That's a bit of an unfair comparison. I don't advocate giving the government unlimited power, merely "Power greater than you think is absolutely necessary". I can point to societies (often very wealthy societies) that were historically set up more or less the way libertarians advocate (at least from an economic standpoint); and show that the underclasses suffered greatly in those societies. You cannot, I don't think, point to a liberal, modestly socialist society in which major atrocities were perpetrated upon the people.
Libertarians advocate a completely market driven economy in which the government takes a hands off approach and provides few if any social services. I point out that such societies have existed and they created horrifying social stratification and a terrible existence for the lower classes. I advocate a government with very limited powers in the areas of personal freedom, but authority to make and enforce economic policy and provide services to those in need, and you point out that given unlimited authority governments do horrible things. It's a true fact, but it's not what has little to do with what I was suggesting
Like I said, it's difficult to say, if three large pieces of the plane crashed through three different buildings, quite a few people might have been killed. Especially if they were well populated buildings. Remember, this is New York City. Apartment buildings hold thousands of people in a very small geographic space. You're right that the velocity was critical to doing the amount of damage done, but the Towers were also VERY well built. I'm not saying it would have been worse, you're probably right that it wouldn't have, but it's certainly possible. Given the choice, I'd probably take the shot too, given the ability to do so, but once the things were over NYC any choice could have had horrible consequences.
Yeah, except the whole thing happened in like 20 minutes. Not enough time for that kine of verification. Actually, barely enough time to realize that they'd lost comms and the plane was veering off it's flight path. Also, it is intriguing to note that huge airplanes hit by missiles do not simply disintegrate into vapor. Shooting down a 747 over New York might very well have caused just as much or even more damage then letting it hit the building did. Difficult to say of course, but large chunks of 747 raining down on the city would definitely have put a damper on someone's day.
Exactly. As far as aircraft travelers are concerned, the TSA needs exactly one right. The right to cause yo to miss your flight. Even if they can't actually prevent you boarding (and I think they can, though IANAL), as long as they delay you long enough to cause you to miss your scheduled flight it's as good as the same thing. Delays caused at security are not sufficient to get a refund or rescheduled flight. Since the whole reason I (theoretically) went through the process in the first place was to get on an airplane, why would I do something to jeopardize that?
Of course tying an IP to a machine is useless , because you can't prove that I was using my machine at a given time. Especially in a dorm room. I used to let people use my computer all the time in college. Further, a moderately competent user could simply spoof a MAC address and make it look like the guy the down the hall is downloading all the music.
Yeah, cause like, I'll just chose not to have Internet because I don't like Cox's corporate polices! Never mind that I need it for my job. It's not like anyone else offers it here. I could also not have phone service or electricity. Thankfully I don't live in an area where Walmart is the only grocery store, otherwise I'd probably get hungry boycotting them. On the other hand, since I disagree with the polices of all of the oil companies I have another problem... I can't get anywhere in my car, since I can't fuel it (Plus I already gave up electricity). Boy that 3 miles to the store on my bike is gonna hurt... Well, not as bad as coming back with all the groceries...
I love you people and your "vote with your dollars" ideas. Most of the thing we need in life are provided by companies that have bad policies. I boycott the ones I can (I don't go to Walmart, ever), but in point of fact I'd have to drop out of modern society to avoid most of the worst offenders. Worse, half the time, with no paid investigators who have the power to compel evidence, you'd never even know who was doing what. Government regulation controls (or tries to control) the industries that we cannot or should not have to control ourselves. Ever read Sinclair's The Jungle about the meat packing industry before government regulation? It's a nail biter, lemme tell ya.
During the 2000 campaign Bush went so for as to say Wicca wasn't a religion "I don't think that witchcraft is a religion. I wish the military would rethink this decision."
I'm aware... I don't plan to vote for him either:-)
I remain fairly unconvinced on the economic front. I'm just not an economic Libertarian. I think a good part of the reason that government exists is to help people when they need it and make sure that the playing field between rich and poor is somewhat more level. I don't believe that our government always accomplishes this, but I think that by trying it helps at least some. While it is true that inner city schools suck, it is equally true that if there were no government funding those schools would suck worse, assuming they existed at all. Same goes for welfare, Social Security, and Medicare. Yes it gives the government more powers, but history has shown me what happens when we just leave it to charities. Don't think that fiction like Les' Miserables or Oliver Twist were created in a vacuum. People really lived like that in countries that were, at the time, the richest and most powerful in the world.
On the the other hand, I've researched Barr a bit more and like him more than I did. He's recanted all of his former anti-civil rights stances. I still don't trust him, he's done too much that scares me. I will, however, watch him for another 4 years, and might reconsider in the next election if his stripes don't change again. Even then though, I' not sure about the Libertarian Party's economic platform.
I hadn't heard that. Nice to know. Still it falls neatly within the framework of "vote or work for something that shows a contempt for personal rights, then feel bad about it later." The guy has been instrumental in chipping away at, or enshrining the lack of personal rights to do a whole slew of things, but always regrets it later.
On the other hand, doing the research to respond intelligently to these posts, as well as the post themselves has given me a bit more respect for Barr. It does seem as though he has recanted nearly all of his formerly help positions on civil liberties. I still wouldn't vote for him, but if this continued for another 4 years I might look more closely next time.
I 'm still not an economic Libertarian though, so that's a stumbling block, since it's a big part of their platform.
DoMA also says that the federal government cannot recognize same sex marriages, even if states do. That means they can never be seen by the IRS, the Social Security Administration, the federal employee health insurance and life insurance programs, or any of the numerous other federal programs that might care, as valid. That means that even if all 50 states recognize same sex marriages asvalid and legal, they'll still be a "second class" arrangement without a lot of the benefits of "real" marriages.
Bob Barr? You're worried about a nanny state so you want to vote for Bob Barr? The guy wants to control your bedroom and your religion. He led the fight for the Defense of Marriage act (he won that). He led the fight to try and get the Army's first Wiccan Distinctive Faith Group disbanded (he lost that one). He's a real "Christian Nation" kind of guy. He's was a huge supporter of the War on Drugs and opposed to medical marijuana. He's recanted that last bit, I'll admit, but his overall pattern is on of a guy who supports people's liberties only when they fit into his personal moral code.
I like some of his stances, but he has a habit of converting to a a stance in favor of rights only after he has voted to take those rights away. He regrets his PATRIOT act vote, and his medical marijuana work, but it's too late now, he already voted to put them in place. Add tot hat the fact that the Libertarians would demolish the what little control the government still exercises on Corporate America and I have to say Barr scares the Hell out me.
One person does not make a statistic. The GP admits that Apple may have alienated a small segment of the population when they made their design choice. You're in that segment. It's OK though because everyone does not need to have an iPhone. I personaly traveled for years on business and expect to do so again. I have many friends that do as well. Not "ohh, I go to a conference occasionally", "I drive from place to place repairing HPC computers, and am rarely home except at night (if I'm lucky)" kind of travel. Neither I, nor any of those people carried spare batteries. The only time I ever had a major phone issue while traveling was when the phone itself took a crap on me. On the rare occasion that my phone ran close to out of juice I either plugged it in, or put it on the car charger. I did usually have those with me.
Everybody complain about Apple "fan-bois", but most of us that post in defense of our choice to purchase apple aren't denying that the system has problems, we're just reacting to being essentially called morons. Why do so many people seem to equate "I don't personally like/want that gadget" with "People that do like/want that gadget are mouth breathing morons who must be corrected and convinced that my personal needs or feelings are valid across every single experience on Earth." You don't like an iPhones? Don't get one. I like mine, and I don't think it makes me an idiot. It does what I want, when I want, and I haven't regretted replacing my Treo once.
Well, there are lots of things about my iPhone that I like better than my old Treo. There are also a few things I don't like as much to be sure. I wish it had copy/paste, an SSH client, and the ability to tether would not go amiss. These are things I miss, but they are more that made up for or I wouldn't use the thing. (Less the lack of copy/paste) The user interface is way easier to use and I find myself fumbling around looking for stuff a lot less. The built in mail system (especially now that it handles multi-media mail) is a lot more useful, though I'll grant you that the Treo had some decent third party mail apps. I've never found one quite as nice as the iPhone Mail app. The App store is a remarkably convenient way to find applications, though that is part blessing, part curse. Manly though, is the web browser. Blazer, to be as polite as possible, sucked ASS. Opera never worked on my Treo, it loaded but would never run more than a second or two. Safari is so nice that it almost negates the lack of tethering. I use the web on my phone a lot. I used to do so on my Treo some, but on this phone I can always use it to track down a fact, find a picture someone needs to see or just while away the time at the Doctor's office.
Is the iPhone perfect? Definitely not, but it does almost every thing I want, and does it all really well. If a well thought out UI, and apps that do what they are intended to do is "image and style" then I suppose you could accuse Apple of being all image and style.
So really, like, when my friends grandfather in Ireland died he should have:
a) Left his 7 month old to fend for itself. b) Driven across the Atlantic Ocean. c) Taken a boat across and hope granddad didn't smell too bad by the time he got there. d) Flown with an infant
Hmm.. tough one. Let me think...
It's great to say people shouldn't fly with infants, but in actual practice when you have an infant people still (inconveniently IMHO) die, get married, have kids of their own, and otherwise do things that require your presence. Sometimes those people live outside of driving distance. It's a terrible inconvenience to you I realize. Now some people try to abuse their freedom to travel and bring infants on vacations and other non-essential travel, but that's what you get when you give people "rights", they think they apply all the time. Sigh.
You know. I don't have kids. I do, however, know enough people with kids and have enough younger siblings and cousins to realize that sometimes the 18 month old baby is going to cry. Sorry, gonna happen. There is absolutely nothing you can do to "discipline" a kid under about 3-4 that will not make matters worse. if you're in a restaurant or a store a responsible parent will, when this happens, take the kid outside, or even take them home. When you're on a plane there's just not much they can can do. Even a "good" or "well disciplined" child, at a very young age, is going to have temper tantrums or just be cranky (especially if they've been sitting on a airplane for 4, 5,6 or 12 hours).
I'm not saying that there aren't some shitty parents out there, but it sure as hell is ALWAYS the parents fault when the baby is crying on the airplane. The older a kid is, the more you can expect from them, but it's pretty hard to reason with someone who hasn't quite figured out that all those sounds you make actually form meanings.
(My favorite will always remain the children who, as they being removed from the store, restaurant, or whatever for misbehavior, are screaming at the top of their lungs "NO MAMA! I'LL BE GOOOOD! NOOOO!" as if this is helping their case)
If e-mail is that god-awfully important then the employer should be paying for enough redundancy to support the system. Seriously. For most small businesses that only have the budget for one geek or have a staffer that handles the e-mail server the far larger risk is that the server itself throws a hard drive or CPU, or the network dies. Besides, what are you going to do? Unless the problem is a trivial one (i.e. the Postfix Daemon died and needs a restart) chances are you'll need a physical presence on site to fix it anyway.
If e-mail is so critical to a company's function that it CANNOT go down, it should be hosted off-site by a company that is being paid to give "five nines" of reliability, or it should be a redundant system with at least two machines and two admins (or an admin and a second guy who knows enough to restart daemons or reboot the machine at a minimum). Even if the airlines allow you to use your cell, what happens if you forgot to charge it? Or you dropped it in the toilet? Or it just decides it no longer wishes you to be able to talk on it anymore and will now reboot continuously until you can return it to factory defaults (as mine did on a trip once. It was essentially a brick till I could get it back to the office and reinstall everything)? Relying completely on the ability to reach and talk to one guy is a really stupid way to run a critical service.
I was not referring to outrunning the bullet. Disarming is possible at 10-15 ft, but much easier within 5-6. The trick to a disarm at 10-15 feet is to move at angles. Most moderately trained gun wielders cannot track close range target very well. They're taught to hit stationary things or to hunt, in other words to hit something they're tracking at a distance. A person with a pistol pointed at you and trying to prevent you from hurting them will fire their first shot at where you were (it's not the bullet you're out racing, it's the person's reflexes). If you move straight to them you'll still be in their line of fire and you'll be hit, if you move obliquely you might make it out of the bullet's trajectory and get to them before they can reacquire and fire again.
Note I said "may". Much depends on the skill of the martial artist, the skill of the gun holder, and sheer blind luck. The trick to disarming an opponent is not outrun bullets (clearly impossible), it's not being where the person thinks you will be when they pull the trigger. Believe it or not, it takes most people a significant fraction of a second to realize that a) you're moving, b) that movement is threatening, and c) they need to shoot you now. This is helped by the fact that many people feel overconfident when they've got a gun on you. A friend and I did a test with this when he didn't believe me. We used a water gun. He knew more or less exactly what I was going to do, and of course got better over time at stopping me doing it, but I still managed to disarm him as often as not at close range. Add to that complete surprise, and I'd bet a decent or better martial artist can disarm a decent or better gunmen 70 or 80% of the time (I still don't like those odds to be honest though).
It is not entirely accurate to say that martial arts are ineffective against fire arms. It is entirely accurate to say that they are ineffective against fire arms at a range of greater than, say, 10-15 ft; assuming the person holding the firearm is both competent and serious about using it.
Closer than 10-15 ft, a skilled martial artist has a chance against a person with a firearm, and the closer the range the better the chance. Had the guy in the Indy movie simply charged rather than displaying his awesome sword spinning prowess, the result would have been a shorter movie most likely (Which, since it was a movie, is why he didn't)
Of course, the odds might be in favor of the martial artist at 5 ft, but a smart man is not going to risk his life on a 75-25 chance if he can avoid it. I think I could take anyone with a gun pointed at me at 5 ft or less, but there are enough variables that unless I really believe you are going to shoot me, I probably wouldn't try. If I win, you get maybe a broken arm and an fist in the face or knee in the gut... If you win I'm either dead or completely incapacitated and likely to be dead post haste.
Well, if you know all this stuff, then why in the name of all that is good and holy did you buy that HP laptop? You do it for a living!
Because I didn't buy it to run Linux. I bought it before I went to Iraq for a year. It was on clearance and the most powerful machine that I could get at a price I was willing to pay for machine that likely wouldn't last a year. I wanted something to play games on when I wasn't on shift. Amazingly it survived and when I got back I repurposed it.
Oh, and if you handed a Windows CD to your wife, would she be able to install it, and make it work?
Quite probably. She's a smart woman and tech savvy enough to understand the concept of drivers. Since the older model Broadcom wireless card probably would have worked with XP by default, she probably could have installed everything else from HPs site if she had to. Of course, it's a moot point, because HP provided Windows on the Laptop, and they provided a "quick restore" CD that would put Windows back on the Laptop (with appropriate drivers) in the event that something went wrong. Now at this point, I've said something unfair. The reason Windows is easier in this case is because it's already there, and the company provided support. The reason Linux is particularly hard is because the hardware manufacturers are not providing documentation to the community. I get this, it's not Linux's fault, I understand.
The fact remains, when you talk about "Linux for the Masses", that people are going to HAVE to install Linux for themselves (except in very rare cases) and they are most likely to want to do so on whatever hardware they have lying around. This means that until Linux can reliably be installed on whatever hardware people people have lying around, easily and with a minimum of fuss, it's not going to achieve mass acceptance. This isn't a judgment call, I'm not saying that Linux is bad. I like Linux and use it regularly.
The thesis of the the original article is "Mark Shuttleworth says he can make a useful, pretty, and integrated Linux Desktop, and he can lure people away from Apple and Microsoft by doing so." My comment to this is that until people can buy Linux desktops and laptops easily, or install Linux trivially on whatever hardware they happen to have, Mark Shuttleworth is wrong. People (not you, or me, or Bob over there, people in general) are not going to download a CD, go through an install process, realize half their hardware doesn't work, surf around until they figure out why (assuming they can do so, because if they only have one computer, and lots of people do, they may not be able to get to the Internet at all), install strange tools with arcane text commands and finally bask in the glow of accomplishment (until they realize that they can't pay their electric bill now, because the site is IE only)
And "just works" is very much in the eye of the beholder. I find Linux "Just Works". For me, Windows and OSX don't. They keep throwing up mindless obstacles, for instance.
Again, I am not, in any way, disparaging your choice of operating systems. The article is not about you. It's about Mark Shuttleworth's dream of Linux on every (or at least "a lot of") desktops. Given that most people are NOT you, and many of them fear the machine in front of them to some degree or another, Mark is sadly smoking crack in the short term.
As a side note, how do you feel OS X "gets in your way"? Personally I find it to be the best of both worlds, with easy access to a Unix tool chest combined with a generally usable GUI and versions of several useful commercial products (Office and the CS suites specifically). Not to mention a pretty active dev community producing software for niches all over the place. The development model takes a few minutes to get used to, but even then you can use the underlying Unix and an X desktop to ignore all the fancy Apple APIs. It's not the be all-end all, but it's a pretty usable OS.
Package managers are a mixed bag IMHO. On the one hand, if I want a specific Linux program 99% of the time I type "yum install $program" or "apt-get install $program" and whoo hoo! I have $program! The problem comes when I don't exactly what I want, or can't easily figure out which package contains the specific small thing I want (this can be especially tricky with libraries which are often packed into together with non-helpful package names). Then there are the things which have no packages at all, or only packages in whichever manager is inappropriate to your OS. I don't mind compiling from source, but it can be a PITA, and it tends to make the package manager unhappy.
Packages are slightly more difficult to install (though not much, you can pretty much put the apps anywhere) but I always find it easier to know exactly what I'm getting. Unless I'm using Fink, which is just a package manager anyway of course.
The point being that this whole conversation is supposed to revolve around "It just works". Personally, I got Hardy Heron working on my HP laptop. I had to do some serious internet searches and play fun games with NDISwrapper and some alpha quality sound system, but I got it working. I also install and configure Linux workstations for a living. If its possible to make something work in Linux, chances are I can make it work. If I handed that CD to my wife, and said, "hey babe, install this and make work." she'd never be able to do it.
That's the problem. Every time one of these "Linux For The Masses" articles comes out you get about 30% people who had no problem installing, 30% people with some vaguely non-standard or proprietary bit of their system that either prevented them from installing or kept the install only partially usable, and 20% people trying to explain to the second 30% that they should have read the HCL, checked the bug reports, searched the obscure forums, or generally done a bunch of stuff that the MASSES WON"T DO then it would have worked or they 'd have known it wouldn't work.
If this was an article about Linux on Dev workstations or server configuration your point would be valid. As it is you more or less admit that the system is not ready for the masses.
The tactile feedback point is a good one. I know that I ways feel the need to wait for a response when I hit the "keys" on the touch screen POS systems in retail stores, since I am never sure I touched it hard enough. The fact that a lot of these system are very slow and take several seconds to refresh their displays doesn't help.
Would someone please, please tell Cisco that serial ports are dead? Please? Gods I'm tired of the "Oh, we need to configure a Cisco device. Someone find the computer with the serial port" game. It's called USB, it's fairly well used, please develop a cable already.
(On a side note, does anyone know of a USB-serial device that actually works on OSX? I've purchased two, one actually advertised Mac support. Turned out to be OS 9 only. This was a year ago, what kind of bullshit is advertising Mac support if you're only supporting the 6 year old OS?)
This is a silly argument. You're conflating free as in beer and free an in speech. It is arguable that the iPhone is problematical for the latter, but there are a ton of the former on the App Store. Furthermore all of the apps on the App Store are relatively inexpensive. I had a Treo before my iPhone and app ran from free to over $75 for some of the "corporate" apps. Nothing on the App Store was over $15 that I saw and the sweet spot was less than $10. Much was free and several very nice apps from very large game dev firms were between $7 and $10. These are the same guys who sell DS or PsP games for $20 or $25. From an actual monetary cost perspective, this may have a net affect of reducing hand-held platform software costs.
"Rich" people who don't care about DRM (and I'm hardly rich), aren't paying much more if any at all for the hardware as they would for any other smart phone, and they are paying, if anything, less for software
Well, something is different about the CPUs, Dell have an option for a different 3.0 ghz CPU that was about $200 more per processor. I went with the cheaper one, but from what I can tell the Pro used the more expensive one.
I just did an Apples for Apples (ha) buy of an Apple Mac Pro and a Dell Workstation. There is premium, but it's not all that bad. We're building test boxes for high end graphics design and programming to see which will perform better. Spec follow:
2 Quad core 3Ghz CPUs (The Macs have Xeons, but the Dells don't. This is one the few real differences. It explains part of the price difference) 16 GB RAM Nvidia Quadro 5500 Hardware RAID with 3 300GB SAS drives.
There is approximately $1000 difference in the price. Probably $5-700 of that is the two Xeon CPUs vs non. So there's a $3-500 premium on a roughly 10K box. Not nothing, for sure, but not horrible. Having said that, I'd likely have chosen smaller drives had Apple offered them, and clearly don't think I really need Xeon CPUs. At least part of Apple's "Premium" is in refusing to let you get less than the highest end hardware in many cases.
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That's a bit of an unfair comparison. I don't advocate giving the government unlimited power, merely "Power greater than you think is absolutely necessary". I can point to societies (often very wealthy societies) that were historically set up more or less the way libertarians advocate (at least from an economic standpoint); and show that the underclasses suffered greatly in those societies. You cannot, I don't think, point to a liberal, modestly socialist society in which major atrocities were perpetrated upon the people.
Libertarians advocate a completely market driven economy in which the government takes a hands off approach and provides few if any social services. I point out that such societies have existed and they created horrifying social stratification and a terrible existence for the lower classes. I advocate a government with very limited powers in the areas of personal freedom, but authority to make and enforce economic policy and provide services to those in need, and you point out that given unlimited authority governments do horrible things. It's a true fact, but it's not what has little to do with what I was suggesting
Like I said, it's difficult to say, if three large pieces of the plane crashed through three different buildings, quite a few people might have been killed. Especially if they were well populated buildings. Remember, this is New York City. Apartment buildings hold thousands of people in a very small geographic space. You're right that the velocity was critical to doing the amount of damage done, but the Towers were also VERY well built. I'm not saying it would have been worse, you're probably right that it wouldn't have, but it's certainly possible. Given the choice, I'd probably take the shot too, given the ability to do so, but once the things were over NYC any choice could have had horrible consequences.
Yeah, except the whole thing happened in like 20 minutes. Not enough time for that kine of verification. Actually, barely enough time to realize that they'd lost comms and the plane was veering off it's flight path. Also, it is intriguing to note that huge airplanes hit by missiles do not simply disintegrate into vapor. Shooting down a 747 over New York might very well have caused just as much or even more damage then letting it hit the building did. Difficult to say of course, but large chunks of 747 raining down on the city would definitely have put a damper on someone's day.
Exactly. As far as aircraft travelers are concerned, the TSA needs exactly one right. The right to cause yo to miss your flight. Even if they can't actually prevent you boarding (and I think they can, though IANAL), as long as they delay you long enough to cause you to miss your scheduled flight it's as good as the same thing. Delays caused at security are not sufficient to get a refund or rescheduled flight. Since the whole reason I (theoretically) went through the process in the first place was to get on an airplane, why would I do something to jeopardize that?
Of course tying an IP to a machine is useless , because you can't prove that I was using my machine at a given time. Especially in a dorm room. I used to let people use my computer all the time in college. Further, a moderately competent user could simply spoof a MAC address and make it look like the guy the down the hall is downloading all the music.
Yeah, cause like, I'll just chose not to have Internet because I don't like Cox's corporate polices! Never mind that I need it for my job. It's not like anyone else offers it here. I could also not have phone service or electricity. Thankfully I don't live in an area where Walmart is the only grocery store, otherwise I'd probably get hungry boycotting them. On the other hand, since I disagree with the polices of all of the oil companies I have another problem... I can't get anywhere in my car, since I can't fuel it (Plus I already gave up electricity). Boy that 3 miles to the store on my bike is gonna hurt... Well, not as bad as coming back with all the groceries...
I love you people and your "vote with your dollars" ideas. Most of the thing we need in life are provided by companies that have bad policies. I boycott the ones I can (I don't go to Walmart, ever), but in point of fact I'd have to drop out of modern society to avoid most of the worst offenders. Worse, half the time, with no paid investigators who have the power to compel evidence, you'd never even know who was doing what. Government regulation controls (or tries to control) the industries that we cannot or should not have to control ourselves. Ever read Sinclair's The Jungle about the meat packing industry before government regulation? It's a nail biter, lemme tell ya.
During the 2000 campaign Bush went so for as to say Wicca wasn't a religion "I don't think that witchcraft is a religion. I wish the military would rethink this decision."
I'm aware... I don't plan to vote for him either :-)
I remain fairly unconvinced on the economic front. I'm just not an economic Libertarian. I think a good part of the reason that government exists is to help people when they need it and make sure that the playing field between rich and poor is somewhat more level. I don't believe that our government always accomplishes this, but I think that by trying it helps at least some. While it is true that inner city schools suck, it is equally true that if there were no government funding those schools would suck worse, assuming they existed at all. Same goes for welfare, Social Security, and Medicare. Yes it gives the government more powers, but history has shown me what happens when we just leave it to charities. Don't think that fiction like Les' Miserables or Oliver Twist were created in a vacuum. People really lived like that in countries that were, at the time, the richest and most powerful in the world.
On the the other hand, I've researched Barr a bit more and like him more than I did. He's recanted all of his former anti-civil rights stances. I still don't trust him, he's done too much that scares me. I will, however, watch him for another 4 years, and might reconsider in the next election if his stripes don't change again. Even then though, I' not sure about the Libertarian Party's economic platform.
I hadn't heard that. Nice to know. Still it falls neatly within the framework of "vote or work for something that shows a contempt for personal rights, then feel bad about it later." The guy has been instrumental in chipping away at, or enshrining the lack of personal rights to do a whole slew of things, but always regrets it later.
On the other hand, doing the research to respond intelligently to these posts, as well as the post themselves has given me a bit more respect for Barr. It does seem as though he has recanted nearly all of his formerly help positions on civil liberties. I still wouldn't vote for him, but if this continued for another 4 years I might look more closely next time.
I 'm still not an economic Libertarian though, so that's a stumbling block, since it's a big part of their platform.
DoMA also says that the federal government cannot recognize same sex marriages, even if states do. That means they can never be seen by the IRS, the Social Security Administration, the federal employee health insurance and life insurance programs, or any of the numerous other federal programs that might care, as valid. That means that even if all 50 states recognize same sex marriages asvalid and legal, they'll still be a "second class" arrangement without a lot of the benefits of "real" marriages.
Bob Barr? You're worried about a nanny state so you want to vote for Bob Barr? The guy wants to control your bedroom and your religion. He led the fight for the Defense of Marriage act (he won that). He led the fight to try and get the Army's first Wiccan Distinctive Faith Group disbanded (he lost that one). He's a real "Christian Nation" kind of guy. He's was a huge supporter of the War on Drugs and opposed to medical marijuana. He's recanted that last bit, I'll admit, but his overall pattern is on of a guy who supports people's liberties only when they fit into his personal moral code.
I like some of his stances, but he has a habit of converting to a a stance in favor of rights only after he has voted to take those rights away. He regrets his PATRIOT act vote, and his medical marijuana work, but it's too late now, he already voted to put them in place. Add tot hat the fact that the Libertarians would demolish the what little control the government still exercises on Corporate America and I have to say Barr scares the Hell out me.
One person does not make a statistic. The GP admits that Apple may have alienated a small segment of the population when they made their design choice. You're in that segment. It's OK though because everyone does not need to have an iPhone. I personaly traveled for years on business and expect to do so again. I have many friends that do as well. Not "ohh, I go to a conference occasionally", "I drive from place to place repairing HPC computers, and am rarely home except at night (if I'm lucky)" kind of travel. Neither I, nor any of those people carried spare batteries. The only time I ever had a major phone issue while traveling was when the phone itself took a crap on me. On the rare occasion that my phone ran close to out of juice I either plugged it in, or put it on the car charger. I did usually have those with me.
Everybody complain about Apple "fan-bois", but most of us that post in defense of our choice to purchase apple aren't denying that the system has problems, we're just reacting to being essentially called morons. Why do so many people seem to equate "I don't personally like/want that gadget" with "People that do like/want that gadget are mouth breathing morons who must be corrected and convinced that my personal needs or feelings are valid across every single experience on Earth." You don't like an iPhones? Don't get one. I like mine, and I don't think it makes me an idiot. It does what I want, when I want, and I haven't regretted replacing my Treo once.
Well, there are lots of things about my iPhone that I like better than my old Treo. There are also a few things I don't like as much to be sure. I wish it had copy/paste, an SSH client, and the ability to tether would not go amiss. These are things I miss, but they are more that made up for or I wouldn't use the thing. (Less the lack of copy/paste) The user interface is way easier to use and I find myself fumbling around looking for stuff a lot less. The built in mail system (especially now that it handles multi-media mail) is a lot more useful, though I'll grant you that the Treo had some decent third party mail apps. I've never found one quite as nice as the iPhone Mail app. The App store is a remarkably convenient way to find applications, though that is part blessing, part curse. Manly though, is the web browser. Blazer, to be as polite as possible, sucked ASS. Opera never worked on my Treo, it loaded but would never run more than a second or two. Safari is so nice that it almost negates the lack of tethering. I use the web on my phone a lot. I used to do so on my Treo some, but on this phone I can always use it to track down a fact, find a picture someone needs to see or just while away the time at the Doctor's office.
Is the iPhone perfect? Definitely not, but it does almost every thing I want, and does it all really well. If a well thought out UI, and apps that do what they are intended to do is "image and style" then I suppose you could accuse Apple of being all image and style.
So really, like, when my friends grandfather in Ireland died he should have:
a) Left his 7 month old to fend for itself.
b) Driven across the Atlantic Ocean.
c) Taken a boat across and hope granddad didn't smell too bad by the time he got there.
d) Flown with an infant
Hmm.. tough one. Let me think...
It's great to say people shouldn't fly with infants, but in actual practice when you have an infant people still (inconveniently IMHO) die, get married, have kids of their own, and otherwise do things that require your presence. Sometimes those people live outside of driving distance. It's a terrible inconvenience to you I realize. Now some people try to abuse their freedom to travel and bring infants on vacations and other non-essential travel, but that's what you get when you give people "rights", they think they apply all the time. Sigh.
(For the record, I do not have children)
You know. I don't have kids. I do, however, know enough people with kids and have enough younger siblings and cousins to realize that sometimes the 18 month old baby is going to cry. Sorry, gonna happen. There is absolutely nothing you can do to "discipline" a kid under about 3-4 that will not make matters worse. if you're in a restaurant or a store a responsible parent will, when this happens, take the kid outside, or even take them home. When you're on a plane there's just not much they can can do. Even a "good" or "well disciplined" child, at a very young age, is going to have temper tantrums or just be cranky (especially if they've been sitting on a airplane for 4, 5 ,6 or 12 hours).
I'm not saying that there aren't some shitty parents out there, but it sure as hell is ALWAYS the parents fault when the baby is crying on the airplane. The older a kid is, the more you can expect from them, but it's pretty hard to reason with someone who hasn't quite figured out that all those sounds you make actually form meanings.
(My favorite will always remain the children who, as they being removed from the store, restaurant, or whatever for misbehavior, are screaming at the top of their lungs "NO MAMA! I'LL BE GOOOOD! NOOOO!" as if this is helping their case)
If e-mail is that god-awfully important then the employer should be paying for enough redundancy to support the system. Seriously. For most small businesses that only have the budget for one geek or have a staffer that handles the e-mail server the far larger risk is that the server itself throws a hard drive or CPU, or the network dies. Besides, what are you going to do? Unless the problem is a trivial one (i.e. the Postfix Daemon died and needs a restart) chances are you'll need a physical presence on site to fix it anyway.
If e-mail is so critical to a company's function that it CANNOT go down, it should be hosted off-site by a company that is being paid to give "five nines" of reliability, or it should be a redundant system with at least two machines and two admins (or an admin and a second guy who knows enough to restart daemons or reboot the machine at a minimum). Even if the airlines allow you to use your cell, what happens if you forgot to charge it? Or you dropped it in the toilet? Or it just decides it no longer wishes you to be able to talk on it anymore and will now reboot continuously until you can return it to factory defaults (as mine did on a trip once. It was essentially a brick till I could get it back to the office and reinstall everything)? Relying completely on the ability to reach and talk to one guy is a really stupid way to run a critical service.
I was not referring to outrunning the bullet. Disarming is possible at 10-15 ft, but much easier within 5-6. The trick to a disarm at 10-15 feet is to move at angles. Most moderately trained gun wielders cannot track close range target very well. They're taught to hit stationary things or to hunt, in other words to hit something they're tracking at a distance. A person with a pistol pointed at you and trying to prevent you from hurting them will fire their first shot at where you were (it's not the bullet you're out racing, it's the person's reflexes). If you move straight to them you'll still be in their line of fire and you'll be hit, if you move obliquely you might make it out of the bullet's trajectory and get to them before they can reacquire and fire again.
Note I said "may". Much depends on the skill of the martial artist, the skill of the gun holder, and sheer blind luck. The trick to disarming an opponent is not outrun bullets (clearly impossible), it's not being where the person thinks you will be when they pull the trigger. Believe it or not, it takes most people a significant fraction of a second to realize that a) you're moving, b) that movement is threatening, and c) they need to shoot you now. This is helped by the fact that many people feel overconfident when they've got a gun on you. A friend and I did a test with this when he didn't believe me. We used a water gun. He knew more or less exactly what I was going to do, and of course got better over time at stopping me doing it, but I still managed to disarm him as often as not at close range. Add to that complete surprise, and I'd bet a decent or better martial artist can disarm a decent or better gunmen 70 or 80% of the time (I still don't like those odds to be honest though).
It is not entirely accurate to say that martial arts are ineffective against fire arms. It is entirely accurate to say that they are ineffective against fire arms at a range of greater than, say, 10-15 ft; assuming the person holding the firearm is both competent and serious about using it.
Closer than 10-15 ft, a skilled martial artist has a chance against a person with a firearm, and the closer the range the better the chance. Had the guy in the Indy movie simply charged rather than displaying his awesome sword spinning prowess, the result would have been a shorter movie most likely (Which, since it was a movie, is why he didn't)
Of course, the odds might be in favor of the martial artist at 5 ft, but a smart man is not going to risk his life on a 75-25 chance if he can avoid it. I think I could take anyone with a gun pointed at me at 5 ft or less, but there are enough variables that unless I really believe you are going to shoot me, I probably wouldn't try. If I win, you get maybe a broken arm and an fist in the face or knee in the gut... If you win I'm either dead or completely incapacitated and likely to be dead post haste.
Well, if you know all this stuff, then why in the name of all that is good and holy did you buy that HP laptop? You do it for a living!
Because I didn't buy it to run Linux. I bought it before I went to Iraq for a year. It was on clearance and the most powerful machine that I could get at a price I was willing to pay for machine that likely wouldn't last a year. I wanted something to play games on when I wasn't on shift. Amazingly it survived and when I got back I repurposed it.
Oh, and if you handed a Windows CD to your wife, would she be able to install it, and make it work?
Quite probably. She's a smart woman and tech savvy enough to understand the concept of drivers. Since the older model Broadcom wireless card probably would have worked with XP by default, she probably could have installed everything else from HPs site if she had to. Of course, it's a moot point, because HP provided Windows on the Laptop, and they provided a "quick restore" CD that would put Windows back on the Laptop (with appropriate drivers) in the event that something went wrong. Now at this point, I've said something unfair. The reason Windows is easier in this case is because it's already there, and the company provided support. The reason Linux is particularly hard is because the hardware manufacturers are not providing documentation to the community. I get this, it's not Linux's fault, I understand.
The fact remains, when you talk about "Linux for the Masses", that people are going to HAVE to install Linux for themselves (except in very rare cases) and they are most likely to want to do so on whatever hardware they have lying around. This means that until Linux can reliably be installed on whatever hardware people people have lying around, easily and with a minimum of fuss, it's not going to achieve mass acceptance. This isn't a judgment call, I'm not saying that Linux is bad. I like Linux and use it regularly.
The thesis of the the original article is "Mark Shuttleworth says he can make a useful, pretty, and integrated Linux Desktop, and he can lure people away from Apple and Microsoft by doing so." My comment to this is that until people can buy Linux desktops and laptops easily, or install Linux trivially on whatever hardware they happen to have, Mark Shuttleworth is wrong. People (not you, or me, or Bob over there, people in general) are not going to download a CD, go through an install process, realize half their hardware doesn't work, surf around until they figure out why (assuming they can do so, because if they only have one computer, and lots of people do, they may not be able to get to the Internet at all), install strange tools with arcane text commands and finally bask in the glow of accomplishment (until they realize that they can't pay their electric bill now, because the site is IE only)
And "just works" is very much in the eye of the beholder. I find Linux "Just Works". For me, Windows and OSX don't. They keep throwing up mindless obstacles, for instance.
Again, I am not, in any way, disparaging your choice of operating systems. The article is not about you. It's about Mark Shuttleworth's dream of Linux on every (or at least "a lot of") desktops. Given that most people are NOT you, and many of them fear the machine in front of them to some degree or another, Mark is sadly smoking crack in the short term.
As a side note, how do you feel OS X "gets in your way"? Personally I find it to be the best of both worlds, with easy access to a Unix tool chest combined with a generally usable GUI and versions of several useful commercial products (Office and the CS suites specifically). Not to mention a pretty active dev community producing software for niches all over the place. The development model takes a few minutes to get used to, but even then you can use the underlying Unix and an X desktop to ignore all the fancy Apple APIs. It's not the be all-end all, but it's a pretty usable OS.
Package managers are a mixed bag IMHO. On the one hand, if I want a specific Linux program 99% of the time I type "yum install $program" or "apt-get install $program" and whoo hoo! I have $program! The problem comes when I don't exactly what I want, or can't easily figure out which package contains the specific small thing I want (this can be especially tricky with libraries which are often packed into together with non-helpful package names). Then there are the things which have no packages at all, or only packages in whichever manager is inappropriate to your OS. I don't mind compiling from source, but it can be a PITA, and it tends to make the package manager unhappy.
Packages are slightly more difficult to install (though not much, you can pretty much put the apps anywhere) but I always find it easier to know exactly what I'm getting. Unless I'm using Fink, which is just a package manager anyway of course.
The point being that this whole conversation is supposed to revolve around "It just works". Personally, I got Hardy Heron working on my HP laptop. I had to do some serious internet searches and play fun games with NDISwrapper and some alpha quality sound system, but I got it working. I also install and configure Linux workstations for a living. If its possible to make something work in Linux, chances are I can make it work. If I handed that CD to my wife, and said, "hey babe, install this and make work." she'd never be able to do it.
That's the problem. Every time one of these "Linux For The Masses" articles comes out you get about 30% people who had no problem installing, 30% people with some vaguely non-standard or proprietary bit of their system that either prevented them from installing or kept the install only partially usable, and 20% people trying to explain to the second 30% that they should have read the HCL, checked the bug reports, searched the obscure forums, or generally done a bunch of stuff that the MASSES WON"T DO then it would have worked or they 'd have known it wouldn't work.
If this was an article about Linux on Dev workstations or server configuration your point would be valid. As it is you more or less admit that the system is not ready for the masses.
The tactile feedback point is a good one. I know that I ways feel the need to wait for a response when I hit the "keys" on the touch screen POS systems in retail stores, since I am never sure I touched it hard enough. The fact that a lot of these system are very slow and take several seconds to refresh their displays doesn't help.
Would someone please, please tell Cisco that serial ports are dead? Please? Gods I'm tired of the "Oh, we need to configure a Cisco device. Someone find the computer with the serial port" game. It's called USB, it's fairly well used, please develop a cable already.
(On a side note, does anyone know of a USB-serial device that actually works on OSX? I've purchased two, one actually advertised Mac support. Turned out to be OS 9 only. This was a year ago, what kind of bullshit is advertising Mac support if you're only supporting the 6 year old OS?)
This is a silly argument. You're conflating free as in beer and free an in speech. It is arguable that the iPhone is problematical for the latter, but there are a ton of the former on the App Store. Furthermore all of the apps on the App Store are relatively inexpensive. I had a Treo before my iPhone and app ran from free to over $75 for some of the "corporate" apps. Nothing on the App Store was over $15 that I saw and the sweet spot was less than $10. Much was free and several very nice apps from very large game dev firms were between $7 and $10. These are the same guys who sell DS or PsP games for $20 or $25. From an actual monetary cost perspective, this may have a net affect of reducing hand-held platform software costs.
"Rich" people who don't care about DRM (and I'm hardly rich), aren't paying much more if any at all for the hardware as they would for any other smart phone, and they are paying, if anything, less for software
Well, something is different about the CPUs, Dell have an option for a different 3.0 ghz CPU that was about $200 more per processor. I went with the cheaper one, but from what I can tell the Pro used the more expensive one.
I just did an Apples for Apples (ha) buy of an Apple Mac Pro and a Dell Workstation. There is premium, but it's not all that bad. We're building test boxes for high end graphics design and programming to see which will perform better. Spec follow:
2 Quad core 3Ghz CPUs (The Macs have Xeons, but the Dells don't. This is one the few real differences. It explains part of the price difference)
16 GB RAM
Nvidia Quadro 5500
Hardware RAID with 3 300GB SAS drives.
There is approximately $1000 difference in the price. Probably $5-700 of that is the two Xeon CPUs vs non. So there's a $3-500 premium on a roughly 10K box. Not nothing, for sure, but not horrible. Having said that, I'd likely have chosen smaller drives had Apple offered them, and clearly don't think I really need Xeon CPUs. At least part of Apple's "Premium" is in refusing to let you get less than the highest end hardware in many cases.