The advice I'd give is advice I actually got from our church minister (yes, I know that's pathetic) when I was 12: it's wonderful when you are different, but you don't have try to be even more different just to get attention.
To that, I'd add not to act as if things you're not good at (like sports) are less important than things you are good at.
Other countries have the same issues as the U.S. with underpriviledged urban minorities and ethnic tensions -- many cities in the U.K. have large underpriviledged East Indian populations and France has a large underpriviledged North African/Muslim population, and in both cases there are sometimes actual race riots.
If the U.S. cannot blame the problem on an urban underclass, gang violence, or racial issues (the U.K. and France have those too), then it has to look inwards. Easy access to guns is probably part of the problem, but the culture behind it is a lot worse. Many Canadians outside the cities and suburbs own rifles or shotguns -- they're necessary tools for a farmer or for moving around in the far North -- but they're not romanticised the way they are in the U.S.
That's not all, though. If you really want the answer, look at law enforcement. The U.S. imprisons and executes more of its own citizens, both percentage-wise and in absolute terms, than nearly any other country in the world, including such beacons of freedom and democracy as Iran, China, and Sudan. Ouch! Countries that save prisons for rapists and murderers, rather than shoplifters, computer programmers and drug users, seem to have a lot less crime.
Almost no other first-world country executes its own citizens any more. Japan has capital punishment on the books but rarely uses it; most of the rest of the countries you wouldn't be ashamed to visit don't even have it on the books anymore. Canada abolished capital punishment in the 1970's, and the murder rate has been dropping ever since.
Sure, since Americans are more likely to have a handgun in the purse, bedside table, or glove compartment, they're more likely to use it to settle disputes, and a few more people get killed that way (usually friends or family members). The biggest problem, though, is the whole cultural attitude towards crime and punishment. I'm not proposing any feel-good rehabilitation stuff here -- I don't know if criminals *can* be reformed -- but just going by the numbers, the U.S. locks more of its citizens and has a higher crime rate than other rich countries, and it is harder on drugs and has more drug-related crime. Go do the math.
Ouch! I am a private pilot, actually. The general public has an idea that planes crash when their engines fail, hence the fascination with the BRS chute stuff. You know, as I do, that that is not the case -- we both had to do gazillions of simulated forced-landings to get our PPLs, and when we're a little high we sometimes pull the engine to idle on base or final and glide in anyway.
You might want to read the discussion from AvWeb on this whole thing. I don't want to second-guess the pilot -- after all, he's alive, and that's what counts -- but the plane was still under control when he pulled the chute (albeit with one separated aileron), so it's as much of a leap to assume that the plane could not have been landed as it is to assume that the plane could have been.
Pulling the chute doesn't automatically destroy the plane, just the chute. In this case, when the plane hit the short trees, it nosed over hard, causing substantial damage; in principle, the chute could have brought it down just fine (if a little hard) on a flat, soft surface; the trouble is that once you've pulled the chute, you've given up your power to choose.
I would like to believe that pilots are smart enough not to pull the chute if they can make a safe forced landing, but in a world like that, pilots would also be smart enough not to try to turn back at 400 ft AGL with an engine failure after takeoff, and they'd be smart enough not to try to stretch a glide during a forced landing. A quick read over NTSB reports shows that's not the case.
There are a few, very rare situations where a whole-plane parachute might be useful in a certified airplane, such as structural breakup in flight or a midair collision. Overall, however, the main purpose of the parachute would be to reassure passengers who don't know much about flying.
Most fatal accidents take place either just after takeoff or just before landing, when you're too low for a chute to do any good, or during continued flight into instrument conditions, where the pilot often doesn't realize there's a problem. Presumably, the chute would be useful for engine failures, but which would you prefer?
glide the plane, under control, into a field or parking lot; or
descend at a relatively high speed, possibly smashing into the middle of a freeway, the edge of a tall building, a cliff slope, tree tops, water, etc.?
With an engine failure over hostile terrain (no flat surfaces for landing) the chute might help, but the terrain probably isn't too friendly for a 2000fpm plunge any more than for a gliding landing. Even with only tiny trees in the reported case, the plane suffered substantial damage when it nosed over.
So, yes, if I had one I might use it in a pinch, but I might also be tempted to use it when I didn't need to (a simple engine failure near lots of open fields) and perhaps kill myself, my passengers, and people on the ground when I could have done a routine forced landing instead and walked away from an intact plane.
I have both Win98 and Debian sid on the family computer. I originally had it set to boot to Win98 by default, but I noticed that my girls (7 and 10) almost always booted into Linux, so I switched it over.
It turned out that they liked Tux Racer, Tux AQFH, and FlightGear more than they liked the Windows games (Civ II, the Sims, etc.). The fact that Tux AQFH was never finished seems to help -- they don't believe me when I tell them, and keep trying to find a way to the end anyway. My older daughter now uses Mozilla for her e-mail and school projects and is a big fan of the Gimp.
So, use a carrot instead of a stick -- set up your computer to dual boot and then put some fun stuff on the Linux partition. I guarantee that they'll find it on their own, especially if they think you're hiding it from them. Besides, you can always buy them stuffed penguins for Christmas or Hannukah.
Airplanes are expensive to own and fly, and one of the main problems is the internal-combustion engines. Even a little Cessna 172 needs an engine overhaul every 2,000 hours or so, at a cost of US $15,000 or more each time. The engines on a six-seat twin can cost far over USD 50,000 to overhaul. Go online and look at how many used small planes for sale have a time since major overhaul (SMOH) of close to 2,000 hours -- the owners are forced to sell because they cannot afford an overhaul.
Electric motors don't have cylinders that get scored, seals that leak, and so on. A lot of small plane owners like to go up for a quick spin on nice weekends, and it doesn't sound like the battery technology is too far off for them (2 hours would be fine for a sport plane) -- it might just make flying affordable.
I agree that we're a long way off from a battery-powered 747, if such a thing were even worthwhile.
Nearly every platform has an interpreter for the old Infocom text games. Zork I, II, and III are available for free legally from ActiVision, and once you have a z-machine interpreter for your Mac, you can use any of the other Infocom games you can find. There are also many (legal) free z-machine games available on the net, and I think that Activision recently sold a CD-ROM with most of the old Infocom collection, including Hitchhiker's Guide, Enchanter, and the others.
Any one of these will keep you busy for the whole flight and taxi ride to your hotel, and you'll probably stay up and keep playing once you get there instead of sleeping off the jet lag. Just remember to bring a pad of paper, pencil, and eraser for drawing maps and working out mazes.
PrettyPoly is another open-source 3D editor. It's not ready to replace Blender yet, since it lacks essential tools like extrusion and UV-editing, but it's a good start:
I agree with RMS, but I doubt that his arguments will convince anyone who's not already convinced.
We could try pushing some fear buttons instead: tell them that their e-mail was rejected for security reasons (or even as "a possible virus attack"), because Word attachments often carry viruses, and to please resend in plain text. The word "virus" is needed, even if not entirely technically accurate, because that's the one people know.
I run a small business (two employees) that has to work with two different currencies -- most of the revenue is USD, but salaries, taxes, and dividends are CAD.
I switched to GnuCash at the beginning of this fiscal year and have been happy enough -- it supports double-entry well, and multicurrency is only moderately awkward. The reports have been adequate for me (and the tax people) so far, at least. It responds fast, and supports arbitrarily complex split entries, which are important for my work.
On Debian Sid (unstable), the maintainers are doing a great job keeping up with the latest Gnome developments -- everything plays nicely with everything else, and new versions appear almost immediately.
Initially, I made the mistake of including Ximian in my/etc/apt/sources.list, and had all kinds of problems; leaving it out got me better Gnome software sooner.
In Ottawa, a cable modem from Rogers@Home costs CAD 39.95/month, or about USD 26.00including modem rental. This satellite service costs nearly USD 100.00/month, plus a setup charge of close to USD1,000.
Nice try, but I think that we'll have to stick with laying cable, at least for the more populous parts of the country (i.e. the parts that can be reached by phone line). In isolated communities, we can have a single (hopefully faster) dish for the whole town, then run fiber to individual homes. That leaves only a tiny percentage of Canadians who would need private satellite dishes or something similar.
Even if Google paid USD 1,000 per machine (and I'll bet they paid much less), that comes to only USD 8 million for the whole setup -- you cannot buy much big iron for that, at least not enough to run one of the busiest sites on the Web.
Furthermore, Google had the enormous advantage of being able to scale up one machine at a time rather than dumping a whole lot of money at the start, and support and replacement parts are dirt cheap. I've seen the same approach work elsewhere.
C'mon, people -- I didn't buy my 3D card to play Quake. There are other 3D applications, such as flight simulators, where you can see dozens of miles in every direction: the better performance means that people can add a lot more detail (buildings, roads, rivers, railroads, towers, powerlines, etc.) and still keep things above 30fps.
Managers figure out how to use resources (i.e. people); architects design systems. While there's a little management in Open Source, most of my work with SAX (Simple API for XML) has been a combination of design and implementation. After all, I can hardly threaten to fire people or offer them bonuses or promotions, so I cannot make anyone do anything but what they wanted to do in the first place. That's what Eric meant, I think -- the architecture evolves according to what people are willing to do, not (usually) according to a strong central vision. I remember being part of the thread that annoyed Linus into allowing loadable kernel modules (hardly part of Linus's grand vision at the time).
I chaired a W3C working group for a year and spent most of my time worrying about absurd procedures designed by non-coders to make sure that the coders couldn't do any real work. That was management.
The demo that everyone's looking at won't work through a firewall because it's deliberately non-malicious. The scary part (for me) is that the Java applet has access to the file system, and I cannot see how a firewall can help if someone decides on a more malicious attack.
Instead of setting up an HTTP server, the applet could simply open an HTTP connection to the original server and start posting files from your hard drive. Applets are allowed to open connections back to the original host.
This is why client-software vulnerabilities are so scary -- the client software usually has the same privileges as you do.
A big advantage of open source is market-making: open-sourcing a product might build up a large community of users and integrators, and even if only 5% of users buy the fancier commercial version of a product, 5% of a $100M market is much more interesting than 100% of a $100K market.
In fact, a lot of companies will buy the commercial version if it's easier to integrate into their systems: skilled engineers are expensive and rare, so they have to be rationed carefully among projects. If the commercial version of your product can be installed and integrated by a junior person alone (i.e. installation GUIs, custom adapters, etc.), then it's easily worth $20K-$50K to a company; it would be stupid to try to install the Open-Source version if it meant pulling a good techie off an important project, and maybe delaying a major lauch, just for the sake of saving a few thousand dollars.
After all, $20K is the cost of sending, say, 8 engineers to a single trade show.
The original SlashDot refers to Thomas Jefferson and mentions that a little revolution is sometimes a good thing. Perhaps that's true, but as Samuel Johnson wrote (about Jefferson):
How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty from the drivers of negros?
Native Americans might also question that statement, since the American Revolution took away their protection from land-grabbing settlers, and led, eventually, to the ethnic cleansing and even extinction of some of their groups.
Slashdot Mirror
The advice I'd give is advice I actually got from our church minister (yes, I know that's pathetic) when I was 12: it's wonderful when you are different, but you don't have try to be even more different just to get attention.
To that, I'd add not to act as if things you're not good at (like sports) are less important than things you are good at.
Other countries have the same issues as the U.S. with underpriviledged urban minorities and ethnic tensions -- many cities in the U.K. have large underpriviledged East Indian populations and France has a large underpriviledged North African/Muslim population, and in both cases there are sometimes actual race riots.
If the U.S. cannot blame the problem on an urban underclass, gang violence, or racial issues (the U.K. and France have those too), then it has to look inwards. Easy access to guns is probably part of the problem, but the culture behind it is a lot worse. Many Canadians outside the cities and suburbs own rifles or shotguns -- they're necessary tools for a farmer or for moving around in the far North -- but they're not romanticised the way they are in the U.S.
That's not all, though. If you really want the answer, look at law enforcement. The U.S. imprisons and executes more of its own citizens, both percentage-wise and in absolute terms, than nearly any other country in the world, including such beacons of freedom and democracy as Iran, China, and Sudan. Ouch! Countries that save prisons for rapists and murderers, rather than shoplifters, computer programmers and drug users, seem to have a lot less crime.
Almost no other first-world country executes its own citizens any more. Japan has capital punishment on the books but rarely uses it; most of the rest of the countries you wouldn't be ashamed to visit don't even have it on the books anymore. Canada abolished capital punishment in the 1970's, and the murder rate has been dropping ever since.
Sure, since Americans are more likely to have a handgun in the purse, bedside table, or glove compartment, they're more likely to use it to settle disputes, and a few more people get killed that way (usually friends or family members). The biggest problem, though, is the whole cultural attitude towards crime and punishment. I'm not proposing any feel-good rehabilitation stuff here -- I don't know if criminals *can* be reformed -- but just going by the numbers, the U.S. locks more of its citizens and has a higher crime rate than other rich countries, and it is harder on drugs and has more drug-related crime. Go do the math.
> It is quite obvious you are not a pilot. (I am)
Ouch! I am a private pilot, actually. The general public has an idea that planes crash when their engines fail, hence the fascination with the BRS chute stuff. You know, as I do, that that is not the case -- we both had to do gazillions of simulated forced-landings to get our PPLs, and when we're a little high we sometimes pull the engine to idle on base or final and glide in anyway.
You might want to read the discussion from AvWeb on this whole thing. I don't want to second-guess the pilot -- after all, he's alive, and that's what counts -- but the plane was still under control when he pulled the chute (albeit with one separated aileron), so it's as much of a leap to assume that the plane could not have been landed as it is to assume that the plane could have been.
Pulling the chute doesn't automatically destroy the plane, just the chute. In this case, when the plane hit the short trees, it nosed over hard, causing substantial damage; in principle, the chute could have brought it down just fine (if a little hard) on a flat, soft surface; the trouble is that once you've pulled the chute, you've given up your power to choose.
I would like to believe that pilots are smart enough not to pull the chute if they can make a safe forced landing, but in a world like that, pilots would also be smart enough not to try to turn back at 400 ft AGL with an engine failure after takeoff, and they'd be smart enough not to try to stretch a glide during a forced landing. A quick read over NTSB reports shows that's not the case.
There are a few, very rare situations where a whole-plane parachute might be useful in a certified airplane, such as structural breakup in flight or a midair collision. Overall, however, the main purpose of the parachute would be to reassure passengers who don't know much about flying.
Most fatal accidents take place either just after takeoff or just before landing, when you're too low for a chute to do any good, or during continued flight into instrument conditions, where the pilot often doesn't realize there's a problem. Presumably, the chute would be useful for engine failures, but which would you prefer?
glide the plane, under control, into a field or parking lot; or
descend at a relatively high speed, possibly smashing into the middle of a freeway, the edge of a tall building, a cliff slope, tree tops, water, etc.?
With an engine failure over hostile terrain (no flat surfaces for landing) the chute might help, but the terrain probably isn't too friendly for a 2000fpm plunge any more than for a gliding landing. Even with only tiny trees in the reported case, the plane suffered substantial damage when it nosed over.
So, yes, if I had one I might use it in a pinch, but I might also be tempted to use it when I didn't need to (a simple engine failure near lots of open fields) and perhaps kill myself, my passengers, and people on the ground when I could have done a routine forced landing instead and walked away from an intact plane.
I have both Win98 and Debian sid on the family computer. I originally had it set to boot to Win98 by default, but I noticed that my girls (7 and 10) almost always booted into Linux, so I switched it over.
It turned out that they liked Tux Racer, Tux AQFH, and FlightGear more than they liked the Windows games (Civ II, the Sims, etc.). The fact that Tux AQFH was never finished seems to help -- they don't believe me when I tell them, and keep trying to find a way to the end anyway. My older daughter now uses Mozilla for her e-mail and school projects and is a big fan of the Gimp.
So, use a carrot instead of a stick -- set up your computer to dual boot and then put some fun stuff on the Linux partition. I guarantee that they'll find it on their own, especially if they think you're hiding it from them. Besides, you can always buy them stuffed penguins for Christmas or Hannukah.
Airplanes are expensive to own and fly, and one of the main problems is the internal-combustion engines. Even a little Cessna 172 needs an engine overhaul every 2,000 hours or so, at a cost of US $15,000 or more each time. The engines on a six-seat twin can cost far over USD 50,000 to overhaul. Go online and look at how many used small planes for sale have a time since major overhaul (SMOH) of close to 2,000 hours -- the owners are forced to sell because they cannot afford an overhaul.
Electric motors don't have cylinders that get scored, seals that leak, and so on. A lot of small plane owners like to go up for a quick spin on nice weekends, and it doesn't sound like the battery technology is too far off for them (2 hours would be fine for a sport plane) -- it might just make flying affordable.
I agree that we're a long way off from a battery-powered 747, if such a thing were even worthwhile.
Nearly every platform has an interpreter for the old Infocom text games. Zork I, II, and III are available for free legally from ActiVision,
and once you have a z-machine interpreter for your Mac, you can use any of the other Infocom games you can find. There are also many (legal) free z-machine games available on the net, and I think that Activision recently sold a CD-ROM with most of the old Infocom collection, including Hitchhiker's Guide, Enchanter, and the others.
Any one of these will keep you busy for the whole flight and taxi ride to your hotel, and you'll probably stay up and keep playing once you get there instead of sleeping off the jet lag. Just remember to bring a pad of paper, pencil, and eraser for drawing maps and working out mazes.
PrettyPoly is another open-source 3D editor. It's not ready to replace Blender yet, since it lacks essential tools like extrusion and UV-editing, but it's a good start:
http://prettypoly.sourceforge.net/
I agree with RMS, but I doubt that his arguments will convince anyone who's not already convinced.
We could try pushing some fear buttons instead: tell them that their e-mail was rejected for security reasons (or even as "a possible virus attack"), because Word attachments often carry viruses, and to please resend in plain text. The word "virus" is needed, even if not entirely technically accurate, because that's the one people know.
I run a small business (two employees) that has to work with two different currencies -- most of the revenue is USD, but salaries, taxes, and dividends are CAD.
I switched to GnuCash at the beginning of this fiscal year and have been happy enough -- it supports double-entry well, and multicurrency is only moderately awkward. The reports have been adequate for me (and the tax people) so far, at least. It responds fast, and supports arbitrarily complex split entries, which are important for my work.
On Debian Sid (unstable), the maintainers are doing a great job keeping up with the latest Gnome developments -- everything plays nicely with everything else, and new versions appear almost immediately.
Initially, I made the mistake of including Ximian in my /etc/apt/sources.list, and had all kinds of problems; leaving it out got me better Gnome software sooner.
In Ottawa, a cable modem from Rogers@Home costs CAD 39.95/month, or about USD 26.00 including modem rental. This satellite service costs nearly USD 100.00/month, plus a setup charge of close to USD1,000.
Nice try, but I think that we'll have to stick with laying cable, at least for the more populous parts of the country (i.e. the parts that can be reached by phone line). In isolated communities, we can have a single (hopefully faster) dish for the whole town, then run fiber to individual homes. That leaves only a tiny percentage of Canadians who would need private satellite dishes or something similar.
Even if Google paid USD 1,000 per machine (and I'll bet they paid much less), that comes to only USD 8 million for the whole setup -- you cannot buy much big iron for that, at least not enough to run one of the busiest sites on the Web.
Furthermore, Google had the enormous advantage of being able to scale up one machine at a time rather than dumping a whole lot of money at the start, and support and replacement parts are dirt cheap. I've seen the same approach work elsewhere.
C'mon, people -- I didn't buy my 3D card to play Quake. There are other 3D applications, such as flight simulators, where you can see dozens of miles in every direction: the better performance means that people can add a lot more detail (buildings, roads, rivers, railroads, towers, powerlines, etc.) and still keep things above 30fps.
Managers figure out how to use resources (i.e. people); architects design systems. While there's a little management in Open Source, most of my work with SAX (Simple API for XML) has been a combination of design and implementation. After all, I can hardly threaten to fire people or offer them bonuses or promotions, so I cannot make anyone do anything but what they wanted to do in the first place. That's what Eric meant, I think -- the architecture evolves according to what people are willing to do, not (usually) according to a strong central vision. I remember being part of the thread that annoyed Linus into allowing loadable kernel modules (hardly part of Linus's grand vision at the time).
I chaired a W3C working group for a year and spent most of my time worrying about absurd procedures designed by non-coders to make sure that the coders couldn't do any real work. That was management.
The demo that everyone's looking at won't work through a firewall because it's deliberately non-malicious. The scary part (for me) is that the Java applet has access to the file system, and I cannot see how a firewall can help if someone decides on a more malicious attack.
Instead of setting up an HTTP server, the applet could simply open an HTTP connection to the original server and start posting files from your hard drive. Applets are allowed to open connections back to the original host.
This is why client-software vulnerabilities are so scary -- the client software usually has the same privileges as you do.
A big advantage of open source is market-making: open-sourcing a product might build up a large community of users and integrators, and even if only 5% of users buy the fancier commercial version of a product, 5% of a $100M market is much more interesting than 100% of a $100K market.
In fact, a lot of companies will buy the commercial version if it's easier to integrate into their systems: skilled engineers are expensive and rare, so they have to be rationed carefully among projects. If the commercial version of your product can be installed and integrated by a junior person alone (i.e. installation GUIs, custom adapters, etc.), then it's easily worth $20K-$50K to a company; it would be stupid to try to install the Open-Source version if it meant pulling a good techie off an important project, and maybe delaying a major lauch, just for the sake of saving a few thousand dollars.
After all, $20K is the cost of sending, say, 8 engineers to a single trade show.
The original SlashDot refers to Thomas Jefferson and mentions that a little revolution is sometimes a good thing. Perhaps that's true, but as Samuel Johnson wrote (about Jefferson):
Native Americans might also question that statement, since the American Revolution took away their protection from land-grabbing settlers, and led, eventually, to the ethnic cleansing and even extinction of some of their groups.