Re:Time to change your OS to OSX or BSD
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Time To Dump XP?
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· Score: 1
I will first tell you what Win7 brings that XP does not: Security updates past 2014. The point of the article is not "OMG, migrates nao!!1!elventyone11". It's that you should be starting to plan your migration so that you're not sitting there in late 2013 going, "Uhh, guys? Our OS is going out of support in 6 months and I think our core functional software is incompatible with Windows 7."
I will now attempt to tell you what Windows 7 brings that Linux or BSD don't: *takes deep breathe* Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, FlashwWorks (I think that's what it's called), Pagemaker, AutoCAD, 3DS MAX, MASSIVE, Lightwave, Quick Books Pro, That Custom Package We Wrote for Accounting 3 Years Ago... Nope. Ran out of breath. Seriously, this is the big problem with switching off of Windows. Thousands of pieces of software either custom written in house or purchased from vendors that will have to be ported, replaced, or whatever.
Some of this stuff is essentially irreplaceable by packages that work on Open Source OSes. Some of it has alternatives that can run on OSS, but will require more training, and/or lack certain functions. You could go MacOS to get some of it, but that doesn't save you any money by the time you buy whole new machines, and even then you're only solving part of the problem. Regardless of the commercial packages porting everything in house is a HUGE expense for medium to large shops.
I'm all for doing the switch, don't get me wrong, but we looked into what was necessary at my last place, and decided it wasn't feasible. This was a very Unix heavy shop, mind. Most of the technical staff used Linux or Macs. We could move the admin staff and most of the creative to Macs pretty easy, but but in the end, a portion of the technical staff (that wrote code for Windows), and a portion of the creative staff (that used Windows only modeling software) couldn't be reasonably moved. That called into question the value of moving anyone since it would cost us a quite a bit, and wouldn't simplify the environment much. Taking the Macs out of the equation would have cheapened the costs considerably, but the creative staff wouldn't have been able to switch at all, and the admin staff was balky about Openoffice (reasonably so in my opinion. I use when I have too, but really prefer MS Office or even that new Apple suite).
Yes, the courts can declare you mentally incompetent. Typically you have to have broken a law for the state to involuntarily commit you to mental hospital, so I think that's a bit of a red herring. Typically when someone is declared mentally incompetent, the courts simply establish a guardian relationship where someone (usually a close family member) takes on the role of a parent to the incompetent person in an either temporary or permanent capacity. What other solution do you offer to this problem? Some people are, either through injury, illness, or birth defect made temporarily or permanently unable to make rational decisions. Do we just make all adults completely responsible for themselves regardless of mental health, brain injury, or severe mental deficiency?
I think the biggest problem with the way programming is taught in school is that everything is "Computer Science".
"The sort of useful you're talking about is concerned with places where all the interesting, hard problems have already been solved."
There's a place for that. The fact of the matter is that business needs a class of reasonably skilled code monkeys who can take someone else's algorithm, or design and write code around it. Business also needs the software engineers who can design that algorithm or design. The world also needs the guys who understands computers in and out and can push the envelope of what we think computers can do. Right now all three of those guys go to college and get computer science degrees. Which essentially try to teach them to be that last and most elite guy.
This is changing a bit. You're starting to see some level of specialization in degrees and associates degrees meant to provide low level grunt programmers and IT people, but you still see a lot of "Company looking for entry level IT monkey. CS degree required!" ads out there. The simple fact of the matter is that we're not all going to pushing the boundaries of Computer Science with every project we work on.
The vast majority of us will be solving problems that have already been solved most of the time. A lot of people are happy with that. Personally I'm glad I studied "real" computer science. I like working on new and challenging problems and situations (one of the reasons I'm not terribly happy with my current job), but I can also see where people who don't want to do cutting edge research professionally also don't see why they have to take Calculus 4 to become junior Java devs at Megacorp.
You are either deliberately or ignorantly misunderstanding what makes someone an adult in our society. The health care law provides parents and children the options of continuing a voluntary dependency past the age of 18. If the parents chose not to pay for a (adult) child's health care, or the (adult) child chooses not to accept the parent's health care (either because they have better or simply want to be "independent") they may do so. This may result in the (adult) child being fined when the mandatory coverage clause kicks in, but it remains the option at both the parent and the child level. The kid is an adult: their parent are not forced to cover them, and they are not forced to accept the coverage. The only one being forced into anything is the insurance company, who is simply required to keep the option open. This is more along the lines of a consumer protection law than anything to do with a legal status of adulthood.
Gambling, drinking, and credit cards are by our current laws considered privileges rather than rights, and the state retains the ability to regulate them. Again, this has nothing to do with legal adulthood. Especially in the case of alcohol and gambling, jurisdictions are often completely arbitrary in how they regulate these privileges. In some places both practices are completely banned, in others purchase or practice may only be performed at certain times, in certain locales, in certain quantities, or may be regulated based on type.
In Alabama we have dry counties, wet cities within the dry counties, wet counties, dry cities within the wet counties, we can only purchase liquor at certain stores, beer until recently could only have 6% or less of alcohol (though wine and liquor were fine) and can still not be sold in containers larger than 16 oz., and there is a heated debate as to whether bingo is "gambling" or not. Age limits are simply another way of regulating the "privileges". The federal age limit is in fact not even a directly enforceable law. It's simply tied to highway funding. Louisiana ignored until the late 90's when they finally couldn't afford to do without the funding any more. When I went to college in New Orleans from 92-96 we drank, legally, from Freshman year.
Many-if-not-most of those private non-profits are funded by government grants. Organizations like the American Cancer Society, direct donations, and similar charitable activities fund the rest, true, but without doing a LOT more research than you have there is no way to determine how much of any individual lab's budget comes from government grants vs. private charitable donations. Having worked for research institutions and having had my wife work for the American Heart Association, I can reasonably guess that the government pays for at least half of the health care research in this country. At least. Of course I'm kinda pulling numbers out of my butt too, and I doubt either of us has the time to really research the matter. At any rate, no the government doesn't *do* much research. It *pays* for research.
I think the argument that I would make (and most reasonable people who are not entirely against the whole concept of patents) is that it would be perfectly reasonable to patent the drug you developed to fight Breast Cancer based upon your discovery of this gene. Patenting the gene itself is not reasonable. I cannot patent my discovery that steam forced into a confined space can turn temperature energy into kinetic energy. I can patent the steam engine I built based on this realization. I cannot patent my discovery that these specific proteins in combination result in a Breast Cancer gene. I can patent the drug I synthesized to combat breast Cancer based on this gene's construction.
Saying that "Parents can choose to leave their kids on their Health Care plan until they are 28" is nowhere near the same as saying that kids are legal dependents of their parents until they are 28. An 18 year old is legally an adult in all ways that matter. They are not allowed to drink and gamble in some jurisdictions, but those are considered additional privileges above and beyond majority (stupid in my opinion, but legally and logically defensible). At the age of 18 you can choose to do whatever you like, though there may be consequences to those choices. If you're 18 and your parents tell you to go to rehab, you can say "no" and they can't make you. They can stop supporting you, tell you that you can longer live in their house, or cut off your health insurance, but they can't employ any sort of physical or legal force to make you go.
That is the definition of legal adulthood. You are freed of any requirement to obey your parents, they are freed of any financial responsibility for you. Now, having said that, many people, probably a large majority of people, continue to provide some level of support to their young adult children out of love and affection. Many, probably a large majority, of these young adult children chose to accept that support and continue to respect their parents advice or even obey their orders. Usually out of a combination of reciprocal love and affection and a mercenary desire to not lose the extra support. One should not confuse this voluntary symbiotic relationship with a legal status of required dependency.
The *only* people in the US who are both over 18 years of age *and* in a legally required dependent status are people that have been declared mentally incompetent in a court of law.
They must have gone somewhere, but I don't see Ubuntu. Ubuntu is all about the ease of use, and bringing Linux to the masses. Gentoo compiled every package from source as it installed them for Gods' sake. I thought about installing it once, then thought "You know the last time you had to recompile X11 from source, it took three hours. That was years ago, when it was much smaller, and that's just one package in Gentoo." Then I downloaded whatever Red Hat or Fedora was current at the time.
A bit off topic and purely out of curiosity, what distro do you use? I recently bought a new desktop gaming rig, which removed the need for Windows on my Laptop. Since most of my work is with Linux I decided to make the laptop Linux only. Most of the office machines are Red Hat, so Fedora seemed like the easiest bet. I got everything installed and wasn't very happy with the results. No wireless (of course), touch pad acted really finicky, no Nvidia graphic drivers (again, kind of obviously). Nothing was awful, it was all stuff I'd kind of expected, and all stuff I could fix, but for some reason it all annoyed me.
I decided I'd deal with all the etcetera the next day after work. By some odd feat of chance I read the next day that Unbuntu had released 10.4. I've played with Ubuntu a few times, but never thought it was really worth the hype. It wasn't a bad distro, just nothing special that I could see. On a whim, though, I grabbed 10.4. Another reinstall wouldn't be any less fun than what awaited me in Fedoraland.
I have to say I'm pleasantly surprised. Everything works. First thing that greeted me on login was a note that the systems had installed default video drivers, but if I wanted it could grab the closed source drivers from Nvidia and set them up for me. My wireless was working (This was a shock. I used USB wireless on this laptop, never gotten around to replacing the dead internal card) so I entered the network key and clicked "yes" for the video card thing. Bam, installed. The touchpad was acting normal *and* the button to turn it off and on worked. The system informed me that my battery was failing and I should replace it (I knew this, but I'd never had an OS let me know). Then the big shock... All the media and volume touch pad buttons over the keyboard worked too. Sleep also behaves as I would expect.
All in all I was kind of shocked. Everything worked like it was supposed to instantly on boot up, or gave me an easy to use wizard to fix it (and the fix worked like it was supposed to). Like I said, I don't necessarily need this kind of dead simple setup,but I was mighty pleased to get it. This may have been the first time in my life that I put Linux on a stock laptop and it all just worked. Not to say that a distro change will fix your problems, but I'm awful glad I switched.
The "Founding Fathers" were born generations after the initial settlers of the original colonies. As a very large generalization, the settlers were religious zealots who could not get along with their countrymen. There were exceptions: Georgia was an early experiment in the sort of penal colony that Australia would later become and Virgina was largely settled because of delusions of easy money, but in general the colonies were settled by religious zealots. It's a misnomer to say that these colonies were founded for "religious freedom" too. The colonists were generally free to practice their religions back in England, but felt terribly constrained by their inability to force their beliefs upon their countrymen. Again, there are exceptions: Pennsylvania was founded for religious reasons, but with a goal of true religious freedom.
This has little to do with the events of two hundred years later when the decedents of these original settlers decided to break ties with the mother country. The men who founded the United States were chronologically separated from the original European settlers of the land that would eventually become the United States by nearly as much time as we are separated from those founders now.
I'm curious about these Theistic Evolutionists. One of the major holes I've always seen in using "Intelligent Design" as a counter to Evolutionary Theory by the Religious Right is that it's not inherently incompatible with Evolution. If the basic theory behind "Intelligent Design" is that life is to complex to have evolved randomly and therefore must have a designer, who's to say that the designer doesn't simply use Evolution as a tool to accomplish Its goals. From inside the system it would appear to us that such small tweaks and experiments were random mutation.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not suggesting that this is the case, just pondering how the two concepts are theoretically compatible.
You realize you're talking about a multi-player game right? I mean, yeah, there's a single player campaign, but buying SC2 just for the single player game is essentially wasting half your money. The same B.net servers that allow you to play the multiplayer version of the game authenticates its one time check. If you can play the game completely, you can authenticate it. Besides, your argument is a straw man. if you really wanted to play the game it would trivial to give the computer Net access for the 30 seconds required.
What are your principles exactly then? If you want Free Software, obviously Blizzard's games are not for you. They never made any pretense to that fact. Of course, if you want Free Software there are only a VERY limited number of games that are for you (Beyond the 17th free version of Majong.) If I were to make a Venn diagram of "games I want to play" (beyond killing time a few minutes here or there) and "FOSS games" the overlap would be pretty small. If you want a game with no DRM at all, again, Blizzard's games aren't for you. They have always made token anti-piracy efforts to keep the most casual pirates from simply giving away copies of their games. Again though, the number of games you *can* play is kinda slim.
If you want a sane, reasonable DRM policy, Blizzard seems to fit the bill. Their protection schemes have never been terribly onerous, and they often make the DRM go away once the game is past it's first blush of popularity. They aren't asking for much here. "Hook up to our servers once so we can verify the game." 95% of the people playing will use B.net for online games at some point anyway. Unless you plan to install SC2 on a classified government network with no possibility of hooking up to the Internet, there's practically no way this can be considered onerous.
The concept of SOME kind of check to make sure you actually paid for the game you're playing isn't going to go anywhere when the games are made by companies that want to make money. I have no objection to Blizzard making money, they've made a ton of games that I've spent *many* hours being entertained by. I therefore feel perfectly comfortable supporting their reasonable and painless approach to making sure you bought your game.
No color. I'm not an expert in the field by any stretch, but my understanding is that "electronic paper" screens can do color, but it's cost prohibitive right now. Please correct me if I'm wrong. This is a fairly serious serious issue, that can't be easily resolved short of waiting for cost on the technology to come down.
No ability to "mark up" the books. No highlighting or margin notes. This is a pure software issue. The problem (it seems to me) probably relates to the DRM on the book somehow, but seems solvable. I know that these devices have pretty extensive bookmarking capability, so it shouldn't be that hard to implement some sort of note system.
Slow to page back and forth. Obviously a hardware/software issue. No idea how hard or easy to solve this would be (seems easy, but I'm not writing the code)
Lack of content. Many books students need simply aren't out for the devices.
Not much cheaper than regular textbooks. This, in my opinion, is the biggest turn off for e-book readers in general. Books are very expensive to publish and ship. There is clearly a significant material cost involved in their production, yet e-books (which lack these costs) are not significantly less expensive. I'm not thrilled about spending $200-300 for a reader so I can save 15-20% on book costs. Seems students aren't either. Especially given that text books tend to be *very* expensive to begin with.
iPad/tabletPCs don't have the first issue, but they have a similar or related issue. They're simply difficult to read for long periods of time, and often very difficult to see in natural light situations (ie, studying outside on a sunny day). Otherwise they simply use software to emulate the functions of e-book readers. So they probably share most of the other faults of the readers.
We do. We have to. It's the nature of the system. In order to ensure the hearing of all valid and useful opinions, we have to allow voice to all opinions. Even the invalid useless ones. Otherwise someone gets to decide what is invalid and useless, and we rightly don't wish to trust anyone with that job.
I will grant you that the author is not exactly a technology guru, but to say that a nuanced, detailed statement cannot have parts of it that are correct and parts that are incorrect is simply staggering. The world is not black and white. Privacy is a word with several overlapping meanings. I can make myself "private" in the short term by locking myself in a soundproof room, you might be invading my "privacy" while I sit in this room by stealing personal objects out of my desk. Similarly current technology makes it easier to be "private", by ignoring phone calls from people you don't want to talk to, or e-mails from people who don't want to correspond with, while often invading your "privacy" by say, changing your Facebook settings without telling you.
Hmm. Now you say that, I checked Dropbox's policy and I'm not clear. The way I originally read it you aren't supposed to put porn in your "public" folder (Dropbox allows you to put files in a public folder that the world can see, for stuff you want to share), but I could have misread the legalese. On the other hand, since everything in your non-public folders is private and they specifically state that they don't look at it, I don't suppose anyone could tell. Probably more like one of those "we aren't going to look, but if we find out later we'll cancel your account" situations.
Where do you people get this stuff. First of all, do you really think that national intelligences services have nothing better to do with their time than browse my (fairly mundane) porn collection? My suggestion merely provides a perfectly honest and legal way for you to bypass having some customs good pawing through your perfectly legal pictures and movies of consenting adults performing sexual acts.
In the second place Dropbox is located in the US, which means that to get access to my Dropbox a law enforcement agency will have to get a warrant. The PATRIOT act doesn't apply to stuff like Dropbox, that is considered my "personal" space and a warrant would be required. Since the contract I agreed to with them says that they won't give up my information unless legally required to, I can sue them if they give it up without a warrant. Regardless, of course, I still didn't recommend doing anything illegal.
If you're suggesting that "national intelligence" services are going to crack into Dropbox in order to browse my porn collection... Well, I admit I can't control the security at Dropbox, but I rather doubt that if the CIA really wanted my data THAT badly I'd be able to protect my personal computer any better.
Realistically, unless we're talking about storing stuff on an eternal storage device that I keep in a safe and only connect when I need the data on it, I don't see my cloud data as being any more vulnerable than any other data I own. My computer sits on the internet and is vulnerable to being cracked (not highly vulnerable, I take precautions, but vulnerable). My computer could be seized with a warrant.
What you say is somewhat true, but also varies widely between systems and methods of looking at the information. In Red Hat and Ubuntu you have to enter a password (either root's or your own, depending on the system and whether you're in sudoers) to look at the same information if you use the GUI tools. In those cases, the privileges are bound to the "exe" just like in Windows. In a stock system config, you can look at most of the bare text files as a non-privileged user on most versions of Linux, so you have a point there. Though at work we change permissions on as many of those files as we can to prevent people from looking at them. It's a stupid thing to do, but someone somewhere thinks it improves security (obviously lots of files have to be world readable for the system to function).
Macs let you look at pretty much everything by default and only ask you to enter a password to change stuff. So far as I know there's no way to change this behavior, though I've never tried so there might be.
China is a "special case" I'm not bringing any electronic media I own into China period. Porn, no porn, regardless. Maybe a completely clean laptop with an OS CD and a carefully checked "data" CD, if I absolutely must have a computer for some reason related to the travel. I admit I wasn't clear. I meant no Australian nation firewall will block popular cloud services.
Huh. I a always thought every Tuesday was patch Tuesday. You lives, you learns; I stand corrected. Realistically I don't see how you can complain about a once a month reboot. MacOS and Linux updates include kernel updates that require reboots probably around that often.
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I will first tell you what Win7 brings that XP does not: Security updates past 2014. The point of the article is not "OMG, migrates nao!!1!elventyone11". It's that you should be starting to plan your migration so that you're not sitting there in late 2013 going, "Uhh, guys? Our OS is going out of support in 6 months and I think our core functional software is incompatible with Windows 7."
I will now attempt to tell you what Windows 7 brings that Linux or BSD don't: *takes deep breathe* Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, FlashwWorks (I think that's what it's called), Pagemaker, AutoCAD, 3DS MAX, MASSIVE, Lightwave, Quick Books Pro, That Custom Package We Wrote for Accounting 3 Years Ago... Nope. Ran out of breath. Seriously, this is the big problem with switching off of Windows. Thousands of pieces of software either custom written in house or purchased from vendors that will have to be ported, replaced, or whatever.
Some of this stuff is essentially irreplaceable by packages that work on Open Source OSes. Some of it has alternatives that can run on OSS, but will require more training, and/or lack certain functions. You could go MacOS to get some of it, but that doesn't save you any money by the time you buy whole new machines, and even then you're only solving part of the problem. Regardless of the commercial packages porting everything in house is a HUGE expense for medium to large shops.
I'm all for doing the switch, don't get me wrong, but we looked into what was necessary at my last place, and decided it wasn't feasible. This was a very Unix heavy shop, mind. Most of the technical staff used Linux or Macs. We could move the admin staff and most of the creative to Macs pretty easy, but but in the end, a portion of the technical staff (that wrote code for Windows), and a portion of the creative staff (that used Windows only modeling software) couldn't be reasonably moved. That called into question the value of moving anyone since it would cost us a quite a bit, and wouldn't simplify the environment much. Taking the Macs out of the equation would have cheapened the costs considerably, but the creative staff wouldn't have been able to switch at all, and the admin staff was balky about Openoffice (reasonably so in my opinion. I use when I have too, but really prefer MS Office or even that new Apple suite).
Yes, the courts can declare you mentally incompetent. Typically you have to have broken a law for the state to involuntarily commit you to mental hospital, so I think that's a bit of a red herring. Typically when someone is declared mentally incompetent, the courts simply establish a guardian relationship where someone (usually a close family member) takes on the role of a parent to the incompetent person in an either temporary or permanent capacity. What other solution do you offer to this problem? Some people are, either through injury, illness, or birth defect made temporarily or permanently unable to make rational decisions. Do we just make all adults completely responsible for themselves regardless of mental health, brain injury, or severe mental deficiency?
I think the biggest problem with the way programming is taught in school is that everything is "Computer Science".
"The sort of useful you're talking about is concerned with places where all the interesting, hard problems have already been solved."
There's a place for that. The fact of the matter is that business needs a class of reasonably skilled code monkeys who can take someone else's algorithm, or design and write code around it. Business also needs the software engineers who can design that algorithm or design. The world also needs the guys who understands computers in and out and can push the envelope of what we think computers can do. Right now all three of those guys go to college and get computer science degrees. Which essentially try to teach them to be that last and most elite guy.
This is changing a bit. You're starting to see some level of specialization in degrees and associates degrees meant to provide low level grunt programmers and IT people, but you still see a lot of "Company looking for entry level IT monkey. CS degree required!" ads out there. The simple fact of the matter is that we're not all going to pushing the boundaries of Computer Science with every project we work on.
The vast majority of us will be solving problems that have already been solved most of the time. A lot of people are happy with that. Personally I'm glad I studied "real" computer science. I like working on new and challenging problems and situations (one of the reasons I'm not terribly happy with my current job), but I can also see where people who don't want to do cutting edge research professionally also don't see why they have to take Calculus 4 to become junior Java devs at Megacorp.
Crap. this was meant as a reply to sibling, not parent. Why can't we edit or delete our posts here again?
You are either deliberately or ignorantly misunderstanding what makes someone an adult in our society. The health care law provides parents and children the options of continuing a voluntary dependency past the age of 18. If the parents chose not to pay for a (adult) child's health care, or the (adult) child chooses not to accept the parent's health care (either because they have better or simply want to be "independent") they may do so. This may result in the (adult) child being fined when the mandatory coverage clause kicks in, but it remains the option at both the parent and the child level. The kid is an adult: their parent are not forced to cover them, and they are not forced to accept the coverage. The only one being forced into anything is the insurance company, who is simply required to keep the option open. This is more along the lines of a consumer protection law than anything to do with a legal status of adulthood.
Gambling, drinking, and credit cards are by our current laws considered privileges rather than rights, and the state retains the ability to regulate them. Again, this has nothing to do with legal adulthood. Especially in the case of alcohol and gambling, jurisdictions are often completely arbitrary in how they regulate these privileges. In some places both practices are completely banned, in others purchase or practice may only be performed at certain times, in certain locales, in certain quantities, or may be regulated based on type.
In Alabama we have dry counties, wet cities within the dry counties, wet counties, dry cities within the wet counties, we can only purchase liquor at certain stores, beer until recently could only have 6% or less of alcohol (though wine and liquor were fine) and can still not be sold in containers larger than 16 oz., and there is a heated debate as to whether bingo is "gambling" or not. Age limits are simply another way of regulating the "privileges". The federal age limit is in fact not even a directly enforceable law. It's simply tied to highway funding. Louisiana ignored until the late 90's when they finally couldn't afford to do without the funding any more. When I went to college in New Orleans from 92-96 we drank, legally, from Freshman year.
Many-if-not-most of those private non-profits are funded by government grants. Organizations like the American Cancer Society, direct donations, and similar charitable activities fund the rest, true, but without doing a LOT more research than you have there is no way to determine how much of any individual lab's budget comes from government grants vs. private charitable donations. Having worked for research institutions and having had my wife work for the American Heart Association, I can reasonably guess that the government pays for at least half of the health care research in this country. At least. Of course I'm kinda pulling numbers out of my butt too, and I doubt either of us has the time to really research the matter. At any rate, no the government doesn't *do* much research. It *pays* for research.
I think the argument that I would make (and most reasonable people who are not entirely against the whole concept of patents) is that it would be perfectly reasonable to patent the drug you developed to fight Breast Cancer based upon your discovery of this gene. Patenting the gene itself is not reasonable. I cannot patent my discovery that steam forced into a confined space can turn temperature energy into kinetic energy. I can patent the steam engine I built based on this realization. I cannot patent my discovery that these specific proteins in combination result in a Breast Cancer gene. I can patent the drug I synthesized to combat breast Cancer based on this gene's construction.
Saying that "Parents can choose to leave their kids on their Health Care plan until they are 28" is nowhere near the same as saying that kids are legal dependents of their parents until they are 28. An 18 year old is legally an adult in all ways that matter. They are not allowed to drink and gamble in some jurisdictions, but those are considered additional privileges above and beyond majority (stupid in my opinion, but legally and logically defensible). At the age of 18 you can choose to do whatever you like, though there may be consequences to those choices. If you're 18 and your parents tell you to go to rehab, you can say "no" and they can't make you. They can stop supporting you, tell you that you can longer live in their house, or cut off your health insurance, but they can't employ any sort of physical or legal force to make you go.
That is the definition of legal adulthood. You are freed of any requirement to obey your parents, they are freed of any financial responsibility for you. Now, having said that, many people, probably a large majority of people, continue to provide some level of support to their young adult children out of love and affection. Many, probably a large majority, of these young adult children chose to accept that support and continue to respect their parents advice or even obey their orders. Usually out of a combination of reciprocal love and affection and a mercenary desire to not lose the extra support. One should not confuse this voluntary symbiotic relationship with a legal status of required dependency.
The *only* people in the US who are both over 18 years of age *and* in a legally required dependent status are people that have been declared mentally incompetent in a court of law.
Wait. There's a Robotic Unicorn Attack iPhone game? Crap. There goes all my productivity, like, ever. Dammit.
They must have gone somewhere, but I don't see Ubuntu. Ubuntu is all about the ease of use, and bringing Linux to the masses. Gentoo compiled every package from source as it installed them for Gods' sake. I thought about installing it once, then thought "You know the last time you had to recompile X11 from source, it took three hours. That was years ago, when it was much smaller, and that's just one package in Gentoo." Then I downloaded whatever Red Hat or Fedora was current at the time.
Or maybe "We're really annoyingly crazy"?
No insult intended, I think that would be a really great motto personally.
A bit off topic and purely out of curiosity, what distro do you use? I recently bought a new desktop gaming rig, which removed the need for Windows on my Laptop. Since most of my work is with Linux I decided to make the laptop Linux only. Most of the office machines are Red Hat, so Fedora seemed like the easiest bet. I got everything installed and wasn't very happy with the results. No wireless (of course), touch pad acted really finicky, no Nvidia graphic drivers (again, kind of obviously). Nothing was awful, it was all stuff I'd kind of expected, and all stuff I could fix, but for some reason it all annoyed me.
I decided I'd deal with all the etcetera the next day after work. By some odd feat of chance I read the next day that Unbuntu had released 10.4. I've played with Ubuntu a few times, but never thought it was really worth the hype. It wasn't a bad distro, just nothing special that I could see. On a whim, though, I grabbed 10.4. Another reinstall wouldn't be any less fun than what awaited me in Fedoraland.
I have to say I'm pleasantly surprised. Everything works. First thing that greeted me on login was a note that the systems had installed default video drivers, but if I wanted it could grab the closed source drivers from Nvidia and set them up for me. My wireless was working (This was a shock. I used USB wireless on this laptop, never gotten around to replacing the dead internal card) so I entered the network key and clicked "yes" for the video card thing. Bam, installed. The touchpad was acting normal *and* the button to turn it off and on worked. The system informed me that my battery was failing and I should replace it (I knew this, but I'd never had an OS let me know). Then the big shock... All the media and volume touch pad buttons over the keyboard worked too. Sleep also behaves as I would expect.
All in all I was kind of shocked. Everything worked like it was supposed to instantly on boot up, or gave me an easy to use wizard to fix it (and the fix worked like it was supposed to). Like I said, I don't necessarily need this kind of dead simple setup,but I was mighty pleased to get it. This may have been the first time in my life that I put Linux on a stock laptop and it all just worked. Not to say that a distro change will fix your problems, but I'm awful glad I switched.
The "Founding Fathers" were born generations after the initial settlers of the original colonies. As a very large generalization, the settlers were religious zealots who could not get along with their countrymen. There were exceptions: Georgia was an early experiment in the sort of penal colony that Australia would later become and Virgina was largely settled because of delusions of easy money, but in general the colonies were settled by religious zealots. It's a misnomer to say that these colonies were founded for "religious freedom" too. The colonists were generally free to practice their religions back in England, but felt terribly constrained by their inability to force their beliefs upon their countrymen. Again, there are exceptions: Pennsylvania was founded for religious reasons, but with a goal of true religious freedom.
This has little to do with the events of two hundred years later when the decedents of these original settlers decided to break ties with the mother country. The men who founded the United States were chronologically separated from the original European settlers of the land that would eventually become the United States by nearly as much time as we are separated from those founders now.
I'm curious about these Theistic Evolutionists. One of the major holes I've always seen in using "Intelligent Design" as a counter to Evolutionary Theory by the Religious Right is that it's not inherently incompatible with Evolution. If the basic theory behind "Intelligent Design" is that life is to complex to have evolved randomly and therefore must have a designer, who's to say that the designer doesn't simply use Evolution as a tool to accomplish Its goals. From inside the system it would appear to us that such small tweaks and experiments were random mutation.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not suggesting that this is the case, just pondering how the two concepts are theoretically compatible.
You realize you're talking about a multi-player game right? I mean, yeah, there's a single player campaign, but buying SC2 just for the single player game is essentially wasting half your money. The same B.net servers that allow you to play the multiplayer version of the game authenticates its one time check. If you can play the game completely, you can authenticate it. Besides, your argument is a straw man. if you really wanted to play the game it would trivial to give the computer Net access for the 30 seconds required.
What are your principles exactly then? If you want Free Software, obviously Blizzard's games are not for you. They never made any pretense to that fact. Of course, if you want Free Software there are only a VERY limited number of games that are for you (Beyond the 17th free version of Majong.) If I were to make a Venn diagram of "games I want to play" (beyond killing time a few minutes here or there) and "FOSS games" the overlap would be pretty small. If you want a game with no DRM at all, again, Blizzard's games aren't for you. They have always made token anti-piracy efforts to keep the most casual pirates from simply giving away copies of their games. Again though, the number of games you *can* play is kinda slim.
If you want a sane, reasonable DRM policy, Blizzard seems to fit the bill. Their protection schemes have never been terribly onerous, and they often make the DRM go away once the game is past it's first blush of popularity. They aren't asking for much here. "Hook up to our servers once so we can verify the game." 95% of the people playing will use B.net for online games at some point anyway. Unless you plan to install SC2 on a classified government network with no possibility of hooking up to the Internet, there's practically no way this can be considered onerous.
The concept of SOME kind of check to make sure you actually paid for the game you're playing isn't going to go anywhere when the games are made by companies that want to make money. I have no objection to Blizzard making money, they've made a ton of games that I've spent *many* hours being entertained by. I therefore feel perfectly comfortable supporting their reasonable and painless approach to making sure you bought your game.
Essentially their criticism seem to boil down to:
iPad/tabletPCs don't have the first issue, but they have a similar or related issue. They're simply difficult to read for long periods of time, and often very difficult to see in natural light situations (ie, studying outside on a sunny day). Otherwise they simply use software to emulate the functions of e-book readers. So they probably share most of the other faults of the readers.
We do. We have to. It's the nature of the system. In order to ensure the hearing of all valid and useful opinions, we have to allow voice to all opinions. Even the invalid useless ones. Otherwise someone gets to decide what is invalid and useless, and we rightly don't wish to trust anyone with that job.
I will grant you that the author is not exactly a technology guru, but to say that a nuanced, detailed statement cannot have parts of it that are correct and parts that are incorrect is simply staggering. The world is not black and white. Privacy is a word with several overlapping meanings. I can make myself "private" in the short term by locking myself in a soundproof room, you might be invading my "privacy" while I sit in this room by stealing personal objects out of my desk. Similarly current technology makes it easier to be "private", by ignoring phone calls from people you don't want to talk to, or e-mails from people who don't want to correspond with, while often invading your "privacy" by say, changing your Facebook settings without telling you.
Hmm. Now you say that, I checked Dropbox's policy and I'm not clear. The way I originally read it you aren't supposed to put porn in your "public" folder (Dropbox allows you to put files in a public folder that the world can see, for stuff you want to share), but I could have misread the legalese. On the other hand, since everything in your non-public folders is private and they specifically state that they don't look at it, I don't suppose anyone could tell. Probably more like one of those "we aren't going to look, but if we find out later we'll cancel your account" situations.
Where do you people get this stuff. First of all, do you really think that national intelligences services have nothing better to do with their time than browse my (fairly mundane) porn collection? My suggestion merely provides a perfectly honest and legal way for you to bypass having some customs good pawing through your perfectly legal pictures and movies of consenting adults performing sexual acts.
In the second place Dropbox is located in the US, which means that to get access to my Dropbox a law enforcement agency will have to get a warrant. The PATRIOT act doesn't apply to stuff like Dropbox, that is considered my "personal" space and a warrant would be required. Since the contract I agreed to with them says that they won't give up my information unless legally required to, I can sue them if they give it up without a warrant. Regardless, of course, I still didn't recommend doing anything illegal.
If you're suggesting that "national intelligence" services are going to crack into Dropbox in order to browse my porn collection... Well, I admit I can't control the security at Dropbox, but I rather doubt that if the CIA really wanted my data THAT badly I'd be able to protect my personal computer any better.
Realistically, unless we're talking about storing stuff on an eternal storage device that I keep in a safe and only connect when I need the data on it, I don't see my cloud data as being any more vulnerable than any other data I own. My computer sits on the internet and is vulnerable to being cracked (not highly vulnerable, I take precautions, but vulnerable). My computer could be seized with a warrant.
What you say is somewhat true, but also varies widely between systems and methods of looking at the information. In Red Hat and Ubuntu you have to enter a password (either root's or your own, depending on the system and whether you're in sudoers) to look at the same information if you use the GUI tools. In those cases, the privileges are bound to the "exe" just like in Windows. In a stock system config, you can look at most of the bare text files as a non-privileged user on most versions of Linux, so you have a point there. Though at work we change permissions on as many of those files as we can to prevent people from looking at them. It's a stupid thing to do, but someone somewhere thinks it improves security (obviously lots of files have to be world readable for the system to function).
Macs let you look at pretty much everything by default and only ask you to enter a password to change stuff. So far as I know there's no way to change this behavior, though I've never tried so there might be.
China is a "special case" I'm not bringing any electronic media I own into China period. Porn, no porn, regardless. Maybe a completely clean laptop with an OS CD and a carefully checked "data" CD, if I absolutely must have a computer for some reason related to the travel. I admit I wasn't clear. I meant no Australian nation firewall will block popular cloud services.
When did I ever say "child porn". I just don't want customs agents inquiring about my taste in porn. You never lied and you never violated a law.
Huh. I a always thought every Tuesday was patch Tuesday. You lives, you learns; I stand corrected. Realistically I don't see how you can complain about a once a month reboot. MacOS and Linux updates include kernel updates that require reboots probably around that often.