Seriously? I upgraded my laptop from 10.6 to 10.8 to 10.9. The few problems I've had in 10.6 to 10.8 upgrade, were only due to open source software lagging behind and not being Cocoa and 64 bit ready. Everything else worked fine. Once tcl/tk and wxWindows were up to snuff, I could update macports. It was smooth sailing otherwise.
I've upgraded two other machines from 10.6 straight to 10.9. It took way less than a day in spite of it being a major upgrade. I've mostly just let it install, and then let it install all the app store updates necessary. IIRC the Messages needed to have the jabber account removed and re-added, otherwise it couldn't connect. Hardly a major issue, and I can't imagine a minor update, say from 10.9 to 10.9.1 would take much time at all. It never did. The only thing I need to do on my "ancient" laptop is to re-run the TRIM-enabling script for the SSD. That's all. There were some minor glitches in various Apple applications due to Mavericks, but this required no work at all on my end to fix - just wait for Apple to release necessary updates.
Faronics is a place in decline - demonstrably so. They can't fucking manage sell their stuff online! I mean, come the fuck on, it's 2013, not 1993. If a company is irresponsible enough to have their online shopping links simply broken, then they may, from my perspective, go to hell. I don't trust their technical prowess. They are clueless. They just don't get it.
What you say about kids is mostly true, but the blame lies almost always on the parents, sometimes on the school rules as well. Say, those who defend themselves from the bullies are often facing negative repercussions from the fucking school!
Last I heard gangs in parts of the UK were trying to make their own ammo at home and the result was of a much lower quality that killed far less frequently than professionally manufactured ammo.
They must be idiots, then, since at-home reloading is very common in the U.S., you have many catalogs and sites selling reloading supplies. I've yet to hear that the reloads are somehow fundamentally inferior.
In the US you have cases of people walking into bars and restaurants with loaded guns, even in urban areas.
I think this would be news, unless you really talk about "cases" as in "federal court cases" since it's is illegal under federal law to carry a firearm into any establishment that serves alcohol. If you think people would do so openly, think again. They'd be arrested in short order.
The problem with your statistics is that the gun culture in the UK was drastically different to the US before the ban anyway
I'd go even further. The overall culture in the U.S. is very different than in Europe. It can be best observed in the unfortunately very popular gospel of prosperity approach to life here. Some "churches" (I'd call them money congregations) in the U.S. would be subject of wide ridicule elsewhere in the world, and especially in Europe. So there's something very fundamentally different about the way people here "think".
I'd say that there's a much lower level difference in cultures between the U.S. and the rest of the world, a difference that is somehow very fundamental to the way of life here. It's only my gut feeling at the moment, but somehow I think this is the make-or-break when it comes to the resulting social differences that end up in school shootings.
You're assuming that whatever underlying problem is that leads to those mass school shootings is present in the other countries. Since the problem most demonstrably isn't easy availability of guns, it's not hard to imagine that whatever the real problem is, would be also endemic to the U.S. Let's not forget that guns "made" North America yet school shootings are only very recent.
You've nailed it: these days are the key words here. Guns were widely available in North America since before the U.S.A. was even a country. Yet those mass school shootings seem to be the thing of the last decade. There's the answer everyone is looking for: stuff has changed over time, and enough change in whatever is the underlying parameter (or parameters) has accumulated that in the last 10 years we've got more kids killed by gun in schools than there have been, apparently, in the previous 100 years (or so it'd seem?). I doubt that removal of guns will change much, because the underlying problem will still be there. We'll have mass knifings, mass strangulations (an 18 inch zip tie is all it takes!), etc. instead.
While this would be the "obvious" solution, you should not forget that those shootings seem to be a recent phenomenon. Access to guns hasn't changed much in the U.S. over the last 100 years. Easy access to guns is a proximate cause. The ultimate cause is social change - but how, why and if there's a fix to that, I wouldn't know:(
It's exactly like with poisonous mushrooms: you can ingest a lethal dose in 30 seconds; it doesn't mean you'll be dead in 30 seconds. Radiation poisoning, unless the dose is gigantic so as to cause instant burns, has delayed onset of symptoms and that's why it's so insidious. By the time you figure out what's wrong, there's nothing you can do. The difference between radiation poisoning and mushrooms is that with mushrooms, you can do a tox test. With gamma ray radiation poisoning from Co60, unless you look at the DNA you might never know what the heck happened because it leaves no toxicological nor radiological traces. The symptoms and pathology is all you've got. You are irradiated, but you're not radioactive - your body's atom's nuclei don't transmute into radioactive ones, and you are not being contaminated with radioactive particulates (we assume its a solid, concentrated source). It'd be just like if you received a rather unfocused but very humongous dose of radiation cancer therapy.
Yes, and anyone less than scrupulous could use that to empty your account. If I wanted to transfer money to you, and called your bank and asked for your account number, they wouldn't give it out saying it's private, protected stuff. Basically the only reason you have not been screwed yet is that everyone who handled your check happened not to be a fraudster. Seriously, it's that bad. That's also why corporations don't print their account numbers on stationery in the U.S. They'd get a talking-to from their bank, and they could potentially lose in court should they wish to bring civil suits against people who stole from them.
Your bank account and routing number are printed on every single paper check. There is no way that they were intended to be or can expected to be "secure" or private.
They are indeed meant to be private!!! In SPITE of being on the checks! Checks are supposed to be handled like confidential/sensitive documents! It's a big nod-and-wink scheme, kludged so bad that some localities have laws against disclosure of such numbers - just to work around the holes in the system in hope of discouraging at least local small-time fraudsters.
Elsewhere in the world, businesses put their account numbers on their stationery and websites. In the U.S. you don't do it, because anyone can use the routing number and account number to do an electronic funds transfer withdrawal from your account. Some accounts, say like the ones used for payroll payments, go through special processing where the combo of account+check number is a one-time thing, and is randomly generated and thus unfeasible to guess in advance. Also the payment amount is treated as part of it, so unless you know the entire quadruplet of the data (routing+account+check#+amount), your withdrawal will be denied. That's a rarity, though, not the way everyone's accounts are set up.
It'd be no biggie to have even private checking accounts set up so that unless you pre-authorize a check, it won't be honored. Yet I don't think any bank offers that for regular consumer use.
Credit card payments based solely on a number without some additional form of authentication is an obsolete form of payment.
Yet that's precisely how it's done in the U.S. You put in a bunch of numbers that are static and your payment goes through. It's going full retard, but the "industry" just doesn't care.
In the process of migration they've also consolidated a dozen IT departments, each one doing their own thing. They've done a lot more than simply moving a well-ran Windows shop over to Linux. They've done that but also had to create a well-ran shop in parallel with the migration.
A "hand rolled" distribution is about the same amount of work as any large, customized deployment of Windows images. The "hand rolling" is what actually makes it useful, and it applies equally to any operating system, whether Windows, Linux or OS X. Just that for Windows people don't ordinarily call it a "hand rolled distro". The amount of effort is the same. If the "major corporate" players have IT departments so clueless that they won't see it for what it is, then there's truly no help for them.
You're a raving lunatic. Of course they need a custom distro, what the heck did you think? A custom distro is like a custom hard drive image: once you're past a dozen or two PCs, you'll be way more productive having the customizations official, in effect creating a custom distro. It takes someone totally clueless, or a useless busybody who want to click endlessly on people's machines "configuring them" not to see that.
As far as I'm concerned, it's not very kosher. You can't download their customized distribution anywhere. The fuck? Couldn't they at least upload it to source forge or some such if they don't want to host it themselves???
Same goes for bank account numbers - in the U.S., they are supposed to be kept private. Why? Because anyone can suck your account dry if they just have your account number! That's why. Sad but true.
Why should they avoid collecting fucking numbers? Why is it their problem? What other information they "should just avoid collecting". It's a very slippery slope I'd them rather not take. If it takes Google to get the U.S. credit card industry to wake up and realize that people need to use secure chip cards for physically-present transactions and secure pin generators for card-not present ones, like is done in a lot of more bank-developed places on Earth, then so let it be. The fallout from having those numbers visible for all to see can't be but beneficial for the consumer in the long term.
Google. They are a search engine. They are supposed to index stuff, not to censor it. It's the problem of the fucktards whose site security is so bad that a search engine can get to customer data like such (or the fucktards who leak such things on purpose). I really don't see why Google cares abbot it, and why do other retards classify this as a "security hole". It's not Google who is leaking the data, so why is it upon them to fix it? If I were running a search engine, I'd be fighting requests for such "improvements" tooth and nail. People need to realize how insecure some sites/servers are, and who is to better expose it than a large search engine. Sigh.
Ultimately, there are routers or modems involved, and they push some legacy protocols, and there's a lot of providers out there who offer modules for modern routing hardware that take those old protocols and push them quite transparently over modern data pipes. It's a reasonably well understood problem. It would not require reworking the whole thing, that's the whole point - you take what you have and push the data around using modern hardware that can ensure that the data is safe.
Even if all you have is a 7 bit-only "ASCII" link, you can still push HDLC/X.25 on top of it and then any other protocol you wish on top of that. All it takes is inserting new hardware at key points in the infrastructure. Eventually you can provision alternate links, in an emergency you can leverage public internet - it's better than downtime, and with proper cryptography it's actually more secure than legacy non-encrypted links.
It's not tone deaf, they clearly speak their mouth, and this is in perfect agreement with their customer-facing behavior. They're like AT&T of today, what with Bell labs a mere shadow of their former glory.
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these days it takes hours to get firefox anywhere near sane or usable after installing or defaulting it
WTF? What are you talking about? You install it and you use it. That's about I've ever done with firefox. What's your problem?
Seriously? I upgraded my laptop from 10.6 to 10.8 to 10.9. The few problems I've had in 10.6 to 10.8 upgrade, were only due to open source software lagging behind and not being Cocoa and 64 bit ready. Everything else worked fine. Once tcl/tk and wxWindows were up to snuff, I could update macports. It was smooth sailing otherwise.
I've upgraded two other machines from 10.6 straight to 10.9. It took way less than a day in spite of it being a major upgrade. I've mostly just let it install, and then let it install all the app store updates necessary. IIRC the Messages needed to have the jabber account removed and re-added, otherwise it couldn't connect. Hardly a major issue, and I can't imagine a minor update, say from 10.9 to 10.9.1 would take much time at all. It never did. The only thing I need to do on my "ancient" laptop is to re-run the TRIM-enabling script for the SSD. That's all. There were some minor glitches in various Apple applications due to Mavericks, but this required no work at all on my end to fix - just wait for Apple to release necessary updates.
Faronics is a place in decline - demonstrably so. They can't fucking manage sell their stuff online! I mean, come the fuck on, it's 2013, not 1993. If a company is irresponsible enough to have their online shopping links simply broken, then they may, from my perspective, go to hell. I don't trust their technical prowess. They are clueless. They just don't get it.
What you say about kids is mostly true, but the blame lies almost always on the parents, sometimes on the school rules as well. Say, those who defend themselves from the bullies are often facing negative repercussions from the fucking school!
Last I heard gangs in parts of the UK were trying to make their own ammo at home and the result was of a much lower quality that killed far less frequently than professionally manufactured ammo.
They must be idiots, then, since at-home reloading is very common in the U.S., you have many catalogs and sites selling reloading supplies. I've yet to hear that the reloads are somehow fundamentally inferior.
In the US you have cases of people walking into bars and restaurants with loaded guns, even in urban areas.
I think this would be news, unless you really talk about "cases" as in "federal court cases" since it's is illegal under federal law to carry a firearm into any establishment that serves alcohol. If you think people would do so openly, think again. They'd be arrested in short order.
The problem with your statistics is that the gun culture in the UK was drastically different to the US before the ban anyway
I'd go even further. The overall culture in the U.S. is very different than in Europe. It can be best observed in the unfortunately very popular gospel of prosperity approach to life here. Some "churches" (I'd call them money congregations) in the U.S. would be subject of wide ridicule elsewhere in the world, and especially in Europe. So there's something very fundamentally different about the way people here "think".
I'd say that there's a much lower level difference in cultures between the U.S. and the rest of the world, a difference that is somehow very fundamental to the way of life here. It's only my gut feeling at the moment, but somehow I think this is the make-or-break when it comes to the resulting social differences that end up in school shootings.
You're assuming that whatever underlying problem is that leads to those mass school shootings is present in the other countries. Since the problem most demonstrably isn't easy availability of guns, it's not hard to imagine that whatever the real problem is, would be also endemic to the U.S. Let's not forget that guns "made" North America yet school shootings are only very recent.
will be hard to get rid of these days
You've nailed it: these days are the key words here. Guns were widely available in North America since before the U.S.A. was even a country. Yet those mass school shootings seem to be the thing of the last decade. There's the answer everyone is looking for: stuff has changed over time, and enough change in whatever is the underlying parameter (or parameters) has accumulated that in the last 10 years we've got more kids killed by gun in schools than there have been, apparently, in the previous 100 years (or so it'd seem?). I doubt that removal of guns will change much, because the underlying problem will still be there. We'll have mass knifings, mass strangulations (an 18 inch zip tie is all it takes!), etc. instead.
While this would be the "obvious" solution, you should not forget that those shootings seem to be a recent phenomenon. Access to guns hasn't changed much in the U.S. over the last 100 years. Easy access to guns is a proximate cause. The ultimate cause is social change - but how, why and if there's a fix to that, I wouldn't know :(
It's exactly like with poisonous mushrooms: you can ingest a lethal dose in 30 seconds; it doesn't mean you'll be dead in 30 seconds. Radiation poisoning, unless the dose is gigantic so as to cause instant burns, has delayed onset of symptoms and that's why it's so insidious. By the time you figure out what's wrong, there's nothing you can do. The difference between radiation poisoning and mushrooms is that with mushrooms, you can do a tox test. With gamma ray radiation poisoning from Co60, unless you look at the DNA you might never know what the heck happened because it leaves no toxicological nor radiological traces. The symptoms and pathology is all you've got. You are irradiated, but you're not radioactive - your body's atom's nuclei don't transmute into radioactive ones, and you are not being contaminated with radioactive particulates (we assume its a solid, concentrated source). It'd be just like if you received a rather unfocused but very humongous dose of radiation cancer therapy.
Yes, and anyone less than scrupulous could use that to empty your account. If I wanted to transfer money to you, and called your bank and asked for your account number, they wouldn't give it out saying it's private, protected stuff. Basically the only reason you have not been screwed yet is that everyone who handled your check happened not to be a fraudster. Seriously, it's that bad. That's also why corporations don't print their account numbers on stationery in the U.S. They'd get a talking-to from their bank, and they could potentially lose in court should they wish to bring civil suits against people who stole from them.
Your bank account and routing number are printed on every single paper check. There is no way that they were intended to be or can expected to be "secure" or private.
They are indeed meant to be private!!! In SPITE of being on the checks! Checks are supposed to be handled like confidential/sensitive documents! It's a big nod-and-wink scheme, kludged so bad that some localities have laws against disclosure of such numbers - just to work around the holes in the system in hope of discouraging at least local small-time fraudsters.
Elsewhere in the world, businesses put their account numbers on their stationery and websites. In the U.S. you don't do it, because anyone can use the routing number and account number to do an electronic funds transfer withdrawal from your account. Some accounts, say like the ones used for payroll payments, go through special processing where the combo of account+check number is a one-time thing, and is randomly generated and thus unfeasible to guess in advance. Also the payment amount is treated as part of it, so unless you know the entire quadruplet of the data (routing+account+check#+amount), your withdrawal will be denied. That's a rarity, though, not the way everyone's accounts are set up.
It'd be no biggie to have even private checking accounts set up so that unless you pre-authorize a check, it won't be honored. Yet I don't think any bank offers that for regular consumer use.
Credit card payments based solely on a number without some additional form of authentication is an obsolete form of payment.
Yet that's precisely how it's done in the U.S. You put in a bunch of numbers that are static and your payment goes through. It's going full retard, but the "industry" just doesn't care.
There is no download. Seriously.
I acted it out in my mind as I've read it, and it's been wonderful. Thank you!
In the process of migration they've also consolidated a dozen IT departments, each one doing their own thing. They've done a lot more than simply moving a well-ran Windows shop over to Linux. They've done that but also had to create a well-ran shop in parallel with the migration.
A "hand rolled" distribution is about the same amount of work as any large, customized deployment of Windows images. The "hand rolling" is what actually makes it useful, and it applies equally to any operating system, whether Windows, Linux or OS X. Just that for Windows people don't ordinarily call it a "hand rolled distro". The amount of effort is the same. If the "major corporate" players have IT departments so clueless that they won't see it for what it is, then there's truly no help for them.
You're a raving lunatic. Of course they need a custom distro, what the heck did you think? A custom distro is like a custom hard drive image: once you're past a dozen or two PCs, you'll be way more productive having the customizations official, in effect creating a custom distro. It takes someone totally clueless, or a useless busybody who want to click endlessly on people's machines "configuring them" not to see that.
As far as I'm concerned, it's not very kosher. You can't download their customized distribution anywhere. The fuck? Couldn't they at least upload it to source forge or some such if they don't want to host it themselves???
Same goes for bank account numbers - in the U.S., they are supposed to be kept private. Why? Because anyone can suck your account dry if they just have your account number! That's why. Sad but true.
Why should they avoid collecting fucking numbers? Why is it their problem? What other information they "should just avoid collecting". It's a very slippery slope I'd them rather not take. If it takes Google to get the U.S. credit card industry to wake up and realize that people need to use secure chip cards for physically-present transactions and secure pin generators for card-not present ones, like is done in a lot of more bank-developed places on Earth, then so let it be. The fallout from having those numbers visible for all to see can't be but beneficial for the consumer in the long term.
Google. They are a search engine. They are supposed to index stuff, not to censor it. It's the problem of the fucktards whose site security is so bad that a search engine can get to customer data like such (or the fucktards who leak such things on purpose). I really don't see why Google cares abbot it, and why do other retards classify this as a "security hole". It's not Google who is leaking the data, so why is it upon them to fix it? If I were running a search engine, I'd be fighting requests for such "improvements" tooth and nail. People need to realize how insecure some sites/servers are, and who is to better expose it than a large search engine. Sigh.
Ultimately, there are routers or modems involved, and they push some legacy protocols, and there's a lot of providers out there who offer modules for modern routing hardware that take those old protocols and push them quite transparently over modern data pipes. It's a reasonably well understood problem. It would not require reworking the whole thing, that's the whole point - you take what you have and push the data around using modern hardware that can ensure that the data is safe.
Even if all you have is a 7 bit-only "ASCII" link, you can still push HDLC/X.25 on top of it and then any other protocol you wish on top of that. All it takes is inserting new hardware at key points in the infrastructure. Eventually you can provision alternate links, in an emergency you can leverage public internet - it's better than downtime, and with proper cryptography it's actually more secure than legacy non-encrypted links.
It's not tone deaf, they clearly speak their mouth, and this is in perfect agreement with their customer-facing behavior. They're like AT&T of today, what with Bell labs a mere shadow of their former glory.