Summary up front: off-topic, but -- I'd had strongly unsatisfactory experiences with LG G3 (D855) in terms of hardware reliability, accordingly I decided not to ever consider LG phones again.
There were three significant malfunctions during the 1.5 years of the G3's life; two of them were supposedly use-related by practically indicative of bad design (never happened to the same user, me, with a different phone in over a decade); the third and final one was the main board dying.
Since the first two failures occurred during travel out of the country where there was warranty, I had to go for the repair to a local repair shop; subsequently LG refused to honor their warranty on the motherboard, which means the phone was beyond economic repair after only 18 months of use.
And violent acts lead to more violent acts - that's why September 11th happened
Considering terrorism a simple form of violence is a fatal fallacy. The only thing you can do with peacefully with terrorists is to give up. Else, you have to fight. As to September the 11th, could you honestly say that radical Islam would either not appear or wouldn't come to a violent confrontation with the West if there hadn't been an Israel? The confrontation is around since the Crusades, and there wasn't an Israel back then.
Many mainstream Israeli politicians and senior military figures support the ethnic cleansing, and in some cases liquidation of the Palestinians. Sounds awfully like Nazi policies towards Jews, gypsies and Slavs to me.
Absolute lie. Show me one Israeli politician who speaks of ethnic cleansing of any sort. The most extreme (supported by like 3% of the public) speak about a volontary transfer.
Israel is a state which justifies its existence on religious/political tracts from over 2000 years ago.
Your understanding of Zionism is as lacking as it could be. Israel justifies its existence as a unique nation-state for the Jews. If you want practical justifications for why such a state is needed, look up any encyclopedia under the entry "Holocaust"
Israel ignores UN resolutions and invades neighbouring states
Just don't trivialize the Arab-Israeli conflict by appealing to the U.N. authority. Was the Jordanian control of West Bank prior to 1967 legal (hint: it was recognized solely by the UK and Pakistan)? Yet I don't see you jumping on that. Was the closure of Tyran straits legal (look it up: the 1888 Constantinople Convention)?
So here we have a state that uses military aggression against civilians, essentially its own citizens
Palestinians are not Israeli citizens. The Palestinian Authority is a separate political entity, and it had accidentially declared de-facto war on Israel. So true, life is hard in the Palestinian cities. Life was also hard in Hamburg when it was bombed in 1943.
have violated other states sovereignty to assasinate figures they don't like
So has U.S. Or is blowing up people in Yemen allowable by international law? The rules of the game are different now, from what they were 30 years ago. It's simple: if you don't kill a terrorist now, you're gonna suffer dozens, hundreds or thousands dead later.
he looks more anti-semitic that way
Oh I see, speaking of "dirty Jews" is legitimate then?
I wish RedHat cared more of the people who don't have the memory or don't want to have both Qt and Gtk+ (and their various wrappers) loaded at the same time. Neither of them is particularly small; it is quite apparent to me that having both at the same time is simply not worth it.
I find the new decision to visually blend Gnome and KDE into a single environment as a continuation of the old RedHat mindset, which is exactly what makes me reconsider my loyalty to the distro, in spite of my appreciation for its powerful feature set and significant contribution to the community.
What bothers me is that for the sake of being generic and "one size fits all", RedHat has sacrificed each user's ability to have an installation that fits what he wishes to do - no more and no less.
For instance, the option to select particular packages at install-time is extremely inconvenient (and tends to crash). The user, of course, can install broad categories, like "Kernel development" and "desktop publishing". But, many pieces of software that I routinely use are outside these categories, and unless I select "everything", they do not get installed. As opposed to that, I do receive several hundred MBs (from 400 in 6.2 to 800 or more in 7.3) of software that I don't need. For instance, I don't need pine, mail, rmail and mh at all. I need just KMail. I don't need dozens of newsreaders. Most workstations these days don't need Sendmail (by the way, I find Postfix a better choice for an MTA), BIND or telnetd. and I definitely don't need 2 desktop environments. Python, Perl and Tcl are all nice languages, but I see no reason why I've got to have all 3 on my particular workstation. For most libraries out there, I don't need compatibility interfaces for earlier versions, and neither do I need their development versions.
The root of the problem is: I don't have infinite system resources. I might have a lot of memory - but I don't want to waste it with 2 distinct GUI toolkits. I might have a reasonably large disk, but I don't want large parts of it to be covered with stuff I never asked for. I think leaving just enough resources for apps to work reasonably is a silly Microsoft way of doing stuff; I don't know why RedHat has to join the race. Allowing the users not to make choices (by bundling it all) translates into forcing them never to do so.
Several months ago I've got RedHat 7.3 installed on a 4 GB partition. I didn't ask for Everything - but the install was still around 60% of the available drive space. After this, I chose not to upgrade a 6.2 box to a newer version (in spite of the absence of new RPMs), because I know it'll drain too much resources. In the time since, I've considered several possibilities for replacing RedHat with other distributions (I also considered BSD). I won't abandon RedHat just yet; but frankly, I'm afraid it's simply not going the right way.
IANAL, but what if someone in Germany sued the manufacturers of copy-protected CDs for trademark infringenment? These CDs bear the designation "CD-DA" (which belongs to Phillips) without having the right for that (as they are intentionally manufactured in a different format).
The current legislation in Germany allows a third party to sue someone for trademark infringement. Considering the nature of this suit, it won't be too hard to prove that copy-protected CD makers are using the trademark "CD-DA" unrightfully and grab a couple of millions for court bill compensationts as a bonus.
This has nothing to do with patents, it's about trademarks
Phillips owns the CDDA trademark and controls what is called CDDA and what is not. It is in Phillips' interest not to call "CDDA compliant" a copy-protected disk that is not CDDA compliant.
It's definitely not a non-event, quite the opposite actually. Noone gets happy when he notices that the term under which a technology was licensed are abused, and neither does Phillips.
If it wasn't (i.e. it guaranteed a loss), you could take an input, run it through the compressor several time, and end up with a single byte, or even 0 bytes.
Obviously the problem would appear at the decompression stage, since there aren't quite a lot of things you can get from decompressing a single byte.
Although internally OS X is a UNIX, the GUI toolkit that it uses, Cocoa is not X11, and has nothing to do with it. Most of the low-level jobs are done using PostScript, and the high-level APIs are in Objective C.
Because of that, Cocoa is even further from Linux than native Windows APIs. The closest thing to Cocoa on Linux is Qt, but they still have such substancial differences that easy porting is not an option.
Reports on The One Ring indicate that several scenes that are known to have been filmed have not appeared in the final movie cut.
Examples include some of the way from Bree to Rivendell, the scene where Aragorn and Elrond talk about Narsil, and the scene where the Fellowship parts from Galadriel. All of these appear on some of the merchandise (cards, stickers - I don't remember exactly which), but they're not in the movie. A particular favorite of my is the lake they see when they depart from Moria. Just as I managed to think "Kheled-Zaram" - the Fellowship entered Lothlorien.
Obviously, these scenes have been filmed (there are stills from them), so they must have been cut out because of time constraints as some of the less important detail. It occurs to me that they could integrate well with the plot as it is. So I just hope they will come as a part of the DVD (and not just as "director's trash", but rather as a part of an alternative viewing sequence.
Shall I compare thee to bits of stone?
You serve less purpose, and cause much more trouble
The stone doth stay when roughest winds are gone
But when IPs are traced, you're already on the double
Sometimes too slow the mail servers are
And often is their total bandwith dimm'd
By thine empty headers who bring far
Less money than to you it must have seemed
But thy eternal spam-fest will not pass
Nor will you lose those d4rk-IPz j00 0wn
Nor shall/dev/null contain all your tries
To make some money, since your work's really worth none
So long as l4m3rs live and traffic's free
So long lives spam, and spam gives life to thee
First of all, I'd like to say that a strategy can be devised for any game, computer or not. So there's no question whether RTS games may have a strategy: they may. Moreover, for most games, there are winning strategies, and as the time passes, the player learns to understand and implement them.
However, the fact that a strategy is always present does not mean that it resembles "real" strategy. For a real commander, operative strategy is based on a number of factors: his task, the terrain he's at, the state of his forces, the configuration of the enemy, the extent to which the latter is known, the location of friendly and hostile routes of supply and many more.
While RTSs do provide a task and a terrain for a commander, and simulate a state of the forces, they often do this in a very limited way. For example, there's a very significant decrease in the performance of soldiers when they're tired and hungry; the location of the enemy is often unknown; unless in action, tanks should be moved using trailers or trains, to spare their resource and after a rain most types of surfaces become impassible for motor vehicles.
In addition, in most of the cases the task of a commander is destroying the enemy forces. No army can fight without food or ammunition; preventing their supply will lead to surrender. Generally, achieving a breakthrough into the rear of the enemy forces (as was done by the Germans in 1940 in France) is much more effective than engaging them.
Unfortunately, the above ideas appear in computer games very seldom and to a limited extent. So, yes, the RTS games lack military strategy. I hope this will change some day.
... that it supported Hebrew. I saw some notice of Bi-Directional text display support, but Hebrew is not supported (neither in the documentation, nor in the released version). I just hope that someone adds at least basic support (even without a spell checker).
It is very sad to me that Apple has lost it; yet it is true. It became Just Another Big Corporation, with all the appropriate consequences.
For example, why did Apple limit all the licensing agreements so noone could manufacture a Mac clone? Hell, I'd love to have a Mac at my home, but not for a price that would make my parents broke!
Their attitude to Open-Source is also very unilateral. As long as they need a kernel, a shell, a web server, a telnet server they're cool with it. But the only thing they've returned back is the kernel, which is of very little practical use. I'm sure it's fine by them as long as they've got their revenue.
The headers just include information about structs and some magic values. I am sure the ATA specifications contain exactly the same information. Now it's known for sure that the driver source code itself is different, and so is its object code.
It could also happen that both the BSD header and the Linux header copied either the ideas or the implementation from the original ATA specs (I'm not acquainted with them, so I can't tell to what degree that is possible).
And finally, we come again to the question what qualifies as IP. The data itself (structs and magic) was publicly available. Therefore the Linux code author may simply claim that he invented the name for the struct fields himself (or that they appear so in the ATA documentation), and so this code was re-written independently, obviously violating no one's IP.
It is apparent that during its history, Microsoft has invented or developed several good ideas. Such are Exchange-based networking, aggresive support for PnP (which, inspite of all its clumsiness is still much better than doing the jumper work), COM as an application design strategy and so on.
However, while conceptually very sound and attractive (and for being so they've gotten consumer support), all these technologies were designed and written inadequately. Exchange is unsafe and unstable. PnP doesn't worry about resource conflicts at all. COM became better after several upgrades, but it still suffers from problems such as binary incompatibility.
In this case, it seems to me that Microsoft is dreaming about a Plan9 kind of system. Well, that's nice. Theoretically. However many of us could not boast with infinite bandwith, fault-tolerant hardware (if your audio board fries, your system should stay up) or rationally-written software (including Microsoft's own). In conclusion, Microsoft has overcome itself in its fantasies this time, and only a little part of them will make it to the real world.
Using a computer is a lot like driving a car, from the point of view of responsibility taken. A normal PC is like some family wagon: relatively cheap, quick and quite safe. Running a web-server is a lot like driving an 18-wheeler.
A person who runs a web server has to defend himself fromm all the security risks that he might face, exactly in the same way as a truck driver has to maintain his brake system. Of course, one can get along driving a truck without tuning it all but then what can protect him from wet slopes in stormy weather?
Lots of people install a web server either because they don't bother to look at what they install, or because they think it cool. But web servers are not children's toys; if people aren't aware of the harm they're causing, they must be stopped.
I live in Israel. In the last few days I've been getting quite a lot of internal ISP trafic bound to my port 80 (luckily I run Apache and a firewall). Many of the people from whose IPs (dial-up!) I've been getting connections haven't even bothered to shut down their FTP servers (which were of course MS-FTP). Those morons deserve to be thrown out.
There are no complete things in this world: there is no absolute favorite food, no perfectly happy people, no totally free lunches and no absolutely free people.
Each part of our everyday lives is influenced by that: we limit the rights of persons who commit crimes, we violate property rights by collecting taxes, we limit the people's freedom of movement inside and around airports in order to prevent terrorist attacks.
It is therefore apparent for me, from the moral point of view, that we are obliged to give up some of our rights in favor of the general good. It could be used against us later; however for now there is no alternative.
I just hope that Sun & Co. will not try to go for their profits immediately. It'd be better to lower the prices, perhaps sponsor some Open-Source work, make it a popular thing among the consumer. Otherwise, it'll all be crushed by M$'s "we do it for free" strategy.
First of all I'd like to express my respect to RMS. His opinions are generally worth to consider and his contribution so far has been great. However for any opinion, there's a condition where it becomes irrelevant. I think we all have reached this position.
The network of international terrorism that has performed the WTC bombing still exists. Moreover, it uses publicly available resources - the Internet - in order to carry out its operations. The only practical way to shut them down would be to compromise their communications.
Without losing one may not gain. The United States will not have security from international terrorism, as long as its communications are uncontrolled and open to abuse. One may not have both complete privacy and complete security.
At times of war (and when thousands of people are killed it is a war), citizens often have to endure hardships. What would happen if Winston Churchill would offer to each Englishman a cup of 5 o'clock tea rather than "blood, toil, tears and sweat"?
Yeah, I can do all these things except that I have a plenty of other, more useful, things to do with my free time than repair the damage of someone's insolence!
There's a project called ming. It is an open-source library that produces SWF (Flash) files on the fly. It is quite early in the development, but it's already very useful. A few months ago I decided to write a converter from an XML-based format into SWF The XML's tag set was modeled very closely upon Ming's inteface, so it was really closer to a wrapper. I called my program xml2swf.
Anyway, at an early step in the development I became stuck. The problem was that I wanted to know where I'd moved an object (on the screen) previously. This information is stored in the library anyway, thought I, so there must be a way of getting it out.
Well, I was wrong. The structs which contain the position are hidden behind opaque pointers. So I could either compile my program with knowledge about ming's internals (unelegant), store the information on my own (inefficient and long) or to offer a small patch to ming's developers so that it would provide accessor functions.
Naturally, I chose the third approach. However noone responded me. It was a month ago; ming still doesn't have accessor functions, xml2swf is in deep freeze and I'm thinking about other projects where I could encounter more cooperative developers.
Well, Palestinians have a plenty of weaponry. It includes tens of thousands of AK-47, AK-74 and M-16 weapons (many of which were given to Palestinians by Israel to enforce their internal security), machine guns, mortars, high explosives, AT weapons (mainly the ubitiquous RPG-7b AT grenade launcher) and possibly AH missiles and Katyusha salvo fire devices. Is that ample ammunition for you? Also, tanks play a very limited part in the fighting. A situation where both parties conduct military activities is a war so far as I am concerned.
Slashdot Mirror
Summary up front: off-topic, but -- I'd had strongly unsatisfactory experiences with LG G3 (D855) in terms of hardware reliability, accordingly I decided not to ever consider LG phones again.
There were three significant malfunctions during the 1.5 years of the G3's life; two of them were supposedly use-related by practically indicative of bad design (never happened to the same user, me, with a different phone in over a decade); the third and final one was the main board dying.
Since the first two failures occurred during travel out of the country where there was warranty, I had to go for the repair to a local repair shop; subsequently LG refused to honor their warranty on the motherboard, which means the phone was beyond economic repair after only 18 months of use.
Considering terrorism a simple form of violence is a fatal fallacy. The only thing you can do with peacefully with terrorists is to give up. Else, you have to fight. As to September the 11th, could you honestly say that radical Islam would either not appear or wouldn't come to a violent confrontation with the West if there hadn't been an Israel? The confrontation is around since the Crusades, and there wasn't an Israel back then.
Absolute lie. Show me one Israeli politician who speaks of ethnic cleansing of any sort. The most extreme (supported by like 3% of the public) speak about a volontary transfer.
Your understanding of Zionism is as lacking as it could be. Israel justifies its existence as a unique nation-state for the Jews. If you want practical justifications for why such a state is needed, look up any encyclopedia under the entry "Holocaust"
Just don't trivialize the Arab-Israeli conflict by appealing to the U.N. authority. Was the Jordanian control of West Bank prior to 1967 legal (hint: it was recognized solely by the UK and Pakistan)? Yet I don't see you jumping on that. Was the closure of Tyran straits legal (look it up: the 1888 Constantinople Convention)?
Palestinians are not Israeli citizens. The Palestinian Authority is a separate political entity, and it had accidentially declared de-facto war on Israel. So true, life is hard in the Palestinian cities. Life was also hard in Hamburg when it was bombed in 1943.
So has U.S. Or is blowing up people in Yemen allowable by international law? The rules of the game are different now, from what they were 30 years ago. It's simple: if you don't kill a terrorist now, you're gonna suffer dozens, hundreds or thousands dead later.
Oh I see, speaking of "dirty Jews" is legitimate then?
I wish RedHat cared more of the people who don't have the memory or don't want to have both Qt and Gtk+ (and their various wrappers) loaded at the same time. Neither of them is particularly small; it is quite apparent to me that having both at the same time is simply not worth it.
I find the new decision to visually blend Gnome and KDE into a single environment as a continuation of the old RedHat mindset, which is exactly what makes me reconsider my loyalty to the distro, in spite of my appreciation for its powerful feature set and significant contribution to the community. What bothers me is that for the sake of being generic and "one size fits all", RedHat has sacrificed each user's ability to have an installation that fits what he wishes to do - no more and no less.
For instance, the option to select particular packages at install-time is extremely inconvenient (and tends to crash). The user, of course, can install broad categories, like "Kernel development" and "desktop publishing". But, many pieces of software that I routinely use are outside these categories, and unless I select "everything", they do not get installed. As opposed to that, I do receive several hundred MBs (from 400 in 6.2 to 800 or more in 7.3) of software that I don't need. For instance, I don't need pine, mail, rmail and mh at all. I need just KMail. I don't need dozens of newsreaders. Most workstations these days don't need Sendmail (by the way, I find Postfix a better choice for an MTA), BIND or telnetd. and I definitely don't need 2 desktop environments. Python, Perl and Tcl are all nice languages, but I see no reason why I've got to have all 3 on my particular workstation. For most libraries out there, I don't need compatibility interfaces for earlier versions, and neither do I need their development versions.
The root of the problem is: I don't have infinite system resources. I might have a lot of memory - but I don't want to waste it with 2 distinct GUI toolkits. I might have a reasonably large disk, but I don't want large parts of it to be covered with stuff I never asked for. I think leaving just enough resources for apps to work reasonably is a silly Microsoft way of doing stuff; I don't know why RedHat has to join the race. Allowing the users not to make choices (by bundling it all) translates into forcing them never to do so.
Several months ago I've got RedHat 7.3 installed on a 4 GB partition. I didn't ask for Everything - but the install was still around 60% of the available drive space. After this, I chose not to upgrade a 6.2 box to a newer version (in spite of the absence of new RPMs), because I know it'll drain too much resources. In the time since, I've considered several possibilities for replacing RedHat with other distributions (I also considered BSD). I won't abandon RedHat just yet; but frankly, I'm afraid it's simply not going the right way.
IANAL, but what if someone in Germany sued the manufacturers of copy-protected CDs for trademark infringenment? These CDs bear the designation "CD-DA" (which belongs to Phillips) without having the right for that (as they are intentionally manufactured in a different format).
The current legislation in Germany allows a third party to sue someone for trademark infringement. Considering the nature of this suit, it won't be too hard to prove that copy-protected CD makers are using the trademark "CD-DA" unrightfully and grab a couple of millions for court bill compensationts as a bonus.
This has nothing to do with patents, it's about trademarks
Phillips owns the CDDA trademark and controls what is called CDDA and what is not. It is in Phillips' interest not to call "CDDA compliant" a copy-protected disk that is not CDDA compliant.
It's definitely not a non-event, quite the opposite actually. Noone gets happy when he notices that the term under which a technology was licensed are abused, and neither does Phillips.
Greater than 1.
If it wasn't (i.e. it guaranteed a loss), you could take an input, run it through the compressor several time, and end up with a single byte, or even 0 bytes.
Obviously the problem would appear at the decompression stage, since there aren't quite a lot of things you can get from decompressing a single byte.
The original author surely wisheth his humble Selfe be mentioned at occasioun.
Although internally OS X is a UNIX, the GUI toolkit that it uses, Cocoa is not X11, and has nothing to do with it. Most of the low-level jobs are done using PostScript, and the high-level APIs are in Objective C.
Because of that, Cocoa is even further from Linux than native Windows APIs. The closest thing to Cocoa on Linux is Qt, but they still have such substancial differences that easy porting is not an option.
Reports on The One Ring indicate that several scenes that are known to have been filmed have not appeared in the final movie cut.
Examples include some of the way from Bree to Rivendell, the scene where Aragorn and Elrond talk about Narsil, and the scene where the Fellowship parts from Galadriel. All of these appear on some of the merchandise (cards, stickers - I don't remember exactly which), but they're not in the movie. A particular favorite of my is the lake they see when they depart from Moria. Just as I managed to think "Kheled-Zaram" - the Fellowship entered Lothlorien.
Obviously, these scenes have been filmed (there are stills from them), so they must have been cut out because of time constraints as some of the less important detail. It occurs to me that they could integrate well with the plot as it is. So I just hope they will come as a part of the DVD (and not just as "director's trash", but rather as a part of an alternative viewing sequence.
Shall I compare thee to bits of stone?
/dev/null contain all your tries
You serve less purpose, and cause much more trouble
The stone doth stay when roughest winds are gone
But when IPs are traced, you're already on the double
Sometimes too slow the mail servers are
And often is their total bandwith dimm'd
By thine empty headers who bring far
Less money than to you it must have seemed
But thy eternal spam-fest will not pass
Nor will you lose those d4rk-IPz j00 0wn
Nor shall
To make some money, since your work's really worth none
So long as l4m3rs live and traffic's free
So long lives spam, and spam gives life to thee
First of all, I'd like to say that a strategy can be devised for any game, computer or not. So there's no question whether RTS games may have a strategy: they may. Moreover, for most games, there are winning strategies, and as the time passes, the player learns to understand and implement them.
However, the fact that a strategy is always present does not mean that it resembles "real" strategy. For a real commander, operative strategy is based on a number of factors: his task, the terrain he's at, the state of his forces, the configuration of the enemy, the extent to which the latter is known, the location of friendly and hostile routes of supply and many more.
While RTSs do provide a task and a terrain for a commander, and simulate a state of the forces, they often do this in a very limited way. For example, there's a very significant decrease in the performance of soldiers when they're tired and hungry; the location of the enemy is often unknown; unless in action, tanks should be moved using trailers or trains, to spare their resource and after a rain most types of surfaces become impassible for motor vehicles.
In addition, in most of the cases the task of a commander is destroying the enemy forces. No army can fight without food or ammunition; preventing their supply will lead to surrender. Generally, achieving a breakthrough into the rear of the enemy forces (as was done by the Germans in 1940 in France) is much more effective than engaging them.
Unfortunately, the above ideas appear in computer games very seldom and to a limited extent. So, yes, the RTS games lack military strategy. I hope this will change some day.
... that it supported Hebrew. I saw some notice of Bi-Directional text display support, but Hebrew is not supported (neither in the documentation, nor in the released version). I just hope that someone adds at least basic support (even without a spell checker).
It is very sad to me that Apple has lost it; yet it is true. It became Just Another Big Corporation, with all the appropriate consequences.
For example, why did Apple limit all the licensing agreements so noone could manufacture a Mac clone? Hell, I'd love to have a Mac at my home, but not for a price that would make my parents broke!
Their attitude to Open-Source is also very unilateral. As long as they need a kernel, a shell, a web server, a telnet server they're cool with it. But the only thing they've returned back is the kernel, which is of very little practical use. I'm sure it's fine by them as long as they've got their revenue.
The headers just include information about structs and some magic values. I am sure the ATA specifications contain exactly the same information. Now it's known for sure that the driver source code itself is different, and so is its object code.
It could also happen that both the BSD header and the Linux header copied either the ideas or the implementation from the original ATA specs (I'm not acquainted with them, so I can't tell to what degree that is possible).
And finally, we come again to the question what qualifies as IP. The data itself (structs and magic) was publicly available. Therefore the Linux code author may simply claim that he invented the name for the struct fields himself (or that they appear so in the ATA documentation), and so this code was re-written independently, obviously violating no one's IP.
It is apparent that during its history, Microsoft has invented or developed several good ideas. Such are Exchange-based networking, aggresive support for PnP (which, inspite of all its clumsiness is still much better than doing the jumper work), COM as an application design strategy and so on.
However, while conceptually very sound and attractive (and for being so they've gotten consumer support), all these technologies were designed and written inadequately. Exchange is unsafe and unstable. PnP doesn't worry about resource conflicts at all. COM became better after several upgrades, but it still suffers from problems such as binary incompatibility.
In this case, it seems to me that Microsoft is dreaming about a Plan9 kind of system. Well, that's nice. Theoretically. However many of us could not boast with infinite bandwith, fault-tolerant hardware (if your audio board fries, your system should stay up) or rationally-written software (including Microsoft's own). In conclusion, Microsoft has overcome itself in its fantasies this time, and only a little part of them will make it to the real world.
Using a computer is a lot like driving a car, from the point of view of responsibility taken. A normal PC is like some family wagon: relatively cheap, quick and quite safe. Running a web-server is a lot like driving an 18-wheeler.
A person who runs a web server has to defend himself fromm all the security risks that he might face, exactly in the same way as a truck driver has to maintain his brake system. Of course, one can get along driving a truck without tuning it all but then what can protect him from wet slopes in stormy weather?
Lots of people install a web server either because they don't bother to look at what they install, or because they think it cool. But web servers are not children's toys; if people aren't aware of the harm they're causing, they must be stopped.
I live in Israel. In the last few days I've been getting quite a lot of internal ISP trafic bound to my port 80 (luckily I run Apache and a firewall). Many of the people from whose IPs (dial-up!) I've been getting connections haven't even bothered to shut down their FTP servers (which were of course MS-FTP). Those morons deserve to be thrown out.
There are no complete things in this world: there is no absolute favorite food, no perfectly happy people, no totally free lunches and no absolutely free people.
Each part of our everyday lives is influenced by that: we limit the rights of persons who commit crimes, we violate property rights by collecting taxes, we limit the people's freedom of movement inside and around airports in order to prevent terrorist attacks.
It is therefore apparent for me, from the moral point of view, that we are obliged to give up some of our rights in favor of the general good. It could be used against us later; however for now there is no alternative.
I just hope that Sun & Co. will not try to go for their profits immediately. It'd be better to lower the prices, perhaps sponsor some Open-Source work, make it a popular thing among the consumer. Otherwise, it'll all be crushed by M$'s "we do it for free" strategy.
Actually, there is a gain here. Bin-Laden won't be able to communicate with his group and we will stay alive!
First of all I'd like to express my respect to RMS. His opinions are generally worth to consider and his contribution so far has been great. However for any opinion, there's a condition where it becomes irrelevant. I think we all have reached this position.
The network of international terrorism that has performed the WTC bombing still exists. Moreover, it uses publicly available resources - the Internet - in order to carry out its operations. The only practical way to shut them down would be to compromise their communications.
Without losing one may not gain. The United States will not have security from international terrorism, as long as its communications are uncontrolled and open to abuse. One may not have both complete privacy and complete security.
At times of war (and when thousands of people are killed it is a war), citizens often have to endure hardships. What would happen if Winston Churchill would offer to each Englishman a cup of 5 o'clock tea rather than "blood, toil, tears and sweat"?
Yeah, I can do all these things except that I have a plenty of other, more useful, things to do with my free time than repair the damage of someone's insolence!
For the sake of clarification, I did submit a patch both to one of ming's developers and to its mailing list, but I've gotten no reply either.
There's a project called ming. It is an open-source library that produces SWF (Flash) files on the fly. It is quite early in the development, but it's already very useful. A few months ago I decided to write a converter from an XML-based format into SWF The XML's tag set was modeled very closely upon Ming's inteface, so it was really closer to a wrapper. I called my program xml2swf.
Anyway, at an early step in the development I became stuck. The problem was that I wanted to know where I'd moved an object (on the screen) previously. This information is stored in the library anyway, thought I, so there must be a way of getting it out.
Well, I was wrong. The structs which contain the position are hidden behind opaque pointers. So I could either compile my program with knowledge about ming's internals (unelegant), store the information on my own (inefficient and long) or to offer a small patch to ming's developers so that it would provide accessor functions.
Naturally, I chose the third approach. However noone responded me. It was a month ago; ming still doesn't have accessor functions, xml2swf is in deep freeze and I'm thinking about other projects where I could encounter more cooperative developers.
Well, Palestinians have a plenty of weaponry. It includes tens of thousands of AK-47, AK-74 and M-16 weapons (many of which were given to Palestinians by Israel to enforce their internal security), machine guns, mortars, high explosives, AT weapons (mainly the ubitiquous RPG-7b AT grenade launcher) and possibly AH missiles and Katyusha salvo fire devices. Is that ample ammunition for you? Also, tanks play a very limited part in the fighting. A situation where both parties conduct military activities is a war so far as I am concerned.