We have a mix of various documents that one uses when one needs to identify oneself, which is ridiculous. This is stupid and should be reformed.
But I already know who I am. It sounds facile but its true. I don't need other people, especially not government employees, to know who I am, I'm just fine. Nor do I accept the premiss that it the government that has a right to "clarify" my identity.
I presume you have a bank account
Yeah, but I don't see why they can't just look at my signature, or, heaven forbid, actually get to know me and recognise me when I come in. Nor do I think minor problems like this, that were non-problems in the past, are an excuse for government mandated identity documents.
David Blunkett had his id stolen recently by someone who bought a copy of his birth cert from St Cath's house. I think it was Paul Kenyon, the 'campaigning' journalist. It showed clearly how not having a proper system means it can be chronically abused.
Then don't treat birth certificates as ID! - I don't. I never ask people for a birth certificate when I meet them.
I value people by the content of their character, not by government issued papers.
"I don't think it matter what the people in England say, as they are all subjects of the Queen. Not like us valuable citizens, our leaders always listen to us..."
It is that Prime Minister guy and all the MPs who are the problem. If the Queen had actually stood up for British peoples rights and for freedom I wouldn't mind so much, but what little constitution we had has in recent years just menat the PM can do anything he likes at all, no matter how bad. As far as I'm concerned the whole system can go.
the royal navy sought and sunk slavers of other nations.
Surely you mean "arrested slaving ships from other nations, released the slaves and sold the vessles"? I don't remember anything about sinking ships full of slaves as part of the anti-slavery policy.
That is fair enough, but why do you accept car number plates? How is that really different to having a tag through your ear like a cow? Ok, so the tag is on your car instead, but it amounts to the same thing, an ownership mark from the government like a cow has.
I'd be able to take a lot of other British people more seriously about personal freedom if they actually supported it in other areas.
If your operating system happens to use a flat memory model, like Linux does, this limits each process to 4GB total.
I thought it was Linux 2.2 that had the 4Gb memory limit? - I think it was 2Gb plus 2Gb actually, or 3 + 1. anyway, I'm pretty sure I've seen 64Gb as a compile option for 2.4 kernels, back when I used to use it (I got scared off around 2.4.11 and went onto FreeBSD 4.x)
Open as in comes with a TCP/IP stack and can be connected to over the Internet. Supports Telnet _and_ Apache, runs X. That is what the Open bit stands for. I've actually used Netscape 3.01 on it! -
I used OpenVMS a bit at my universty, and I have to say I never really got into it - getting my solaris account was a great day! I can understand people wanting to maintain legacy apps (big purchasing systems maybe?) but is OpenVMS really good for anything _new_ today? Does it have any real particular advantages that mean you would want to use it for reasons other that "we've already got a stack of Alphas this high on it and gonna keep using it until forever"?
I spent a lot of my childhood in Vanuatu in the early 80s. We were there as expatriates (with time-limited residency) but even back then you had to have proven assets of over a million dollars to go live there perminantly.
When are you people going to realise that there is no dependence on fossil fuels? The only reason we use LPG, petrol/gasoline and diesel oil from fossil fuels is becuase ethanol and canola are 1.5 times the price. If fossil fuels run low we use timber, ethanol and corn/canola oils and everythin continues as normal. If you took out fuel taxes people's costs would actually fall.
Using corn oil to make ethanol for cars is a possibility, but I am more interested in using corn oil (or rapeseed, sunflower etc.) as a direct substitute for diesel fuel, like this guy is doing.
Actaully I was thinking of crusing over and seeing the guy later this week - a friend an I are thinking of starting a diesel to veg-oil conversion business. If anyone else is interested in this you can email me on palfreman at ntlworld.com and we pay him a visit.
Yeah but a lot less than the cost of the plane, when you count the capital costs absorbed by airbus over the last 30 odd years. Boing raises its own money by comparison.
If we had done that Airbus (and it's about 50% market share) wouldn't exists nowadays. Why bother make our own plane if we can just buy some overpriced Boeings?
Er, because when you take into account the many billions of taxpayers money Airbus has had for free, Boings work out as much cheaper?
As with the ESA, the only reason for Airbus is the jelousy felt by European government employees at the site of visible American success. So they threw tax money at the various contractors and for those billions they got planes which people in other countries now buy - in otherwords, a significant transfer of resources from European taxpayers to the world airline travalling public. Great. I'm sure that was worthwhile.
It's a smaller example of a large principle at work, namely the European governments and the EU wasting our money (no, my money) on pointless things designed to solely to make them look good.
You may think that the EU, for its large physical number of people and its combined GDP of almost that of the US, can cream off some of that GDP, and granted we do have a great deal of technical expertise in wasting money pointlessly, not just by firing it into space. But that doesn't make it a pleasing thought.
The ESA / EU/ EU governments shouldn't try to keep up with America or Russia because it isn't a race, and firing peoples' money pointlessly into space has to be about the least efficient way of burning though other peoples' money imaginable.
What are they planning, to raise the 12 stars on Mars and claim it as a colony? To use it as a base for firing missiles at America? Establish diplomatic relations with underground Martians, then launch a trade embargo on red sand? All and none probably, and however you look at it big EU spacerockets are just plain laughable.
Normally I laugh at NASA doing this kind of thing - partly because it's over in America and it isn't my money being shot into space. But seeing the European Space Agency is planning a Mars trip - just as you or I may plan a booze-cruise to Calais - just makes me feel extremely distant from the whole EU/United Europe nonsense.
You may think this is a troll - I suppose it is a little bit - but surely you must be able to see the absurdity in this. All along some Europeans - particularly the French, although there is much to admire about them themselves - have felt a profound jellously about America and in his case, the American Space program. A sensible approach would be to let the Americans spend the money, then when it becomes commercial feasible people in Europe will start running commercial services up their anyway: after all the Russians already are, if only into near orbit.
But no, the EU has to have its own space programme, even though it could never keep up with either the Russians or the Americans. I don't so much mind having to pay for it pointlessly - there are plenty of other things I get taxed for pointlessly. It's the pseudo-prestige they get from it, as though somehow they're playing with the big boys now.
I can't believe the space guys are digging up this corpse again. The fact is, they are talking about dust. Not living examples, not any scientifically meaningful examples , just some extremely small "magnetic crystals" that resemble other tiny magnetic crystals found on earth, and probably everywhere in the universe, living or not.
This is juts a rehash of that nonsense about them claiming to have found "tiny fossilised bacteria" which also turned out to be dust, non-living, never living.
I live in England too and I also have a valuable mobile phone. However, there are better ways of dealing with mugging than criminalising ligitimate use of consumer electronics.
This will do nothing to stop mugging, nothing to stop stolen phone chipping, but it will mean people like us will get sent to jail from time to time for excercising our normal (and legitimate) curiosity.
Yes, there is a legitimate reason. You bought the phone, you own it, so you can reprogramme it if you want to. You own the phone. You don't need any more reasons.
Maybe it a conspiracy, but there is a small but perfectly viable chance that the person discovering an exploit would be on an IRC channel at the same time as the person whos box had been owned. Statistically it is bound to happen every now and again.
What I want to know is how they made a 200GB hard drive with 60GB platters. Doesn't seem to add up.
The IDE standard allows for up to 40% on-disk errors before the low-level (factory) format. 60 GB x four platters = 240GB, 16.6% standardised on-disk errors, with the rest being sold as smaller drives or binned, and you have your 200GB drive.
With the four 60GB platters drives it obviously isn't worth assuming less than 16.6% errors currently, presumably because 10% errors disks don't give them enough volume to make a viable sales line yet. Watch out for a 224GB model later, if they've been putting the 10%'s aside for a later release.
The z: drive is mapped to the netlogon share of a pdc when logging in windows 98. That can cause all kinds of problems. Use another letter.
Yeah. Thinking about it I usually use H: for my Samba'd home directories. Then change the location of "My Documents" on the users machine to point to H:\ instead of C:\blah\blah\blah and it everyone starts saving to the "network" - well, that's what they call it:-)
Build yourself a samba server on your favourite brand of UNIX (I prefer Freebsd, many don't). Attach a tape drive and use Amanda as your backup program. Get them all accounts on this machine and get them used to using their "Z:" drive for everything. Then everyone has a daily backup and you are in control - which helps a lot when dealing with people less technically competent than you.
I was interested to se that Murray Stokely asked if the poster of the story was "trying to help
the spread of trojanned copies of FreeBSD" Why would he think that? It is a serious thing to alledge. Is it likely that someone was trying to?
You shouldn't make ASSumptions.
I'm well versed in the architecture and protocols (both political and computational) of DNS.
So you say. But you seem unaware of the essential nature of DNS - that is is just a database service designed to make IP addresses easier to handle. You seem to think it is part of a country itself, which just strikes me as misguided.
.za is property. It's a ccTLD, which according to IANA defers to ISO 3166-1 on what constitutes a country and what doesn't.
IANA and the International Standards Organisation may think it is property, or part of a state or whatever, but people who actually know DNS know that is is just a database lookup service for mapping hostnames to IP addresses. There can be other.za's, other . roots, people can use other TLDs or make up new ones. (How about.rsa?) It is all entirely flexible and fundamentally based on utility to the end-users (ISPs and their customers). Not only is it inappropriate for something like that to be run by governments, its not even enforcable nor does it make any logical sense. Notwithstanding all the arguments against the South Afican government being the domain owner for.za, their record on running.gov.za is shocking, and they haven't even bothered to go about requesting the transfer in the RFC complient way. To imagine they could get away with all this, and then introduce a government-controlled licencing scheme where domain delagatees needed permission from some corrupt government department every time they wanted to change a zonefile, shows a profound ignorance about the way these things work.
If they do embargo.za and it's new gov't run and subsidized agency, they set a dangerous precedent.
Will internet embargos go up around China's.CN next time they piss off human right advocates or free speech fanatics?
The short answer is no. Lots of countries have poor human rights records, but most of the people who call themselves the government in these places know to leave TLDs alone, valuing their countries often fragile links to the outside world. They know the Internet represents a great hope for lifting themselves out of poverty and becoming modern countries. Mbeki's government in SA seems to be heading in exactly the opposite direction, deliberately harming South Africa and the people who live there.
It's up to the citizens in those countries to change their process from the INSIDE OUT.
Er no, not with DNS. You do not need to go round the townships getting votes in order to run a namesever. You need the co-ooperation of other DNS administrators and you need to be able to show them you 1) have the agreement of the delagator, and 2) can actuallly provide the service. The South African government fulfils neither condition.
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But I already know who I am. It sounds facile but its true. I don't need other people, especially not government employees, to know who I am, I'm just fine. Nor do I accept the premiss that it the government that has a right to "clarify" my identity.
I presume you have a bank account
Yeah, but I don't see why they can't just look at my signature, or, heaven forbid, actually get to know me and recognise me when I come in. Nor do I think minor problems like this, that were non-problems in the past, are an excuse for government mandated identity documents.
David Blunkett had his id stolen recently by someone who bought a copy of his birth cert from St Cath's house. I think it was Paul Kenyon, the 'campaigning' journalist. It showed clearly how not having a proper system means it can be chronically abused.
Then don't treat birth certificates as ID! - I don't. I never ask people for a birth certificate when I meet them.
I value people by the content of their character, not by government issued papers.
It is that Prime Minister guy and all the MPs who are the problem. If the Queen had actually stood up for British peoples rights and for freedom I wouldn't mind so much, but what little constitution we had has in recent years just menat the PM can do anything he likes at all, no matter how bad. As far as I'm concerned the whole system can go.
Surely you mean "arrested slaving ships from other nations, released the slaves and sold the vessles"? I don't remember anything about sinking ships full of slaves as part of the anti-slavery policy.
I'd be able to take a lot of other British people more seriously about personal freedom if they actually supported it in other areas.
I thought it was Linux 2.2 that had the 4Gb memory limit? - I think it was 2Gb plus 2Gb actually, or 3 + 1. anyway, I'm pretty sure I've seen 64Gb as a compile option for 2.4 kernels, back when I used to use it (I got scared off around 2.4.11 and went onto FreeBSD 4.x)
Open as in comes with a TCP/IP stack and can be connected to over the Internet. Supports Telnet _and_ Apache, runs X. That is what the Open bit stands for. I've actually used Netscape 3.01 on it! -
I used OpenVMS a bit at my universty, and I have to say I never really got into it - getting my solaris account was a great day! I can understand people wanting to maintain legacy apps (big purchasing systems maybe?) but is OpenVMS really good for anything _new_ today? Does it have any real particular advantages that mean you would want to use it for reasons other that "we've already got a stack of Alphas this high on it and gonna keep using it until forever"?
I spent a lot of my childhood in Vanuatu in the early 80s. We were there as expatriates (with time-limited residency) but even back then you had to have proven assets of over a million dollars to go live there perminantly.
When are you people going to realise that there is no dependence on fossil fuels? The only reason we use LPG, petrol/gasoline and diesel oil from fossil fuels is becuase ethanol and canola are 1.5 times the price. If fossil fuels run low we use timber, ethanol and corn/canola oils and everythin continues as normal. If you took out fuel taxes people's costs would actually fall.
Actaully I was thinking of crusing over and seeing the guy later this week - a friend an I are thinking of starting a diesel to veg-oil conversion business. If anyone else is interested in this you can email me on palfreman at ntlworld.com and we pay him a visit.
Switzerland is not a member of the EU and does not participate in the EU Space programme.
Yeah but a lot less than the cost of the plane, when you count the capital costs absorbed by airbus over the last 30 odd years. Boing raises its own money by comparison.
Er, because when you take into account the many billions of taxpayers money Airbus has had for free, Boings work out as much cheaper?
As with the ESA, the only reason for Airbus is the jelousy felt by European government employees at the site of visible American success. So they threw tax money at the various contractors and for those billions they got planes which people in other countries now buy - in otherwords, a significant transfer of resources from European taxpayers to the world airline travalling public. Great. I'm sure that was worthwhile.
You may think that the EU, for its large physical number of people and its combined GDP of almost that of the US, can cream off some of that GDP, and granted we do have a great deal of technical expertise in wasting money pointlessly, not just by firing it into space. But that doesn't make it a pleasing thought.
The ESA / EU/ EU governments shouldn't try to keep up with America or Russia because it isn't a race, and firing peoples' money pointlessly into space has to be about the least efficient way of burning though other peoples' money imaginable.
What are they planning, to raise the 12 stars on Mars and claim it as a colony? To use it as a base for firing missiles at America? Establish diplomatic relations with underground Martians, then launch a trade embargo on red sand? All and none probably, and however you look at it big EU spacerockets are just plain laughable.
You may think this is a troll - I suppose it is a little bit - but surely you must be able to see the absurdity in this. All along some Europeans - particularly the French, although there is much to admire about them themselves - have felt a profound jellously about America and in his case, the American Space program. A sensible approach would be to let the Americans spend the money, then when it becomes commercial feasible people in Europe will start running commercial services up their anyway: after all the Russians already are, if only into near orbit.
But no, the EU has to have its own space programme, even though it could never keep up with either the Russians or the Americans. I don't so much mind having to pay for it pointlessly - there are plenty of other things I get taxed for pointlessly. It's the pseudo-prestige they get from it, as though somehow they're playing with the big boys now.
This is juts a rehash of that nonsense about them claiming to have found "tiny fossilised bacteria" which also turned out to be dust, non-living, never living.
This will do nothing to stop mugging, nothing to stop stolen phone chipping, but it will mean people like us will get sent to jail from time to time for excercising our normal (and legitimate) curiosity.
Yes, there is a legitimate reason. You bought the phone, you own it, so you can reprogramme it if you want to. You own the phone. You don't need any more reasons.
Maybe it a conspiracy, but there is a small but perfectly viable chance that the person discovering an exploit would be on an IRC channel at the same time as the person whos box had been owned. Statistically it is bound to happen every now and again.
The IDE standard allows for up to 40% on-disk errors before the low-level (factory) format. 60 GB x four platters = 240GB, 16.6% standardised on-disk errors, with the rest being sold as smaller drives or binned, and you have your 200GB drive.
With the four 60GB platters drives it obviously isn't worth assuming less than 16.6% errors currently, presumably because 10% errors disks don't give them enough volume to make a viable sales line yet. Watch out for a 224GB model later, if they've been putting the 10%'s aside for a later release.
Cool. I would be interested in looking at that. Are you going to publish it here?
Yeah. Thinking about it I usually use H: for my Samba'd home directories. Then change the location of "My Documents" on the users machine to point to H:\ instead of C:\blah\blah\blah and it everyone starts saving to the "network" - well, that's what they call it :-)
Build yourself a samba server on your favourite brand of UNIX (I prefer Freebsd, many don't). Attach a tape drive and use Amanda as your backup program. Get them all accounts on this machine and get them used to using their "Z:" drive for everything. Then everyone has a daily backup and you are in control - which helps a lot when dealing with people less technically competent than you.
I was interested to se that Murray Stokely asked if the poster of the story was "trying to help the spread of trojanned copies of FreeBSD" Why would he think that? It is a serious thing to alledge. Is it likely that someone was trying to?
So you say. But you seem unaware of the essential nature of DNS - that is is just a database service designed to make IP addresses easier to handle. You seem to think it is part of a country itself, which just strikes me as misguided.
IANA and the International Standards Organisation may think it is property, or part of a state or whatever, but people who actually know DNS know that is is just a database lookup service for mapping hostnames to IP addresses. There can be other .za's, other . roots, people can use other TLDs or make up new ones. (How about .rsa?) It is all entirely flexible and fundamentally based on utility to the end-users (ISPs and their customers). Not only is it inappropriate for something like that to be run by governments, its not even enforcable nor does it make any logical sense. Notwithstanding all the arguments against the South Afican government being the domain owner for .za, their record on running .gov.za is shocking, and they haven't even bothered to go about requesting the transfer in the RFC complient way. To imagine they could get away with all this, and then introduce a government-controlled licencing scheme where domain delagatees needed permission from some corrupt government department every time they wanted to change a zonefile, shows a profound ignorance about the way these things work.
If they do embargo .za and it's new gov't run and subsidized agency, they set a dangerous precedent.
Will internet embargos go up around China's .CN next time they piss off human right advocates or free speech fanatics?
The short answer is no. Lots of countries have poor human rights records, but most of the people who call themselves the government in these places know to leave TLDs alone, valuing their countries often fragile links to the outside world. They know the Internet represents a great hope for lifting themselves out of poverty and becoming modern countries. Mbeki's government in SA seems to be heading in exactly the opposite direction, deliberately harming South Africa and the people who live there.
It's up to the citizens in those countries to change their process from the INSIDE OUT.
Er no, not with DNS. You do not need to go round the townships getting votes in order to run a namesever. You need the co-ooperation of other DNS administrators and you need to be able to show them you 1) have the agreement of the delagator, and 2) can actuallly provide the service. The South African government fulfils neither condition.