Ok, so 100k shootings a year, in a country with how many guns? Your figures are meaningless. How many suicides are there in the non-gun owning population? Are the percentages comparable? If there are 250 million guns, and only 17,000 suicides, that's not really a high percentage, is it? I don't honestly know how many guns there are in the USA, and I'm not even necessarily arguing against gun control. I'm merely pointing out the logical inconsistencies in your argument.
They've been at least partially repealed in Canada. Our long gun registry (LGR) was recently scrapped. Unfortunately, too recently to show any difference between before and after, so you'll have to wait a while for that. What you may be interested in, however, is an editorial about the LGR in the National Post, which is a conservative paper, but only mildly so. http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2012/12/11/gary-mauser-why-the-long-gun-registry-doesnt-work-and-never-did/ It's definitely strongly against the LGR, but is very logical and factual in its reasoning, without the usual emotional knee-jerk reactions that the subject normally evokes on both sides.
Exactly. The response to a tragic incident in NASCAR, from those involved with NASCAR, is unlikely to be: "To make NASCAR safer, we must add more cars on track".
True. But for the flipside, if a NASCAR driver goes crazy on the track, and intentionally drives into the stands and kills a bunch of people, it's unlikely that the political talking heads would say "This driver was a video gamer. We must ban racing in video games...."
just like when you hold your phone to your head it causes you to lose mental focus.
If you're going to be distracted by a phone call, it's not holding the phone to your head that's the problem. The actual conversation takes many times the mental capacity of holding the phone. That's why all these hands free laws are stupid. If you're not capable of driving with a hand held phone, you're not capable of driving with a hands free phone, either.
And for the rest, my home movies are not recorded by a corporation, stored on their servers without me having access to them, and datamined for the purpose of sending me ads.
but people actually interested in a topic won't make up their minds based only on a few internet comments, but do further research. And the people who don't most likely are politicians passing laws on the subject, anyway.
Nowhere does it say the 20 ISPs responsible fr 41% of the spam are the only ISPs for the BRIC nations. Neither does it say they were all from BRIC nations. If these assumptions of yours are invalid, and I suspect they are - only 20 ISPs for all of Russia and India? Really? - then your figures are comparing apples and chocolate cake.
Something tells me that's the kind of stuff that gets you disappeared in China.
Probably not worth the risk. Hell, it's hardly even worth the risk in North America...
I once got bitten by a bug in Debian unstable's X11. (Long time ago. Potato XFree86 if I remember correctly.)
Wow, that was a long time ago. I was running stable at that point, even for desktops, so I wouldn't have run into that particular bug. I really think stable/unstable in Debian's case doesn't refer to the crash-resistance of the system, so much as the version stability of packages.
The whole point of the thread was that the old machines would give a high failure rate, of 1/14 per week. If buying new machines is still going to give a high failure rate, then that's not a reason to upgrade.
I realize power and performance are still valid reasons, but that wasn't where this particular thread was going.
Absolutely nowhere in my comment did I state anything about power efficiency. My simple point was reliability.
If you're expecting a 7% failure rate per week, then you run crap hardware. As I said, I've got a half dozen Pentium IIIs, which are at least 3 times as old as these, that have been running flawlessly for years, so how does your setup suck so badly?
This rename actually makes sense. Previously, with BackTrack, it was almost an LFS approach. Installing it on a hard disk was a complex, multi-step process that could go wrong as easily as it could go right. It involved booting the live CD, creating all the partitions/filesystems on your HD, mounting them, and then copying all files from the running live CD over to your HD manually. Manually, as in "cp -a". Then you had to configure the bootloader, again manually, to make sure it would boot from the HD after removing the live CD. Sometime along the way, somebody wrote a GUI script to do the install visually, but I never managed to get it to work properly, despite numerous attempts over numerous versions. It always either hung for hours, or finished up, but on reboot the installed system wouldn't come up, or whatever. Eventually I gave up, and just did all my installs manually from the get go. Now, not only were all these steps necessary for an initial install, but they were also necessary for upgrades, because there *was* no upgrade path from one version to the next. It was a clean install, or nothing.
Kali, on the other hand, is a complete rebuild based on the Debian packaging system. You can install it over the network, like Debian, you can pick the packages you want, like Debian, and most importantly, you can upgrade from one version to the next seamlessly, simply by updating your apt sources, like Debian. You can also build your own custom live CD using Debian's live-build scripts, which was all but impossible with BackTrack.
Its purpose is the same, and it was designed by the same group of people, but it really is a completely new distro.
Probably not, but how much fun could somebody in IT have if they rigged it to automatically update your Facebook status when you got something... Bob: "Damn. Spilled my coffee again. Need a new keyboard" (walkwalkwalk...kchunk..walkwalkwalk...plug Bill: "Hey Bob! Your status says you jizzed on your keyboard again! How can you still see to type?!"
Coke vending machines are not Coke vending machines. They're normal vending machines loaded with Coke. Do you realize how stupid that sounds? They're vending high tech, not made of it. Although this being Facebook, they're probably aggregating the data for marketing... "Bob, you've used 3 keyboards in the last month! How would you like to try out.....
Tht sounds like you just pulled the version info from Debian's website. I've run sid as a desktop OS before, and rarely had issues. Very occasionally, a library update would break an application for a couple of days until the application was updated for the new lib, but even that was never more than a couple of days, and always an unessential application.
We're operating in a global economy now, by the way.
No. The corporations are operating in a global economy. You and I aren't.
When you can import cheaper goods from Bangladesh as easily as corporations can import workers from Bangladesh, *then* we're living in a global economy. But that's not allowed, for various reasons like, ironically, protecting domestic jobs, protecting intellectual property, etc.
The system is set up to favour corporations, plain and simple.
The last "work for a corporation" IT job I had, I made just over $30k, Canadian. I kept the network sections, workstations and servers I was responsible for working flawlessly for several years, while also writing code for data analysis, handholding some academics through that data analysis, and all the other bits and pieces that go with a job like that. The only time that my section was down wasn't actually that our section was down, but rather the larger organization had been hit with some massive malware infection - which didn't touch anything I looked after, by the way - and the entire network shut down as a result. I ended up helping the main IT group clean up their mess, because there wasn't much I could do without any Internet access, and when no other groups were bringing stuff to work on. That job ended up with me being laid off because I cost too much. At $30k, I was too expensive. Less than 6 months after I was let go, I heard from a contact in the organization that they'd been hit with a second massive malware infection. This infection had been let in, by the reckoning of the main IT group, through a computer that I used to look after, and caused another massive, organization-wide shutdown.
Since then, I've been doing mostly consulting, in which I can charge businesses $150/hour to fix something their IT group screwed up, and they're happy to pay it.
SMTP isn't multicast. It still has to be received by a single MTA, and then spit out to all the storage locations. If the initial receiving MTA dumps it without storing it properly, then it's going to get deleted. Even if you have multiple MX records, the sender doesn't try to use the second unless it knows the first has failed.
The single point of failure is still the primary MTA.
Accidents happen because somebody does something stupid.
That's too harsh a view. No one can foresee everything. There are accidents in which no one did anything stupid. Races have many of those. Was Evel Knievel stupid? Are astronauts and test pilots stupid? Professional racers are all excellent, attentive drivers, yet accidents still happen because they are pushing the limits, taking more risks.
Many accidents that do result from stupidity may not be driver stupidity. The stupidity is sometimes on the part of the road designers, or the car designers. We still have a lot of Dead Man's Curves and Corners.
It's still stupidity, but for the sake of argument, how do you justify going into a dead man's curve at 70 MPH, and still say you're not a stupid driver? If it's a particularly invisible one, which some are, all the municipality needs to do is put up a sign - make it a very unique, standout design - for dead man's curves. If you're paying attention, you'll see it, and if you're not stupid, you'll slow down. Paying attention and not being stupid are prerequisites for not being a bad driver, so I don't see the problem with this approach.
There's bad weather, steep mountains, deer strikes, stuck accelerators, tire blowouts, and more.
Stuck accelerators only happen regularly on Toyotas, so that's not a problem for me.:P Seriously, though...you seem to think I'm saying everybody should be able to drive at 100 MPH on any road under any conditions, as long as they don't do anything stupid, and we'll all be safe. I'm not saying that. Driving beyond the traction of your tires in bad weather is being stupid. Driving faster than your line of sight allows you to stop on a mountain road is stupid. Stuck accelerators.....how is this an argument for driving slowly? I don't follow. Tire blowouts tend to only happen when you hit something big in the road, in which case you weren't paying attention, or when you're driving on a damaged or bald tire. Either way, you're being stupid. Having said that, have you ever had a tire blow out at speed? Years ago, when I was younger and stupid, I had a 1985 Camaro 5 speed. It was fast, and I enjoyed misbehaving in it. I was driving somewhere north of 140 km/h (85 MPH) - the speedometer only went up to that, and it was buried - and a tire on the back that was, yes, bald in one spot, turned out to have an internal defect that made it go bald. It was actually so thin in that spot that it wore clear through, and in the time it took for me to stop, had worn a 3/8 inch hole through the tread section. Not exactly catastrophic blowout, but still going flat *very* quickly, and at high speed. Loss of control was virtually zero.
What are you expecting, perfection?
When a single mistake with your 2.5 ton urban assault weapon can kill multiple people, then yes....I'm pretty much expecting perfection. However, mistakes happen, so a single mistake shouldn't get your driver's licence pulled, but you should have to verify that you're a capable driver after you make it. If you can't, *then* you get your licence pulled.
You're right, everyone does have to pay attention. However, nowhere in my comment did I state that only *I* had to pay attention.
The problem is we hand out driver's licences in North America like candy, and then wonder why we've got such crappy drivers on the road.
See this comment: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3534055&cid=43154291 That explains how I would go about fixing the problem. It would take a while, and would require some significant improvements in public transit over time, but I don't see that as a problem.
Slashdot Mirror
Ok, so 100k shootings a year, in a country with how many guns?
Your figures are meaningless. How many suicides are there in the non-gun owning population? Are the percentages comparable?
If there are 250 million guns, and only 17,000 suicides, that's not really a high percentage, is it? I don't honestly know how many guns there are in the USA, and I'm not even necessarily arguing against gun control.
I'm merely pointing out the logical inconsistencies in your argument.
They've been at least partially repealed in Canada.
Our long gun registry (LGR) was recently scrapped. Unfortunately, too recently to show any difference between before and after, so you'll have to wait a while for that.
What you may be interested in, however, is an editorial about the LGR in the National Post, which is a conservative paper, but only mildly so.
http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2012/12/11/gary-mauser-why-the-long-gun-registry-doesnt-work-and-never-did/
It's definitely strongly against the LGR, but is very logical and factual in its reasoning, without the usual emotional knee-jerk reactions that the subject normally evokes on both sides.
Exactly. The response to a tragic incident in NASCAR, from those involved with NASCAR, is unlikely to be: "To make NASCAR safer, we must add more cars on track".
True.
But for the flipside, if a NASCAR driver goes crazy on the track, and intentionally drives into the stands and kills a bunch of people, it's unlikely that the political talking heads would say "This driver was a video gamer. We must ban racing in video games...."
Sure... so where is the country that has the exact same culture, politics, racial issues, etc. to compare to?
Canada, and our gun murder rate has been doing nothing but climbing.
Canada has the same culture, politics and racial issues as the USA?
BWAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!!!!!!
Wait...seriously, now....
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!
just like when you hold your phone to your head it causes you to lose mental focus.
If you're going to be distracted by a phone call, it's not holding the phone to your head that's the problem.
The actual conversation takes many times the mental capacity of holding the phone. That's why all these hands free laws are stupid.
If you're not capable of driving with a hand held phone, you're not capable of driving with a hands free phone, either.
There used to be nudity on Slashdot, even if it was only a text description of it.
Naked, petrified Natalie Portman with hot grits and all......
Quite sure.
Mostly because, in America, anything to do with thinking is somewhat frowned upon....
For a start, that's "one and the same".
And for the rest, my home movies are not recorded by a corporation, stored on their servers without me having access to them, and datamined for the purpose of sending me ads.
So, as the GP asked, non sequitur much?
but people actually interested in a topic won't make up their minds based only on a few internet comments, but do further research. And the people who don't most likely are politicians passing laws on the subject, anyway.
FTFY.
all the readability of Perl
Hey!
Perl is perfectly readable. Understanding it, on the other hand....
Nowhere does it say the 20 ISPs responsible fr 41% of the spam are the only ISPs for the BRIC nations. Neither does it say they were all from BRIC nations.
If these assumptions of yours are invalid, and I suspect they are - only 20 ISPs for all of Russia and India? Really? - then your figures are comparing apples and chocolate cake.
I was thinking:
Mar 12 11:57:03 hedvig kernel: So long, and thanks for all the bits.......
Something tells me that's the kind of stuff that gets you disappeared in China.
Probably not worth the risk. Hell, it's hardly even worth the risk in North America...
I once got bitten by a bug in Debian unstable's X11. (Long time ago. Potato XFree86 if I remember correctly.)
Wow, that was a long time ago. I was running stable at that point, even for desktops, so I wouldn't have run into that particular bug.
I really think stable/unstable in Debian's case doesn't refer to the crash-resistance of the system, so much as the version stability of packages.
The whole point of the thread was that the old machines would give a high failure rate, of 1/14 per week.
If buying new machines is still going to give a high failure rate, then that's not a reason to upgrade.
I realize power and performance are still valid reasons, but that wasn't where this particular thread was going.
Absolutely nowhere in my comment did I state anything about power efficiency. My simple point was reliability.
If you're expecting a 7% failure rate per week, then you run crap hardware. As I said, I've got a half dozen Pentium IIIs, which are at least 3 times as old as these, that have been running flawlessly for years, so how does your setup suck so badly?
This rename actually makes sense. Previously, with BackTrack, it was almost an LFS approach. Installing it on a hard disk was a complex, multi-step process that could go wrong as easily as it could go right. It involved booting the live CD, creating all the partitions/filesystems on your HD, mounting them, and then copying all files from the running live CD over to your HD manually. Manually, as in "cp -a". Then you had to configure the bootloader, again manually, to make sure it would boot from the HD after removing the live CD.
Sometime along the way, somebody wrote a GUI script to do the install visually, but I never managed to get it to work properly, despite numerous attempts over numerous versions. It always either hung for hours, or finished up, but on reboot the installed system wouldn't come up, or whatever. Eventually I gave up, and just did all my installs manually from the get go.
Now, not only were all these steps necessary for an initial install, but they were also necessary for upgrades, because there *was* no upgrade path from one version to the next. It was a clean install, or nothing.
Kali, on the other hand, is a complete rebuild based on the Debian packaging system. You can install it over the network, like Debian, you can pick the packages you want, like Debian, and most importantly, you can upgrade from one version to the next seamlessly, simply by updating your apt sources, like Debian. You can also build your own custom live CD using Debian's live-build scripts, which was all but impossible with BackTrack.
Its purpose is the same, and it was designed by the same group of people, but it really is a completely new distro.
Probably not, but how much fun could somebody in IT have if they rigged it to automatically update your Facebook status when you got something...
Bob: "Damn. Spilled my coffee again. Need a new keyboard" (walkwalkwalk...kchunk..walkwalkwalk...plug
Bill: "Hey Bob! Your status says you jizzed on your keyboard again! How can you still see to type?!"
Coke vending machines are not Coke vending machines. They're normal vending machines loaded with Coke.
Do you realize how stupid that sounds?
They're vending high tech, not made of it.
Although this being Facebook, they're probably aggregating the data for marketing...
"Bob, you've used 3 keyboards in the last month! How would you like to try out.....
ACME keyboard protector!!!!!!11!!1!1!@@!!1"
Tht sounds like you just pulled the version info from Debian's website. I've run sid as a desktop OS before, and rarely had issues.
Very occasionally, a library update would break an application for a couple of days until the application was updated for the new lib, but even that was never more than a couple of days, and always an unessential application.
We're operating in a global economy now, by the way.
No. The corporations are operating in a global economy. You and I aren't.
When you can import cheaper goods from Bangladesh as easily as corporations can import workers from Bangladesh, *then* we're living in a global economy. But that's not allowed, for various reasons like, ironically, protecting domestic jobs, protecting intellectual property, etc.
The system is set up to favour corporations, plain and simple.
The last "work for a corporation" IT job I had, I made just over $30k, Canadian. I kept the network sections, workstations and servers I was responsible for working flawlessly for several years, while also writing code for data analysis, handholding some academics through that data analysis, and all the other bits and pieces that go with a job like that.
The only time that my section was down wasn't actually that our section was down, but rather the larger organization had been hit with some massive malware infection - which didn't touch anything I looked after, by the way - and the entire network shut down as a result. I ended up helping the main IT group clean up their mess, because there wasn't much I could do without any Internet access, and when no other groups were bringing stuff to work on.
That job ended up with me being laid off because I cost too much. At $30k, I was too expensive.
Less than 6 months after I was let go, I heard from a contact in the organization that they'd been hit with a second massive malware infection. This infection had been let in, by the reckoning of the main IT group, through a computer that I used to look after, and caused another massive, organization-wide shutdown.
Since then, I've been doing mostly consulting, in which I can charge businesses $150/hour to fix something their IT group screwed up, and they're happy to pay it.
SMTP isn't multicast. It still has to be received by a single MTA, and then spit out to all the storage locations. If the initial receiving MTA dumps it without storing it properly, then it's going to get deleted. Even if you have multiple MX records, the sender doesn't try to use the second unless it knows the first has failed.
The single point of failure is still the primary MTA.
Accidents happen because somebody does something stupid.
That's too harsh a view. No one can foresee everything. There are accidents in which no one did anything stupid. Races have many of those. Was Evel Knievel stupid? Are astronauts and test pilots stupid? Professional racers are all excellent, attentive drivers, yet accidents still happen because they are pushing the limits, taking more risks.
Evil Knievel, astronauts, test pilots, and professional racers do not perform their duties on public roads. I'm not talking about doing 160MPH 3 feet from the rear bumper of the car ahead of you. I'm talking about doing 160km/h on a road with traffic that looks something like this:
http://maps.google.ca/?ll=43.136154,-80.501831&spn=0.012996,0.027595&t=m&z=15&layer=c&cbll=43.136154,-80.501831&panoid=XBjL3hLanETodiKA9RE26g&cbp=12,92.82,,0,0
Many accidents that do result from stupidity may not be driver stupidity. The stupidity is sometimes on the part of the road designers, or the car designers. We still have a lot of Dead Man's Curves and Corners.
It's still stupidity, but for the sake of argument, how do you justify going into a dead man's curve at 70 MPH, and still say you're not a stupid driver? If it's a particularly invisible one, which some are, all the municipality needs to do is put up a sign - make it a very unique, standout design - for dead man's curves. If you're paying attention, you'll see it, and if you're not stupid, you'll slow down.
Paying attention and not being stupid are prerequisites for not being a bad driver, so I don't see the problem with this approach.
There's bad weather, steep mountains, deer strikes, stuck accelerators, tire blowouts, and more.
Stuck accelerators only happen regularly on Toyotas, so that's not a problem for me. :P
Seriously, though...you seem to think I'm saying everybody should be able to drive at 100 MPH on any road under any conditions, as long as they don't do anything stupid, and we'll all be safe. I'm not saying that.
Driving beyond the traction of your tires in bad weather is being stupid. Driving faster than your line of sight allows you to stop on a mountain road is stupid. Stuck accelerators.....how is this an argument for driving slowly? I don't follow.
Tire blowouts tend to only happen when you hit something big in the road, in which case you weren't paying attention, or when you're driving on a damaged or bald tire. Either way, you're being stupid.
Having said that, have you ever had a tire blow out at speed? Years ago, when I was younger and stupid, I had a 1985 Camaro 5 speed. It was fast, and I enjoyed misbehaving in it. I was driving somewhere north of 140 km/h (85 MPH) - the speedometer only went up to that, and it was buried - and a tire on the back that was, yes, bald in one spot, turned out to have an internal defect that made it go bald. It was actually so thin in that spot that it wore clear through, and in the time it took for me to stop, had worn a 3/8 inch hole through the tread section. Not exactly catastrophic blowout, but still going flat *very* quickly, and at high speed.
Loss of control was virtually zero.
What are you expecting, perfection?
When a single mistake with your 2.5 ton urban assault weapon can kill multiple people, then yes....I'm pretty much expecting perfection. However, mistakes happen, so a single mistake shouldn't get your driver's licence pulled, but you should have to verify that you're a capable driver after you make it. If you can't, *then* you get your licence pulled.
You're right, everyone does have to pay attention. However, nowhere in my comment did I state that only *I* had to pay attention.
The problem is we hand out driver's licences in North America like candy, and then wonder why we've got such crappy drivers on the road.
See this comment: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3534055&cid=43154291
That explains how I would go about fixing the problem. It would take a while, and would require some significant improvements in public transit over time, but I don't see that as a problem.