Maybe it's no big deal from an engineering standpoint. But I don't see why everyone is arguing about whether or not an FM radio is useful or difficult to add. The real "big deal" is that someone wants Congress to determine what features my phone or MP3 player has, and there seems to be a large number of people that don't realize how stupid of an idea that is.
Enforcing that requires a system to store your last 10 passwords in cleartext.
What? No it doesn't, you can still keep the hashed passwords and verify against that.
That would work if the requirement was just that the password be different than your last 10 passwords, but in this case the requirement is "at least three characters different from your last 10 passwords." It's possible that there are some fancy algorithms that could be used to store a hash of the password and still somehow determine if three characters match, but it's certainly not obvious to me how you could do it.
Some people live far away from services for reasons that benefit society; farmers are a reasonable example. Many other people live far away from services because they want to. We see it where I live in suburban developments all the time; a new housing development goes up far away from everything (because nobody wants to live near the riff-raff you get in the city), people move in, and the first thing they do is start trying to get the government (read: somebody else) to pay for the lifestyle they chose.
Claiming that a "give everyone what they want because some of them may deserve it" policy is "equitable" is ridiculous.
That's important for infrastructure where you need universality of coverage to have an equitable society.
Although that raises the question of whether it's really "equitable" to have person A pay for the extra expense of providing a service to person B, because person B chose to live in an area where it costs much more to provide those services. (See those who move to a place out in the middle of nowhere, and then expect that the government should give them roads, power, internet, or whatever of the same quality and price as those who live in the middle of a dense city.)
Is there anything here for the Justice Department or the EU to look at?
I would hope that the Justice Department would have something better to do than investigate complaints that you can only view a particular photo on a particular OS. Of course, I could be wrong.
I built a Shuttle SFF PC once, and the barebones kit started around $200-$400, and that's before dropping in a CPU and RAM.
You can start at less than $180, with CPU at around $150 (for Core 2 Duo or Quad), and 4GB of RAM for less than $75. A video card 5-10 times as fast as the GeForce 320M is around $50.
So, for around $450 you can buy faster hardware in about the same form factor as the Mac Mini, but with far more future expandability.
When I last replaced my computer (earlier this year), I actually was considering the mac mini, but ended up building a Shuttle PC instead. Total cost was right about where you put it, about $450. The specs are probably a bit better than on the (previous gen) Mini, but not by a whole lot.
The main things that steered me away from the Mini were the price ($600 was a little steep in my opinion), and the fact that I couldn't find much info about running Linux on it. (The documentation I did find led me to believe that I could probably have gotten it working, but not without a fair amount of effort.) It looks like this update also comes with an extra $100 bump in price.
On the other hand, the Shuttle does have its drawbacks. It's relatively small, but nowhere near the "same form factor." It's also not as quiet as I would have liked. And, of course, it's only a good option for someone who doesn't mind building and setting up the computer themselves; it did take me a couple of hours and some troubleshooting to get it working.
I'm guessing this still means no adblock plus and no noscript for Chrome? Without those I have no interest.
There are various filtering web proxies that work with Chrome, and are a good replacement for Adblock Plus. I've been using BFilter, which was the simplest and most effective one I tried, although it's no longer being developed, so I expect that it will become less and less effective. It's much, much better than the (rather poor) ad blockers available as extensions to Chrome, although perhaps not quite up to the level of Adblock Plus, and of course there's no real browser integration.
Just checked the law for my state (Arizona), and it only prohibits entering the intersection on a red light. There is nothing that prohibits being in the intersection when the light turns red.
- Smaller screen (10"), but you can add an external one later if that bothers you.
- Slightly smaller keyboard (though I'm 6' 4" with proportionally large hands, and I can type nearly as fast on a netbook as I can my laptop or Microsoft Natural keyboard), but again you can add one if you need it later.
Of course, if you do those, then you just blew way past the $300 price point you were talking about. Also, although I didn't look at exactly what the specs on the two are, chances are that you're going to be getting more bang for your buck with the DIY desktop.
If you want a portable computer, then a pre-built netbook or laptop is probably a better bet than trying to build your own. But if what you really want is a desktop, then getting a netbook and using it as a desktop probably isn't the best choice.
So you're ok with putting innocent men in jail, just in case?
From a perfectly rational perspective, allowing, for instance, ten violent criminals to go free probably does more overall harm to society than imprisoning one innocent man. That doesn't mean that it's OK, but it's better than the alternative. You can argue what the threshold should be. Maybe you really think that it would be better to release every imprisoned person in the world, because there are bound to be innocent people among them, but I don't think you'd get much support for that idea.
At the time, the police said they believed it to be related to the way he was protesting. See
http://www.cnn.com/2009/CRIME/09/11/michigan.shooting/. Of course, since there was very little coverage later on, there's really nothing more one way or the other.
"The son also said his father used his abortion stance to terrorize women and said his father abused his mother, Mary Lou Kadera. The two divorced in 1987 and she died in a 2001 car accident."
When pro-choicers start threatening, murdering and blowing up clinics that refuse to carry out abortions, then you may have a point...
Back in September an anti-abortion activist named James Pouillon was murdered. Of course, most people didn't hear about it because the news organizations quickly pushed it to the back burner. It's kind of disturbing that political violence is only newsworthy if you happen to like the victim.
That must be why millions of people died in India, after an accident at a chemical plant, in the 1980s.
I think he's probably referring to this accident. According to Wikipedia, the estimates of the death toll seem to range from 15000 to 35000. That's only "millions" in RIAA math.
Despite our best efforts, man-made disasters are pitiful compared to what nature has managed to do.
Stallman is consistent about his beliefs. Don't read 3rd hand re-interpretations: proceed directly to the GPL, and to Stallman's presentations, to understand what he said and what he believes.
You can read the thread in question to decide whether the characterization above is accurate; it's his posts that seem to have triggered this argument. It looks pretty accurate to me.
On the other hand, it doesn't look to me like anyone actually took Stallman's recommendation seriously (in terms of actually making any policy changes.) Seems to me like it would be a little silly to make a major organizational change based on the statements of one man who is known for shooting his mouth off.
Everyone who breaks from the status quo should be punished by everyone with an axe to grind in perpetuity forever and ever.
Anyone who tells you that life is fair is an idiot. "Should" has very little to do with what people actually do. And if you think you can change that, you're deluding yourself.
The parent poster suggested RAID as solving the same problem as the article's subject. Which it does. The parent poster did not suggest that RAID replaces backup or archive solutions; that was something you invented on your own.
Neither is the technique that is being discussed in the article. Did you not even read the summary? The technique described is a method to increase resistance to data corruption or loss in a set of hardware due to hardware failures. RAID (with parity or mirroring) can do the same. It's intended to make your archive or backup strategy more reliable, not replace it.
If you have a RAID1 system with bit errors on one disk - you now have them on the other disk.
Whether or not this is true depends on the failure mode. If you have undetected bit errors, then that may be the case, but if the bit error can be detected (could be done at several different levels) you can fail the bad disk or correct the error without corrupting data.
For any archiving solution tapes are still king. The LTO and Dat72 varieties have been around for a long time, and each manufacturer pledges a certain timeframe for device support and even more have services to retrieve files long after the storage media is unsupported.
The premise of this exercise was that all storage media is susceptible to eventual degradation. If you believe that just because your archive data is on a tape, that it's safe, then you may have a nasty surprise some day when you go to restore important data from a tape that's several years old.
You do not have the right to be a fucking bunch of asshats and liars aka Fox News.
Perhaps you would like to show me the part of the Constitution that prohibits me from being an asshat and a liar.
In fact, it seems to me that one of the most important lessons of the Bill of Rights is that asshats (or the nicer term, "people I don't like") have the same rights that I do.
If you had a universally supported package system, then it would automatically pick the right binary. Developers would distribute a simple 'Linux' package and your package manager would pick the right one.
Some people pointed out some good uses for this (binaries on NFS filesystems, for instance), but simplifying package management is not one of them.
Lack of slashes (as in "tar/deb/rpm") and no multiplicity of install procedures. Its simpler for the user, witch has no doubt about how to go with one specific file (tars should be opened and README, debs should get dpkgs, etc, etc)
You could get the same "advantages" by just picking one package format and getting rid of the others. (No, that will never happen. And no, fat binaries would never replace tar/deb/rpm.) Adding another system that does the same job isn't going to make anything simpler for anybody.
What is with people whining about AdBlock all the time? OH NOES TEH ADZ@!1!One. Is it really that big a deal? Thanks to my Slashdot obsession and excellent karma, I have the option to disable ads on Slashdot natively, but I don't even use the option. Why do people care so much about little images trying to sell things?
Because web advertising has gone way beyond "little images trying to sell things." Instead, we get Flash monstrosities that slow my computer to a crawl, pop-ups that jump in front of the content you're trying to read and steal mouse clicks, and pages full of blinking, animated pictures that make it difficult to find the actual content.
Just because you don't mind having your time wasted in that way doesn't mean that everyone else will put up with it.
It certainly works much faster than Firefox on Linux in most circumstances. One thing I have noticed, though, is that Flash applications seem to run much more slowly in Chrome than in Firefox (to the point where Chrome becomes unusable on my computer for some sites that run acceptably in Firefox.) That seems a little weird to me, since it's the same plugin. Hopefully it's a problem that will be corrected before the official Linux release.
That and the lack of a decent ad blocker are the main things that keep me from switching from Firefox. I really like the speed and the interface is generally a big step forward, but I don't really like having to switch between two browsers.
I leave for the train at 7:00AM, and it took weeks of calling and threatening to cancel my subscription just to get them to start getting me the paper before 7:00.
Maybe after the first few times they realized that you weren't really going to cancel your subscription anyway?
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Maybe it's no big deal from an engineering standpoint. But I don't see why everyone is arguing about whether or not an FM radio is useful or difficult to add. The real "big deal" is that someone wants Congress to determine what features my phone or MP3 player has, and there seems to be a large number of people that don't realize how stupid of an idea that is.
That would work if the requirement was just that the password be different than your last 10 passwords, but in this case the requirement is "at least three characters different from your last 10 passwords." It's possible that there are some fancy algorithms that could be used to store a hash of the password and still somehow determine if three characters match, but it's certainly not obvious to me how you could do it.
Some people live far away from services for reasons that benefit society; farmers are a reasonable example. Many other people live far away from services because they want to. We see it where I live in suburban developments all the time; a new housing development goes up far away from everything (because nobody wants to live near the riff-raff you get in the city), people move in, and the first thing they do is start trying to get the government (read: somebody else) to pay for the lifestyle they chose.
Claiming that a "give everyone what they want because some of them may deserve it" policy is "equitable" is ridiculous.
Although that raises the question of whether it's really "equitable" to have person A pay for the extra expense of providing a service to person B, because person B chose to live in an area where it costs much more to provide those services. (See those who move to a place out in the middle of nowhere, and then expect that the government should give them roads, power, internet, or whatever of the same quality and price as those who live in the middle of a dense city.)
I would hope that the Justice Department would have something better to do than investigate complaints that you can only view a particular photo on a particular OS. Of course, I could be wrong.
When I last replaced my computer (earlier this year), I actually was considering the mac mini, but ended up building a Shuttle PC instead. Total cost was right about where you put it, about $450. The specs are probably a bit better than on the (previous gen) Mini, but not by a whole lot.
The main things that steered me away from the Mini were the price ($600 was a little steep in my opinion), and the fact that I couldn't find much info about running Linux on it. (The documentation I did find led me to believe that I could probably have gotten it working, but not without a fair amount of effort.) It looks like this update also comes with an extra $100 bump in price.
On the other hand, the Shuttle does have its drawbacks. It's relatively small, but nowhere near the "same form factor." It's also not as quiet as I would have liked. And, of course, it's only a good option for someone who doesn't mind building and setting up the computer themselves; it did take me a couple of hours and some troubleshooting to get it working.
There are various filtering web proxies that work with Chrome, and are a good replacement for Adblock Plus. I've been using BFilter, which was the simplest and most effective one I tried, although it's no longer being developed, so I expect that it will become less and less effective. It's much, much better than the (rather poor) ad blockers available as extensions to Chrome, although perhaps not quite up to the level of Adblock Plus, and of course there's no real browser integration.
Just checked the law for my state (Arizona), and it only prohibits entering the intersection on a red light. There is nothing that prohibits being in the intersection when the light turns red.
Of course, if you do those, then you just blew way past the $300 price point you were talking about. Also, although I didn't look at exactly what the specs on the two are, chances are that you're going to be getting more bang for your buck with the DIY desktop.
If you want a portable computer, then a pre-built netbook or laptop is probably a better bet than trying to build your own. But if what you really want is a desktop, then getting a netbook and using it as a desktop probably isn't the best choice.
Don't be stupid. Everyone knows that Slashdotters are the only ones who can possibly think of the obvious objections to every new technology.
It is if you round to the nearest 9 billion.
From a perfectly rational perspective, allowing, for instance, ten violent criminals to go free probably does more overall harm to society than imprisoning one innocent man. That doesn't mean that it's OK, but it's better than the alternative. You can argue what the threshold should be. Maybe you really think that it would be better to release every imprisoned person in the world, because there are bound to be innocent people among them, but I don't think you'd get much support for that idea.
Which is, of course, irrelevant.
Back in September an anti-abortion activist named James Pouillon was murdered. Of course, most people didn't hear about it because the news organizations quickly pushed it to the back burner. It's kind of disturbing that political violence is only newsworthy if you happen to like the victim.
Yes, very informative, moderators.
I think he's probably referring to this accident. According to Wikipedia, the estimates of the death toll seem to range from 15000 to 35000. That's only "millions" in RIAA math.
Despite our best efforts, man-made disasters are pitiful compared to what nature has managed to do.
You can read the thread in question to decide whether the characterization above is accurate; it's his posts that seem to have triggered this argument. It looks pretty accurate to me.
On the other hand, it doesn't look to me like anyone actually took Stallman's recommendation seriously (in terms of actually making any policy changes.) Seems to me like it would be a little silly to make a major organizational change based on the statements of one man who is known for shooting his mouth off.
Anyone who tells you that life is fair is an idiot. "Should" has very little to do with what people actually do. And if you think you can change that, you're deluding yourself.
The parent poster suggested RAID as solving the same problem as the article's subject. Which it does. The parent poster did not suggest that RAID replaces backup or archive solutions; that was something you invented on your own.
Neither is the technique that is being discussed in the article. Did you not even read the summary? The technique described is a method to increase resistance to data corruption or loss in a set of hardware due to hardware failures. RAID (with parity or mirroring) can do the same. It's intended to make your archive or backup strategy more reliable, not replace it.
Whether or not this is true depends on the failure mode. If you have undetected bit errors, then that may be the case, but if the bit error can be detected (could be done at several different levels) you can fail the bad disk or correct the error without corrupting data.
The premise of this exercise was that all storage media is susceptible to eventual degradation. If you believe that just because your archive data is on a tape, that it's safe, then you may have a nasty surprise some day when you go to restore important data from a tape that's several years old.
Perhaps you would like to show me the part of the Constitution that prohibits me from being an asshat and a liar.
In fact, it seems to me that one of the most important lessons of the Bill of Rights is that asshats (or the nicer term, "people I don't like") have the same rights that I do.
If you had a universally supported package system, then it would automatically pick the right binary. Developers would distribute a simple 'Linux' package and your package manager would pick the right one.
Some people pointed out some good uses for this (binaries on NFS filesystems, for instance), but simplifying package management is not one of them.
You could get the same "advantages" by just picking one package format and getting rid of the others. (No, that will never happen. And no, fat binaries would never replace tar/deb/rpm.) Adding another system that does the same job isn't going to make anything simpler for anybody.
Because web advertising has gone way beyond "little images trying to sell things." Instead, we get Flash monstrosities that slow my computer to a crawl, pop-ups that jump in front of the content you're trying to read and steal mouse clicks, and pages full of blinking, animated pictures that make it difficult to find the actual content.
Just because you don't mind having your time wasted in that way doesn't mean that everyone else will put up with it.
It certainly works much faster than Firefox on Linux in most circumstances. One thing I have noticed, though, is that Flash applications seem to run much more slowly in Chrome than in Firefox (to the point where Chrome becomes unusable on my computer for some sites that run acceptably in Firefox.) That seems a little weird to me, since it's the same plugin. Hopefully it's a problem that will be corrected before the official Linux release.
That and the lack of a decent ad blocker are the main things that keep me from switching from Firefox. I really like the speed and the interface is generally a big step forward, but I don't really like having to switch between two browsers.