I know somebody who can actually say that: every year they give up caffeine for Lent.
I'm not Catholic, but having seen this in action it makes a certain sense. If you aren't sure whether you've got hold of it, or it's got hold of you, see if you can do without for six weeks. If you can't, then you've lost control.
I try to avoid caffeine all the time. That way, when I need it, I'm reasonably confident it'll work.
Some years ago, as I recall, Microsoft was saying that "Linux is cheaper than Windows only if your time is worthless". That's far less true now than it was then, if it's even true at all any more.
But as regards OSX, the shoe is clearly on the other foot: I have and use both Mac and Windows machines on a regular basis, and Windows is only cheaper than a Mac if your time is worthless. I got my wife a Mac laptop a few years ago, and we have spent exactly zero time fussing with the OS.
Never had to hunt for a driver: anything we plugged in just worked. It's never crashed; it's never gotten infected; the Time Machine backups are fantastic and painless.
Ballmer would never admit that his "only if your time is worthless" argument applies to Windows now just as it applied to Linux 10 years ago, but that's where he is.
And at the rate things are going, with the latest Ubuntu, the "time is worthless" argument hasn't got long to live.
There are some people who got very upset about the pictures at Abu Graib -- maybe the moralists went a little too far bringing such graphic images into the public square.
If you're a pro-lifer, making people look at the results of abortion is a completely valid way of showing them what they are supporting. If you'd stop them, what's to say somebody else won't stop images of something you are opposed to, because they're graphic and it goes a little too far?
It's not that people couldn't be be stopped, it's that there's no good reason to stop.
One year, you have a party in honor of the god(s) you believe in. During the year, you come to a new faith. When it's time for the annual party, unless there is something about it that's explicitly against the teachings of your new religion, why not have it like always, but instead of honoring the god(s) you used to believe in, do it in honor of the god(s) you believe in now?
There are piles of holidays like this, all throughout the year. Lammas Day is the same day as a pre-Christian holiday in the British Isles, not because it's based on those holidays, but because the adoption of Christianity didn't change the climate of Britain.
I'm always amazed when I hear people say that Christians stole holidays from other religions -- the Christians in question were the same people who celebrated the holiday before. How do you steal a holiday from yourself?
I have a similar feeling about "could not get people to stop" -- what good reason would there BE to stop? Here we have a case where the Church leadership decided not to ban something basically harmless, which for them was a real improvement over some of their other activities.
I'm not crazy about your pejorative, but I agree that experiments should be attention-getting.
If you want something impressive, then you should get Backyard Ballistics, an entire book about stuff you can build (tennis ball mortars, potato cannons, etc).
But I'm not sure this is really what the questioner is asking about: he wants "real science", which seems to mean "ongoing science problems that are actually being researched right now", not "science demonstrations that show stuff we all already know".
Is there "open source science" that high school kids can be part of?
While people will complain about this now, and talk about switching to Comcast or whoever, what will happen next is that Comcast &c. will do the same thing, and there'll be noplace left to switch to.
Since it's unlikely there will ever be any sort of sufficient regulation of this behaviour by the government, the obvious solution is for everybody to use VOIP and run TOR. But that's unlikely too.
Well, per the website, "The holes are just the right size to squeeze the LEDs through and give a good friction fit." Maybe that line will be more appealing; I guess it depends on the lady.
There's nothing stopping them from saying "We don't support this unless it's running on our hardware", so no.
Well, but that's not all, is it? I think the built-in help system hits Apple's servers. The phone calls will go to Apple, and it costs money to have someone answer the phone, even if he just says "We won't support non-Apple hardware".
At the very least, should Apple be able to require Pystar to include a sticker or something saying that this is not supported by Apple, any service calls should go to Pystar, have the right phone numbers, and disable the connection to time.apple.com and the other built-in
"get help from Apple" features? Should Apple be able to charge Pystar five bucks for every call to the Apple support line from a Pystar customer?
I've got no beef with "I bought this software, don't you tell me what to do with it" -- but it seems to me that Apple has a good reputation, and they should be able to defend that. If you buy non-Apple-supported hardware and have trouble, Apple's reputation shouldn't suffer as a result. Among Slashdot readers, no big deal -- lots of us have Linux/BSD machines anyway.
But I've got relatives who would look at that little apple in the upper-left corner and figure it's Apple's fault if anything goes wrong.
Suppose anyone who called for support for a Pystar machine was told "You don't have an Apple computer; you were ripped off by a company called Pystar. You should return that computer and buy a genuine Apple product." It seems to me Apple would get sued if their helpline said such things -- but if Pystar damages Apple's reputation, they're supposed to take it on the chin as the cost of doing business. I'm not saying Apple is entirely in the right, but I think they do have a point: their reputation has significant monetary value, and there should be some way for them to protect it against another company.
I'm pretty sure that if you started making cars in your garage, you couldn't put Mercedes hubcaps on them and include a Mercedes owner's manual.
Does Apple have a legitimate beef that if something goes wrong they'll be expected to support it, even though it's running on who-knows-what hardware that they had no hand in designing or configuring?
No, you want Fantasia Mathematica, by Clifton Fadiman, a bunch of stories with math themes. Like the guy who wants to paint a really long drive belt -- so, to keep him busy, somebody else unlaces it, flips one side over, and relaces it. Painting just the outside of a Möbius strip turns out to be tricky.
After we read that story, my kids and I made some Möbius strips and drew on them, cut them lengthwise, and so on.
I see Obama as smarter than Bush, and more disciplined than Clinton, and capable of learning from their mistakes. Nobody should believe in the overarching morality of a politician (or anyone else, for that matter); he's not going to do things just out of the goodness of his heart or his patriotic wish that the USA be a great country.
But if he's wise enough to see that transparency helps him politically, that's good. Scandals cause trouble for an administration, and people behave better when they know someone is watching them. In this case, transparency is both good for the country and good for Obama's political career and legacy. So I believe he'll push for it.
As bad as those were, TNG Genesis is worse because it's factually stupid.
We don't know about Klingon emotional development, or about whether psychics can absorb energy from warp engines, since none of that stuff exists.
But anyone with even a vague understanding of cladistics knows that Barclay has NO genetic material for the distinctive features of a spider. (See this video on cladistics.)
The episode contained evolutionary rubbish of the worst kind. If "humans could de-evolve into spider-things" is what people think of Darwinian teaching, it's no wonder so many people are Creationists.
TNG's "Genesis" makes people who see it stupider, and that's reason enough to rank it all the way down with Voyager's "Threshhold".
Still the standard for programming language books, IMHO. I tell people to work all the way through it, from start to finish, and do every exercise until it works exactly as it should.
C isn't a perfect programming language, by any means -- no language is -- but writing lots of programs in it gives you a feel for the low-level things a computer has to do.
Forcing someone to actively practice a religion is probably illegal, but requiring someone to be knowledgeable in the religions practices even if it requires training, probably isn't[.]
"Be careful to do everything I have said to you. Do not invoke the names of other gods; do not let them be heard on your lips." (Exodus 23:13)
I have encountered people who take this very seriously; they will not say the names of the months or the days of the week. (Some old Quakers were like this too; they have "First Day School", and on old tombstones at the local Meetinghouse the dates are like "4th Month 23, 1782" -- they don't use the names of the months.)
SO, if these Scientology classes even require saying the names of deities, they have already gone over the limit of denying another person's free exercise of his religion.
Of course it's news! Here on Slashdot, the notion that there are people at Microsoft aren't morons is not merely news, for some regulars it will be positively shocking!
First, I'm not sure I agree that the universe seems perfectly tailored for life. 99.99% of the universe is empty space in which no life as we know it can survive. It seems to me that "perfectly tailored" would mean something other than "99.99% unusable".
Second, I don't know how this solves any God-related problems. The question is "Why is there anything?" The God-related answers usually hinge on the idea that, as we understand it now, the physical universe we can observe does not have within it the ability to create itself. (Hence lots of arguments about "First Cause" and such.) So, it is posited, something outside our physically observable universe must exist which is subject to different rules and created our universe (and with it, us).
So, there's a mind-bogglingly huge multiverse; fine. But why is it there? Why is any of the universes there? The one we live in doesn't seem to have been capable of creating itself, and the ones that arose in parallel with it can't have created it either, since they didn't exist at the time it didn't exist.
And third, unless you have an observation, which for the moment I'll describe as "a number and a unit of measure which can (at least in theory) be independently checked by someone else", you're not doing science. As this "theory" of multiverses proposes (infinitely?) many parallel worlds which we cannot observe in any way, it's not a science at all. It's just another religion made up by people who want to avoid using that word.
Many pieces of equipment have thermal shutoffs, so they don't overheat during general use. But the last thing you want is the radar screen to go black while you're flying and people are shooting at you, so at least some aircraft have "combat switches" which bypass the thermal shutoffs.
For me, both systems can be corrupted, but the electronic system is better because, given the same level of precaution before and after the election, the electronic system gives faster results. To cheat, you need physical access to the system, so the quickest system is safer.
It is true that a corrupt election official can change some votes no matter what system you are using. But think about the scale. If the guy who gave you the flash card rigged it slightly, that one person could in theory change millions of votes undetectably. He could have the card rigged to throw 1.5% of votes toward his preferred candidate, and then to erase the code which makes that happen. And it would affect everyone he gave a card to.
With old-style paper ballots, one person can change a bunch of ballots -- but there's no way, without electronic automation, for one person to change tens of thousands, or even millions, of ballots.
It wouldn't even have to be an election official; an individual employee of the voting machine company could do it. And there's no way that you as a voter, or election official, or anyone but an expert in computer forensics with plenty of time to access the machines would ever be able to know.
The problem with voting machines that don't have paper ballots is that they are too complicated for anyone to guarantee that they haven't been rigged, and without paper ballots there's no way they can be audited.
Yes, paper ballots can be discarded or counted dishonestly. But without automation, no single person can affect a significant percentage of the votes.
I've got a SunRay on my desk which I've used as a primary desktop for about a year. It's not perfect, but it runs X, handles audio, and I can plug a flash drive in the USB port and it just works the way it's supposed to. I've got it set to use KDE, and it actually looks and feels nearly identical to the Linux box whose screen/keyboard/mouse sit next to it. The SunRay is dead silent (it has no moving parts, not even an off switch). When I hit the power strip, it takes about 15 seconds to give me a login window on the server. I'm willing to guess that the server I'm attached to has way more power than just about anything that'll fit on a desk. (Once there were about two dozen KDEs and another dozen or so GNOME sessions up, and the system load was still under 1.)
There are user interface issues; the commands for dealing with USB flash drives are ridiculous, and the mount points aren't much better, so finding your files is annoying. And your network has to be up to moving LOTS of data back and forth in a hurry. And I've had some buggy situations where it wouldn't let me log in, but it would let someone else log in on the same box 10 seconds later. Then, after a minute or two, my login worked without complaint. (I never did track that down, but it went away after a software update.)
OTOH, our system administrator loves the things; the amount of work he spends on any one desktop is essentially zero. Backing up every individual desktop is totally not an issue. Rolling out a new version of some software happens instantly for everybody. So far as I know, none of the units has had any hardware problems of any sort (advantage to having no moving parts). Users can't trash anything but their own stuff without the Magic Password, and only a half-dozen of us know it. The power requirements for a roomful of these things are a fraction of the requirements for a roomful of standard PCs. The power-on boot time-to-login is the shortest of anything since my old Apple2, and the various OS services are always on since the main server runs 24/7.
This won't do for every situation, but it's a good tool for certain jobs. I don't see any reason why a similar setup couldn't involve Ubuntu as the main server OS.
After years of dealing with Microsoft's antics, it's easy to start seeing different solutions as competitors, because Microsoft sees everything as a fight. But there's no reason why a Linux-based solution couldn't take advantage of the benefits of thin clients.
It's not that "All men are sinners", but that all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. In the flesh we are imperfect, but that does not mean that we are continually and purposefully sinning.
"If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is
not in us." -- 1 John 1:8
The guy who says "I can be trusted with no oversight not to abuse power" is not telling the truth. The guy who says "They can be trusted with no oversight not to abuse power" is not telling the truth.
The concept of "the near occasion of sin" is to describe exactly a case where you are
not sinning just to be in that situation, but where you are likely to be tempted from there into a sin. (There's a reason that JRR Tolkien had Gandalf refuse to take the Ring.)
Giving ANYONE permission to carry out wiretaps legally without having to answer for their actions automatically puts those people into a "near occasion of sin". However honorable they may be, they are not sinless. Actively giving them such a strong temptation is unwise, and no Christian who really understands the Bible would ever do it.
Bush and his fellows TALK about the Bible, but they don't actually seem to let it affect what they DO.
"Put Christ BACK in the Oval Office" ? Doesn't the guy in there now claim to have a direct line to what God wants?
I actually believe that Bush is incredibly ignorant of basic Christian teachings, the most basic of which is "All men are sinners". If Bush really believed in his heart that all men -- including all soldiers, all FBI agents, everybody -- were sinners, he would never approve letting them have power with no oversight. Warrantless wiretaps can only be trusted to people who won't be tempted to abuse them.
Bush may SAY that he believes the Bible, but what he DOES shows that he thinks a man with a badge somehow becomes a non-sinner, and that such a man can be trusted to have power without oversight.
So far, it hasn't been McCain/Palin talking about how Bush's "cops are not sinners and won't sin" policies are unChristian. It's been Democrats complaining about the Administration's unChristian positions (although not using that language).
So, it seems to me, if you want an Administration that actually respects the teaching that all men are sinners, then you want Obama to win.
But somehow, I bet you'll find a way to rationalize away the Administration's unChristian ideas, and come up with some reason to believe that just because they SAY what you want to hear, they'll do what they ought to do.
Slashdot Mirror
Quitting is easy. I've done it loads of times.
I know somebody who can actually say that: every year they give up caffeine for Lent.
I'm not Catholic, but having seen this in action it makes a certain sense. If you aren't sure whether you've got hold of it, or it's got hold of you, see if you can do without for six weeks. If you can't, then you've lost control.
I try to avoid caffeine all the time. That way, when I need it, I'm reasonably confident it'll work.
I don't think for one second that Stephen was mocking NASA; he actually saved it from the prior leading write-in: Xenu.
But if I read The Fantastic Article correctly, "Serenity" finished in 2nd place, and so Xenu was never in the lead.
You've hit it, I think.
Some years ago, as I recall, Microsoft was saying that "Linux is cheaper than Windows only if your time is worthless". That's far less true now than it was then, if it's even true at all any more.
But as regards OSX, the shoe is clearly on the other foot: I have and use both Mac and Windows machines on a regular basis, and Windows is only cheaper than a Mac if your time is worthless. I got my wife a Mac laptop a few years ago, and we have spent exactly zero time fussing with the OS. Never had to hunt for a driver: anything we plugged in just worked. It's never crashed; it's never gotten infected; the Time Machine backups are fantastic and painless.
Ballmer would never admit that his "only if your time is worthless" argument applies to Windows now just as it applied to Linux 10 years ago, but that's where he is.
And at the rate things are going, with the latest Ubuntu, the "time is worthless" argument hasn't got long to live.
There are some people who got very upset about the pictures at Abu Graib -- maybe the moralists went a little too far bringing such graphic images into the public square.
If you're a pro-lifer, making people look at the results of abortion is a completely valid way of showing them what they are supporting. If you'd stop them, what's to say somebody else won't stop images of something you are opposed to, because they're graphic and it goes a little too far?
It's not that people couldn't be be stopped, it's that there's no good reason to stop.
One year, you have a party in honor of the god(s) you believe in. During the year, you come to a new faith. When it's time for the annual party, unless there is something about it that's explicitly against the teachings of your new religion, why not have it like always, but instead of honoring the god(s) you used to believe in, do it in honor of the god(s) you believe in now?
There are piles of holidays like this, all throughout the year. Lammas Day is the same day as a pre-Christian holiday in the British Isles, not because it's based on those holidays, but because the adoption of Christianity didn't change the climate of Britain.
I'm always amazed when I hear people say that Christians stole holidays from other religions -- the Christians in question were the same people who celebrated the holiday before. How do you steal a holiday from yourself?
I have a similar feeling about "could not get people to stop" -- what good reason would there BE to stop? Here we have a case where the Church leadership decided not to ban something basically harmless, which for them was a real improvement over some of their other activities.
I'm not crazy about your pejorative, but I agree that experiments should be attention-getting.
If you want something impressive, then you should get Backyard Ballistics, an entire book about stuff you can build (tennis ball mortars, potato cannons, etc).
But I'm not sure this is really what the questioner is asking about: he wants "real science", which seems to mean "ongoing science problems that are actually being researched right now", not "science demonstrations that show stuff we all already know".
Is there "open source science" that high school kids can be part of?
While people will complain about this now, and talk about switching to Comcast or whoever, what will happen next is that Comcast &c. will do the same thing, and there'll be noplace left to switch to.
Since it's unlikely there will ever be any sort of sufficient regulation of this behaviour by the government, the obvious solution is for everybody to use VOIP and run TOR. But that's unlikely too.
You should never talk to the police, their only interest is incriminating you in a crime, not the other way around.
There's a video on exactly that point.
Just look at the Apple Product Cycle page.
Well, per the website, "The holes are just the right size to squeeze the LEDs through and give a good friction fit." Maybe that line will be more appealing; I guess it depends on the lady.
There's nothing stopping them from saying "We don't support this unless it's running on our hardware", so no.
Well, but that's not all, is it? I think the built-in help system hits Apple's servers. The phone calls will go to Apple, and it costs money to have someone answer the phone, even if he just says "We won't support non-Apple hardware".
At the very least, should Apple be able to require Pystar to include a sticker or something saying that this is not supported by Apple, any service calls should go to Pystar, have the right phone numbers, and disable the connection to time.apple.com and the other built-in "get help from Apple" features? Should Apple be able to charge Pystar five bucks for every call to the Apple support line from a Pystar customer?
I've got no beef with "I bought this software, don't you tell me what to do with it" -- but it seems to me that Apple has a good reputation, and they should be able to defend that. If you buy non-Apple-supported hardware and have trouble, Apple's reputation shouldn't suffer as a result. Among Slashdot readers, no big deal -- lots of us have Linux/BSD machines anyway. But I've got relatives who would look at that little apple in the upper-left corner and figure it's Apple's fault if anything goes wrong.
Suppose anyone who called for support for a Pystar machine was told "You don't have an Apple computer; you were ripped off by a company called Pystar. You should return that computer and buy a genuine Apple product." It seems to me Apple would get sued if their helpline said such things -- but if Pystar damages Apple's reputation, they're supposed to take it on the chin as the cost of doing business. I'm not saying Apple is entirely in the right, but I think they do have a point: their reputation has significant monetary value, and there should be some way for them to protect it against another company.
I'm pretty sure that if you started making cars in your garage, you couldn't put Mercedes hubcaps on them and include a Mercedes owner's manual.
Does Apple have a legitimate beef that if something goes wrong they'll be expected to support it, even though it's running on who-knows-what hardware that they had no hand in designing or configuring?
No, you want Fantasia Mathematica, by Clifton Fadiman, a bunch of stories with math themes. Like the guy who wants to paint a really long drive belt -- so, to keep him busy, somebody else unlaces it, flips one side over, and relaces it. Painting just the outside of a Möbius strip turns out to be tricky.
After we read that story, my kids and I made some Möbius strips and drew on them, cut them lengthwise, and so on.
I see Obama as smarter than Bush, and more disciplined than Clinton, and capable of learning from their mistakes. Nobody should believe in the overarching morality of a politician (or anyone else, for that matter); he's not going to do things just out of the goodness of his heart or his patriotic wish that the USA be a great country.
But if he's wise enough to see that transparency helps him politically, that's good. Scandals cause trouble for an administration, and people behave better when they know someone is watching them. In this case, transparency is both good for the country and good for Obama's political career and legacy. So I believe he'll push for it.
As bad as those were, TNG Genesis is worse because it's factually stupid.
We don't know about Klingon emotional development, or about whether psychics can absorb energy from warp engines, since none of that stuff exists.
But anyone with even a vague understanding of cladistics knows that Barclay has NO genetic material for the distinctive features of a spider. (See this video on cladistics.)
The episode contained evolutionary rubbish of the worst kind. If "humans could de-evolve into spider-things" is what people think of Darwinian teaching, it's no wonder so many people are Creationists.
TNG's "Genesis" makes people who see it stupider, and that's reason enough to rank it all the way down with Voyager's "Threshhold".
Still the standard for programming language books, IMHO. I tell people to work all the way through it, from start to finish, and do every exercise until it works exactly as it should.
C isn't a perfect programming language, by any means -- no language is -- but writing lots of programs in it gives you a feel for the low-level things a computer has to do.
Forcing someone to actively practice a religion is probably illegal, but requiring someone to be knowledgeable in the religions practices even if it requires training, probably isn't[.]
"Be careful to do everything I have said to you. Do not invoke the names of other gods; do not let them be heard on your lips." (Exodus 23:13)
I have encountered people who take this very seriously; they will not say the names of the months or the days of the week. (Some old Quakers were like this too; they have "First Day School", and on old tombstones at the local Meetinghouse the dates are like "4th Month 23, 1782" -- they don't use the names of the months.)
SO, if these Scientology classes even require saying the names of deities, they have already gone over the limit of denying another person's free exercise of his religion.
Well, don't feel too stupid. The guys at Yahoo misspelled "American" in their title, leaving out the "c".
Of course it's news! Here on Slashdot, the notion that there are people at Microsoft aren't morons is not merely news, for some regulars it will be positively shocking!
First, I'm not sure I agree that the universe seems perfectly tailored for life. 99.99% of the universe is empty space in which no life as we know it can survive. It seems to me that "perfectly tailored" would mean something other than "99.99% unusable".
Second, I don't know how this solves any God-related problems. The question is "Why is there anything?" The God-related answers usually hinge on the idea that, as we understand it now, the physical universe we can observe does not have within it the ability to create itself. (Hence lots of arguments about "First Cause" and such.) So, it is posited, something outside our physically observable universe must exist which is subject to different rules and created our universe (and with it, us).
So, there's a mind-bogglingly huge multiverse; fine. But why is it there? Why is any of the universes there? The one we live in doesn't seem to have been capable of creating itself, and the ones that arose in parallel with it can't have created it either, since they didn't exist at the time it didn't exist.
And third, unless you have an observation, which for the moment I'll describe as "a number and a unit of measure which can (at least in theory) be independently checked by someone else", you're not doing science. As this "theory" of multiverses proposes (infinitely?) many parallel worlds which we cannot observe in any way, it's not a science at all. It's just another religion made up by people who want to avoid using that word.
Many pieces of equipment have thermal shutoffs, so they don't overheat during general use. But the last thing you want is the radar screen to go black while you're flying and people are shooting at you, so at least some aircraft have "combat switches" which bypass the thermal shutoffs.
For me, both systems can be corrupted, but the electronic system is better because, given the same level of precaution before and after the election, the electronic system gives faster results. To cheat, you need physical access to the system, so the quickest system is safer.
It is true that a corrupt election official can change some votes no matter what system you are using. But think about the scale. If the guy who gave you the flash card rigged it slightly, that one person could in theory change millions of votes undetectably. He could have the card rigged to throw 1.5% of votes toward his preferred candidate, and then to erase the code which makes that happen. And it would affect everyone he gave a card to.
With old-style paper ballots, one person can change a bunch of ballots -- but there's no way, without electronic automation, for one person to change tens of thousands, or even millions, of ballots.
It wouldn't even have to be an election official; an individual employee of the voting machine company could do it. And there's no way that you as a voter, or election official, or anyone but an expert in computer forensics with plenty of time to access the machines would ever be able to know.
The problem with voting machines that don't have paper ballots is that they are too complicated for anyone to guarantee that they haven't been rigged, and without paper ballots there's no way they can be audited.
Yes, paper ballots can be discarded or counted dishonestly. But without automation, no single person can affect a significant percentage of the votes.
What makes you think it's necessarily either/or?
I've got a SunRay on my desk which I've used as a primary desktop for about a year. It's not perfect, but it runs X, handles audio, and I can plug a flash drive in the USB port and it just works the way it's supposed to. I've got it set to use KDE, and it actually looks and feels nearly identical to the Linux box whose screen/keyboard/mouse sit next to it. The SunRay is dead silent (it has no moving parts, not even an off switch). When I hit the power strip, it takes about 15 seconds to give me a login window on the server. I'm willing to guess that the server I'm attached to has way more power than just about anything that'll fit on a desk. (Once there were about two dozen KDEs and another dozen or so GNOME sessions up, and the system load was still under 1.)
There are user interface issues; the commands for dealing with USB flash drives are ridiculous, and the mount points aren't much better, so finding your files is annoying. And your network has to be up to moving LOTS of data back and forth in a hurry. And I've had some buggy situations where it wouldn't let me log in, but it would let someone else log in on the same box 10 seconds later. Then, after a minute or two, my login worked without complaint. (I never did track that down, but it went away after a software update.)
OTOH, our system administrator loves the things; the amount of work he spends on any one desktop is essentially zero. Backing up every individual desktop is totally not an issue. Rolling out a new version of some software happens instantly for everybody. So far as I know, none of the units has had any hardware problems of any sort (advantage to having no moving parts). Users can't trash anything but their own stuff without the Magic Password, and only a half-dozen of us know it. The power requirements for a roomful of these things are a fraction of the requirements for a roomful of standard PCs. The power-on boot time-to-login is the shortest of anything since my old Apple2, and the various OS services are always on since the main server runs 24/7.
This won't do for every situation, but it's a good tool for certain jobs. I don't see any reason why a similar setup couldn't involve Ubuntu as the main server OS.
After years of dealing with Microsoft's antics, it's easy to start seeing different solutions as competitors, because Microsoft sees everything as a fight. But there's no reason why a Linux-based solution couldn't take advantage of the benefits of thin clients.
It's not that "All men are sinners", but that all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. In the flesh we are imperfect, but that does not mean that we are continually and purposefully sinning.
The guy who says "I can be trusted with no oversight not to abuse power" is not telling the truth. The guy who says "They can be trusted with no oversight not to abuse power" is not telling the truth.
The concept of "the near occasion of sin" is to describe exactly a case where you are not sinning just to be in that situation, but where you are likely to be tempted from there into a sin. (There's a reason that JRR Tolkien had Gandalf refuse to take the Ring.)
Giving ANYONE permission to carry out wiretaps legally without having to answer for their actions automatically puts those people into a "near occasion of sin". However honorable they may be, they are not sinless. Actively giving them such a strong temptation is unwise, and no Christian who really understands the Bible would ever do it.
Bush and his fellows TALK about the Bible, but they don't actually seem to let it affect what they DO.
"Put Christ BACK in the Oval Office" ? Doesn't the guy in there now claim to have a direct line to what God wants?
I actually believe that Bush is incredibly ignorant of basic Christian teachings, the most basic of which is "All men are sinners". If Bush really believed in his heart that all men -- including all soldiers, all FBI agents, everybody -- were sinners, he would never approve letting them have power with no oversight. Warrantless wiretaps can only be trusted to people who won't be tempted to abuse them.
Bush may SAY that he believes the Bible, but what he DOES shows that he thinks a man with a badge somehow becomes a non-sinner, and that such a man can be trusted to have power without oversight.
So far, it hasn't been McCain/Palin talking about how Bush's "cops are not sinners and won't sin" policies are unChristian. It's been Democrats complaining about the Administration's unChristian positions (although not using that language).
So, it seems to me, if you want an Administration that actually respects the teaching that all men are sinners, then you want Obama to win.
But somehow, I bet you'll find a way to rationalize away the Administration's unChristian ideas, and come up with some reason to believe that just because they SAY what you want to hear, they'll do what they ought to do.