I will not consider voting for anyone who supports the murder of innocent people. That is my absolute minimum standard for support for a political candidate. Since both major parties are fully committed to wars of aggression, I believe that voting for them is unconscionable. That leaves me with a choice of refusing to vote, or voting for a candidate that will not win. Since I like a lot of what Jill Stein has to say, I may as well vote for her. At least it slightly increases the odds of her message getting out.
Both major parties supported the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. So no, there was no difference between the two major parties. The two major parties claim somewhat different domestic policies, but almost never actually differ on foreign policies.
I was surprised last year when I first saw an article from EFF suggesting that we open our wifi networks. I did see some reason to support what they were suggesting, but I was also anxious about opening up my LAN, weak as wireless encryption may actually be. Since then, I bought a new wireless router, which does make it easy to offer separate WLANs with configurable levels of access to each other. I see TLS being used more widely. I've learned a bit about VPNs, and set up OpenVPN on my router. And, I read the article others have mentioned in this thread, that Bruce Schneier, who both knows more than I do and has more to worry about, doesn't bother securing his wireless, since it's really not the security vulnerability that it's made out to be. https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/01/my_open_wireles.html
But most important, I worry that a lot of the structure of IT, and especially IT security, tends to foster an individualistic and cautious outlook that needs the balance of the considerations of fostering community. Of course, offering security advice is a service to the community, but it's worth arguing for something that explicitly supports an open community, now and then.
A communist economy is by definition managed by the state.
False. A communist economy is by definition one in which there is no state. That's how Marx and Engels defined it.
When, in the course of development, class distinctions have disappeared, and all production has been concentrated in the hands of a vast association of the whole nation, the public power will lose its political character. Political power, properly so called, is merely the organised power of one class for oppressing another. If the proletariat during its contest with the bourgeoisie is compelled, by the force of circumstances, to organise itself as a class, if, by means of a revolution, it makes itself the ruling class, and, as such, sweeps away by force the old conditions of production, then it will, along with these conditions, have swept away the conditions for the existence of class antagonisms and of classes generally, and will thereby have abolished its own supremacy as a class. http://marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch02.htm
You may not like this idea. You may not believe it is possible. But it is the definition of communism.
Skud's an experienced programmer. As is the case with many experienced computer programmers, she didn't have a computer science degree. Please see any of the countless debates on Slashdot on whether computer science degrees are necessary for programming. She wasn't switching to a technical position: she was getting forced out of a technical position she had held for three years. She wasn't switching to a handle; her name is Skud, that is the name she normally uses, and that is what Google's official policy supposedly defines as the name to use for a Google account.
Much of the article is a critique of Silicon Valley culture in general, and why she's glad she left.
It's Facebook. What else are they going to say? "We're terribly sorry, but our business model depends upon selling third parties your personal information, so we have no intention of actually respecting anyone's privacy, and our privacy settings are fraudulent"?
1. In most cases, with a typical desktop, you can boot a Linux distro and get to a GUI with no trouble at all. This has been true for years. Try a LiveCD some time. 2. In some cases, you'll run into problems, and need to fix things on the command line, but that's true with Windows as well. 3. There is much better documentation for fixing Linux problems than there is for fixing Windows problems.
Admittedly, I'd actually given up on Ubuntu, not because of Unity exactly, but because of how Canonical was making it clear they had no interest whatsoever in what the community thought.
However, I wasn't talking about Fedora and Ubuntu completely shutting down their UI projects. I wouldn't want them to; I rather like Gnome Shell. I had in mind more simply that if a whole lot of users switch to LXDE, then that would send signals that would lead to improvements in LXDE.
And you must admit, it's much easier for a Linux desktop distribution user to switch desktop environments, then it is for a Windows user to switch to Linux or OS X.
There are, after all, several full-fledged desktop environments available for Fedora and Ubuntu and all their kin. If fewer people are using Gnome Shell and more are using LXDE, there will be a shift in feature requests and bug reports and new applets developed, and resources will shift around.
One of his lessons learned is that "everyone is replaceable", which is the sort of things action movie villains say when they're pointing a gun at the hero's head.
More and more often, when I search for documentation, I get links to videos, mostly YouTube videos. At best, these are inefficient; if you really need to explain details of the GUI, you should be able to do it with a few screenshots, but videos involve someone who is almost certainly not a professional voice actor reading technical information aloud, in a format that is difficult to review or index, and doesn't allow for copy-and-paste of URLs or command lines.
It's worse in my job, where for some reason, instead of actually writing out documentation, we get training videos recorded by project managers in which they talk over a Powerpoint presentation. At least there's the Powerpoint to refer to, but any additional explanations by the managers are difficult to hear, and again, difficult to review or index.
Really, what's so appealing about recording a video, instead of just writing out an explanation?
I'm happy enough with Gnome 3 as implemented in Fedora, and I thought Unity in Ubuntu was pretty decent. Neither is flawless, but I prefer either of them to any other desktop UI I've tried.
I can understand the frustration with a sudden change in the Gnome UI. But I don't understand the depth or breadth of the rage.
I was thinking that 'dd' is part of the GNU core utilities, so any Linux installation CD would have it, but it might not have 'shred'. I just checked and found 'shred' is part of the GNU core utilities. I thought it was absent from the Ubuntu LiveCD I used to wipe a hard drive on an old computer I was preparing to give away, though maybe I was mistaken.
When I was wiping a hard drive on an old computer a few months ago, I did a first pass from/dev/urandom, and a second from/dev/zero. I didn't time them with much accuracy, but I know that the/dev/urandom pass took several hours, and the/dev/zero pass took less than an hour.
I'd have thought, even on that old CPU, generating pseudo-random numbers would be significantly faster than writing them to disk, so that it wouldn't make much difference, but it appears otherwise.
Because 'dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda' is just so fucking difficult. Maybe it would have worked better to have the staffer throw rocks, and a young kid wipe the hard disk.
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Is anyone else having problems posting to Sl TRANSACTION SUCCESSFUL: RECORD 'Romney, Willard Mitt' INCREMENTED.
I will not consider voting for anyone who supports the murder of innocent people. That is my absolute minimum standard for support for a political candidate. Since both major parties are fully committed to wars of aggression, I believe that voting for them is unconscionable. That leaves me with a choice of refusing to vote, or voting for a candidate that will not win. Since I like a lot of what Jill Stein has to say, I may as well vote for her. At least it slightly increases the odds of her message getting out.
Both major parties supported the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. So no, there was no difference between the two major parties. The two major parties claim somewhat different domestic policies, but almost never actually differ on foreign policies.
Frankly, I would vote for a one eyed, hump backed, anarchist Hobbit, if I thought it would mean an end to Repubmocrat tyranny.
Actually, that sounds like a pretty good candidate to me.
I was surprised last year when I first saw an article from EFF suggesting that we open our wifi networks. I did see some reason to support what they were suggesting, but I was also anxious about opening up my LAN, weak as wireless encryption may actually be. Since then, I bought a new wireless router, which does make it easy to offer separate WLANs with configurable levels of access to each other. I see TLS being used more widely. I've learned a bit about VPNs, and set up OpenVPN on my router. And, I read the article others have mentioned in this thread, that Bruce Schneier, who both knows more than I do and has more to worry about, doesn't bother securing his wireless, since it's really not the security vulnerability that it's made out to be.
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/01/my_open_wireles.html
But most important, I worry that a lot of the structure of IT, and especially IT security, tends to foster an individualistic and cautious outlook that needs the balance of the considerations of fostering community. Of course, offering security advice is a service to the community, but it's worth arguing for something that explicitly supports an open community, now and then.
A communist economy is by definition managed by the state.
False. A communist economy is by definition one in which there is no state. That's how Marx and Engels defined it.
When, in the course of development, class distinctions have disappeared, and all production has been concentrated in the hands of a vast association of the whole nation, the public power will lose its political character. Political power, properly so called, is merely the organised power of one class for oppressing another. If the proletariat during its contest with the bourgeoisie is compelled, by the force of circumstances, to organise itself as a class, if, by means of a revolution, it makes itself the ruling class, and, as such, sweeps away by force the old conditions of production, then it will, along with these conditions, have swept away the conditions for the existence of class antagonisms and of classes generally, and will thereby have abolished its own supremacy as a class.
http://marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch02.htm
You may not like this idea. You may not believe it is possible. But it is the definition of communism.
Skud's an experienced programmer. As is the case with many experienced computer programmers, she didn't have a computer science degree. Please see any of the countless debates on Slashdot on whether computer science degrees are necessary for programming. She wasn't switching to a technical position: she was getting forced out of a technical position she had held for three years. She wasn't switching to a handle; her name is Skud, that is the name she normally uses, and that is what Google's official policy supposedly defines as the name to use for a Google account.
Much of the article is a critique of Silicon Valley culture in general, and why she's glad she left.
I keep my Fedora VM regularly updated from the stable repository.
$ uname -a
Linux fedora.vm 3.6.2-4.fc17.x86_64 #1 SMP Wed Oct 17 02:43:21 UTC 2012 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
So yes, at least one major Linux distribution is using the 3.6 kernel.
It's Facebook. What else are they going to say? "We're terribly sorry, but our business model depends upon selling third parties your personal information, so we have no intention of actually respecting anyone's privacy, and our privacy settings are fraudulent"?
The best quote from a game full of good writing.
There can be no democracy if institutions act in secret.
1. In most cases, with a typical desktop, you can boot a Linux distro and get to a GUI with no trouble at all. This has been true for years. Try a LiveCD some time.
2. In some cases, you'll run into problems, and need to fix things on the command line, but that's true with Windows as well.
3. There is much better documentation for fixing Linux problems than there is for fixing Windows problems.
Bankers are overpowered.
Admittedly, I'd actually given up on Ubuntu, not because of Unity exactly, but because of how Canonical was making it clear they had no interest whatsoever in what the community thought.
However, I wasn't talking about Fedora and Ubuntu completely shutting down their UI projects. I wouldn't want them to; I rather like Gnome Shell. I had in mind more simply that if a whole lot of users switch to LXDE, then that would send signals that would lead to improvements in LXDE.
And you must admit, it's much easier for a Linux desktop distribution user to switch desktop environments, then it is for a Windows user to switch to Linux or OS X.
There are, after all, several full-fledged desktop environments available for Fedora and Ubuntu and all their kin. If fewer people are using Gnome Shell and more are using LXDE, there will be a shift in feature requests and bug reports and new applets developed, and resources will shift around.
Or, "Have you ever seen one?"
One of his lessons learned is that "everyone is replaceable", which is the sort of things action movie villains say when they're pointing a gun at the hero's head.
I'm getting annoyed with video tutorials.
More and more often, when I search for documentation, I get links to videos, mostly YouTube videos. At best, these are inefficient; if you really need to explain details of the GUI, you should be able to do it with a few screenshots, but videos involve someone who is almost certainly not a professional voice actor reading technical information aloud, in a format that is difficult to review or index, and doesn't allow for copy-and-paste of URLs or command lines.
It's worse in my job, where for some reason, instead of actually writing out documentation, we get training videos recorded by project managers in which they talk over a Powerpoint presentation. At least there's the Powerpoint to refer to, but any additional explanations by the managers are difficult to hear, and again, difficult to review or index.
Really, what's so appealing about recording a video, instead of just writing out an explanation?
Oh, so horribly true. Especially when those three articles are incomplete, inaccurate, or years out of date.
Users are even expected to open a web browser and navigated to https://extensions.gnome.org/local/ to view installed extensions. Seriously. WTF.
This surprised me. I had no idea this resource existed, and that is a bad way to distribute UI extensions, even if it was well-publicized.
I'm happy enough with Gnome 3 as implemented in Fedora, and I thought Unity in Ubuntu was pretty decent. Neither is flawless, but I prefer either of them to any other desktop UI I've tried.
I can understand the frustration with a sudden change in the Gnome UI. But I don't understand the depth or breadth of the rage.
Yeah, that'd be easier.
I was thinking that 'dd' is part of the GNU core utilities, so any Linux installation CD would have it, but it might not have 'shred'. I just checked and found 'shred' is part of the GNU core utilities. I thought it was absent from the Ubuntu LiveCD I used to wipe a hard drive on an old computer I was preparing to give away, though maybe I was mistaken.
When I was wiping a hard drive on an old computer a few months ago, I did a first pass from /dev/urandom, and a second from /dev/zero. I didn't time them with much accuracy, but I know that the /dev/urandom pass took several hours, and the /dev/zero pass took less than an hour.
I'd have thought, even on that old CPU, generating pseudo-random numbers would be significantly faster than writing them to disk, so that it wouldn't make much difference, but it appears otherwise.
Because 'dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda' is just so fucking difficult. Maybe it would have worked better to have the staffer throw rocks, and a young kid wipe the hard disk.
Then they don't "meaningfully" ban encryption. They just use it as an excuse to harass, arrest, and interrogate people they don't like.