Nothing stops you from lieing, but no real security regime is going to take your word for anything, anyway. If the threat at the EPA in the Triangle is sufficient, they'll likely start x-raying hardware or banning it altogther.
The 5-second checks at your local base are intended to be a deterrent, not a foolproof net. It gives the guards enough time to match you and your vehicle to any current warnings. It also allows them, I'd suspect, to get a photo as you drive through.
Not every terrorist is bent on suicide, They're just as likely to plant a bomb in someone else's car. I've lived in places where people died because someone did just that and where, at the local embassy's recommendation, I checked under the hood and under the car with a mirror everytime I started my car.
It has nothing to do with anyone's courage. It has everything to do with selfish, spoiled Americans who would willingly risk the lives of others rather than accept the slightest inconvenience. All that I've seen here is simple whining from children who are stamping their feet because the adults need to impose a few rules.
Different countries and airlines will imposed dofferent security regimes based on their assessment of the threat t the time you fly. I've flown on domestic flights in South Africa that involved three separate checkpoints on the way to the gate (each staffed by armed military personnel with dogs). They didn't pat you down, but they searched every piece of luggage, carryon or checked. Anything with a semblance of a sharp point was removed, heavily taped to prevent use, and placed in checked luggage. Mideast airlines typically pat everyone down before allowing passengers to board, and baggage is matched to each passenger on the tarmac by the plane.
As for why they want to kill us, I don't really care. Nor do i think "understanding" them will make them change their minds. (Although some of us might change our opinions.) They're wrong. We're right. If you think they hate us because they find our culture offensive, think again. They hate us because they are medieval fanatics who don't believe in human dignity. There's no more reason to "understand' them than there was to understand Hitler. They are beyond understanding and reason; they have declared war on us and the solution is their destruction.
Almost to a person, everyone I ever spoke with in Arabic countries who launched on a venonmous tirade against America concluded the converstation by asking me to help him get a visa so he could move here. So much for finding our culture offensive. Those aren't Americans lining up at all those overseas McDonald's, you know.
...that I'm appalled at the unreasoning naivete of posters here who launch venomous diatribes because they can't take a two-inch nail clipper on board an airliner. Put it in your checked baggage, or buy one when you arrive. or trim your nails before you leave, for God's sake! Are your lives so bereft of any sense of adult civil responsibility that you see even the slightest inconvenience as a threat to all your freedoms?
Are you all so willfully isolated, so comfortable stewing in your self-imposed wanna-be geek alienation, that you are in denial, that you simply can accept the reality that there is a threat?
Are you so entrenched in your perpetual adolescence that you think freedom is only the satisfaction of your immediate individual desires? That if you can't have what you want, when you want it, that your freedom is being denied?
In other words, feel free to take chances with your freedom, just don't take chance with mine.
Rolling out citations of all the other ways people die is irrelevant and pointless. If we have the means to save lives, should we not do that? Or do you believe that the deaths of thousands on our highways justifies allowing others to die in terrorist attacks? The same logic would have us ignore cancer research because people die from heart attacks.
During World War II food, fuel and other consumables were rationed or not available at all. I can only imagine how some of you would react to not being able to put gas in your car!
Slashdot asked how 9/11 has affected us all. Well, for me, most of the responses posted here are convincing evidence that too many people equate freedom with fulfilling their own selfish interests, no matter the cost or danger to others. It's all about "me". Screw my social responsibilities.
Interesting. I used to be a fed, and was responsible for the expenditure of a modest amount of taxpayer money for IT buys. Maybe I was in the wrong place, but no one ever offered me any "extra" inducements.
Of course, we had Microsoft on all the desktops. Servers were a mix of MS on Intel and Solaris on Sun. We did use Apache on a number of servers, after we (us feds, not the contractors) set up an internal staff to support it. However, I don't recall ever building a requirements spec or an RFP that called for a specifc vendor or brand of software. So how did we end up with all that proprietary stuff? The government tends to award contracts to the familiar very b-i-g IT and defense corporations. These guys, in turn, sub-contract with other vendors. It is the subs that come in with the usual proprietary software. (If there's any serious bribery and kickbacks going on, it's in the space between the prime contractor and the subs.)
These guys were not ignorant of Linux and other open and free software. They used it on occassion, in singleton low-risk environments. But, typically, we weren't asking them to write code or build individual appllications. We didn't want to spend money paying someone to write code. We wanted our contractors to build rather large systems -- think global broadband with several hundred dispersed users -- against a backdrop of a lot of legacy stuff that had to be kept alive -- by integrating off-the-shelf software. We begrudged paying for any code needed to glue the parts together.
It would have been nice to see a "libre' software firm join in the fun, but none did. This has nothing to do with the quality of their code. But it does, I think, have a lot to do with the current state of libre software's business infrastructure and whether it's ready to play in that league.
Anyone who wants to turn a nail clipper into a weapon is going to do it before they get on the plane. And just because airport security is lax enough to allow one kind of weapon through is no excuse for laxity about other weapons.
I'm not selling anyone's freedom. I'm not arguing that U.S. airline security is good. I'm not fooled or lulled into a false sense of security by anything that's going on at U.S. airports. Airport security here is still nowhere near what it should be. (See the post directly below about El Al.)
I am, however, arguing for the freedom to fly without threat from terrorism. I have absolutely no sympathy for the original poster who whined about his dad's nail clipper. Are you people so pampered, so isolated from mainstream American reality, that you equate a ban on a small cosmetic tool as a threat to the republic?
If you are willing to die so you can carry a nail clipper onto an airplane, you're foolish beyond belief.
I define amateur and professional much as you do. I don't, though, think the world is full of open soure/free developers of the calibre of Newton and Einstein. And I do think that traditional institutions and the open source/free community have no idea how to do business with each other.
In my experience, institutions buying code really don't care that much about the quality of the code. They care that it works and that someone is available to fix it when it doesn't work. What they really do care about is cost and schedule, because individuals within that institution have a stake in that. No one has a stake in fostering code quality. There's also the bias that says "How can you be any good if no one is willing to pay you?"
Organizations don't want to search for a few equivalents of old-fashioned village craftsmen. They just want to do a deal with someone and move on.
It's the file on the clippers that's at issue. With a few minutes effort, you can turn itinto a nice little blade.
Agree that the random checks are inconvenient. And that sophisticated and suicidal terrorists may not be caught. But if it deters even one not-so-sophisticated terrorist, I'm OK with it.
Since 9/11, in U.S. airports, I've been patted down, asked to remove my shoes and belt; had my carry-on thoroughly searched. All that, and more, also happened years before in flights to, from and within other countries. In some countries, you couldn't get into a shopping mall or other public venue without having being patted down, opening anything you were carrying, and being scanned by a portable metal dectector. All done in direct response to acts of terror by someone who wasn't checked or scanned.
Now, the threat is here, too. Damn inconvenient, but so is being murdered.
That sounds pretty much like SOP in many other gov't installations before 9/11. Visitors wouldn't get in unless met and accompanied at all times by someone working in the building, and hardware was checked and tracked coming and going.
They want to make sure that anyone who enters has a legitimate reason to be there, that everyone who enters actually leaves, and that every piece of hardware that goes in with someone goes out with them.
It really isn't a matter of someone thinking a Mac users group is likely to harbor terrorists. They could pose a threat in other ways. E.g. real terrorists could kidnap and threaten a member's family unless he or she carried their laptop into the building. That's not as farfetched as it may seem; the technique has been used by terrorists in Northern Ireland.
No, they're doing it because terrorists in more than one country (e.g., FARC in Colombia, Taliban in Afghanistan) raise money by controlling the drug trade. You don't honestly think your money really goes to Jose and Maria on their family farm?
Too bad about your dad and his nail clippers. Guess both of you missed the notices banning them from airplanes. Practices like this have been common in other countries for years. They had their reasons. Now we have ours.
There are more people willing to kill you just for being born where you born than you can imagine. Even spoiled brats like you.
This appears to me to be a stack of unsubstantiated assertions combined with gratuitous insults about the skills and ethics of professional developers. In other words, the usual claims that developers who don't get paid are better than developers who do get paid.
More importantly, even if all these assertions are legitimate, how is somebody supposed to get open source developers under contract? A common thread running thorugh the open source development community seems to be that individual developers work on what interests them. Is the State of Florida supposed to trust that some amorphous cloud of open source developers will build better voting machines and continue to provide support for decades?
1. The article doesn't tell us that the software is proprietary. Nor does it tell us that most of the problems are due to the use of closed software. Anyone wondering if Slashdot is an example of journalism or just a bunch of poseurs-for-hire tossing words around need look no further.
2. So anyway, why would we expect open source to work any better?
Why is reading a book having "it all presented to them" but reading a README file is "finding out" for yourself?
README files typically present installation and usage instructions. Also typically, they're written for a peer audience, i.e., other software developers. And even more typically, they're written by people who can't write.
What I'd expect from this O'Reilly book is a balanced comparison of the tools being examined, a review of their individual strengths and weaknesses, any outside knowledge and experience the author can bring, and an assessment of the usability and support I'm likely to receive if I choose on the pacakges (and that includes the usefulness of the readme files.)
I'd also expect a decent review to tell me if the book got anywhere close to answering those questions. This review failed, because it is a thinly disguised rant against blogging.
Who would buy it? Someone who wants to know which is the best tool to use. Too bad the review didn't tell us much about that.
Blogging is about writing, it isn't about computing. Tools like Blogger, Radio and Moveable Type allow more people to use their computer and the web without needing to learn how to write code.
Most of the posts are full of ridicule about people who write blogs. The irony of that coming from Slashdot is more than sweet.
...that tells us that the author doesn't think much of blogging to begin with, that the book has too many pictures for his tastes, and that he can't fathom why anyone would want to use the three highlighted tools in the first place.
How about installing and using the tools, per the book, and telling us how if the instructions work?
And, why the gratuitous plug for the Slash book? And why the implied slur of anyone who wants a blog but doesn't need, want, or have time to wade through Slash? He might as well have said "Why would anyone not smart enough to understand Perl code even pretend their smart enough to use these tools?"
Next time, I'd like to learn about the book, not the author. This "review" is just another example of geek bias and elitism.
Nope, that doesn't make you a bad person. Just someone using a bogus argument. I'm glad there's room for your head, but what good is all that empty space behind the driver's seat?
Slashdot Mirror
Nothing stops you from lieing, but no real security regime is going to take your word for anything, anyway. If the threat at the EPA in the Triangle is sufficient, they'll likely start x-raying hardware or banning it altogther.
The 5-second checks at your local base are intended to be a deterrent, not a foolproof net. It gives the guards enough time to match you and your vehicle to any current warnings. It also allows them, I'd suspect, to get a photo as you drive through.
Not every terrorist is bent on suicide, They're just as likely to plant a bomb in someone else's car. I've lived in places where people died because someone did just that and where, at the local embassy's recommendation, I checked under the hood and under the car with a mirror everytime I started my car.
It has nothing to do with anyone's courage. It has everything to do with selfish, spoiled Americans who would willingly risk the lives of others rather than accept the slightest inconvenience. All that I've seen here is simple whining from children who are stamping their feet because the adults need to impose a few rules.
Different countries and airlines will imposed dofferent security regimes based on their assessment of the threat t the time you fly. I've flown on domestic flights in South Africa that involved three separate checkpoints on the way to the gate (each staffed by armed military personnel with dogs). They didn't pat you down, but they searched every piece of luggage, carryon or checked. Anything with a semblance of a sharp point was removed, heavily taped to prevent use, and placed in checked luggage. Mideast airlines typically pat everyone down before allowing passengers to board, and baggage is matched to each passenger on the tarmac by the plane.
As for why they want to kill us, I don't really care. Nor do i think "understanding" them will make them change their minds. (Although some of us might change our opinions.)
They're wrong. We're right. If you think they hate us because they find our culture offensive, think again. They hate us because they are medieval fanatics who don't believe in human dignity. There's no more reason to "understand' them than there was to understand Hitler. They are beyond understanding and reason; they have declared war on us and the solution is their destruction.
Almost to a person, everyone I ever spoke with in Arabic countries who launched on a venonmous tirade against America concluded the converstation by asking me to help him get a visa so he could move here. So much for finding our culture offensive. Those aren't Americans lining up at all those overseas McDonald's, you know.
...that I'm appalled at the unreasoning naivete of posters here who launch venomous diatribes because they can't take a two-inch nail clipper on board an airliner. Put it in your checked baggage, or buy one when you arrive. or trim your nails before you leave, for God's sake! Are your lives so bereft of any sense of adult civil responsibility that you see even the slightest inconvenience as a threat to all your freedoms?
Are you all so willfully isolated, so comfortable stewing in your self-imposed wanna-be geek alienation, that you are in denial, that you simply can accept the reality that there is a threat?
Are you so entrenched in your perpetual adolescence that you think freedom is only the satisfaction of your immediate individual desires? That if you can't have what you want, when you want it, that your freedom is being denied?
In other words, feel free to take chances with your freedom, just don't take chance with mine.
Rolling out citations of all the other ways people die is irrelevant and pointless. If we have the means to save lives, should we not do that? Or do you believe that the deaths of thousands on our highways justifies allowing others to die in terrorist attacks? The same logic would have us ignore cancer research because people die from heart attacks.
During World War II food, fuel and other consumables were rationed or not available at all. I can only imagine how some of you would react to not being able to put gas in your car!
Slashdot asked how 9/11 has affected us all. Well, for me, most of the responses posted here are convincing evidence that too many people equate freedom with fulfilling their own selfish interests, no matter the cost or danger to others. It's all about "me". Screw my social responsibilities.
Right?
Interesting. I used to be a fed, and was responsible for the expenditure of a modest amount of taxpayer money for IT buys. Maybe I was in the wrong place, but no one ever offered me any "extra" inducements.
Of course, we had Microsoft on all the desktops. Servers were a mix of MS on Intel and Solaris on Sun. We did use Apache on a number of servers, after we (us feds, not the contractors) set up an internal staff to support it. However, I don't recall ever building a requirements spec or an RFP that called for a specifc vendor or brand of software. So how did we end up with all that proprietary stuff? The government tends to award contracts to the familiar very b-i-g IT and defense corporations. These guys, in turn, sub-contract with other vendors. It is the subs that come in with the usual proprietary software. (If there's any serious bribery and kickbacks going on, it's in the space between the prime contractor and the subs.)
These guys were not ignorant of Linux and other open and free software. They used it on occassion, in singleton low-risk environments. But, typically, we weren't asking them to write code or build individual appllications. We didn't want to spend money paying someone to write code. We wanted our contractors to build rather large systems -- think global broadband with several hundred dispersed users -- against a backdrop of a lot of legacy stuff that had to be kept alive -- by integrating off-the-shelf software. We begrudged paying for any code needed to glue the parts together.
It would have been nice to see a "libre' software firm join in the fun, but none did. This has nothing to do with the quality of their code. But it does, I think, have a lot to do with the current state of libre software's business infrastructure and whether it's ready to play in that league.
Anyone who wants to turn a nail clipper into a weapon is going to do it before they get on the plane. And just because airport security is lax enough to allow one kind of weapon through is no excuse for laxity about other weapons.
I'm not selling anyone's freedom. I'm not arguing that U.S. airline security is good. I'm not fooled or lulled into a false sense of security by anything that's going on at U.S. airports. Airport security here is still nowhere near what it should be. (See the post directly below about El Al.)
I am, however, arguing for the freedom to fly without threat from terrorism. I have absolutely no sympathy for the original poster who whined about his dad's nail clipper. Are you people so pampered, so isolated from mainstream American reality, that you equate a ban on a small cosmetic tool as a threat to the republic?
If you are willing to die so you can carry a nail clipper onto an airplane, you're foolish beyond belief.
Irrelevant. My neighbor's house isn't an airport occupied by hundreds of thousands of strangers every year.
I define amateur and professional much as you do. I don't, though, think the world is full of open soure/free developers of the calibre of Newton and Einstein. And I do think that traditional institutions and the open source/free community have no idea how to do business with each other.
In my experience, institutions buying code really don't care that much about the quality of the code. They care that it works and that someone is available to fix it when it doesn't work. What they really do care about is cost and schedule, because individuals within that institution have a stake in that. No one has a stake in fostering code quality. There's also the bias that says "How can you be any good if no one is willing to pay you?"
Organizations don't want to search for a few equivalents of old-fashioned village craftsmen. They just want to do a deal with someone and move on.
True, but the worry is about a bomb in a laptop, not about someone breaking into an unclassified network.
That's assinine. People who break the law are responsible.
It's the file on the clippers that's at issue. With a few minutes effort, you can turn itinto a nice little blade.
Agree that the random checks are inconvenient. And that sophisticated and suicidal terrorists may not be caught. But if it deters even one not-so-sophisticated terrorist, I'm OK with it.
Since 9/11, in U.S. airports, I've been patted down, asked to remove my shoes and belt; had my carry-on thoroughly searched. All that, and more, also happened years before in flights to, from and within other countries. In some countries, you couldn't get into a shopping mall or other public venue without having being patted down, opening anything you were carrying, and being scanned by a portable metal dectector. All done in direct response to acts of terror by someone who wasn't checked or scanned.
Now, the threat is here, too. Damn inconvenient, but so is being murdered.
>> Sorry for posting w/o researching..
No need to apologize. Everyone else is posting without thinking.
That sounds pretty much like SOP in many other gov't installations before 9/11. Visitors wouldn't get in unless met and accompanied at all times by someone working in the building, and hardware was checked and tracked coming and going.
They want to make sure that anyone who enters has a legitimate reason to be there, that everyone who enters actually leaves, and that every piece of hardware that goes in with someone goes out with them.
It really isn't a matter of someone thinking a Mac users group is likely to harbor terrorists. They could pose a threat in other ways. E.g. real terrorists could kidnap and threaten a member's family unless he or she carried their laptop into the building. That's not as farfetched as it may seem; the technique has been used by terrorists in Northern Ireland.
No, they're doing it because terrorists in more than one country (e.g., FARC in Colombia, Taliban in Afghanistan) raise money by controlling the drug trade. You don't honestly think your money really goes to Jose and Maria on their family farm?
Too bad about your dad and his nail clippers. Guess both of you missed the notices banning them from airplanes. Practices like this have been common in other countries for years. They had their reasons. Now we have ours.
There are more people willing to kill you just for being born where you born than you can imagine. Even spoiled brats like you.
This appears to me to be a stack of unsubstantiated assertions combined with gratuitous insults about the skills and ethics of professional developers. In other words, the usual claims that developers who don't get paid are better than developers who do get paid.
More importantly, even if all these assertions are legitimate, how is somebody supposed to get open source developers under contract? A common thread running thorugh the open source development community seems to be that individual developers work on what interests them. Is the State of Florida supposed to trust that some amorphous cloud of open source developers will build better voting machines and continue to provide support for decades?
Agree! How about an "Ask Slashdot" that asks how Slashdot works?
1. The article doesn't tell us that the software is proprietary. Nor does it tell us that most of the problems are due to the use of closed software. Anyone wondering if Slashdot is an example of journalism or just a bunch of poseurs-for-hire tossing words around need look no further.
2. So anyway, why would we expect open source to work any better?
This book is written for non-coders. You kow, the people coders are supposed to be working for....
Why is reading a book having "it all presented to them" but reading a README file is "finding out" for yourself?
README files typically present installation and usage instructions. Also typically, they're written for a peer audience, i.e., other software developers. And even more typically, they're written by people who can't write.
What I'd expect from this O'Reilly book is a balanced comparison of the tools being examined, a review of their individual strengths and weaknesses, any outside knowledge and experience the author can bring, and an assessment of the usability and support I'm likely to receive if I choose on the pacakges (and that includes the usefulness of the readme files.)
I'd also expect a decent review to tell me if the book got anywhere close to answering those questions. This review failed, because it is a thinly disguised rant against blogging.
Who would buy it? Someone who wants to know which is the best tool to use. Too bad the review didn't tell us much about that.
Blogging is about writing, it isn't about computing. Tools like Blogger, Radio and Moveable Type allow more people to use their computer and the web without needing to learn how to write code.
Most of the posts are full of ridicule about people who write blogs. The irony of that coming from Slashdot is more than sweet.
Isn't the self-publishing the essential point of the web? Or does the geek community think "users" should stay in their place?
Let people write. No one's forcing you to click on that link.
And you come to Slashdot to ask why anyone would want to read this kind of stuff?
...that tells us that the author doesn't think much of blogging to begin with, that the book has too many pictures for his tastes, and that he can't fathom why anyone would want to use the three highlighted tools in the first place.
How about installing and using the tools, per the book, and telling us how if the instructions work?
And, why the gratuitous plug for the Slash book? And why the implied slur of anyone who wants a blog but doesn't need, want, or have time to wade through Slash? He might as well have said "Why would anyone not smart enough to understand Perl code even pretend their smart enough to use these tools?"
Next time, I'd like to learn about the book, not the author. This "review" is just another example of geek bias and elitism.
Nope, that doesn't make you a bad person. Just someone using a bogus argument. I'm glad there's room for your head, but what good is all that empty space behind the driver's seat?
I'm 6'4" and drive a VW.