Mirror
If you think that a policeman's purpose is to go home on Friday night, give his old lady some grocery money, watch television, and get laid before going to sleep, then a firearm is a far more effective weapon. ESPECIALLY when trying to get close enough to use a tazer on some fool wearing a bomb jacket or vest. The dumbass armed with a tazer ain't getting laid after that damned bomb goes off.
Why don't you stop at your local Walmart, and buy some anaesthetic bullets? You could donate them to your own local law enforcement. Tell them that you're helping them to be prepared for the next unscheduled bombing event in your hometown.
You may become a "person of interest", but it's all for a worthy cause!!
Strange. Almost everyone who has issues with the corruption found in American politics is labeled as a "communist".
And, if my wealth, relative to that of the rest of the world, depends on a subservient Latin America - well, I don't need or want it.
"There is no good or bad."
You were making sense, until you wrote that bit of drivel. Yes, child, there really IS good, and there really IS bad. I can agree with you that the US government often doesn't know the difference. I can agree that the US government is in no position to be the final arbiter of good and bad. But, there really are evil sumbitches in the world. A significant number of them occupy positions of power.
I was mildly surprised to find the story here on Slashdot. But - I'll bet a few nerds were involved, at least peripherally. Some nerd's brother may have been running . . .
Maybe I'm tired, or just having a slow day. The joke nearly went "whoosh" for me. Good one though!
The residents of Silicon Valley are more confused than usual after a billboard campaign by the National Multiple Sclerosis Society of America used this line in an ad slogan "MS, it's not a software company"... exploiting the fame of a certain company to draw attention to an altogether worthier cause.
Requests to comment on the campaign have been met by a surly silence by Microsoft, which doesn't relish the association of ideas but is painfully aware that it can't afford to appear insensitive over such an issue.
Seasoned information technology professionals will have no trouble telling the two MSs apart One is a debilitating and surprisingly widespread affliction that renders the sufferer barely able to perform the simplest task.
The other is a disease.
AC says you've ruined all the fun. I don't think so. Just because you can't find a more recent fossil of a steggy, doesn't mean that the last few survivors didn't hang on, hidden away in a nice quiet valley somewhere. How many OTHER dinos had teachers and classrooms? (need the smiley here, sticking my tongue out at you)
"You're chances of dying by being struck by lightning i far, far bigger than death by asteroid."
That's what the teacher was saying to her class of juvenile stegosaurus, when the big one hit.
I have to agree with you. My upgrade to an SSD gave me very noticeable faster boot times. But, since I don't use virtual memory, I never have stuff swapped to disk anyway. Yeah, some stuff seems to actually work a bit faster because of the SSD, but it's certainly not a mind blowing difference.
Your disk shouldn't double as memory, ever. I've ALWAYS had max memory installed, since the era of the P2. Prior to that time, memory really was prohibitively expensive, so I suffered with Virtual Memory.
Who's on second.
"prewritten is probably a good idea,"
When the shit hits the fan, there won't be any bean counters around. That 20 year old kid isn't going to remember which "button" sends which message either. Might as well let him ad lib it.
"The bomb set us up, we all die now!"
1/4 inch of aluminum? Aircraft skins are 1/4 inch of aluminum? That doesn't seem right - that's really a lot of weight. A quick Google finds a couple hits that suggest 3 to 4 mm thickness, another page says about .16 inch.
Any aviation people around who know for sure?
The jury is still out on that question. You might enjoy this PDF. It might even alter your thinking on your question.
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2239412
I've read it three times now, over the course of a week or so. Yeah - IMHO, surveillance is worrisome.
Filter error: That's an awful long string of letters there.
Instead of the PDF, you get the web page, with a download link.
You might run into the old Linux problem. It's hard to port proprietary drivers if the proprietor isn't willing to cooperate. That was a real killer for a long time. Drivers defeated many a hopeful Linux user. Drivers defeated me, several times, before I finally got a working installation. Thankfully, that problem is less pervasive today, but it could be recreated in the Mobile Market.
"distribution of Android at below-cost"
What, exactly, is the cost of Android, per installation? As has been pointed out, it's an open source operating system. Much of the work on the OS was done before Google took over. They altered the Linux kernel, added some stuff, borrowed other stuff, and packaged it up, and gave it away. What's the cost? Has it cost Google as much as ten cents per phone to have their OS installed on phones? Maybe fifty cents? I really don't know, but I'll bet it can't be as high as ten dollars per phone.
I've never attempted to use a .deb file as a user. I was referring to the Sun Java installer specifically, and peripherally to source files. When I feel a need to install from a .deb repository, I just become root, then install from a trusted repository. Rarely, I'll go outside of "official" trusted repositories to install something.
A user can install and update applications into his own folder. Notably, I have two or more versions of Java installed on all of my systems.
Any user can visit Oracle, download the latest bin file to his own home folder, extract it into his own home folder, then point his browser to the plugin in that home folder. He can also set his default java to use that folder.
Updating Java does not put the system at risk, it doesn't require root access.
What brand are you smoking?
A generous person would call it "bloatware". A less generous person calls it malware.
A game icon was installed on the system, you click the icon, it connected to the internet, and offered you a bunch of games. The server that the games came from was a known advert and tracking server. I don't think ANYTHING that happened on that computer was NOT monitored.
Spyware, malware, trojan, whatever you want to call it - it was installed because someone paid Compaq to install it on end user's computers. It was such poorly crafted spyware that it consumed a tremendous amount of system resources even when it was apparently doing nothing.
You got source code, so that you can actually make fixes? Didn't think so. Maybe you can make an offer to Microsoft. They give you the source code, and you take over support for WinXP. Yeah - they'll go for that, I'm sure.
7 doesn't always run well on the same hardware. If the existing hardware performs satisfactorily, there is no real reason to upgrade. When the hardware craps out, then it's time to upgrade.
Ipso facto? You want an ipso facto? For a few years prior to, and after the release of XP, I tried to keep three sons and a wife on computers. It proved to be nearly impossible. There were constant problems with viruses. Tons of malware, some of it installed by the likes of Compaq.
I finally converted the wife to Linux. My "service calls" to her computer have been for things like failed hard drives, and "Where can I find an application to do blah blah?" Not a single virus. Not one malware. One scare involving Wine, but no lost or corrupted data, no infestations.
Did the wife suddenly grow technically savvy, overnight? Hardly.
Despite the claimed superiority of Windows security - only the tech savvy seem to maintain a healthy Windows environment. But, a housewife who doesn't understand the differences between file systems can keep a Linux installation running for years, with very little technical support from anyone else.
Ipso facto - Linux has done something better than Windows. I think it's due to diversity, as much as anything. You may believe it's due to relatively low numbers of users. Whatever - Windows is ultimately less secure than any Unix-like which I'm aware of.
When XP has become history, then we'll see how the numbers stack up.
"After all, everybody can impersonate Anonymous."
Really? Can I be anonymous? I don't have to get someone's permission first? I don't need to apply for a permit, or a license? That's just awesome!
Oh - wait - What about that "trusted computing" crap? And government tracking? And, corporate tracking? And, don't forget the proposed laws that would have government and corporations sharing all that tracking information.
Maybe only the computer savvy minorities can be anonymous. Of the people that I know, I really don't think any of them see a real need for anonymity. And, only one of them seems to understand the mechanics of maintaining anonymity. For that matter, I understand a need for anonymity, and I pretty much understand the mechanics. Still - I'm rather careless. A committed investigator could connect a lot, if not all, of my online accounts and identities. Just because Google fails to do so doesn't mean it can't be done.
Oh-kay. I'm not going to argue real hard about any of that. I don't really agree with that position, but I don't really disagree.
I will note that there must be some symbiotes contributing back to BSD. Without ongoing contributions, the body of BSD licensed OS's and software would soon become obsolete, and forgotten. Maybe it's more fair to say that BSD is more tolerant of parasites than GPL is?
The interstate system.
We need to consider a few things about the interstate, before we can compare it to train systems.
First - Eisenhower didn't give one flying fsck about commuters. The man was a military officer who saw the need to move troops and military equipment quickly. His dream of an interstate system revolved around military necessity. The interstate was built to pass conveniently near all major military installations. Coincidentally - major military installations are also conveniently located near major population centers, for the most part. So - some commuters benefited.
Second - as explained in my first point, the interstates do connect major population centers.
Third - businesses relocated to take advantage of the interstates, while new businesses located by default close to the interstates. People, individuals, followed suit, but to a lesser extent. People, by necessity, locate themselves closer to employment and business. We still have a lot of people who prefer to live way out in the boonies, and drive on dirt roads and tertiary paved roads to get to work.
Taking California as a primary example - the trains mostly seem to connect tourist traps together. I don't see a lot of spurs in Los Angeles, running out to East LA, enabling the poorer people to rapidly get to work in the mornings. California's trains don't seem to connect smaller communities, either. As mentioned - they connect tourist traps, and communities without spectacular views of the ocean or the mountains are left out in the cold.
Washington D.C. seems to be somewhat better, from what I've seen. But - obviously, the interstate is still choked with traffic. Apparently, D.C. doesn't have the spurs necessary to serve surrounding communities, existing spurs don't reach out far enough, and there are not enough trains. During the morning rush hour, I've seen D.C.'s trains zipping past the traffic jams, filled to half capacity or less. Something is wrong is such a picture. Why aren't my fellow travelers on the interstate driving five or ten miles to a train station, to avoid these multiples of ten miles of driving in congested traffic?
Chicago may be a little better. It seems that they might actually reach further, and get into more communities. I'm not asserting that as fact - it just seems that way, from what I've seen. Maybe if I bothered to research, I'd change my mind. I do know, for certain, that the interstate highway system in Chicago is choked with traffic. Whatever Chicago might be doing better than LA or D.C. is insufficient. The local streets are no better than the interstate. During rush hour, you can sit in traffic forever, and not move.
We really need to reconsider how we allocate resources. We need to study how other cities and nations do things, take the best they have to offer, and apply it to our own needs.
Key word was "seldom".
Bringing traffic to a screeching stop on the highway is a daily occurrence. Traffic being slowed by one person's stupidity and/or misfortune is an all day, every day happening.
Trains have the advantage, regarding disasters. For the most part, they can just keep on going. When they can't keep on going, it's one train involved, most often, not every train. The train can be put on a siding, and the rest of the city's train traffic can keep on moving.
Despite the fact that a train wreck will involve a lot of people - trains aren't wrecked often enough to compete with automotive deaths, pain, and suffering.
If we could make up our minds to build WORKING train systems, we could only benefit from them.