I estimated that from my own experience in Pakistan. A small fraction of the population can afford the computer, and I assure you, they cannot afford Microsoft tax.
Microsoft has such a strong monopoly in the west, breaking ground is hard enough here. So the easy solution seems to be just hook the Chinese and Indians onto Linux and the enormous software base that will result will put Microsoft at a severe disadvantage. It doesnt help either than the average cost of Windows XP is a month's salary of the average person with a computer there. Microsoft can use huge discounts, but they cannot beat the 100% discount Linux/BSD offers.
I tried searching some info on the web about Chimeras but apart from the same definitions, theres nothing.
I'm curious, are there any obvious signs a person is heavily a chimera as in Downs Syndrome or Autism? What are the DNA percentages.... I suspect theyre around 1% outside DNA for bone marrows and the like, is there a chimera person with more than 30% outside DNA? Is there someone with chimera in his brain and what are the syndromes?
Lastly, has there ever been siamese twins who are not identical... ie 50% chimera?
I custom-compile all kernels for the FreeBSD servers and remove everything I dont need, not even as 'option'. I also delete the old modules lying around. I like em lean.
Yeah thats not all that impressive. It must still be exciting to be standing in Ireland and see the plane arriving from Canada. High GPS tolerance devices could be used as the planes can be controlled from over 5 miles. Now I wanna build one.
I wouldnt worry about ibcs, always compile a kernel without it(and other binary compatibilities) for real usage. The statfs problem looks real and worrisome though. We've seen too many of similar problems where a user grabs large memory and reads the sensitive data.
I wonder if a C-reading script could read all the source code and mark all the big mallocs/reallocs that users get access to.
Landing most impressive
on
TAM 5 Has landed
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I believe the landing part was the most impressive of feats whether it was automated by GPS or some smart sensors on the plane and runway brought it down smoothly. I'd like to know more on that.
The second most impressive part is maintaining a constant flight. The general altitude direction are set by a GPS sensor but constantly monitoring the devices, compensating for the temperature and winds, and sending the data back through satellite would be pretty complex. I'd like to know more about the on-board computers and the satellite uplink (and how much that cost).
You can slap a 32-bit MCU with enough ram, flash and maybe a geforcefx go or ATI embedded chip to create a high performance handheld game device, and with some community effort even a simple software SDK for it.
The real problem is standardizing ROMs so game companies could develop and sell for such a platform. It would be interesting if the free software community develops a handheld game ROM standard that runs on many manufacturers' handhelds. Any geek could select his chips (ati/nvidia/fujitsu) and his flash and ram, and plug in the CF game card and start playing. A new cottage industry would be born. How hard the larger companies would work to block this.
Something like this is too obvious to take any space on slashdot. We all know Microsoft wants to defame Linux with any 'report' they try to pull.
The reason why its not worthy of mention is because theres a whole slew of embedded manufacturers using Linux or trying to use Linux and not Windows CE. We know how many arches CE runs on and how reliably. We've seen the evaluation packs of ARM7TDMI and ARM720T based chips that allow the running of Linux and companies like QT bringing packages for development on Linux.
In this regard alone, Linux is the monopolist and Microsoft the underdog. If they get a little reactive it surprises noone and neither do them lying. Most of the comments for this post will be of the sarcastic 'no kidding!' kind.
why America would want to kill people is beyond me
Hey youre not alone. Its beyond me too, even beyond the marine ordered to shoot at protesting Iraqis or pilot-on-speed ordered to bomb a village in Afghanistan. Its beyond most Americans how in the world did W get elected and why did the US head for Iraq while Osama has not yet been found.
With many harddisks at 2.5" for laptops, I think it should be easy to produce RAIDed harddisks in the same package to connect to one IDE cable and power supply and fit in a 3.5" or 5.25" drive bay. Each smaller drive could also be disconnected and used seperately in case the RAID chipset is bad. Such a complex drive will sell well given the importance of data at many places. For many servers that I run, I would prefer to pay twice for such a reliable setup.
I tried the same thing with 15GB Maxtor harddrives some time ago. Didnt really seem to work. Model numbers were the same but I suppose theres more variety. I lost precious photos and email archives.
Now we have the a/b/g and maybe the x standard, and possibly more to come, them all being close in speed and performance to each other. Why arent they all rolled into one single spec which accomodates 5.4GHz, 2.6Ghz 11Ghz and more rather than making seperate specs and causing trouble to the manufacturers, users and buyers?
Youve used the UN version of the word. Ive used the literal. I have also been referring to the continued use of the word 'terrorist' by the North American media as if the person is a seperate species entirely.
Youre points are still interesting and informed.
Intimidation is not in and of itself terrorism
Organizations intimidate civilians for various purposes. This is most likely to subjugate the population or drive them out in an exhodus such as the intimidation of Chinese in Indonesia. Intimidation to subjugate has been used in Pakistan by the Sippah e Sahaba on Shias to impose their control. They are both examples of 'terrorizing' in the literal sense. I'm not sure but they might also be terrorizing in the Geneva Conventions definition.
The US campaigns you mentioned were overwhelmingly aimed at enemy combattants
I'm pretty sure of disagreements of facts now. I can point out the enormous 'increase' of 'mistakes' of bombing in Afghanistan in which Pashtun civilians in the south were killed. Same pretty much seems to be true of the Tikrit region in Iraq these days, although I'm not as sure of that as in Afghanistan. The USSR's fear tactics in Afghanistan are well documented about pouring chemicals in hiding places, summary executions of all males in many villages and other 'terrorizing' ways.
little used deliberately against civillians
You are admitting here terrorism was carried out. I'm not as informed about Iraq as an Iraqi but I assure you the Soviet terrorism against civilians was not 'little'. We're talking about hundereds of thousands (conservative numbers) of civilians directly killed.
You're drawing lines where there are none. Al Qaeda's express aim is to deliberately target American civillians
The line is between deliberately targetting civilians and supporting them for another reason. The Taliban claimed to be harbouring for other reasons, but that makes their definition of terrorists on this basis fuzzy. They were surely terrorists for doing unto Afghans what Al Qaeda tried with America. Religious relations are strong in Afghanistan and there are high moral principles on protecting guests, especially from other 'terrorists'. I'm only showing the facts as presented by the Taliban in their defence which were somewhat valid. I doubt they really had any such moral principles driving them.
"They were terrorists because they terrorized Afghans."
No, they were terrorists because they systematicly slaughtered Afghan civillians
I dont see the difference.
Some dictionary definitions link up terrorism with intimidation and the 9/11 attacks were exactly that. Currently in the events and by republican spokespeople, the word along with the rest like evildoers, WMD and freedom has been changed in definition. A terrorist is now a bearded muslim who supports the idea of a religious government in muslim countries. This isnt too different from the witch-hunt against the commies a few decades ago, who possibly were sincere to their own countries but not the form of government. I am hoping this word is longer used as a slapped label to assist the frenzy of the witch-hunt, which itself has gone against the Geneva Convention in many ways.
I can see it now. 25 years into the future. The country is one big communist state. Everyone is poor and machines do all the work. But the state provides high speed internet connections and free Linux-based game machines. People spend 14 hours a day in a huge virtual world. The game is called Matrix. People dont care. Children are weaned on it. People meet each other on it. They practise their religion in the system. They form armies behind their ideologies and fight wars with various virtual technologies. Noone cares what happens outside....or do they!
I tried a logitech trackball about 5 years ago and never went back to mice. At home on all 3 workstations I use the new marble trackball. Instead of moving my arm, I just move three fingers. In counterstrike, I never have to pick up the mouse and with three fingers you can aim really precise. Ive seen a few other gamers use trackballs too, and good at it.
Theyre also good with laptops. I would buy a logitech trackball embedded into the side of a laptop anytime. Not the old apple/toshiba trackballs in the center below the keyboard though.
I know the learning curve is steep, but I have NO idea why people arent trying these.
It all stems from our multi-cultural roots
A certain more-diverse country to our south has recently lost its status as the most free country in the world. Canada used to be seen by immigrants as a platform to move to the US. After 9/11 I saw a small exhodus of people of a certain religon move to Canada. No number of democrat leaders can now convince the world of America's tolerance.
I used to wonder when I was down south why they hate Canadians so much. That was when I was drinking 'soda'. I am still wondering.
I did a dd to dump the whole filesystem to a file in a larger filesystem for recovery purposes. The XFS tools that came with RedHat 7.1 seemed to crash so I did a small slackware install and went from there. xfs_restore and other tools sounding like xfs_sync or something found my third superblock. I used it to reconstruct the other superblocks. The root and early directories were gone, and the files I needed were in the root directory, well the xfs_restore linked them all to numbered directories and files. A few greps later I was in a directory that had those files all intact. I recovered around 80% of all the files, and 100% of the ones I was seeking. Just because I succeeded in one major recovery op from an XFS filesystem, I feel confident with it more than the ext3 or reiser guys. I havent really compared them.
You're correct about many things and I believe we're in the same general ballpark. Talking about what we agree on is boring, so I'll move to the few things we dont agree on.
Evil lies in the eyes of the beholder. Hanging witches a few centuries ago was a good thing. Morality is very much a relative thing pegged to some reference points by some religions and philosophers, but its the only reference we can use. We cannot drop the whole useage of the evil word, but its important to know not everyone shares our points of reference, and that doesnt make us universally correct. Millions supported (and still do) the Taliban. Millions support the Iranian government, Al Qaeda, Communist states etc. Branding any one of them absolutely evil is wrong in my opinion, but we can say they are evil to 'us' and we can take measures on it, while respecting the fact that they're not evil to everyones reference.
One point I missed up there was that we should never take anyone's word on what is 'evil'. We should decide that on our own intuition and merits. W's references of 'evildoers' should have convinced nobody at all without proof, it did convince 60% of the American public with the use of a creative media. However the Afghans in Afghanistan had witnessed the 'evil' of the Taliban and no amount of extremist media could convince them.
On the other hand, where people are denied freedom and basic human rights by their government, I will stand up and call that government wrong
The whole idea of 'Human Rights' has been whipped up as a backlash to countries not too friendly with the ones that defined 'Human Rights'. Remember 'Human Rights' didnt include the women's right to vote a century ago. Enforcing a more 'advanced' government on poorer people is not the job of any foreign power, and the only motivation to do that while spending billions, is to gain control of that whole state by installing a 'puppet regieme'. That is undignified and doesn't really create freedom. Instead, it breaks the sovreignity of that country. Iraq can never have a leader that can face America anymore no matter what the people's wishes. Therefore enforced democracy is never pure democracy.
I agree with standing up and pointing at the 'wrong' government. This is a freedom in itself. However forcing down that government against that country's sovreignity while the people aren't too motivated to help you is much worse.
In cases like Rwanda I would agree with you. Given the threat of such a large scale disaster, those lives are more valuable than their collective dignity as a sovereign state. Measuring that, or deciding what the threshold number of threatened people should be, is tricky.
other people's freedom is not our concern. I say it is everybody's concern, and I believe I can say this, and still disagree with imposing forms of government.
Agree with you there again. We should be concerned about others. I disagree with pacifism. However I would'nt set fire to a freezing person. Invasion of a country has many reprecussions and should never be carried out just to provide freedom to the people who are OK with the government.
Youre technically right about everything you said. However lets look at what you said closely.
The defining nature of many government systems is that they are imposed without the consent of the governed
Every government has people opposing it from within. This does not exclude the most Democratic of governments.
But there is a bigger picture to see. People in many countries live in a state of equilibrium with their dictators, communist or religious leaders. Over their history, they've developed their governments themselves and will change it in the future to reflect the people's requirements. The revolutions including Cromwell or Khomeini came about from the people's will. A shameful kind of democracy that is imposed by an embarrassing level of force for a people who accusedly couldnt do it themselves is undignified and not quite the will of the people. In every such case to date, the new government is also a 'puppet regieme' of the powerful state that brought about the change. Now that is racist.
As for the capability of democracy, in poorer and less educated countries, there are man other dividing factors among people that drive the whole democratic process. Pakistan is a prime example of 50 years of democratic experiments where dictators have always provided a more stable and popular setup than their elected counterparts. Forcing freedom is always motivated by the potential to control the weaker state, which is not freedom really.
I was referring to the 'ideology and extremist' sense of the Taliban, not the political group. This generally includes generals like Hekmatyar who received the most aid from USA during those years. Supporters of such extremists have switched sides frequently but were given an initial boost by the Americans who just supported the wrong kind of people at the cost of the future of Afghanistan just to ensure the defeat of the Russians.
From Canada eh? I'm typing from Toronto myself. The choice of coming to Canada was easy, currently the most free country in the world. Yes many immigrants rejoiced at Chretiens position in the W's wars here and I can relate to the relatively mature point of view of the public here.
However my choice of that blanket statement was informed. Very few (usually quite small) countries do not engage in terrorizing any people at all. Currently here in Toronto the police are having trouble with the black community leaders trying to keep them quite, while black regions such as Scarborough and even the old weston road area see some tough police work where they act like cowboys and dont seem to serve and protect. Ive worked night shifts in a coffee shop in these places and witnessed some of these intimidating behavior.
The story of the natives further north is more bleak. But dont get me wrong, Canada is far better than any of the previous countries I've seen to their credit. I dont know about Switzerland enough to comment there, but generally someone somewhere in any country is terrorized, intimidated and coerced to drop the resistance to their alliance, ideology or belief.
There are other things about filesystems us sysadmins to know about. Which is the most stable and crashproof filesystem? Ive suspected it to be XFS from which I recovered data after doing dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda1 count=2048576
Also what filesystem would require the lest or no syncing at all? Befs?
In server environements with stripped 15K cheetah SCSI drives, you'd worry more about stability than speed.
Slashdot Mirror
I estimated that from my own experience in Pakistan. A small fraction of the population can afford the computer, and I assure you, they cannot afford Microsoft tax.
Microsoft has such a strong monopoly in the west, breaking ground is hard enough here. So the easy solution seems to be just hook the Chinese and Indians onto Linux and the enormous software base that will result will put Microsoft at a severe disadvantage. It doesnt help either than the average cost of Windows XP is a month's salary of the average person with a computer there. Microsoft can use huge discounts, but they cannot beat the 100% discount Linux/BSD offers.
I tried searching some info on the web about Chimeras but apart from the same definitions, theres nothing.
I'm curious, are there any obvious signs a person is heavily a chimera as in Downs Syndrome or Autism? What are the DNA percentages.... I suspect theyre around 1% outside DNA for bone marrows and the like, is there a chimera person with more than 30% outside DNA? Is there someone with chimera in his brain and what are the syndromes?
Lastly, has there ever been siamese twins who are not identical... ie 50% chimera?
So little is known...
I custom-compile all kernels for the FreeBSD servers and remove everything I dont need, not even as 'option'. I also delete the old modules lying around. I like em lean.
Yeah thats not all that impressive. It must still be exciting to be standing in Ireland and see the plane arriving from Canada. High GPS tolerance devices could be used as the planes can be controlled from over 5 miles. Now I wanna build one.
I wouldnt worry about ibcs, always compile a kernel without it(and other binary compatibilities) for real usage. The statfs problem looks real and worrisome though. We've seen too many of similar problems where a user grabs large memory and reads the sensitive data.
I wonder if a C-reading script could read all the source code and mark all the big mallocs/reallocs that users get access to.
I believe the landing part was the most impressive of feats whether it was automated by GPS or some smart sensors on the plane and runway brought it down smoothly. I'd like to know more on that.
The second most impressive part is maintaining a constant flight. The general altitude direction are set by a GPS sensor but constantly monitoring the devices, compensating for the temperature and winds, and sending the data back through satellite would be pretty complex. I'd like to know more about the on-board computers and the satellite uplink (and how much that cost).
It would earn the Russians more than sending boy bands up there, they know the sales of porn since the 70s during which time they had the monopoly.
There might be a space race going between them and Americas. A seperate cargo rocket will carry the viagra.
You can slap a 32-bit MCU with enough ram, flash and maybe a geforcefx go or ATI embedded chip to create a high performance handheld game device, and with some community effort even a simple software SDK for it.
The real problem is standardizing ROMs so game companies could develop and sell for such a platform. It would be interesting if the free software community develops a handheld game ROM standard that runs on many manufacturers' handhelds. Any geek could select his chips (ati/nvidia/fujitsu) and his flash and ram, and plug in the CF game card and start playing. A new cottage industry would be born. How hard the larger companies would work to block this.
Something like this is too obvious to take any space on slashdot. We all know Microsoft wants to defame Linux with any 'report' they try to pull.
The reason why its not worthy of mention is because theres a whole slew of embedded manufacturers using Linux or trying to use Linux and not Windows CE. We know how many arches CE runs on and how reliably. We've seen the evaluation packs of ARM7TDMI and ARM720T based chips that allow the running of Linux and companies like QT bringing packages for development on Linux.
In this regard alone, Linux is the monopolist and Microsoft the underdog. If they get a little reactive it surprises noone and neither do them lying. Most of the comments for this post will be of the sarcastic 'no kidding!' kind.
why America would want to kill people is beyond me
Hey youre not alone. Its beyond me too, even beyond the marine ordered to shoot at protesting Iraqis or pilot-on-speed ordered to bomb a village in Afghanistan. Its beyond most Americans how in the world did W get elected and why did the US head for Iraq while Osama has not yet been found.
a certain amount of military expenditure is necessary to national defense
In that case, the G8 countries should really cut down on their weapons.
With many harddisks at 2.5" for laptops, I think it should be easy to produce RAIDed harddisks in the same package to connect to one IDE cable and power supply and fit in a 3.5" or 5.25" drive bay. Each smaller drive could also be disconnected and used seperately in case the RAID chipset is bad. Such a complex drive will sell well given the importance of data at many places. For many servers that I run, I would prefer to pay twice for such a reliable setup.
I tried the same thing with 15GB Maxtor harddrives some time ago. Didnt really seem to work. Model numbers were the same but I suppose theres more variety. I lost precious photos and email archives.
Now we have the a/b/g and maybe the x standard, and possibly more to come, them all being close in speed and performance to each other. Why arent they all rolled into one single spec which accomodates 5.4GHz, 2.6Ghz 11Ghz and more rather than making seperate specs and causing trouble to the manufacturers, users and buyers?
Youve used the UN version of the word. Ive used the literal. I have also been referring to the continued use of the word 'terrorist' by the North American media as if the person is a seperate species entirely.
Youre points are still interesting and informed.
Intimidation is not in and of itself terrorism
Organizations intimidate civilians for various purposes. This is most likely to subjugate the population or drive them out in an exhodus such as the intimidation of Chinese in Indonesia. Intimidation to subjugate has been used in Pakistan by the Sippah e Sahaba on Shias to impose their control. They are both examples of 'terrorizing' in the literal sense. I'm not sure but they might also be terrorizing in the Geneva Conventions definition.
The US campaigns you mentioned were overwhelmingly aimed at enemy combattants
I'm pretty sure of disagreements of facts now. I can point out the enormous 'increase' of 'mistakes' of bombing in Afghanistan in which Pashtun civilians in the south were killed. Same pretty much seems to be true of the Tikrit region in Iraq these days, although I'm not as sure of that as in Afghanistan. The USSR's fear tactics in Afghanistan are well documented about pouring chemicals in hiding places, summary executions of all males in many villages and other 'terrorizing' ways.
little used deliberately against civillians
You are admitting here terrorism was carried out. I'm not as informed about Iraq as an Iraqi but I assure you the Soviet terrorism against civilians was not 'little'. We're talking about hundereds of thousands (conservative numbers) of civilians directly killed.
You're drawing lines where there are none. Al Qaeda's express aim is to deliberately target American civillians
The line is between deliberately targetting civilians and supporting them for another reason. The Taliban claimed to be harbouring for other reasons, but that makes their definition of terrorists on this basis fuzzy. They were surely terrorists for doing unto Afghans what Al Qaeda tried with America. Religious relations are strong in Afghanistan and there are high moral principles on protecting guests, especially from other 'terrorists'. I'm only showing the facts as presented by the Taliban in their defence which were somewhat valid. I doubt they really had any such moral principles driving them.
"They were terrorists because they terrorized Afghans."
No, they were terrorists because they systematicly slaughtered Afghan civillians
I dont see the difference.
Some dictionary definitions link up terrorism with intimidation and the 9/11 attacks were exactly that. Currently in the events and by republican spokespeople, the word along with the rest like evildoers, WMD and freedom has been changed in definition. A terrorist is now a bearded muslim who supports the idea of a religious government in muslim countries. This isnt too different from the witch-hunt against the commies a few decades ago, who possibly were sincere to their own countries but not the form of government. I am hoping this word is longer used as a slapped label to assist the frenzy of the witch-hunt, which itself has gone against the Geneva Convention in many ways.
I can see it now. 25 years into the future. The country is one big communist state. Everyone is poor and machines do all the work. But the state provides high speed internet connections and free Linux-based game machines. People spend 14 hours a day in a huge virtual world. The game is called Matrix. People dont care. Children are weaned on it. People meet each other on it. They practise their religion in the system. They form armies behind their ideologies and fight wars with various virtual technologies. Noone cares what happens outside. ...or do they!
I tried a logitech trackball about 5 years ago and never went back to mice. At home on all 3 workstations I use the new marble trackball. Instead of moving my arm, I just move three fingers. In counterstrike, I never have to pick up the mouse and with three fingers you can aim really precise. Ive seen a few other gamers use trackballs too, and good at it.
Theyre also good with laptops. I would buy a logitech trackball embedded into the side of a laptop anytime. Not the old apple/toshiba trackballs in the center below the keyboard though.
I know the learning curve is steep, but I have NO idea why people arent trying these.
It all stems from our multi-cultural roots A certain more-diverse country to our south has recently lost its status as the most free country in the world. Canada used to be seen by immigrants as a platform to move to the US. After 9/11 I saw a small exhodus of people of a certain religon move to Canada. No number of democrat leaders can now convince the world of America's tolerance. I used to wonder when I was down south why they hate Canadians so much. That was when I was drinking 'soda'. I am still wondering.
I did a dd to dump the whole filesystem to a file in a larger filesystem for recovery purposes. The XFS tools that came with RedHat 7.1 seemed to crash so I did a small slackware install and went from there. xfs_restore and other tools sounding like xfs_sync or something found my third superblock. I used it to reconstruct the other superblocks. The root and early directories were gone, and the files I needed were in the root directory, well the xfs_restore linked them all to numbered directories and files. A few greps later I was in a directory that had those files all intact. I recovered around 80% of all the files, and 100% of the ones I was seeking. Just because I succeeded in one major recovery op from an XFS filesystem, I feel confident with it more than the ext3 or reiser guys. I havent really compared them.
You're correct about many things and I believe we're in the same general ballpark. Talking about what we agree on is boring, so I'll move to the few things we dont agree on. Evil lies in the eyes of the beholder. Hanging witches a few centuries ago was a good thing. Morality is very much a relative thing pegged to some reference points by some religions and philosophers, but its the only reference we can use. We cannot drop the whole useage of the evil word, but its important to know not everyone shares our points of reference, and that doesnt make us universally correct. Millions supported (and still do) the Taliban. Millions support the Iranian government, Al Qaeda, Communist states etc. Branding any one of them absolutely evil is wrong in my opinion, but we can say they are evil to 'us' and we can take measures on it, while respecting the fact that they're not evil to everyones reference. One point I missed up there was that we should never take anyone's word on what is 'evil'. We should decide that on our own intuition and merits. W's references of 'evildoers' should have convinced nobody at all without proof, it did convince 60% of the American public with the use of a creative media. However the Afghans in Afghanistan had witnessed the 'evil' of the Taliban and no amount of extremist media could convince them. On the other hand, where people are denied freedom and basic human rights by their government, I will stand up and call that government wrong The whole idea of 'Human Rights' has been whipped up as a backlash to countries not too friendly with the ones that defined 'Human Rights'. Remember 'Human Rights' didnt include the women's right to vote a century ago. Enforcing a more 'advanced' government on poorer people is not the job of any foreign power, and the only motivation to do that while spending billions, is to gain control of that whole state by installing a 'puppet regieme'. That is undignified and doesn't really create freedom. Instead, it breaks the sovreignity of that country. Iraq can never have a leader that can face America anymore no matter what the people's wishes. Therefore enforced democracy is never pure democracy. I agree with standing up and pointing at the 'wrong' government. This is a freedom in itself. However forcing down that government against that country's sovreignity while the people aren't too motivated to help you is much worse. In cases like Rwanda I would agree with you. Given the threat of such a large scale disaster, those lives are more valuable than their collective dignity as a sovereign state. Measuring that, or deciding what the threshold number of threatened people should be, is tricky. other people's freedom is not our concern. I say it is everybody's concern, and I believe I can say this, and still disagree with imposing forms of government. Agree with you there again. We should be concerned about others. I disagree with pacifism. However I would'nt set fire to a freezing person. Invasion of a country has many reprecussions and should never be carried out just to provide freedom to the people who are OK with the government.
Youre technically right about everything you said. However lets look at what you said closely. The defining nature of many government systems is that they are imposed without the consent of the governed Every government has people opposing it from within. This does not exclude the most Democratic of governments. But there is a bigger picture to see. People in many countries live in a state of equilibrium with their dictators, communist or religious leaders. Over their history, they've developed their governments themselves and will change it in the future to reflect the people's requirements. The revolutions including Cromwell or Khomeini came about from the people's will. A shameful kind of democracy that is imposed by an embarrassing level of force for a people who accusedly couldnt do it themselves is undignified and not quite the will of the people. In every such case to date, the new government is also a 'puppet regieme' of the powerful state that brought about the change. Now that is racist. As for the capability of democracy, in poorer and less educated countries, there are man other dividing factors among people that drive the whole democratic process. Pakistan is a prime example of 50 years of democratic experiments where dictators have always provided a more stable and popular setup than their elected counterparts. Forcing freedom is always motivated by the potential to control the weaker state, which is not freedom really.
I was referring to the 'ideology and extremist' sense of the Taliban, not the political group. This generally includes generals like Hekmatyar who received the most aid from USA during those years. Supporters of such extremists have switched sides frequently but were given an initial boost by the Americans who just supported the wrong kind of people at the cost of the future of Afghanistan just to ensure the defeat of the Russians.
Hopefully the Taliban ARE dead.
From Canada eh? I'm typing from Toronto myself. The choice of coming to Canada was easy, currently the most free country in the world. Yes many immigrants rejoiced at Chretiens position in the W's wars here and I can relate to the relatively mature point of view of the public here.
However my choice of that blanket statement was informed. Very few (usually quite small) countries do not engage in terrorizing any people at all. Currently here in Toronto the police are having trouble with the black community leaders trying to keep them quite, while black regions such as Scarborough and even the old weston road area see some tough police work where they act like cowboys and dont seem to serve and protect. Ive worked night shifts in a coffee shop in these places and witnessed some of these intimidating behavior.
The story of the natives further north is more bleak. But dont get me wrong, Canada is far better than any of the previous countries I've seen to their credit. I dont know about Switzerland enough to comment there, but generally someone somewhere in any country is terrorized, intimidated and coerced to drop the resistance to their alliance, ideology or belief.
There are other things about filesystems us sysadmins to know about. Which is the most stable and crashproof filesystem? Ive suspected it to be XFS from which I recovered data after doing dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda1 count=2048576
Also what filesystem would require the lest or no syncing at all? Befs?
In server environements with stripped 15K cheetah SCSI drives, you'd worry more about stability than speed.