As a gentooer, I'm not too concerned. This sounds like a replay of the sender-ID thing. I somehow doubt that manufacturers will gladly adopt this standard. Also, this doesn't make older USB devices stop working. I doubt it will be the end of Linux as we know it. Windows can support or not support whatever they want, it's not going to change Linux.
This is entirely different than the Sender-ID thing, namely because Microsoft has HUGE influence over the hardware vendors, whereas their mail servers are only a (comparatively) small part of the market. With Sender-ID, MS can't afford to do their own thing and break interoperability with the rest of the world, because they're not a large-enough player. With PC hardware, they can and want to do just that, because it helps to ensure they retain their monopoly.
If anything will stop them in my opinion, it's that the PC hardware vendors will hold off on implementing their DRM plans, knowing how much consumers hate them. Either that, or the first few chipsets sold with this DRM crap will fail miserably in the market, and hardware vendors will scrap it outright (much like the V-Chip crap with TV's awhile back).
To me, this sounds more like Cringely being Cringely.
If people need to reboot 12% of the time, then they are doing something wrong. It's not the OS, but more the user in my opinion. XP is a stable system, and does a good job of keeping my machines running.
Don't be so quick to condemn the users. While the 12% number seems a bit high based on my experience, I wouldn't rule it out. I've been using the same Windows XP Pro install at the office for nearly 2 years now. At the beginning of that, I could leave the machine up for weeks with no problems, but now I have to shut it down nightly if I want to be able to use it the next day. About 50% of the time MessageApp needs to be end-tasked in order for me to shut down the machine, and every now and again it goes wonky during the day and requires a reboot.
I've been using Windows since 3.0, and have spent considerable time learning how to make it stable. I don't install random crap on my system, and even the set of applications I use hasn't changed hardly at all in those 2 years. I always keep Outlook and an Explorer open, and the rest of my use is divided amongst Excel, Access, PuTTY, HomeSite, Firefox, IE, SQL Enterprise Manager, SQL Query Analyzer, and RDP sessions.
I can understand knocking home users who install loads of spyware and pick up viruses every week for the instability inherent in their systems. There are plenty of folks like me (sysadmins with at least moderately respectable skills) who also have problems though, in spite of running enterprise AV software (we use Trend Micro's) and being careful about what comes near our systems. My hardware isn't crap; my machine is a Dell Dimension series with a P4 2.4GHz and 768Megs of RAM. It's clearly not a "too few resources" problem.
Now, one more time...are you SURE that it's all user error?
A rifle can be used to take down an intruder who's invading my property. A nuke kills him, me, and 85% of the folks downwind. This is clearly not a defensive weapon. The problem I believe is the long-lasting damage nukes do to the places they're used. I would have to be pretty dumb to use one on my own property, which is all I have the right to defend.
The typical Libertarian response to any sort of weapon argument is, "who are YOU to decide whether I can own weapon X or not?" I need my nuke to protect myself against government corruption.
That's a pretty dumb argument, since you don't have the right to place that nuke on somebody else's property and detonate it. That perspective argues from the same basis as mine, though, that the only thing nukes are good for is to serve as deterrents. "Fix the government or I'll blow you up." doesn't exactly sound defensive to me.
If you don't think nukes should be allowed, then exactly how should it be defined what is allowed and what isn't? Oh, you mean, we need weapon control laws?
I should preface this by saying that I'm not a card-carrying Libertarian, nor do I drink the party kool-aid. I'm leaning in their direction though, and my thoughts and arguments are still forming (your assistance in making sure they hold water is greatly appreciated:). In my opinion, weapons which cannot be used for personal defense or the defense of one's property have no business being owned by private individuals. I'm not opposed to "weapon control laws", but I am opposed to ones which restrict my legitimate right to defend myself. I think that's where the distinction should be made.
I hope you have time to tear this argument apart, so that I might have the opportunity to refine it further.:)
If you have the right to life, that implies some measure of good health...
Um, no. You having a right to life means the government isn't allowed to kill you, and neither am I. Your rights stop precisely where mine begin, and so your theoretical "right to health care" becomes problematic because it interferes directly with my concrete right to my possessions.
You don't have the right to take away my possessions via force, and your theoretical "right to health care" doesn't give you this "right", either. Therefore, if you get sick, I don't have to pay for it. This really is common sense..
I've found that many of the wacky beliefs I once thought Libertarians held were really distortions, whose origins I won't speculate upon.
Most Libertarians I've spoken with do NOT think citizens should be able to have their own nuclear weapons, as such weapons are not defensive in nature. Rifles, pistols, even artillery or armor are generally believed to be maintainable and acceptable for private ownership, and can be used for defending one's land or property. Nuclear weapons have no such redeeming value, and are good only as a deterrent, and therefore should be confined to the professional military's purview.
My question is this:
What attempts is the Libertarian Party making to reach out to the less-extreme, or perhaps less-informed citizens in our country, to help them understand that Libertarians aren't all raving loons?
Untarring and ungzipping is a fundamental operation, but it takes something like 30 steps to understand.
Sure, but you can do pretty well by the RTFM method, and using "tar xvzf file.tar.gz" until you discover that you really want to learn what each of those letters means. By then you'll find yourself wanting to use the man pages, because it tells you about all kinds of other nifty stuff you never knew about.
I find all kinds of useful stuff in man pages all the time. Hell, they're oftentimes more useful than all the newbie-friendly documentation on the web. The difference is that each level of information is ideal for a different level of user. Start with web & HowTo docs, then move to less specific HowTo docs, then go to manpages. It's not that hard; it just takes time.
What I get out of your comment is that 'real' learning and knowledge should be constrained to private institutions where only the affluent have access.
I read his comment as stating that private institutions are where the 'real' learning and knowledge are, not that that's where they should be.
I don't see why not. I dropped out of college partway through my junior year, and started working for a Fortune 100 financial services company at which I'd interned during school breaks. I seemed to do okay with it. At the time I was 19 or 20, and was hired as a Senior Systems Analyst. (I think--I had a few different titles while I was there due to the usual reorgs)
Oh--I'm 23 now, happily employed elsewhere, and I took time off between during which I taught ballroom and latin dance fulltime. I'm probably a lucky bastard, but I'm sure I'm not the only one.;P
I understand that, thus my approval of SPF. My general, all-purpose no-frills mini-rant is about the number of networks where every host (read that, potential spambot) on the network is allowed to send smtp outgoing.
I'd be pretty pissed if my ISP all of a sudden decided to limit what ports I can use. I like the idea of everybody being peers. It allows for all sorts of creativity, and at least some semblance of equality on the Internet. Yeah, okay, so I can't move as much data from home as I can from a Tier1-peered datacenter. At least I can provide the same services, if not at the same capacity.
For ISP's to start limiting outbound SMTP is the beginning of a push to control who can publish what, and the folks who win are the ones who can afford professionally-hosted servers (Yes, I'm one of 'em:). Everybody else loses.
SPF moves the spam problem. As more domains publish SPF records, fewer spams get through. The ones that get through will be the ones who do NOT have SPF records published, or ones who publish an "all of internet" wildcard. If these folks are the only ones who are getting mail forged from their domains, they have increasing motivation to publish SPF records. If the mail is being forged from a spammer's own domain, you can blacklist and/or follow the money trail via the domain registration to find out who he is.
The whole point isn't to establish policy for who can do what, but to prevent folks from pretending to be other people. When they can no longer pretend to be somebody else, folks tend to be much more responsible.
There's a difference between knowing which IP's in your netblock are allowed to send mail, and which IP's are allowed to send mail from your domain. SPF requires you to know the latter, which is something you really ought to know if you're running a domain.
The former is much harder to know, for a zillion reasons (subnets controlled by downstream entities, legit residential mailservers, etc.).
3. Most small UPSs have a CPU that is programmed with the approximate capacity of it's battery. Using grossly different sized batteries will likely cause the UPS to freak out, or at least not use the batteries' full capacity. Don't connect deep cycle marine batteries to your UPS's guts, it won't work right. Heck, I once had a UPS go south just because I let it sit with no battery for 6 months and the CPU lost its memory.
I think there's a way around this, at least on APC UPSes. If the CPU "forgets" the battery data, or simply doesn't have it right, APC's website tells you to simply put a non-critical load on the UPS (with batts at full charge) and unplug the UPS from the wall. Wait until the UPS shuts itself off and you should be all set. Apparently the UPS will be able to determine the necessary battery data from how long the battery lasts.
I'm not sure if this info is particular to the SMART-UPS line or is common across all their products, but it was given as a solution to the "blinking battery lights when UPS load reaches moderate levels" problem I was having with my SMART-UPS 1000 (which currently needs new batts, so this Ask Slashdot is nicely timed;).
From your post it appears that what he's doing is providing a compiling service for the windows platform. He's free to charge whatever he wants for that, as long as he still makes the source available as required by the GPL. It appears he's even gone beyond the scope of the GPL by offering to replace code written by folks who don't like what he's doing.
If Red Hat, SuSE, SCO, et al can sell compiled versions of GPLed software for money (and without the express consent of each author), why can't this guy?
(note I haven't read the actual forum posts, due to slashdotting)
My sentiments exactly. My first thought upon reading this was "What the hell was he thinkin'?". In-memory this makes sense, since you're jumping all over the place and editing all over, and most other methods for working with it get cumbersome fast, but on disk? Why not go through your messy in-memory representation in order, and dump it to disk in something with some semblance of structure? Hell, you can even have two regions in your save file if you want your infinite undo to go back to the first character you typed on the first day you touched the document. Use one for a sane, ordered representation of your document, and then the other for a whole mess of undo information. You may have larger file sizes, but you minimise your risk of b0rking the document with something that's needlessly complex.
Apparently I'm not smart enough to see the value of dumping an unordered mess onto disk. Sure it probably speeds save times, but it seems to add an awful lot of complexity in the process.
You could have just mentioned that you have socialist leanings and we could have avoided this whole discussion.:)
I lean more towards the side of "natural rights" libertarianism and correspondingly feel that your argument, while descriptive of reality in countries whose leaders believe the way you do, is still founded upon misguided principles.
I'll stop now to avoid prolonging a thread which is clearly offtopic, and unlikely to end anytime soon.:)
I don't give blood anymore for this reason. I had a bad experience a few years ago with a new nurse who put the needle through the blood vessel in my arm, and into the nerve in my elbow. It took 6 months before my hand felt normal and regained full strength after that. I've read plenty of tales of folks who didn't regain full feeling after an experience like that, and don't want to take the risk of it ever happening again.
If these things can help them learn to take blood without injuring folks like me, I'm all for it. I still probably won't ever give blood again, but if this became commonplace and I was assured of a really well-trained nurse, I *might* consider it..
You are partially incorrect; not only are you not allowed to kill someone, but that "inalienable" right also means that YOU do not have the right to deny resources (if you have control over access to those resources) which that person might need to maintain their own life.
I don't follow your reasoning. I have food in my refrigerator, money in my bank accounts, warm winter clothing in my closet, and a roof over my head. People die from starvation, inability to afford various things (food, medicine), and exposure. In no way am I compelled to provide the resources I've amassed to people who don't have them (Yes, I'm deliberately ignoring all manner of social programs my tax dollars fund right now:), regardless of the happenings in their life in the absence of said resources.
I do most definitely have the right to deny resources, because they're mine. Property rights are fundamental to our society. Certain states have passed Good Samaritan laws to prevent onlookers from standing around and leaving others to die, but even in those states, I've yet to hear of someone being sued because they didn't open their doors or donate their heavy jackets to homeless persons freezing to death on the street.
Again, I feel compelled to mention that I may provide assistance to others out of a sense of compassion for my fellow man, but that most definitely does not imply he has a right to my possessions.
Come again? It's a founding principle of the United States.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
It's pedant time..
There's a difference between having an inalienable right to something, and everybody else having the obligation to help you with that something. An inalienable right is one that's not subject to forfeiture. You have an inalienable Right to Life. That means I'm not allowed to kill you. It doesn't mean I'm obliged to provide you with health care to prolong your life to the greatest extent possible.
I'll grant that compassion would compel me to help you if you get yourself into a bind, but you most certainly do NOT have a right that entitles you to health care.
Problem is, that the hijacker may not be as worried about piercing the hull of the airplane than the passengers. If you fire a shot at him, the chances are high that you'll die, too.
This is a commonly-held fallacy. I used to believe it myself. Apparently large passenger aircraft have vents a few inches across already, and the equipment that keeps the cabin pressurised is more than capable of handling the pressure loss through this outlet. A bullet hole is much smaller by comparison, and wouldn't create nearly the same kind of problems as say, opening a door.:)
Or assume he is using some little girl as a shield - you probably wouldn't want to try shooting him, either. (Remember: historically airplane hijackings were very rarely about killing everybody on board, and it should already be possible to shoot down an airplane which has been taken over.)
Yes, except that's all changed now, and everybody knows it. We can no longer afford to assume we live in a world where the plane will not be used as a giant missile. It's really too bad for the little girl, but if your choice is for a little girl hostage to die, or everybody on the plane to die (including said little girl), the right choice is obvious.
Add to that the risk of drunks in a confined space, equipped with weapons. How often do you see people get into violent arguments about nothing special, just because they are drunk?
Armed drunks aren't any more violent than unarmed drunks. Violence on airplanes doesn't seem to be too prevalent these days in spite of said "drunks".
There is also the danger of people mishandling their guns and accidentially firing a shot while pulling on their carry-on etc.
I wasn't suggesting you hand every idiot a firearm. I simply said "a weapon". Handing people a firearm who have no clue how to use it is pretty universally accepted as a bad idea.
The risk of a plane getting hijacked is so low, it doesn't justify measures which are that dangerous.
I like having the safety of knowing that if I'm having a really unlucky day and somebody tries to hijack my plane, I'm well-equipped to do something about it. If you're okay with not, that's entirely your call.:)
I agree with your thesis that airline security is a sham, but your maglite theory is a little flimsy. I'd bet cash that a hijacker who attempted to take over a plane with a blunt impact weapon would go down hard. Some guy who isn't afraid of "a couple bruises" would tackle him, and when everybody else jumped in it would be all over.
As those in the know would tell you, the most dangerous part of a knife for use in close combat is not the blade, but the handle.
You're nuts. The handle of a blade is primarily useful for less-than-lethal techniques, as a fistload or for use in targeting nerve bundles. I'm not discounting the use of a maglite, but at least one study has shown that humans are vastly more afraid of edged weapons than they are of other kinds, including blunt impact weapons and firearms. There is good reason for this, at least in the case of edged vs. blunt weapons. Firearms are just too clean and "magic" for people to be properly afraid of.
I'd contend the best solution is for everybody to be armed. Weapons are equalisers that help to compensate for size and/or numbers. If an attacker could no longer gain advantage by being armed amongst an unarmed group of passengers, and was reduced to being one person against 200, the odds of him taking over a plane go down by an awful lot.
Is it still called cybersquatting when the other companies have been using the name for *years* already? One has been using it since 1998, fer cryin' out loud.
Granted, I'd consider it a bit fishy that they only now bothered to trademark it (unless they were concerned that Google would force them to change), but they do have a legitimate claim to the name.
Slashdot Mirror
Whoops. I said "V-Chip", and meant "Clipper Chip". Sorry 'bout that.
Yes, I realise that the Clipper Chip had nothing to do with TV's. Stupid malapropisms...
As a gentooer, I'm not too concerned. This sounds like a replay of the sender-ID thing. I somehow doubt that manufacturers will gladly adopt this standard. Also, this doesn't make older USB devices stop working. I doubt it will be the end of Linux as we know it. Windows can support or not support whatever they want, it's not going to change Linux.
;)
This is entirely different than the Sender-ID thing, namely because Microsoft has HUGE influence over the hardware vendors, whereas their mail servers are only a (comparatively) small part of the market. With Sender-ID, MS can't afford to do their own thing and break interoperability with the rest of the world, because they're not a large-enough player. With PC hardware, they can and want to do just that, because it helps to ensure they retain their monopoly.
If anything will stop them in my opinion, it's that the PC hardware vendors will hold off on implementing their DRM plans, knowing how much consumers hate them. Either that, or the first few chipsets sold with this DRM crap will fail miserably in the market, and hardware vendors will scrap it outright (much like the V-Chip crap with TV's awhile back).
To me, this sounds more like Cringely being Cringely.
Well, that much I can agree with.
If people need to reboot 12% of the time, then they are doing something wrong. It's not the OS, but more the user in my opinion. XP is a stable system, and does a good job of keeping my machines running.
Don't be so quick to condemn the users. While the 12% number seems a bit high based on my experience, I wouldn't rule it out. I've been using the same Windows XP Pro install at the office for nearly 2 years now. At the beginning of that, I could leave the machine up for weeks with no problems, but now I have to shut it down nightly if I want to be able to use it the next day. About 50% of the time MessageApp needs to be end-tasked in order for me to shut down the machine, and every now and again it goes wonky during the day and requires a reboot.
I've been using Windows since 3.0, and have spent considerable time learning how to make it stable. I don't install random crap on my system, and even the set of applications I use hasn't changed hardly at all in those 2 years. I always keep Outlook and an Explorer open, and the rest of my use is divided amongst Excel, Access, PuTTY, HomeSite, Firefox, IE, SQL Enterprise Manager, SQL Query Analyzer, and RDP sessions.
I can understand knocking home users who install loads of spyware and pick up viruses every week for the instability inherent in their systems. There are plenty of folks like me (sysadmins with at least moderately respectable skills) who also have problems though, in spite of running enterprise AV software (we use Trend Micro's) and being careful about what comes near our systems. My hardware isn't crap; my machine is a Dell Dimension series with a P4 2.4GHz and 768Megs of RAM. It's clearly not a "too few resources" problem.
Now, one more time...are you SURE that it's all user error?
How is a rifle any more defensive than a nuke?
:). In my opinion, weapons which cannot be used for personal defense or the defense of one's property have no business being owned by private individuals. I'm not opposed to "weapon control laws", but I am opposed to ones which restrict my legitimate right to defend myself. I think that's where the distinction should be made.
:)
A rifle can be used to take down an intruder who's invading my property. A nuke kills him, me, and 85% of the folks downwind. This is clearly not a defensive weapon. The problem I believe is the long-lasting damage nukes do to the places they're used. I would have to be pretty dumb to use one on my own property, which is all I have the right to defend.
The typical Libertarian response to any sort of weapon argument is, "who are YOU to decide whether I can own weapon X or not?" I need my nuke to protect myself against government corruption.
That's a pretty dumb argument, since you don't have the right to place that nuke on somebody else's property and detonate it. That perspective argues from the same basis as mine, though, that the only thing nukes are good for is to serve as deterrents. "Fix the government or I'll blow you up." doesn't exactly sound defensive to me.
If you don't think nukes should be allowed, then exactly how should it be defined what is allowed and what isn't? Oh, you mean, we need weapon control laws?
I should preface this by saying that I'm not a card-carrying Libertarian, nor do I drink the party kool-aid. I'm leaning in their direction though, and my thoughts and arguments are still forming (your assistance in making sure they hold water is greatly appreciated
I hope you have time to tear this argument apart, so that I might have the opportunity to refine it further.
If you have the right to life, that implies some measure of good health...
Um, no. You having a right to life means the government isn't allowed to kill you, and neither am I. Your rights stop precisely where mine begin, and so your theoretical "right to health care" becomes problematic because it interferes directly with my concrete right to my possessions.
You don't have the right to take away my possessions via force, and your theoretical "right to health care" doesn't give you this "right", either. Therefore, if you get sick, I don't have to pay for it. This really is common sense..
I just rephrased the parent's question. Ignore that bit. I'm a moron. :)
I've found that many of the wacky beliefs I once thought Libertarians held were really distortions, whose origins I won't speculate upon.
Most Libertarians I've spoken with do NOT think citizens should be able to have their own nuclear weapons, as such weapons are not defensive in nature. Rifles, pistols, even artillery or armor are generally believed to be maintainable and acceptable for private ownership, and can be used for defending one's land or property. Nuclear weapons have no such redeeming value, and are good only as a deterrent, and therefore should be confined to the professional military's purview.
My question is this:
What attempts is the Libertarian Party making to reach out to the less-extreme, or perhaps less-informed citizens in our country, to help them understand that Libertarians aren't all raving loons?
Untarring and ungzipping is a fundamental operation, but it takes something like 30 steps to understand.
Sure, but you can do pretty well by the RTFM method, and using "tar xvzf file.tar.gz" until you discover that you really want to learn what each of those letters means. By then you'll find yourself wanting to use the man pages, because it tells you about all kinds of other nifty stuff you never knew about.
I find all kinds of useful stuff in man pages all the time. Hell, they're oftentimes more useful than all the newbie-friendly documentation on the web. The difference is that each level of information is ideal for a different level of user. Start with web & HowTo docs, then move to less specific HowTo docs, then go to manpages. It's not that hard; it just takes time.
Damn, that actually made sense.
;)
Thank you!
You don't by any chance teach math somewhere in New England, do you? I'm contemplating going back to school..
What I get out of your comment is that 'real' learning and knowledge should be constrained to private institutions where only the affluent have access.
I read his comment as stating that private institutions are where the 'real' learning and knowledge are, not that that's where they should be.
I don't see why not. I dropped out of college partway through my junior year, and started working for a Fortune 100 financial services company at which I'd interned during school breaks. I seemed to do okay with it. At the time I was 19 or 20, and was hired as a Senior Systems Analyst. (I think--I had a few different titles while I was there due to the usual reorgs)
;P
Oh--I'm 23 now, happily employed elsewhere, and I took time off between during which I taught ballroom and latin dance fulltime. I'm probably a lucky bastard, but I'm sure I'm not the only one.
I understand that, thus my approval of SPF. My general, all-purpose no-frills mini-rant is about the number of networks where every host (read that, potential spambot) on the network is allowed to send smtp outgoing.
:). Everybody else loses.
I'd be pretty pissed if my ISP all of a sudden decided to limit what ports I can use. I like the idea of everybody being peers. It allows for all sorts of creativity, and at least some semblance of equality on the Internet. Yeah, okay, so I can't move as much data from home as I can from a Tier1-peered datacenter. At least I can provide the same services, if not at the same capacity.
For ISP's to start limiting outbound SMTP is the beginning of a push to control who can publish what, and the folks who win are the ones who can afford professionally-hosted servers (Yes, I'm one of 'em
SPF moves the spam problem. As more domains publish SPF records, fewer spams get through. The ones that get through will be the ones who do NOT have SPF records published, or ones who publish an "all of internet" wildcard. If these folks are the only ones who are getting mail forged from their domains, they have increasing motivation to publish SPF records. If the mail is being forged from a spammer's own domain, you can blacklist and/or follow the money trail via the domain registration to find out who he is.
The whole point isn't to establish policy for who can do what, but to prevent folks from pretending to be other people. When they can no longer pretend to be somebody else, folks tend to be much more responsible.
There's a difference between knowing which IP's in your netblock are allowed to send mail, and which IP's are allowed to send mail from your domain. SPF requires you to know the latter, which is something you really ought to know if you're running a domain.
The former is much harder to know, for a zillion reasons (subnets controlled by downstream entities, legit residential mailservers, etc.).
3. Most small UPSs have a CPU that is programmed with the approximate capacity of it's battery. Using grossly different sized batteries will likely cause the UPS to freak out, or at least not use the batteries' full capacity. Don't connect deep cycle marine batteries to your UPS's guts, it won't work right. Heck, I once had a UPS go south just because I let it sit with no battery for 6 months and the CPU lost its memory.
;).
I think there's a way around this, at least on APC UPSes. If the CPU "forgets" the battery data, or simply doesn't have it right, APC's website tells you to simply put a non-critical load on the UPS (with batts at full charge) and unplug the UPS from the wall. Wait until the UPS shuts itself off and you should be all set. Apparently the UPS will be able to determine the necessary battery data from how long the battery lasts.
I'm not sure if this info is particular to the SMART-UPS line or is common across all their products, but it was given as a solution to the "blinking battery lights when UPS load reaches moderate levels" problem I was having with my SMART-UPS 1000 (which currently needs new batts, so this Ask Slashdot is nicely timed
From your post it appears that what he's doing is providing a compiling service for the windows platform. He's free to charge whatever he wants for that, as long as he still makes the source available as required by the GPL. It appears he's even gone beyond the scope of the GPL by offering to replace code written by folks who don't like what he's doing.
If Red Hat, SuSE, SCO, et al can sell compiled versions of GPLed software for money (and without the express consent of each author), why can't this guy?
(note I haven't read the actual forum posts, due to slashdotting)
My sentiments exactly. My first thought upon reading this was "What the hell was he thinkin'?". In-memory this makes sense, since you're jumping all over the place and editing all over, and most other methods for working with it get cumbersome fast, but on disk? Why not go through your messy in-memory representation in order, and dump it to disk in something with some semblance of structure? Hell, you can even have two regions in your save file if you want your infinite undo to go back to the first character you typed on the first day you touched the document. Use one for a sane, ordered representation of your document, and then the other for a whole mess of undo information. You may have larger file sizes, but you minimise your risk of b0rking the document with something that's needlessly complex.
Apparently I'm not smart enough to see the value of dumping an unordered mess onto disk. Sure it probably speeds save times, but it seems to add an awful lot of complexity in the process.
You could have just mentioned that you have socialist leanings and we could have avoided this whole discussion. :)
:)
I lean more towards the side of "natural rights" libertarianism and correspondingly feel that your argument, while descriptive of reality in countries whose leaders believe the way you do, is still founded upon misguided principles.
I'll stop now to avoid prolonging a thread which is clearly offtopic, and unlikely to end anytime soon.
I don't give blood anymore for this reason. I had a bad experience a few years ago with a new nurse who put the needle through the blood vessel in my arm, and into the nerve in my elbow. It took 6 months before my hand felt normal and regained full strength after that. I've read plenty of tales of folks who didn't regain full feeling after an experience like that, and don't want to take the risk of it ever happening again.
If these things can help them learn to take blood without injuring folks like me, I'm all for it. I still probably won't ever give blood again, but if this became commonplace and I was assured of a really well-trained nurse, I *might* consider it..
You are partially incorrect; not only are you not allowed to kill someone, but that "inalienable" right also means that YOU do not have the right to deny resources (if you have control over access to those resources) which that person might need to maintain their own life.
:), regardless of the happenings in their life in the absence of said resources.
I don't follow your reasoning. I have food in my refrigerator, money in my bank accounts, warm winter clothing in my closet, and a roof over my head. People die from starvation, inability to afford various things (food, medicine), and exposure. In no way am I compelled to provide the resources I've amassed to people who don't have them (Yes, I'm deliberately ignoring all manner of social programs my tax dollars fund right now
I do most definitely have the right to deny resources, because they're mine. Property rights are fundamental to our society. Certain states have passed Good Samaritan laws to prevent onlookers from standing around and leaving others to die, but even in those states, I've yet to hear of someone being sued because they didn't open their doors or donate their heavy jackets to homeless persons freezing to death on the street.
Again, I feel compelled to mention that I may provide assistance to others out of a sense of compassion for my fellow man, but that most definitely does not imply he has a right to my possessions.
Come again? It's a founding principle of the United States.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
It's pedant time..
There's a difference between having an inalienable right to something, and everybody else having the obligation to help you with that something. An inalienable right is one that's not subject to forfeiture. You have an inalienable Right to Life. That means I'm not allowed to kill you. It doesn't mean I'm obliged to provide you with health care to prolong your life to the greatest extent possible.
I'll grant that compassion would compel me to help you if you get yourself into a bind, but you most certainly do NOT have a right that entitles you to health care.
Problem is, that the hijacker may not be as worried about piercing the hull of the airplane than the passengers. If you fire a shot at him, the chances are high that you'll die, too.
:)
:)
This is a commonly-held fallacy. I used to believe it myself. Apparently large passenger aircraft have vents a few inches across already, and the equipment that keeps the cabin pressurised is more than capable of handling the pressure loss through this outlet. A bullet hole is much smaller by comparison, and wouldn't create nearly the same kind of problems as say, opening a door.
Or assume he is using some little girl as a shield - you probably wouldn't want to try shooting him, either. (Remember: historically airplane hijackings were very rarely about killing everybody on board, and it should already be possible to shoot down an airplane which has been taken over.)
Yes, except that's all changed now, and everybody knows it. We can no longer afford to assume we live in a world where the plane will not be used as a giant missile. It's really too bad for the little girl, but if your choice is for a little girl hostage to die, or everybody on the plane to die (including said little girl), the right choice is obvious.
Add to that the risk of drunks in a confined space, equipped with weapons. How often do you see people get into violent arguments about nothing special, just because they are drunk?
Armed drunks aren't any more violent than unarmed drunks. Violence on airplanes doesn't seem to be too prevalent these days in spite of said "drunks".
There is also the danger of people mishandling their guns and accidentially firing a shot while pulling on their carry-on etc.
I wasn't suggesting you hand every idiot a firearm. I simply said "a weapon". Handing people a firearm who have no clue how to use it is pretty universally accepted as a bad idea.
The risk of a plane getting hijacked is so low, it doesn't justify measures which are that dangerous.
I like having the safety of knowing that if I'm having a really unlucky day and somebody tries to hijack my plane, I'm well-equipped to do something about it. If you're okay with not, that's entirely your call.
Touche. :)
I agree with your thesis that airline security is a sham, but your maglite theory is a little flimsy. I'd bet cash that a hijacker who attempted to take over a plane with a blunt impact weapon would go down hard. Some guy who isn't afraid of "a couple bruises" would tackle him, and when everybody else jumped in it would be all over.
As those in the know would tell you, the most dangerous part of a knife for use in close combat is not the blade, but the handle.
You're nuts. The handle of a blade is primarily useful for less-than-lethal techniques, as a fistload or for use in targeting nerve bundles. I'm not discounting the use of a maglite, but at least one study has shown that humans are vastly more afraid of edged weapons than they are of other kinds, including blunt impact weapons and firearms. There is good reason for this, at least in the case of edged vs. blunt weapons. Firearms are just too clean and "magic" for people to be properly afraid of.
I'd contend the best solution is for everybody to be armed. Weapons are equalisers that help to compensate for size and/or numbers. If an attacker could no longer gain advantage by being armed amongst an unarmed group of passengers, and was reduced to being one person against 200, the odds of him taking over a plane go down by an awful lot.
someone will invent a fast way to factor large primes
;)
That would be a neat trick indeed. Perhaps you meant to say that "someone will invent a fast way to factor products of large primes"?
Is it still called cybersquatting when the other companies have been using the name for *years* already? One has been using it since 1998, fer cryin' out loud.
Granted, I'd consider it a bit fishy that they only now bothered to trademark it (unless they were concerned that Google would force them to change), but they do have a legitimate claim to the name.