You are forgetting the terms of his probation and the rapid introduction of computers in the jobs you mention.
According to the terms of his probation the guy can't use a cell phone. How can he be a taxi driver? I've been taking taxis for 10 years, and I've never in my life seen a taxi without a computerized fare system.
By the way, have you noticed how many bars and restaurants nowadays use computers in order to simplify the work process and billing? Do you think a baker still uses a notepad for book keeping? 99% of the people in the jobs you mention use computers all the time - when they program their VCR, when they use the dish washer. When they're driving their new car with electronic injection and LCD panel. When they collect money from the ATM. When they call someone on their cell phone.
Computers are entering into every aspect of our lives, just like telephones, cars, paper and the wheel have in the past. You may not always need to be familiar with how the computer works in order to use it, but the only thing that proves is that the computer was well designed. Would you be able to do the job you do and live the life you do without using a computer? Hell no, you wouldn't be posting on/. for one thing.
But that's not the point here. The point is that no one should be kept from expressing their opinion with threats of imprisonment. No one should be held indefinitely without trial. No one should be subjected to an unfair trial (Mitnick wan't allowed to look at the evidence against him). All these basic human rights were trodden on by the government of the 'land of the free'.
Does Mitnick have a way of appealing this ruling limiting his free speech? Can he sue the government for keeping him in prison without trial and without access to the evidence against him?
The U.S. claims to uphold the Human Rights Declaration, but is unwilling to have that commitment tested in an international court. Why? Because it would find that many of the current U.S. government policies are in direct violation with international law and the Declaration of Human Rights.
It's truly painful to see the U.S. slowly turn into a police state at the request of its voters. It seems the courts are no longer there to protect the innocent, punish the guilty and keep the people free from oppression - they exist to cast out the socially unaccepted and the poor, to lock them up for years or kill them using any means necessary (mandatory sentencing, imprisonment without trial, 3 strikes rule, death penalty, etc) while the rich get to go into therapy or to the Betty Ford clinic.
Together the rising power of multinationals as a major political force without democratic controls and the increasingly fascist environment in the U.S. (and elsewhere) make me pessimistic about the near future. Maybe we need a strong leader:).
Perl has version dependencies which make it hard to use for system administration.
Have you ever taken a look at your Unix systems' internals? All those startup scripts are written in sh for a a good reason. It's portable, it doesn't require version checks or included modules (which may be on NFS mounted partitions which are unavailable at boot time or in single user mode).
ksh is neat because it gives you an ok user interface on cleanly installed unix systems (set -o vi anyone?). Then you compile a compiler and get bash and tcsh installed:).
Many of these combined words of Greek or Latin origin were invented during or after the Renaissance. The fact that this word exist now does not mean that it existed in ancient Greece.
If it did, its original meaning may have been warped to suit whomever found sexually explicit material objectionable.
I'd probably take it down also... what would it hurt?
Your power supply for one thing. There have been more power supply failures than usual today because of people shutting off equipment and powering it up again. Interesting to see that the only real outages because of Y2K were caused by people's stupidity.
I've been using Unix (Linux/Solaris) as a desktop system for quite a while now. I agree that the configurability is what I like about it most - but that doesn't mean that users shouldn't have an easy tool to help them configure it.
Whenever someone I know installs a Linux system the first thing they come and ask me is: how do I configure this damn X thing? Configurability should never be an excuse for obscurity.
The information in that.INF file is worth wile. I once spent a couple of days trying to find out the horizontal and vertical rates of a low-end monitor. No info on the website, sales people refused to give the information. The info is in the booklet that comes with the monitor alright, pity that the booklet is what gets lost first... I ended up throwing away the monitor and buying a new one.
Don't underestimate the power of documentation. I mean, what else do you need to know about a monitor than its horizontal and vertical rates? It gets the job done, that's what's important.
People just don't seem to get the difference between a kernel and a distribution. IMHO, nearly everybody who has a linux uses a distribution with (g)libc.
If people want to make programs that do things differently, they'll have to provide statically linked binaries. So what?
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According to the terms of his probation the guy can't use a cell phone. How can he be a taxi driver? I've been taking taxis for 10 years, and I've never in my life seen a taxi without a computerized fare system.
By the way, have you noticed how many bars and restaurants nowadays use computers in order to simplify the work process and billing? Do you think a baker still uses a notepad for book keeping? 99% of the people in the jobs you mention use computers all the time - when they program their VCR, when they use the dish washer. When they're driving their new car with electronic injection and LCD panel. When they collect money from the ATM. When they call someone on their cell phone.
Computers are entering into every aspect of our lives, just like telephones, cars, paper and the wheel have in the past. You may not always need to be familiar with how the computer works in order to use it, but the only thing that proves is that the computer was well designed. Would you be able to do the job you do and live the life you do without using a computer? Hell no, you wouldn't be posting on /. for one thing.
But that's not the point here. The point is that no one should be kept from expressing their opinion with threats of imprisonment. No one should be held indefinitely without trial. No one should be subjected to an unfair trial (Mitnick wan't allowed to look at the evidence against him). All these basic human rights were trodden on by the government of the 'land of the free'.
Does Mitnick have a way of appealing this ruling limiting his free speech? Can he sue the government for keeping him in prison without trial and without access to the evidence against him?
The U.S. claims to uphold the Human Rights Declaration, but is unwilling to have that commitment tested in an international court. Why? Because it would find that many of the current U.S. government policies are in direct violation with international law and the Declaration of Human Rights.
It's truly painful to see the U.S. slowly turn into a police state at the request of its voters. It seems the courts are no longer there to protect the innocent, punish the guilty and keep the people free from oppression - they exist to cast out the socially unaccepted and the poor, to lock them up for years or kill them using any means necessary (mandatory sentencing, imprisonment without trial, 3 strikes rule, death penalty, etc) while the rich get to go into therapy or to the Betty Ford clinic.
Together the rising power of multinationals as a major political force without democratic controls and the increasingly fascist environment in the U.S. (and elsewhere) make me pessimistic about the near future. Maybe we need a strong leader :).
Perl has version dependencies which make it hard to use for system administration.
:).
Have you ever taken a look at your Unix systems' internals? All those startup scripts are written in sh for a a good reason. It's portable, it doesn't require version checks or included modules (which may be on NFS mounted partitions which are unavailable at boot time or in single user mode).
ksh is neat because it gives you an ok user interface on cleanly installed unix systems (set -o vi anyone?). Then you compile a compiler and get bash and tcsh installed
If it did, its original meaning may have been warped to suit whomever found sexually explicit material objectionable.
It looks like you need a new job... I wouldn't stay very long in a company with filters to block out certain pages.
Your power supply for one thing. There have been more power supply failures than usual today because of people shutting off equipment and powering it up again. Interesting to see that the only real outages because of Y2K were caused by people's stupidity.
Whenever someone I know installs a Linux system the first thing they come and ask me is: how do I configure this damn X thing? Configurability should never be an excuse for obscurity.
The information in that .INF file is worth wile. I once spent a couple of days trying to find out the horizontal and vertical rates of a low-end monitor. No info on the website, sales people refused to give the information. The info is in the booklet that comes with the monitor alright, pity that the booklet is what gets lost first... I ended up throwing away the monitor and buying a new one.
Don't underestimate the power of documentation. I mean, what else do you need to know about a monitor than its horizontal and vertical rates? It gets the job done, that's what's important.
And it still supports my ancient printers! I hope we'll soon have the complete suite on Linux.
People just don't seem to get the difference between a kernel and a distribution. IMHO, nearly everybody who has a linux uses a distribution with (g)libc.
If people want to make programs that do things differently, they'll have to provide statically linked binaries. So what?