Interesting to hear about Ubuntu on the server, I'll have to give that a try. However, my experience with Ubuntu on the desktop matches that of dazed1: it seems like it might be a great distro for grannies, but I know it's not for me. I run a Debian desktop myself, and I'm very happy with it. I'm not sure why you'd say "it can be done, but it's not fun", unless you're thinking in terms of running Debian stable on every desktop in an organization, in which case I might agree. But for my own use, on my current machine, I installed Debian's AMD 64-bit version over a year ago, and the only config issue I had was installing the nVidia drivers for a GeForce card.
I still admire the Debian team for what they've accomplished, and I know that Ubuntu was built upon the strong foundations created by Debian, but the child is quickly outdoing the parent.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but Ubuntu still relies on Debian for most of its packages, i.e. if (unimaginably) Debian went away, Ubuntu would be scrambling to replace what Debian does for them. Hardly a "child outdoing the parent" situation: rather, Ubuntu is doing with Debian exactly what Debian is designed to support. I'm glad Debian doesn't focus on making the base distro more granny-friendly, because that would likely cut into its flexibility and usability for non-granny-running purposes.
Also, read this piece for reasons why Ubuntu shouldn't even want to "go it alone" and cut its dependency on Debian.
My overreaction comes from having been on the receiving end of this sort of thing when I was too young to stand up for myself. To me, the crime of using excessive power or force on a child or someone else who cannot possibly defend themselves is not very far from the crime of homicide in its moral seriousness. Add to that the fact that someone who has a position of power and abuses it in this (alleged) way needs to be removed from that position of power.
In light of this, let me moderate my response a little: assuming the story is factually accurate, i.e. that the kids weren't being complete hooligans and vandalizing the tree in a way beyond what you might expect from 12-year olds, I would complain to the police chief and if necessary, the mayor, requesting an apology from the officers involved. If this request did not result in those officers personally and sincerely apologizing to the children in question, I would then pursue having them removed from their positions. Failing that, something would need to be done. I'll just note that natural selection only works if some agent causes selection to take place.
I was responding to your comparison of people doing bad things, to cops doing bad things, as though they were equal. Your rant is completely irrelevant to my point.
I don't give a shit about American Idol, but despite liking all sorts of sci fi, fantasy, adventure, anime etc., I don't give a shit about Firefly either. My sense is that Firefly just has a very narrow demographic.
"At what point does relaxation go past the reasonable?" It sounds as though you're trying to answer this question for other people. You can't do that. You can only answer it for yourself. Of course, you can occupy yourself by bemoaning the decadence of other people, and speculate that it'll all end in tears, but really, how is that any better than what they're doing?
Yeah police are people and do bad things. But come on, people are people and do bad things.
The difference is that police have powers which ordinary citizens don't have, so when police do bad things, it can have severe consequences. Quite often, they're not held accountable for that, which again results from an abuse of power. That's what this is all about: accountability for the actions of public servants, particularly those with extraordinary powers. Cops in general are not the enemy, but bad cops are certainly an enemy which needs to be guarded against and eradicated whenever possible.
As the other reply has observed, the NSA's job is to spy on communications outside the U.S., which includes monitoring your phone calls. Think about the legality here: whatever privacy or communications monitoring laws might exist in Brazil or Japan certainly don't apply to the NSA. They can do whatever they want if they can do it remotely, i.e. without having illegal monitoring stations in the target country, but instead relying on radio and satellite interception, etc.
This logic underlies the UKUSA alliance and the Echelon signals intelligence monitoring program: a group of countries who cooperate can each collect information on each other's citizens without violating their own laws. Exchanging that information isn't illegal, as long as none of the governments collects information on their own citizens. Isn't it fun to see governments working around the limits of their own laws?
Stop being so picky! If you'd thought about it for just a minute, you'd have realized that six orders of magnitute is well within the standard Slashdot margin of error.
You misunderstand. It's only ethical to download music like that when the music is published by an enormous cartel-like industry that's completely unresponsive to its customers, and doesn't move with the technological times, preferring to cling to an outmoded oligopoly that is built on several implicit assumptions that no longer hold true. Notice that since iTunes started up, plenty of people have been willing to pay for downloads. If "record" companies are still wondering why people don't want to buy their quaint plastic discs any more, well, they're already dead, they just don't know it yet.
Gee, so I'm not the first one to make the hobbit comparison. Sorry 'bout that! FWIW, I'm tall but ridiculously skinny (6ft2, 155 lbs, full adult weight, I'm not a kid anymore). That was more of a problem when I was in high school than later, but it has definitely limited my potential girlfriend pool. I sometimes feel like a different species from normally-built guys. A kind of message I took from LOTR (the book) and some other fantasy/scifi stories when I was a teenager being teased is that the common idea of a "norm" of size & shape from which people deviate to a greater or lesser degree is really silly, and in particular, shouldn't be internalized and accepted by someone who doesn't fit that norm. Frodo presumably doesn't worry about his height, and Legolas doesn't worry that Aragorn is beefier than he is. And let's face it, elves and hobbits are more interesting than Men.
Reading your defense of JMS, I'm willing to suspend disbelief and wait and see what he comes up with.
First, let me say, based on that picture... Dude! You're a hobbit! How cool is that?!;)
Assuming you took that as a compliment and are still reading, I hope you're right about JMS. If, as another post suggested, these new episodes are tied together in some interesting way, and aren't just independent short expositions about each character, there may yet be hope.
Now, the idea of a B5 MMORPG - uh, no thank you. I still want an official space combat simulator out of these people... I got the free mousepad and such from the failed attempt.
Give me a turn based strategy game (MOO2 style) and a Flight Simulator and I will set for life, err, until the next big thing
No wonder you disagree with me - no offense, but you sound like the perfect target market for DVDs like these.
I liked the Babylon 5 series just fine, but it had an ambitious overarching plot which did advance over time, albeit slowly and vaguely, that made it a bit more interesting than an ordinary space opera.
Shows about the past of the characters sounds mainly like a way to milk the cash cow represented by the most diehard fanboys and anyone who doesn't have any, whaddayacallem, standards. It doesn't require much creative effort in terms of plot, it's just exploiting the franchise.
Funnily enough, they're on stronger ground with someone who's writing down prices, since they can legitimately have a store policy which disallows that, and they're within their rights to evict anyone who does it from the store. Of course, they don't have much recourse beyond that - notice that the guy in question was found not guilty of trespass (it might be different if he represented a competitor).
However, in the bag search case, you're leaving the store with a bag issued by the store, and they have no reasonable grounds on which to detain you. If they did try it, they'd get in legal trouble pretty quickly with someone who objected, and a pattern of such behavior could easily lead to the store getting in trouble with the local police, and/or a class action lawsuit. However, that's not usually a problem in practice, because as I mentioned, guards are trained to accept it if a customer refuses a bag search, because the store's lawyers know that they'd be on very thin ice otherwise.
If you've never refused a bag search, I strongly recommend trying it a few times, just to remind yourself that you actually do have rights.
This doesn't really affect your stand about boycotting Best Buy, but just in case you're not aware, you should know that having your bags searched as you leave Best Buy, or any other store that does that, is a purely voluntary thing. You can politely refuse and just keep walking. They have no legal right to require you to submit to a bag search, and they know it (the guards are trained to understand that). There's an article about it here.
Also, nice to see that gun control laws work the way we Second Amendment supporters said they would.
The way Second Amendment supporters say gun control works is a tautology, so you don't need empirical evidence of its validity. Perhaps that's just as well, because your ability to detect suspect empirical evidence (in this case, that the gun almost certainly didn't exist) seem roughly equivalent to your ability to detect tautologies. No offense.;)
Huh? Why, just last week I rollyo'd on over to a Slashdot article where I noticed that swickiing was passe, although clustying is still ok. Of course, who hasn't lexxe'd their way through the blogosphere at one time or another? And winking will never go out of style.
Slashdot Mirror
Interesting to hear about Ubuntu on the server, I'll have to give that a try. However, my experience with Ubuntu on the desktop matches that of dazed1: it seems like it might be a great distro for grannies, but I know it's not for me. I run a Debian desktop myself, and I'm very happy with it. I'm not sure why you'd say "it can be done, but it's not fun", unless you're thinking in terms of running Debian stable on every desktop in an organization, in which case I might agree. But for my own use, on my current machine, I installed Debian's AMD 64-bit version over a year ago, and the only config issue I had was installing the nVidia drivers for a GeForce card.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but Ubuntu still relies on Debian for most of its packages, i.e. if (unimaginably) Debian went away, Ubuntu would be scrambling to replace what Debian does for them. Hardly a "child outdoing the parent" situation: rather, Ubuntu is doing with Debian exactly what Debian is designed to support. I'm glad Debian doesn't focus on making the base distro more granny-friendly, because that would likely cut into its flexibility and usability for non-granny-running purposes.
Also, read this piece for reasons why Ubuntu shouldn't even want to "go it alone" and cut its dependency on Debian.
My overreaction comes from having been on the receiving end of this sort of thing when I was too young to stand up for myself. To me, the crime of using excessive power or force on a child or someone else who cannot possibly defend themselves is not very far from the crime of homicide in its moral seriousness. Add to that the fact that someone who has a position of power and abuses it in this (alleged) way needs to be removed from that position of power.
In light of this, let me moderate my response a little: assuming the story is factually accurate, i.e. that the kids weren't being complete hooligans and vandalizing the tree in a way beyond what you might expect from 12-year olds, I would complain to the police chief and if necessary, the mayor, requesting an apology from the officers involved. If this request did not result in those officers personally and sincerely apologizing to the children in question, I would then pursue having them removed from their positions. Failing that, something would need to be done. I'll just note that natural selection only works if some agent causes selection to take place.
Bystander effect
While I find it hard to believe this story, shooting would be too good a death for the officers involved in an action like this. Seriously.
Evidently some Slashdot posters can't handle the concept of the preview button.
I think you mean Global ThermoGNU/clear War.
I was responding to your comparison of people doing bad things, to cops doing bad things, as though they were equal. Your rant is completely irrelevant to my point.
I don't give a shit about American Idol, but despite liking all sorts of sci fi, fantasy, adventure, anime etc., I don't give a shit about Firefly either. My sense is that Firefly just has a very narrow demographic.
"At what point does relaxation go past the reasonable?" It sounds as though you're trying to answer this question for other people. You can't do that. You can only answer it for yourself. Of course, you can occupy yourself by bemoaning the decadence of other people, and speculate that it'll all end in tears, but really, how is that any better than what they're doing?
As the other reply has observed, the NSA's job is to spy on communications outside the U.S., which includes monitoring your phone calls. Think about the legality here: whatever privacy or communications monitoring laws might exist in Brazil or Japan certainly don't apply to the NSA. They can do whatever they want if they can do it remotely, i.e. without having illegal monitoring stations in the target country, but instead relying on radio and satellite interception, etc.
This logic underlies the UKUSA alliance and the Echelon signals intelligence monitoring program: a group of countries who cooperate can each collect information on each other's citizens without violating their own laws. Exchanging that information isn't illegal, as long as none of the governments collects information on their own citizens. Isn't it fun to see governments working around the limits of their own laws?
Stop being so picky! If you'd thought about it for just a minute, you'd have realized that six orders of magnitute is well within the standard Slashdot margin of error.
You misunderstand. It's only ethical to download music like that when the music is published by an enormous cartel-like industry that's completely unresponsive to its customers, and doesn't move with the technological times, preferring to cling to an outmoded oligopoly that is built on several implicit assumptions that no longer hold true. Notice that since iTunes started up, plenty of people have been willing to pay for downloads. If "record" companies are still wondering why people don't want to buy their quaint plastic discs any more, well, they're already dead, they just don't know it yet.
Gee, so I'm not the first one to make the hobbit comparison. Sorry 'bout that! FWIW, I'm tall but ridiculously skinny (6ft2, 155 lbs, full adult weight, I'm not a kid anymore). That was more of a problem when I was in high school than later, but it has definitely limited my potential girlfriend pool. I sometimes feel like a different species from normally-built guys. A kind of message I took from LOTR (the book) and some other fantasy/scifi stories when I was a teenager being teased is that the common idea of a "norm" of size & shape from which people deviate to a greater or lesser degree is really silly, and in particular, shouldn't be internalized and accepted by someone who doesn't fit that norm. Frodo presumably doesn't worry about his height, and Legolas doesn't worry that Aragorn is beefier than he is. And let's face it, elves and hobbits are more interesting than Men. Reading your defense of JMS, I'm willing to suspend disbelief and wait and see what he comes up with.
First, let me say, based on that picture... Dude! You're a hobbit! How cool is that?! ;)
Assuming you took that as a compliment and are still reading, I hope you're right about JMS. If, as another post suggested, these new episodes are tied together in some interesting way, and aren't just independent short expositions about each character, there may yet be hope.
No wonder you disagree with me - no offense, but you sound like the perfect target market for DVDs like these.
...is like reading Playboy for the articles.
I liked the Babylon 5 series just fine, but it had an ambitious overarching plot which did advance over time, albeit slowly and vaguely, that made it a bit more interesting than an ordinary space opera. Shows about the past of the characters sounds mainly like a way to milk the cash cow represented by the most diehard fanboys and anyone who doesn't have any, whaddayacallem, standards. It doesn't require much creative effort in terms of plot, it's just exploiting the franchise.
Funnily enough, they're on stronger ground with someone who's writing down prices, since they can legitimately have a store policy which disallows that, and they're within their rights to evict anyone who does it from the store. Of course, they don't have much recourse beyond that - notice that the guy in question was found not guilty of trespass (it might be different if he represented a competitor).
However, in the bag search case, you're leaving the store with a bag issued by the store, and they have no reasonable grounds on which to detain you. If they did try it, they'd get in legal trouble pretty quickly with someone who objected, and a pattern of such behavior could easily lead to the store getting in trouble with the local police, and/or a class action lawsuit. However, that's not usually a problem in practice, because as I mentioned, guards are trained to accept it if a customer refuses a bag search, because the store's lawyers know that they'd be on very thin ice otherwise.
If you've never refused a bag search, I strongly recommend trying it a few times, just to remind yourself that you actually do have rights.
This doesn't really affect your stand about boycotting Best Buy, but just in case you're not aware, you should know that having your bags searched as you leave Best Buy, or any other store that does that, is a purely voluntary thing. You can politely refuse and just keep walking. They have no legal right to require you to submit to a bag search, and they know it (the guards are trained to understand that). There's an article about it here.
Huh? Why, just last week I rollyo'd on over to a Slashdot article where I noticed that swickiing was passe, although clustying is still ok. Of course, who hasn't lexxe'd their way through the blogosphere at one time or another? And winking will never go out of style.
I hope you're not holding your breath. I suspect the first usable quantum computer will debut right after we all get our flying cars.