This claim is particularily stupid, even considering it comes from SCO.
All released versions of Linux are plainly and openly available for the taking for anyone who cares to. ftp.kernel.org makes that exersize trivial.
They have repeatedly and publically claimed that the 2.6 Linux-kernel contains "thousands of lines of code, we're not talking a function or two" "literally line-for-line copied" from their code. They've also publically claimed "people can use 2.4 kernels, we don't have an issue with that." so the only code in question is that added after 2.6 was started.
So, where is that code ? It's been more than 2 years now. Clearly IBM can destroy none of this evidence, even if they wanted to, and even if it existed in the first place. There's literally tens of (if not hundreds of) millions of copies of the Linux kernel source-code out there in literally hundreds of jurisdictions. It'd be an exersize in futility to try to somehow eradicate any evidence that lives in this code.
You have to disclaim that you're not speaking on behalf of the company,
Yes. Clearly. Because if you don't, a reasonable reader would assume that a person who posts on Slashdot and EXPLICITLY says that he is an EX IBM-employee is posting IBMs official policy.
Oh, and by the way, despite posting from a.no adress, this email does not constitute the official policy of the kingdom of Norway. I suppose you'd assume as much if I didn't explicitly disclaim it.
Needing to disclaim the patently obvious is a particular American disease.
Kay. You're talking about the more-than-50% transmission losses on the current power grid
I don't know where you got this idea. Transmission and distribution-losses for electricity in the USA was about 7.2% in 1995, I wasn't able to find newer numbers, but it'll be in the same ballpark today.
Electrical distribution is very very efficient. Now batteries are a different thing, they are, as everyone points out, bulky, heavy, expensive and on top of that store an absolutely minute amount of energy. kg-for-kg it's like literally 1% of the energy-content of gas or diesel.
Sure they will. Atleast those of them that see it as important to their ego to separate the world into "published" and "unpublished" authors according to some arbitrary and fuzzy line.
In reality there's no clear line between 'published' and 'not published'. There's vanity-press stuff that's absolute crap. There's stuff published by large distributors that is absolute crap. There's vanity-press stuff that's never read by more than a handful of people. There's self-published stuff that sells ten thousand. There's stuff published by large distributors that never sell.
It's not a "yes/no" distinction. It's a more/less floating scale with no hard lines anywhere.
Yes you do. It's amazing that someone can manage to read slashdot without understanding something so mindbogglingly simple.
If you buy a copy of a copyrigthed work, you own that single copy. Plain and simple. You also own the physical media that it is stored on.
Even though it is your property, there are certain things you may not do with it, these things are listed in copyrigth-law and elsewhere. For example, you may not make and distribute copies of a book you own, nor may you use a book you own to whack a policeman over the head.
But you may do anything with your property not specifically prohibited by law. You require no "permission" or "licence" from the copyrigth-holder for this. You can read a book. You can listen to a piece of music. You can give away, or sell, a book you're tired of. You can microwave a CD. You can use Ann Coulter writings to wipe your ass. You can do all of these things, regardless of what the copyrigth-holder thinks about them. Copyrigth is (DUH!) mainly about the rigth to make copies. (what a concept!) and a few other things (public performance is covered for example).
In no way shape or form does copyrigth prevent you from owning books, cds or other copyrigthed works that you have legally aquired.
There's a difference between owning the copyrigth to a work (which you don't, unless you created the work or you bugth the copyrigth from the person who did) and owning a single copy of a work. (which you do if you legally bougth a copy of the work.)
I hugely prefer living in a society where people have atleast some trust in eachother and do not go around in paranoia. Yes, the price of that is making certain kinds of crime somewhat easier. So what ? It's a price I'm more than willing to pay.
Living in a society where everyone where terribly suspicious, all the time, would be horrible.
OK, so there's limits. You shouldn't uninstall all locks or anything. But neither should you allow paranoia to run your life.
True. I was being sloppy. What I actually meant is that among those mutations that actually cause significant change at all, most of them will be detrimental.
You're correct. Accidents happen in all lines of work. The US system is silly. I've read that some kinds of doctors, such as those assisting by childbirth require "insurances" agains malpractice that can cost more than their salary.
In Norway theres instead two different sorts of settlements if you are mistreated.
In like literally 95% of the cases it'll be accidents of the type that can happen. Even if the doctor does his best according to his human limitations. Yes, afterwards we can see it was wrong. But it wasn't gross neglience or anything. It was a simple mistake. (just like the kernel just got a 'if (i = 0)' bug fixed to the correct 'if (i == 0)' The first is unquestionably wrong, but it's a type of bug that can happen even to a diligent coder.
In this case, the state picks up the tab. They have a special fund for such cases, and they'll pay for any direct losses you suffer as a consequence of the mistake. Cheaper than a insurance, for starters insurance-companies want to make a profit... Besides, in this case you don't get any extra cash for emotional suffering etc, only for your direct losses. Being alive *is* risky, sometimes you suffer trough no fault of your own. That's simply the price of being alive.
In a few cases though, its mistakes of a kind that should not be possible. That should really not happen if the doctor was doing his job properly. Not simply a mistake that could happen to anybody. But an error that could only happen if the doctor really failed to do what a doctor should do. In *this* case. (and this case only) the hospital and/or the doctor needs to pick up the tab. The doctor may also lose his licence as a doctor, it depends on the particulars.
Even in the latter cases, the amounts paid are much lower than those in the US. You do in this case get a cash-compensation for any additional suffering you've gone trough, but the amounts are much more conservative than in the US. My father lost articulation in one finger-joint due to a mistake made in supporting the finger when he broke it in a car-accidents a few years back. Technically that makes him 1% disabled, but it has no real influence on his job as a teacher, nor on his possibilities in his spare time. I think he got like $1000.
You don't need keels if you're only planning on deploying the kite as a pulling-help on those occasions where you sail more or less directly downwind. Being a bit off that course can be handled with the normal engines of the ship, for example, if the wind goes S, and you want to go SSW, you migth need to point the ship at SW and run the engines at low-speed. The combined vector of sail pulling S and engines pushing you SW works out to an actual course of SSW. (more or less, you get the idea)
It depends. oil is probably the cheapest transport there is, for multiple reasons:
It's a liquid. Loading and unloading is simple and requires very little manpower.
It has a density sligthly lower than seawater, meaning a ship can be completely "full" with oil and still float nicely. You don't need "airpockets" in the ship to float, like you would if oil where heavier than seawater.
It doesn't need to be cooled.
It keeps for years.
It does however need a controlled atmosphere in the tanks to avoid explosive mixtures.
Transporting a thousand tons of apples costs rather more than transporting a thousand tons of oil.
It's an old problem. In Soviet they had benchmarks for factories, for example lamp-factories that where supposed to make lamps out of so-and-so many tons of steel. The result is predictable: The produced lamps where mind-bogglingly heavy.
Or the practice of ligth-bulb factories being measured in total watts of ligthbulbs produced. The result ? You could only get 100W ligthbulbs, since its *MUCH* easier to produce one of those than 5 20W ligthbulbs.
I agree. By default Google considers any link to a page an implicit endorsement of the page. Which is a problem, you see stuff like comment-spam attempting to increase page-rank by making it appear that slashdot endorses a certain site when that isn't the case.
There's a extension to disable this, something like rel="nofollow" that says, essentially, the link should not be considered an endorsement.
But even more useful would be the possibility to explicitly say what relation you have to some site.
From an evolutionary perspective, telepathy is a strong survival trait. Since we don't see it in the gene pool, it's unlikely that it's even possible."
Evolution has no mechanism for magically making all beneficial possible traits appear. All it does have is a mechanism for selecting in favour of random mutations that are beneficial, and against random mutations that are negative (which is most of them)
Telepathy is very obviously physically possible. We have it. It's called talking. Problem is, it has limited range, can be disturbed by noise, and other animals, if prey or predators, have detectors for it. We can minimize detection by being silent.
Physically, it'd be equally possible to imagine a biological organism communicating by, for example, radio. It'd have the same problems/advantages. There'd be limited range. There'd be disturbances. And if there was an easy way to evolve it, there's no reason to think that your prey/predators wouldn't have it too, which would negate some of the advantage.
The cat-story is amusing, but a poor example of abuse.
If someones cat completely unprovoked attacked me or my kids repeatedly I would expect the problem to be dealt with. A cat is a hobby. There exists no rigth to have hobbies that attack people on a public street. House-arrest for the cat actually sounds quite mild in this case. I'd have expected many judges to have ordered the animal put down.
If programmers could write code ten times faster, that executes a tenth as quickly, that would actually be a beneficial trade-off for many (most?) organisations.
Especially since you can combine. Even in high-performance applications there's typically a only a tiny fraction of the code that actually needs to be efficient, it's perfectly common to have 99% of the time spent in 5% of the code.
Which means that in basically all cases you're going to be better off writing everything in a high-level language and then optimize only those routines that need it later.
That way you make less mistakes, and get higher-quality better code quicker for the 95% of the code where efficiency is unimportant, and you can spend even more time on optimizing those few spots where it matters.
Publication-bias makes this worse. People tend to be more likely to write-up and publish studies that show a result than those that show no result. So odds are if some experiment will show a result 1 time in 10, and 100 people make the experiment, the published results will consist of 9 positives and say 5 negatives. (even though the real results where 10 positives, 90 negatives as expected by random chance alone)
Way too seldom do you see published studies of type: "We tried so-and-so. Nothing happened."
Re:Technology COULD Limit Imagination
on
Re-Inventing Hotwheels
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Thinking back, most of the things I played with as a kid was not toys at all. A tree is no toy. A stream, a lake, an empty barrel, 100 feet of rope, a saw, a bike, a fish, a path, a bunch of planks, a screwdriver, a stick. None of these objects are toys. Though all of them can be used for play.
I think it' silly how so many parents shut their kids away in their own separate universe with brigthly-coloured, but ultimately useless "toys", that ultimately acomplish nothing. Kids these days tend to have plastic saws, plastic screwdrivers, plastic hammers, plastic cooking-pans none of which actually do what these objects normally do.
Now I'm a parent myself, for a two year old son. And given the same choice, real or "toy" he'll go for real every time. "playing" kitchen cannot measure up to actually go in the kitchen and make a cake, or a bread, or dinner. The "toy" screwdriver is no fun, the real one is different, it *works*.
Thing is, real objects can frequently be dangerous, if used improperly. So they tend to require that you spend time with your child, that you have patience. That you accept needing to wipe the kitchen-floor again, for the third time today. The toy, on the other hand, you can generally relatively safely let your kid handle alone with minimal supervision.
Lots of "toys" seem to be made more for the parents than for the kids.
Actually, cell rupture from the result of sharp-edged crystal formation occurs during the post-warming cycle, not during cool down. This is why rescuers prefer to bring avalanche victims back to normal body temp in as much of a controlled process as possible, in order to avoid as much crystal formation as possible.
Are you suggesting that people survive being buried under avalanches until literally frozen (i.e sub-zero body-temperature?)
That's nonsense. People die of hypothermia with a core body-temperature around 28 centigrade.
Now, it's possible (though I'd say unlikely) that some small extremity, say a toe or an ear, could be literally frozen, without requiring a complete amputation. I personally consider even this very unlikely, but perhaps you've got some references ?
True. But also because the cost of preparing for those "emergencies" (cost in the general sense, not just money) times the expected probability they will happen is smaller than the advantage of having prepared.
If carrying a spare tire at all times while driving cost you oh, say $50/year, (the tire, the time to occasionally check it has air, the loss of baggage-capacity, the sligthly worse fuel-economy due to dragging more weigth around) the expected frequency of a flat tire is once every 5 years, and the expected savings of not having to call a rescue-vehicle is $500/incident, then carrying the spare tire makes sense.
For many people, that's actually a debatable value-proposition. Especially smaller vehicles that are used in urban areas where help is never far away anyway. Our small Corsa had a single flat tire in 12 years and 200.000km/s of service. It did drag around a spare tire for all those years, but in hindsigth, it'd probably have been more rational not to. Dragging a 10kg tire around for 200.000 km (that's 5 times around the earth...) has to cost more than it'd have cost to call for help that single time.
Similar logic applies to other preparations for various accidents and mishaps.
You're rigth -- one should in general consider the consequences of what one is doing.
But be careful not to fall into the panic-trap. Life does not consist of a series of crisis. Most things that in principle can go wrong, do not, infact, go wrong. Theres a line between sensible caution and downrigth paranoia.
If you pay too much attention to never risking anything, you give up something else; your freedom.
Some people say, young females should never travel alone. I've read tips that you, as a single traveller, should refuse to take a room if the receptionist tells you the room-number out loud, someone could hear, you should insist he write it on a note for you, without saying it out loud. You should never ask for directions, as this marks you as a tourist. Nor should you talk in public, as your language and/or accent will do the same. You should never go backpacking in the wilderness alone. You should never post anything personally identifiable, certainly not a picture, online. You should never drink alcohol abroad.
Thing is, it migth be that following all of these (and many more) rules reduce your risk of say getting mugged in your vacation. That is, if you can even call whats left a vacation. It's a cost-benefit analysis.
Yes, I agree, you should be aware, you should think about what you're doing and make a conscious choise. But it's not a given that the "rigth" choice is always going to be the "safer" one. Personally I've broken each and every one of the "rules" above that I was able to. (the exception being doing things as a female, which is hard for me to pull off since I'm male)
If I'd followed all the "rules", I'd never have met my now-wife. I'd never have gotten to experience waking up to the sound of a herd of Reindeer running down the valley past my tent. I'd never have had gotten to know most of my closest friends. I'd never have visited Montreal, or Atlanta, or Berlin. Actually, coming to think of it, I'd have missed out on probably something like 40 of the nicest 50 things thats happened to me in my life. That's a steep price to pay for "security".
Being in a panic is how your "administration" likes you though. That way they can justify any and all invasions of privacy and any and all erosions of fundamental freedoms with the trump-all argument; "it's for your own safety."
"they're my ears... you can't make any sounds towards me without my permission".
There are limits to how much noise you can send into how many ears. Try playing music loudly all nigth for a week, and argue that if your neighbours don't want noise to enter, they should install sound-proof windows and keep them shut.
We in general place limits on the freedom of individuals if what they're doing harms society at large a lot more than it helps the individual. Playing music loudly all nigth in a city causes more harm than it's worth, so we don't allow it. If you lived in the countryside miles from the nearest neighbour there'd be no problem.
In much of the world spam is outlawed. In Norway, for example, it's illegal to send individually adressed marketing-messages to people without either a current business-relationship or informed, explicit permission, so SMS, email and IM-spam are all outlawed. For the simple reason that harm to society at large from allowing such is (MUCH) larger than the benefits.
Agreed. using whitespace in separating words is somewhat tricky in a world where whitespace in filenames are getting increasingly common. (and arguably was always broken anyway, only less noticeably so as long as people "didn't do that".)
Several of the gnu-tools has options to null-terminate each filename. Which is better, since \0 isn't valid as part of a filename, but rather few tools understand about this, bash certainly doesn't, it thinks that echo "`find . -print0`" amounts to starting echo with a single argument.
Some of these *are* tricky. I actually had one professor whose standard answer to deleting difficult files created by accident was to instruct students to type "rm -i *" and then just answer yes for the files they actually wanted to delete.
This works for the overwhelming majority of "problematic" filenames. Three guesses what that does when there's a file '-rf' in your current directory.... In the words of the befallen student: "If I didn't know better, I'd think you just deleted all my files..."
The thing is, -i and -f are mutually exclusive, and when both are present on a command-line, whichever is last takes precedence.
so rm -i -rf * won't actually ask anything, but instead it'll recursively, forcefully, remove everything that matches * (which will save your dotfiles, but that's not much of a comfort)
(for the curious '--' means "end of flags" and ensures that anything later will be interpreted as a filename. So "rm -i -- *" would have worked as expected)
unix also has "anything goes", but a strong sense of "not everything is wise".
Under ext3, Linux, all of the following are valid filenames:
"foo bar"
"-rf"
"*"
"\ ?"
" "
"foo\bar.*"
Don't get me started on the havoc newbies manage to make when trying to deal with suchlike. In general, people know this will blow up the first time someone tries a naive script, and tend to avoid all of it. The only thing borderline common is filenames with spaces in them, even this breaks some scripts, but arguably those scripts are broken anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
All released versions of Linux are plainly and openly available for the taking for anyone who cares to. ftp.kernel.org makes that exersize trivial.
They have repeatedly and publically claimed that the 2.6 Linux-kernel contains "thousands of lines of code, we're not talking a function or two" "literally line-for-line copied" from their code. They've also publically claimed "people can use 2.4 kernels, we don't have an issue with that." so the only code in question is that added after 2.6 was started.
So, where is that code ? It's been more than 2 years now. Clearly IBM can destroy none of this evidence, even if they wanted to, and even if it existed in the first place. There's literally tens of (if not hundreds of) millions of copies of the Linux kernel source-code out there in literally hundreds of jurisdictions. It'd be an exersize in futility to try to somehow eradicate any evidence that lives in this code.
Yes. Clearly. Because if you don't, a reasonable reader would assume that a person who posts on Slashdot and EXPLICITLY says that he is an EX IBM-employee is posting IBMs official policy.
Oh, and by the way, despite posting from a .no adress, this email does not constitute the official policy of the kingdom of Norway. I suppose you'd assume as much if I didn't explicitly disclaim it.
Needing to disclaim the patently obvious is a particular American disease.
I don't know where you got this idea. Transmission and distribution-losses for electricity in the USA was about 7.2% in 1995, I wasn't able to find newer numbers, but it'll be in the same ballpark today.
Electrical distribution is very very efficient. Now batteries are a different thing, they are, as everyone points out, bulky, heavy, expensive and on top of that store an absolutely minute amount of energy. kg-for-kg it's like literally 1% of the energy-content of gas or diesel.
In reality there's no clear line between 'published' and 'not published'. There's vanity-press stuff that's absolute crap. There's stuff published by large distributors that is absolute crap. There's vanity-press stuff that's never read by more than a handful of people. There's self-published stuff that sells ten thousand. There's stuff published by large distributors that never sell.
It's not a "yes/no" distinction. It's a more/less floating scale with no hard lines anywhere.
If you buy a copy of a copyrigthed work, you own that single copy. Plain and simple. You also own the physical media that it is stored on.
Even though it is your property, there are certain things you may not do with it, these things are listed in copyrigth-law and elsewhere. For example, you may not make and distribute copies of a book you own, nor may you use a book you own to whack a policeman over the head.
But you may do anything with your property not specifically prohibited by law. You require no "permission" or "licence" from the copyrigth-holder for this. You can read a book. You can listen to a piece of music. You can give away, or sell, a book you're tired of. You can microwave a CD. You can use Ann Coulter writings to wipe your ass. You can do all of these things, regardless of what the copyrigth-holder thinks about them. Copyrigth is (DUH!) mainly about the rigth to make copies. (what a concept!) and a few other things (public performance is covered for example).
In no way shape or form does copyrigth prevent you from owning books, cds or other copyrigthed works that you have legally aquired.
There's a difference between owning the copyrigth to a work (which you don't, unless you created the work or you bugth the copyrigth from the person who did) and owning a single copy of a work. (which you do if you legally bougth a copy of the work.)
I hugely prefer living in a society where people have atleast some trust in eachother and do not go around in paranoia. Yes, the price of that is making certain kinds of crime somewhat easier. So what ? It's a price I'm more than willing to pay.
Living in a society where everyone where terribly suspicious, all the time, would be horrible.
OK, so there's limits. You shouldn't uninstall all locks or anything. But neither should you allow paranoia to run your life.
In Norway theres instead two different sorts of settlements if you are mistreated.
In like literally 95% of the cases it'll be accidents of the type that can happen. Even if the doctor does his best according to his human limitations. Yes, afterwards we can see it was wrong. But it wasn't gross neglience or anything. It was a simple mistake. (just like the kernel just got a 'if (i = 0)' bug fixed to the correct 'if (i == 0)' The first is unquestionably wrong, but it's a type of bug that can happen even to a diligent coder.
In this case, the state picks up the tab. They have a special fund for such cases, and they'll pay for any direct losses you suffer as a consequence of the mistake. Cheaper than a insurance, for starters insurance-companies want to make a profit... Besides, in this case you don't get any extra cash for emotional suffering etc, only for your direct losses. Being alive *is* risky, sometimes you suffer trough no fault of your own. That's simply the price of being alive.
In a few cases though, its mistakes of a kind that should not be possible. That should really not happen if the doctor was doing his job properly. Not simply a mistake that could happen to anybody. But an error that could only happen if the doctor really failed to do what a doctor should do. In *this* case. (and this case only) the hospital and/or the doctor needs to pick up the tab. The doctor may also lose his licence as a doctor, it depends on the particulars.
Even in the latter cases, the amounts paid are much lower than those in the US. You do in this case get a cash-compensation for any additional suffering you've gone trough, but the amounts are much more conservative than in the US. My father lost articulation in one finger-joint due to a mistake made in supporting the finger when he broke it in a car-accidents a few years back. Technically that makes him 1% disabled, but it has no real influence on his job as a teacher, nor on his possibilities in his spare time. I think he got like $1000.
You don't need keels if you're only planning on deploying the kite as a pulling-help on those occasions where you sail more or less directly downwind. Being a bit off that course can be handled with the normal engines of the ship, for example, if the wind goes S, and you want to go SSW, you migth need to point the ship at SW and run the engines at low-speed. The combined vector of sail pulling S and engines pushing you SW works out to an actual course of SSW. (more or less, you get the idea)
Transporting a thousand tons of apples costs rather more than transporting a thousand tons of oil.
Or the practice of ligth-bulb factories being measured in total watts of ligthbulbs produced. The result ? You could only get 100W ligthbulbs, since its *MUCH* easier to produce one of those than 5 20W ligthbulbs.
There's a extension to disable this, something like rel="nofollow" that says, essentially, the link should not be considered an endorsement.
But even more useful would be the possibility to explicitly say what relation you have to some site.
Evolution has no mechanism for magically making all beneficial possible traits appear. All it does have is a mechanism for selecting in favour of random mutations that are beneficial, and against random mutations that are negative (which is most of them)
Telepathy is very obviously physically possible. We have it. It's called talking. Problem is, it has limited range, can be disturbed by noise, and other animals, if prey or predators, have detectors for it. We can minimize detection by being silent.
Physically, it'd be equally possible to imagine a biological organism communicating by, for example, radio. It'd have the same problems/advantages. There'd be limited range. There'd be disturbances. And if there was an easy way to evolve it, there's no reason to think that your prey/predators wouldn't have it too, which would negate some of the advantage.
If someones cat completely unprovoked attacked me or my kids repeatedly I would expect the problem to be dealt with. A cat is a hobby. There exists no rigth to have hobbies that attack people on a public street. House-arrest for the cat actually sounds quite mild in this case. I'd have expected many judges to have ordered the animal put down.
Especially since you can combine. Even in high-performance applications there's typically a only a tiny fraction of the code that actually needs to be efficient, it's perfectly common to have 99% of the time spent in 5% of the code.
Which means that in basically all cases you're going to be better off writing everything in a high-level language and then optimize only those routines that need it later.
That way you make less mistakes, and get higher-quality better code quicker for the 95% of the code where efficiency is unimportant, and you can spend even more time on optimizing those few spots where it matters.
Way too seldom do you see published studies of type: "We tried so-and-so. Nothing happened."
I think it' silly how so many parents shut their kids away in their own separate universe with brigthly-coloured, but ultimately useless "toys", that ultimately acomplish nothing. Kids these days tend to have plastic saws, plastic screwdrivers, plastic hammers, plastic cooking-pans none of which actually do what these objects normally do.
Now I'm a parent myself, for a two year old son. And given the same choice, real or "toy" he'll go for real every time. "playing" kitchen cannot measure up to actually go in the kitchen and make a cake, or a bread, or dinner. The "toy" screwdriver is no fun, the real one is different, it *works*.
Thing is, real objects can frequently be dangerous, if used improperly. So they tend to require that you spend time with your child, that you have patience. That you accept needing to wipe the kitchen-floor again, for the third time today. The toy, on the other hand, you can generally relatively safely let your kid handle alone with minimal supervision.
Lots of "toys" seem to be made more for the parents than for the kids.
Are you suggesting that people survive being buried under avalanches until literally frozen (i.e sub-zero body-temperature?)
That's nonsense. People die of hypothermia with a core body-temperature around 28 centigrade.
Now, it's possible (though I'd say unlikely) that some small extremity, say a toe or an ear, could be literally frozen, without requiring a complete amputation. I personally consider even this very unlikely, but perhaps you've got some references ?
If carrying a spare tire at all times while driving cost you oh, say $50/year, (the tire, the time to occasionally check it has air, the loss of baggage-capacity, the sligthly worse fuel-economy due to dragging more weigth around) the expected frequency of a flat tire is once every 5 years, and the expected savings of not having to call a rescue-vehicle is $500/incident, then carrying the spare tire makes sense.
For many people, that's actually a debatable value-proposition. Especially smaller vehicles that are used in urban areas where help is never far away anyway. Our small Corsa had a single flat tire in 12 years and 200.000km/s of service. It did drag around a spare tire for all those years, but in hindsigth, it'd probably have been more rational not to. Dragging a 10kg tire around for 200.000 km (that's 5 times around the earth...) has to cost more than it'd have cost to call for help that single time. Similar logic applies to other preparations for various accidents and mishaps.
Some preparation makes sense, other does not.
But be careful not to fall into the panic-trap. Life does not consist of a series of crisis. Most things that in principle can go wrong, do not, infact, go wrong. Theres a line between sensible caution and downrigth paranoia.
If you pay too much attention to never risking anything, you give up something else; your freedom.
Some people say, young females should never travel alone. I've read tips that you, as a single traveller, should refuse to take a room if the receptionist tells you the room-number out loud, someone could hear, you should insist he write it on a note for you, without saying it out loud. You should never ask for directions, as this marks you as a tourist. Nor should you talk in public, as your language and/or accent will do the same. You should never go backpacking in the wilderness alone. You should never post anything personally identifiable, certainly not a picture, online. You should never drink alcohol abroad.
Thing is, it migth be that following all of these (and many more) rules reduce your risk of say getting mugged in your vacation. That is, if you can even call whats left a vacation. It's a cost-benefit analysis.
Yes, I agree, you should be aware, you should think about what you're doing and make a conscious choise. But it's not a given that the "rigth" choice is always going to be the "safer" one. Personally I've broken each and every one of the "rules" above that I was able to. (the exception being doing things as a female, which is hard for me to pull off since I'm male)
If I'd followed all the "rules", I'd never have met my now-wife. I'd never have gotten to experience waking up to the sound of a herd of Reindeer running down the valley past my tent. I'd never have had gotten to know most of my closest friends. I'd never have visited Montreal, or Atlanta, or Berlin. Actually, coming to think of it, I'd have missed out on probably something like 40 of the nicest 50 things thats happened to me in my life. That's a steep price to pay for "security".
Being in a panic is how your "administration" likes you though. That way they can justify any and all invasions of privacy and any and all erosions of fundamental freedoms with the trump-all argument; "it's for your own safety."
There are limits to how much noise you can send into how many ears. Try playing music loudly all nigth for a week, and argue that if your neighbours don't want noise to enter, they should install sound-proof windows and keep them shut.
We in general place limits on the freedom of individuals if what they're doing harms society at large a lot more than it helps the individual. Playing music loudly all nigth in a city causes more harm than it's worth, so we don't allow it. If you lived in the countryside miles from the nearest neighbour there'd be no problem.
In much of the world spam is outlawed. In Norway, for example, it's illegal to send individually adressed marketing-messages to people without either a current business-relationship or informed, explicit permission, so SMS, email and IM-spam are all outlawed. For the simple reason that harm to society at large from allowing such is (MUCH) larger than the benefits.
Several of the gnu-tools has options to null-terminate each filename. Which is better, since \0 isn't valid as part of a filename, but rather few tools understand about this, bash certainly doesn't, it thinks that echo "`find . -print0`" amounts to starting echo with a single argument.
This works for the overwhelming majority of "problematic" filenames. Three guesses what that does when there's a file '-rf' in your current directory.... In the words of the befallen student: "If I didn't know better, I'd think you just deleted all my files..."
The thing is, -i and -f are mutually exclusive, and when both are present on a command-line, whichever is last takes precedence. so rm -i -rf * won't actually ask anything, but instead it'll recursively, forcefully, remove everything that matches * (which will save your dotfiles, but that's not much of a comfort)
(for the curious '--' means "end of flags" and ensures that anything later will be interpreted as a filename. So "rm -i -- *" would have worked as expected)
Under ext3, Linux, all of the following are valid filenames:
Don't get me started on the havoc newbies manage to make when trying to deal with suchlike. In general, people know this will blow up the first time someone tries a naive script, and tend to avoid all of it. The only thing borderline common is filenames with spaces in them, even this breaks some scripts, but arguably those scripts are broken anyway.