Where light, et al, must travel the long way (e) from point A to point B, and from point B to point C, etc., but gravity can travel by way of (g) from point A to point B, what exists on the path between A and B by way of (g)? Is that brane-space? Do more branes exist in the same place as our own, or do they somehow exist in the "void" that can be traversed by gravity along the path of (g)?
I can get my mind around the idea that matter that exists on a different brane than ours may affect us gravitationally, though we cannot observe it directly, and that the gravitational effects of these objects may cause the lensing effect we've observed, but only if these different branes exist on the same "wave" as our own (i.e., if the object is in a different wave, its gravitation wouldn't affect our observations because it wouldn't fall in the path between A and B on (e), even if its existence was in a different dimension).
Also, is there any thought as to how to calculate the proximity of a mass in a different brane relative our own in the "bulk" (which, I assume, is what the path (g) traverses)?
> Among the interesting points: several of the initial gyros on the scope were engineering test > models that already had tens of millions of hours of use.
That statement, in itself, is enough to discredit your whole post. FYI, 24*365 = 8760, meaning each year is composed of roughly 8760 hours. That means that, in order to reach "tens of millions" of hours of use, these gyroscopes would have had to be spinning for over 1100 years (that is, just to reach the 10,000,000-hour mark)!
> Microsoft is an evil empire, and it didn't get there with the government's help.
As another reply to this message stated, the governments of the state of Washington and of the United States of America recognize Microsoft Corporation as a legal entity, therefore implicitly granting them favor.
But, the "evils" said to have been committed by Microsoft were... shady at worst. Nothing (really!) stopped Dell, Compaq, IBM, etc. from saying, "Okay, so, you're going to jack up prices on Windows for us if we don't do what you want... okay... well, let's see... we'll get OS/2 and ship with that exclusively, and you will lose ALL sales of Windows on our platforms indefinitely. Have a nice day."
> The classic monopolies all came from unregulated markets, careful regulation prevents monopoly.
The classic monopolies (railroads, telephones, etc.) were *granted* by government - that is to say, ultimately, *created by* and *endorsed by* government.
From what I've read, ESR never said that he didn't want the Chinese people to use Linux, but that he (and most of the Linux community - and I agree with his thoughts on the matter, and I suspect that the vast majority of Linux users do, too) was opposed to the policies of the Chinese government.
He didn't say Communism was bad (at least, not in this writing), nor did he deride the Chinese people (who don't have a *choice* as to how their government behaves). Not once. Get YOUR facts straight, and READ THE F**KING ARTICLE FOR CONTENT!
The reason they'd lose that case (don't think their legal staff hasn't contemplated it - I would lay odds that they've thoroughly investigated it) is that you can't copyright "look-and-feel". If you could, Microsoft would still be paying Apple for ripping off elements of the Macintosh GUI, or they might both be paying Xerox out the nose for the same.
--Corey
Re:Redhat is Crappy (aka Buggy) and has been since
on
Red Hat Buying Cygnus?
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· Score: 1
Ah, I was mistaken before. RH5.2 was the last version of RH I installed. 4.2 was a reasonable package, IMNSHO, but after that, they blew it bigtime.
--Corey
Re:Redhat is Crappy (aka Buggy) and has been since
on
Red Hat Buying Cygnus?
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· Score: 1
The recent IPO suggests that RedHat is the first Linux vendor to trade publically and, hey, this new Linux thing is hot right now. The success of the stock suggests that RedHat is a market leader. But, Microsoft is a market leader, too, and I don't use their software for the same reason I don't use RedHat software.
That reason: IT SUCKS.
Not that I'm anti-RedHat, or anti-MS, I'm just anti-CrapSoftware, and RedHat (like Microsoft) is a prime producer of bit-pollution.
The crappy parts of RedHat's distribution are many; including their inane tendency to include in their distribution pre-release code libraries which cause binary incompatibilities with the release version (i.e. libfoo_BETA.so.1.2.3 has a few different symbols than libfoo.so.1.2.3, and binaries compiled against the beta lib expect those symbols, but they're no longer there because libfoo has evolved and no longer supports or exports those symbols). See the flap over libstdc++ (or was it libg++?) for examples.
Their distribution is about as far from a real Unix flavor as any Microsoft product, and let's not get started on the package management tools (which SUCK ASS). Nonstandard configuration files, oddball filesystem layout, and weird locations for binaries and related packages... A wtmp file that grows, on its own, 25MB every week (on a system that saw _maybe_ 1 login per week - guess what's running OpenBSD now?). Window managers that, in their stock configurations, will refuse to work the same way two logins in a row. The incorrect assumption that I want my screensaver behavior changed to system defaults every single time I login, when I had explicitly changed them in my wm menus, etc. The list goes on and on...
I've not touched a RedHat system since 5.1, and I don't plan to do so ever again.
I don't know about headless (i.e. no framebuffer, or serial-console) support, but I do know something of Digital's RAID array controllers.
They are fucking nice.
The ones I'm used to working with, the HSZ50s and HSZ80s (as well as those I've had a couple of brushes with, like the HSZ40, and one I've never seen running, like the HSZ70) all have their own console drivers.
Hot-swap can be done in a Digital StorageWorks array completely invisible to the host OS. Proper sense data, etc., will allow the host OS to log and/or alert the administrator of a hardware problem, but the remedy can be affected with no downtime whatever.
I can't speak for other vendors, but I'm sure they have analogous systems.
> Either way, you get a quite pissed off M$ and a Compaq that suddenly finds royalties rising.
Maybe.
It could be, though, that the genie is out of the bottle.
Picture it now:
PHB: Hey Tech-Head, what kind of servers do we need to continue our astounding growth?
TH : Well, boss, Compaq has some pretty good hardware nowadays, not like before when even their RAM was proprietary.
PHB: We're going to need 300 of them, but capital is at a premium. We can lease, but we need the expense on the book for a tax write-off. So, we've decided to buy. Do some research and tell me what you'd recommend.
(a while later)
TH : Well, boss, I've done a bit of research. We can get 300 Compaq Proliant servers for X million dollars. For an additional 300,000 dollars, we can get an NT license for them.
PHB: What?! What are the alternatives?
TH : Well, there's Linux. We can get it gratis with the servers, and it's fast and stable, and Compaq supports it.
PHB: Will it do what we need it to do?
TH : With a few adjustments to what we need, and what we expect, yes.
PHB: Good. Linux it is. You get me more specific details, and we'll get together later and write up the P.O.
(I work for a guy that does value the opinions of his tech staff to almost this degree... a rare breed, indeed)
Federal circuit court decisions may be appealed and heard by, ultimately, the Supreme Court (there are various levels of indirection here, appellate courts and the like).
The Supreme Court ultimately has the final say on a given matter.
The Supreme Court isn't final because it's right; it is right because it's final.
Have you tried to contact their customer service representatives lately? "Due to the increase in calls because of our merger with USSB, we are unable to handle your call. Sorry. *click*"
It took me 5 months, nasty mails, and finally refusing to pay the bill to get them to cut off satellite service (what I wanted was a downgrade, to keep paying for the basic package, but after hearing what I heard, I decided that they didn't want my business after all). After all that, I expect them to sic a collection agency on me.
One little, two little, three little endians... Four little, five little, six little endians... Seven little, eight little, nine little endians... Ten little endian boys... --Corey
> BTW: We've just had a Columbine here in Germany a couple of days ago.
Funny... I've not heard a peep of this in the media here. I think they're keeping a lid on it so popular sentiment in the U.S. will continue to lean toward gun control, because "we allow guns, and we're the only country where this type of thing happens".
How long the world's memory seems when Columbine is discussed, but who remembers the school shootings in Scotland, and who's heard of this one in Germany, where gun control is the law?
He did score 100% on his paper, which goes to show how education in this country is degrading. I can honestly say that, when I was in 7th grade, such grammatically poor, horrendously misspelled tripe would have been summarily failed.
> Guns don't solve problems, they create them. Their only valid use: Self Defence by trained > professionals.
So, if you're not a trained professional (professional what, I might ask?), you've no right to defend your person, your family, or your property from a malevolent other? That sounds to me like you're taking away 99.99% of the population's right to defend itself.
Not to mention that the Constitution secures the right to keep and bear arms to the citizens of the United States. That viewpoint has been backed in other decisions by the Supreme Court, who have stated that the intent of the founders at the time of writing the Constitution should be taken into account when interpreting the words on the paper.
Our founders were prolific writers, and reading their works will give you the guts of their intent in writing the Second Amendment. In short, they made a distinction between the militia and the military. The military, called an Army in the language of the Constitution, was an entity whose purpose was a necessary evil. The founders realized that a powerful military would be a government tool to oppress the citizenry, and therefore included language to prohibit the quartering of troops and the assemblage of a standing army on U.S. soil. This is done to protect us, the citizens, from us, the government.
The "well-regulated militia" was seen as a citizen's check over the power of the military, and was deemed necessary by the founders to ensure the liberty of the citizenry. This viewpoint should not go unnoticed in today's society, where government is all-intrusive and where our rights are being attacked "for the good of the children" and "to further the war on drugs".
> [population control is NOT a yearly "in season" thing!]
How else, then, would you propose to regulate hunting? Hunting of, say, deer, is a necessary evil. Sport hunting kills off about as many deer from the herd as would have been killed in a year by a healthy population of predators (whom we've killed off, and keep driven away). Here in the St. Louis region, the deer herd is out of control. There used to be hunting in the region, and there was no problem with overpopulation. The herd remained healthy, and able to feed without problems and without causing problems for their human neighbors.
We created the problem when we killed off the wolves, and we must steward the animal herds for the sake of proper conservation. Nothing worse than seeing an animal starving, and nothing could be worse than feeding it and making it dependent upon you and a nuisance to yourself and to your neighbors.
Licensed sport hunting (deer tags, etc.) as a means of herd population control is a Good Thing [tm]. It's only in the last ten years or so that it's been thought of as a Bad Thing [tm], and in that time period we've seen a problem with population control in the herds.
I suspect that, while my example pertains to the deer herd in a given area, the principle is the same for other animals and for other areas. We have a moral obligation to the lands and animals that we steward to fill the ecological niche of predator, when we've driven the natural predators of the species in question away for one reason or another.
The Bill of Rights is not the origin of our rights as citizens and as free men in this country. The rights we enjoy are ours as human beings, and are inalienable (check out Locke), endowed upon us by our creator (whomever you choose for that creator to be, even if it be fate). I like to think of these rights as being "human rights", and believe that all men are endowed with these rights, and would like to see all men free to pursue their lives with those freedoms. The only reason, to my mind (and, I might add, to the minds of the nations' founders), that all men all over the world don't have the same rights as we enjoy in the U.S. is that their governments are oppressing them. That is, and should be, cause for revolt by the oppressed.
The Bill of Rights secures those rights to us from the oppressive force of the government.
> it really doesn't matter when the only people we can vote for are ones who are trying to > whittle those freedoms away
But, you forget... the Democrat party and the Republican party are not the only parties out there.
There is a party dedicated to repealing a lot of our government's nonsense (of the last, oh, 130 or so years), and restoring liberty to the American people.
They don't get much press, though, because their ideas of "freedom" and "personal responsibility" are chided in the media, and they've yet to live down their unfortunate dominance in the 1970s by anarchists.
Give The Libertarian Party gander, and then tell me there's nobody left for whom to vote.
--Corey
PS - sorry about the duplicate. when logging in and posting at the same time, formatting gets stripped from the post. neat bug.
> it really doesn't matter when the only people we can vote for are ones who are trying to > whittle those freedoms away But, you forget... the Democrat party and the Republican party are not the only parties out there. There is a party dedicated to repealing a lot of our government's nonsense (of the last, oh, 130 or so years), and restoring liberty to the American people. They don't get much press, though, because their ideas of "freedom" and "personal responsibility" are chided in the media, and they've yet to live down their unfortunate dominance in the 1970s by anarchists. Give The Libertarian Party gander, and then tell me there's nobody left for whom to vote. --Corey
Install... am I just weird?
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Which BSD?
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· Score: 2
I've installed all three of the free BSD Unix variants in the last few weeks, and have to say that the OpenBSD installation is by far the easiest of the three.
I guess I'm weird, but I like a no-frills, just-the-facts-maam installation. It installs everything you need, and then some. Out of the box, it's tight and stable. Given a few patches (available at www.openbsd.org) to take care of a couple little niggling bugs, recompilation of the system, and the installation of a couple packages from/usr/ports, it's up and running smoothly and flawlessly.
FreeBSD - well, I installed Free and ran it for a while. It has a *ton* of stuff with its system, most of which actually works. The only thing I can say here is that it seemed less "tight" than OpenBSD. One day, my X configuration worked. The next day, after having changed exactly *nothing*, my window manager mysteriously stopped working. Then, the next day, X refused to come up at all. So, I wiped it out. It didn't seem very well put-together at that point (v3.2).
NetBSD - its installer is less straightforward than OpenBSD. It uses a somewhat curses-type installer on x86, and it's a little less than flexible. For instance, I couldn't convince it to install the system to two disks (having a couple of smallish disks is an unfortunate reality on a couple of my machines). At any rate, I had to set up the slices on wd0, reboot and pretend to want to install to wd1 and set up the slices there, and then reboot again (because I wanted / on wd0a), suspend the installer after having "set up" wd0 again, and mount wd1a to/usr before resuming. After that little bit of hacking around, the system installed normally. The mouse device still eludes me, though, and I've not the time to deal with it currently. On OpenBSD, it's/dev/psm0. On NetBSD, from which Open is derived back in the mists of time, even after compiling in the wscons console drivers and setting things up,/dev/wsmouse won't allow the mouse to work. It, too, is less "tight" than OpenBSD in my opinion, but in a different way.
There seems to be a spirit of technological innovation in the NetBSD camp that the other BSDs benefit from greatly. Witness RAIDFrame, pciide, etc. migrating from Net to Open. Softupdates originated in, I believe, FreeBSD, and was ported into OpenBSD. Some of the better parts of FreeBSD's userland made it to OpenBSD and was audited and changed. Some of it made it back to Free and even back into Net. So, there's a lot of cross-pollination between all of them.
YMMV, of course, but my miles will be run on Open.
--Corey
Install... am I just weird?
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Which BSD?
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· Score: 0
I've installed all three of the free BSD Unix variants in the last few weeks, and have to say that the OpenBSD installation is by far the easiest of the three. I guess I'm weird, but I like a no-frills, just-the-facts-maam installation. It installs everything you need, and then some. Out of the box, it's tight and stable. Given a few patches (available at www.openbsd.org) to take care of a couple little niggling bugs, recompilation of the system, and the installation of a couple packages from/usr/ports, it's up and running smoothly and flawlessly. FreeBSD - well, I installed Free and ran it for a while. It has a *ton* of stuff with its system, most of which actually works. The only thing I can say here is that it seemed less "tight" than OpenBSD. One day, my X configuration worked. The next day, after having changed exactly *nothing*, my window manager mysteriously stopped working. Then, the next day, X refused to come up at all. So, I wiped it out. It didn't seem very well put-together at that point (v3.2). NetBSD - its installer is less straightforward than OpenBSD. It uses a somewhat curses-type installer on x86, and it's a little less than flexible. For instance, I couldn't convince it to install the system to two disks (having a couple of smallish disks is an unfortunate reality on a couple of my machines). At any rate, I had to set up the slices on wd0, reboot and pretend to want to install to wd1 and set up the slices there, and then reboot again (because I wanted / on wd0a), suspend the installer after having "set up" wd0 again, and mount wd1a to/usr before resuming. After that little bit of hacking around, the system installed normally. The mouse device still eludes me, though, and I've not the time to deal with it currently. On OpenBSD, it's/dev/psm0. On NetBSD, from which Open is derived back in the mists of time, even after compiling in the wscons console drivers and setting things up,/dev/wsmouse won't allow the mouse to work. It, too, is less "tight" than OpenBSD in my opinion, but in a different way. There seems to be a spirit of technological innovation in the NetBSD camp that the other BSDs benefit from greatly. Witness RAIDFrame, pciide, etc. migrating from Net to Open. Softupdates originated in, I believe, FreeBSD, and was ported into OpenBSD. Some of the better parts of FreeBSD's userland made it to OpenBSD and was audited and changed. Some of it made it back to Free and even back into Net. So, there's a lot of cross-pollination between all of them. YMMV, of course, but my miles will be run on Open. --Corey
Slashdot Mirror
> ---------X--------------\
...
> -----------Y------------/
What I have to wonder is, given:
_e_ _e_
/ \ / \
A -g- B -g- C
__/ \_ _/
e
Where light, et al, must travel the long way (e) from point A to point B, and from point B to point C, etc., but gravity can travel by way of
(g) from point A to point B, what exists on the path between A and B by way of (g)? Is that brane-space? Do more branes exist in the same place as our own, or do they somehow exist in the "void" that can be traversed by gravity along the path of (g)?
I can get my mind around the idea that matter that exists on a different brane than ours may affect us gravitationally, though we cannot observe it directly, and that the gravitational effects of these objects may cause the lensing effect we've observed, but only if these different branes exist on the same "wave" as our own (i.e., if the object is in a different wave, its gravitation wouldn't affect our observations because it wouldn't fall in the path between A and B on (e), even if its existence was in a different dimension).
Also, is there any thought as to how to calculate the proximity of a mass in a different brane relative our own in the "bulk" (which, I assume, is what the path (g) traverses)?
Interesting stuff... gotta go read the paper now.
--Corey
> Among the interesting points: several of the initial gyros on the scope were engineering test
> models that already had tens of millions of hours of use.
That statement, in itself, is enough to discredit your whole post. FYI, 24*365 = 8760, meaning each year is composed of roughly 8760 hours. That means that, in order to reach "tens of millions" of hours of use, these gyroscopes would have had to be spinning for over 1100 years (that is, just to reach the 10,000,000-hour mark)!
Get real.
--Corey
> Thank god we have an inept government, can you imagine what a working one could do?
Reminds me of the old American saw, "Thank GOD we don't have the government we paid for!"
--Corey
Well, I'll be goddamned. I clicked preview, and the thing looked just fine. I clicked submit, and it turned to shit.
Rob, fix it.
Wah.
--Corey
> ... see also monoply. Umm... don't you mean monopOly? If you're going to make incendiary statements, do it well. :-) --Corey
> Microsoft is an evil empire, and it didn't get there with the government's help.
As another reply to this message stated, the governments of the state of Washington and of the United States of America recognize Microsoft Corporation as a legal entity, therefore implicitly granting them favor.
But, the "evils" said to have been committed by Microsoft were... shady at worst. Nothing (really!) stopped Dell, Compaq, IBM, etc. from saying, "Okay, so, you're going to jack up prices on Windows for us if we don't do what you want... okay... well, let's see... we'll get OS/2 and ship with that exclusively, and you will lose ALL sales of Windows on our platforms indefinitely. Have a nice day."
> The classic monopolies all came from unregulated markets, careful regulation prevents monopoly.
The classic monopolies (railroads, telephones, etc.) were *granted* by government - that is to say, ultimately, *created by* and *endorsed by* government.
From what I've read, ESR never said that he didn't want the Chinese people to use Linux, but that he (and most of the Linux community - and I agree with his thoughts on the matter, and I suspect that the vast majority of Linux users do, too) was opposed to the policies of the Chinese government.
He didn't say Communism was bad (at least, not in this writing), nor did he deride the Chinese people (who don't have a *choice* as to how their government behaves). Not once. Get YOUR facts straight, and READ THE F**KING ARTICLE FOR CONTENT!
--Corey
The reason they'd lose that case (don't think their legal staff hasn't contemplated it - I would lay odds that they've thoroughly investigated it) is that you can't copyright "look-and-feel". If you could, Microsoft would still be paying Apple for ripping off elements of the Macintosh GUI, or they might both be paying Xerox out the nose for the same.
--Corey
Ah, I was mistaken before. RH5.2 was the last version of RH I installed. 4.2 was a reasonable package, IMNSHO, but after that, they blew it bigtime.
--Corey
The recent IPO suggests that RedHat is the first Linux vendor to trade publically and, hey, this new Linux thing is hot right now. The success of the stock suggests that RedHat is a market leader. But, Microsoft is a market leader, too, and I don't use their software for the same reason I don't use RedHat software.
That reason: IT SUCKS.
Not that I'm anti-RedHat, or anti-MS, I'm just anti-CrapSoftware, and RedHat (like Microsoft) is a prime producer of bit-pollution.
The crappy parts of RedHat's distribution are many; including their inane tendency to include in their distribution pre-release code libraries which cause binary incompatibilities with the release version (i.e. libfoo_BETA.so.1.2.3 has a few different symbols than libfoo.so.1.2.3, and binaries compiled against the beta lib expect those symbols, but they're no longer there because libfoo has evolved and no longer supports or exports those symbols). See the flap over libstdc++ (or was it libg++?) for examples.
Their distribution is about as far from a real Unix flavor as any Microsoft product, and let's not get started on the package management tools (which SUCK ASS). Nonstandard configuration files, oddball filesystem layout, and weird locations for binaries and related packages... A wtmp file that grows, on its own, 25MB every week (on a system that saw _maybe_ 1 login per week - guess what's running OpenBSD now?). Window managers that, in their stock configurations, will refuse to work the same way two logins in a row. The incorrect assumption that I want my screensaver behavior changed to system defaults every single time I login, when I had explicitly changed them in my wm menus, etc. The list goes on and on...
I've not touched a RedHat system since 5.1, and I don't plan to do so ever again.
--Corey
I could swear I saw discussion of this topic a couple or three days ago on /.
--Corey
I don't know about headless (i.e. no framebuffer, or serial-console) support, but I do know something of Digital's RAID array controllers.
They are fucking nice.
The ones I'm used to working with, the HSZ50s and HSZ80s (as well as those I've had a couple of brushes with, like the HSZ40, and one I've never seen running, like the HSZ70) all have their own console drivers.
Hot-swap can be done in a Digital StorageWorks array completely invisible to the host OS. Proper sense data, etc., will allow the host OS to log and/or alert the administrator of a hardware problem, but the remedy can be affected with no downtime whatever.
I can't speak for other vendors, but I'm sure they have analogous systems.
--Corey, a Tru64 admin
> Either way, you get a quite pissed off M$ and a Compaq that suddenly finds royalties rising.
Maybe.
It could be, though, that the genie is out of the bottle.
Picture it now:
PHB: Hey Tech-Head, what kind of servers do we need to continue our astounding growth?
TH : Well, boss, Compaq has some pretty good hardware nowadays, not like before when even their RAM was proprietary.
PHB: We're going to need 300 of them, but capital is at a premium. We can lease, but we need the expense on the book for a tax write-off. So, we've decided to buy. Do some research and tell me what you'd recommend.
(a while later)
TH : Well, boss, I've done a bit of research. We can get 300 Compaq Proliant servers for X million dollars. For an additional 300,000 dollars, we can get an NT license for them.
PHB: What?! What are the alternatives?
TH : Well, there's Linux. We can get it gratis with the servers, and it's fast and stable, and Compaq supports it.
PHB: Will it do what we need it to do?
TH : With a few adjustments to what we need, and what we expect, yes.
PHB: Good. Linux it is. You get me more specific details, and we'll get together later and write up the P.O.
(I work for a guy that does value the opinions of his tech staff to almost this degree... a rare breed, indeed)
--Corey
Yes.
Federal circuit court decisions may be appealed and heard by, ultimately, the Supreme Court (there are various levels of indirection here, appellate courts and the like).
The Supreme Court ultimately has the final say on a given matter.
The Supreme Court isn't final because it's right; it is right because it's final.
--Corey
DirecTV my ass.
Have you tried to contact their customer service representatives lately? "Due to the increase in calls because of our merger with USSB, we are unable to handle your call. Sorry. *click*"
It took me 5 months, nasty mails, and finally refusing to pay the bill to get them to cut off satellite service (what I wanted was a downgrade, to keep paying for the basic package, but after hearing what I heard, I decided that they didn't want my business after all). After all that, I expect them to sic a collection agency on me.
In short, get Dish Network.
--Corey
One little, two little, three little endians... Four little, five little, six little endians... Seven little, eight little, nine little endians... Ten little endian boys... --Corey
Whizz... THUNK. Ooh, sorry.
I never knew freon could get you high. I did a whippit or two, and burned a joint or two in high school, but I never once inhaled freon.
--Corey
> BTW: We've just had a Columbine here in Germany a couple of days ago.
Funny... I've not heard a peep of this in the media here. I think they're keeping a lid on it so popular sentiment in the U.S. will continue to lean toward gun control, because "we allow guns, and we're the only country where this type of thing happens".
How long the world's memory seems when Columbine is discussed, but who remembers the school shootings in Scotland, and who's heard of this one in Germany, where gun control is the law?
Frustrated,
--Corey
He did score 100% on his paper, which goes to show how education in this country is degrading. I can honestly say that, when I was in 7th grade, such grammatically poor, horrendously misspelled tripe would have been summarily failed.
Where are our educators? In Gestapo school?
--Corey
> Guns don't solve problems, they create them. Their only valid use: Self Defence by trained
> professionals.
So, if you're not a trained professional (professional what, I might ask?), you've no right to defend your person, your family, or your property from a malevolent other? That sounds to me like you're taking away 99.99% of the population's right to defend itself.
Not to mention that the Constitution secures the right to keep and bear arms to the citizens of the United States. That viewpoint has been backed in other decisions by the Supreme Court, who have stated that the intent of the founders at the time of writing the Constitution should be taken into account when interpreting the words on the paper.
Our founders were prolific writers, and reading their works will give you the guts of their intent in writing the Second Amendment. In short, they made a distinction between the militia and the military. The military, called an Army in the language of the Constitution, was an entity whose purpose was a necessary evil. The founders realized that a powerful military would be a government tool to oppress the citizenry, and therefore included language to prohibit the quartering of troops and the assemblage of a standing army on U.S. soil. This is done to protect us, the citizens, from us, the government.
The "well-regulated militia" was seen as a citizen's check over the power of the military, and was deemed necessary by the founders to ensure the liberty of the citizenry. This viewpoint should not go unnoticed in today's society, where government is all-intrusive and where our rights are being attacked "for the good of the children" and "to further the war on drugs".
> [population control is NOT a yearly "in season" thing!]
How else, then, would you propose to regulate hunting? Hunting of, say, deer, is a necessary evil. Sport hunting kills off about as many deer from the herd as would have been killed in a year by a healthy population of predators (whom we've killed off, and keep driven away). Here in the St. Louis region, the deer herd is out of control. There used to be hunting in the region, and there was no problem with overpopulation. The herd remained healthy, and able to feed without problems and without causing problems for their human neighbors.
We created the problem when we killed off the wolves, and we must steward the animal herds for the sake of proper conservation. Nothing worse than seeing an animal starving, and nothing could be worse than feeding it and making it dependent upon you and a nuisance to yourself and to your neighbors.
Licensed sport hunting (deer tags, etc.) as a means of herd population control is a Good Thing [tm]. It's only in the last ten years or so that it's been thought of as a Bad Thing [tm], and in that time period we've seen a problem with population control in the herds.
I suspect that, while my example pertains to the deer herd in a given area, the principle is the same for other animals and for other areas. We have a moral obligation to the lands and animals that we steward to fill the ecological niche of predator, when we've driven the natural predators of the species in question away for one reason or another.
The Bill of Rights is not the origin of our rights as citizens and as free men in this country. The rights we enjoy are ours as human beings, and are inalienable (check out Locke), endowed upon us by our creator (whomever you choose for that creator to be, even if it be fate). I like to think of these rights as being "human rights", and believe that all men are endowed with these rights, and would like to see all men free to pursue their lives with those freedoms. The only reason, to my mind (and, I might add, to the minds of the nations' founders), that all men all over the world don't have the same rights as we enjoy in the U.S. is that their governments are oppressing them. That is, and should be, cause for revolt by the oppressed.
The Bill of Rights secures those rights to us from the oppressive force of the government.
--Corey
> it really doesn't matter when the only people we can vote for are ones who are trying to
> whittle those freedoms away
But, you forget... the Democrat party and the Republican party are not the only parties out there.
There is a party dedicated to repealing a lot of our government's nonsense (of the last, oh, 130 or so years), and restoring liberty to the American people.
They don't get much press, though, because their ideas of "freedom" and "personal responsibility" are chided in the media, and they've yet to live down their unfortunate dominance in the 1970s by anarchists.
Give The Libertarian Party gander, and then tell me there's nobody left for whom to vote.
--Corey
PS - sorry about the duplicate. when logging in and posting at the same time, formatting gets stripped from the post. neat bug.
> it really doesn't matter when the only people we can vote for are ones who are trying to > whittle those freedoms away But, you forget... the Democrat party and the Republican party are not the only parties out there. There is a party dedicated to repealing a lot of our government's nonsense (of the last, oh, 130 or so years), and restoring liberty to the American people. They don't get much press, though, because their ideas of "freedom" and "personal responsibility" are chided in the media, and they've yet to live down their unfortunate dominance in the 1970s by anarchists. Give The Libertarian Party gander, and then tell me there's nobody left for whom to vote. --Corey
I guess I'm weird, but I like a no-frills, just-the-facts-maam installation. It installs everything you need, and then some. Out of the box, it's tight and stable. Given a few patches (available at www.openbsd.org) to take care of a couple little niggling bugs, recompilation of the system, and the installation of a couple packages from /usr/ports, it's up and running smoothly and flawlessly.
FreeBSD - well, I installed Free and ran it for a while. It has a *ton* of stuff with its system, most of which actually works. The only thing I can say here is that it seemed less "tight" than OpenBSD. One day, my X configuration worked. The next day, after having changed exactly *nothing*, my window manager mysteriously stopped working. Then, the next day, X refused to come up at all. So, I wiped it out. It didn't seem very well put-together at that point (v3.2).
NetBSD - its installer is less straightforward than OpenBSD. It uses a somewhat curses-type installer on x86, and it's a little less than flexible. For instance, I couldn't convince it to install the system to two disks (having a couple of smallish disks is an unfortunate reality on a couple of my machines). At any rate, I had to set up the slices on wd0, reboot and pretend to want to install to wd1 and set up the slices there, and then reboot again (because I wanted / on wd0a), suspend the installer after having "set up" wd0 again, and mount wd1a to /usr before resuming. After that little bit of hacking around, the system installed normally. The mouse device still eludes me, though, and I've not the time to deal with it currently. On OpenBSD, it's /dev/psm0. On NetBSD, from which Open is derived back in the mists of time, even after compiling in the wscons console drivers and setting things up, /dev/wsmouse won't allow the mouse to work. It, too, is less "tight" than OpenBSD in my opinion, but in a different way.
There seems to be a spirit of technological innovation in the NetBSD camp that the other BSDs benefit from greatly. Witness RAIDFrame, pciide, etc. migrating from Net to Open. Softupdates originated in, I believe, FreeBSD, and was ported into OpenBSD. Some of the better parts of FreeBSD's userland made it to OpenBSD and was audited and changed. Some of it made it back to Free and even back into Net. So, there's a lot of cross-pollination between all of them.
YMMV, of course, but my miles will be run on Open.
--Corey
I've installed all three of the free BSD Unix variants in the last few weeks, and have to say that the OpenBSD installation is by far the easiest of the three. I guess I'm weird, but I like a no-frills, just-the-facts-maam installation. It installs everything you need, and then some. Out of the box, it's tight and stable. Given a few patches (available at www.openbsd.org) to take care of a couple little niggling bugs, recompilation of the system, and the installation of a couple packages from /usr/ports, it's up and running smoothly and flawlessly. FreeBSD - well, I installed Free and ran it for a while. It has a *ton* of stuff with its system, most of which actually works. The only thing I can say here is that it seemed less "tight" than OpenBSD. One day, my X configuration worked. The next day, after having changed exactly *nothing*, my window manager mysteriously stopped working. Then, the next day, X refused to come up at all. So, I wiped it out. It didn't seem very well put-together at that point (v3.2). NetBSD - its installer is less straightforward than OpenBSD. It uses a somewhat curses-type installer on x86, and it's a little less than flexible. For instance, I couldn't convince it to install the system to two disks (having a couple of smallish disks is an unfortunate reality on a couple of my machines). At any rate, I had to set up the slices on wd0, reboot and pretend to want to install to wd1 and set up the slices there, and then reboot again (because I wanted / on wd0a), suspend the installer after having "set up" wd0 again, and mount wd1a to /usr before resuming. After that little bit of hacking around, the system installed normally. The mouse device still eludes me, though, and I've not the time to deal with it currently. On OpenBSD, it's /dev/psm0. On NetBSD, from which Open is derived back in the mists of time, even after compiling in the wscons console drivers and setting things up, /dev/wsmouse won't allow the mouse to work. It, too, is less "tight" than OpenBSD in my opinion, but in a different way. There seems to be a spirit of technological innovation in the NetBSD camp that the other BSDs benefit from greatly. Witness RAIDFrame, pciide, etc. migrating from Net to Open. Softupdates originated in, I believe, FreeBSD, and was ported into OpenBSD. Some of the better parts of FreeBSD's userland made it to OpenBSD and was audited and changed. Some of it made it back to Free and even back into Net. So, there's a lot of cross-pollination between all of them. YMMV, of course, but my miles will be run on Open. --Corey
And here I thought Heinlein had it right when he called them "Loonies" (luna - the Moon).
--Corey
Indeed you are correct. It is I who was mistaken. No doubt we are both full of shit.
--Corey