Not that the little 'ol trade embargo imposed in 1962 and still in effect today would have anything to do with that, eh?
Sorry, that — the embargo — comes with the confiscations of property, mass executions of dissenters, and, most importantly, with inviting an openly hostile power to install nuclear missiles aimed at the US on your territory. Presumably — to fulfill your promise and desire to see the United States (or, at least, NYC) destroyed...
USSR has pumped a lot of resources into Cuba to compensate for the embargo. It was not enough — you can not compensate for the government, that is both bloody and incompetent...
if you take a look at the UN Human Development Index, you will notice that Cuba actually scores pretty well for the region. Certainly a lot better than a dozen countries which have had the "blessing" of being under the American boot.
Link? Oops...
But yes, be sure to take only the "top" as a proof. It certainly makes you look better than looking at the whole picture.
When that top is derided daily as evidence of America's inherent evil, pointing out, that it is, in fact, a top is most appropriate. Awaiting links/names on those 12 countries suffering under the American boot...
NVidia may have released FreeBSD/i386 drivers, but has anyone actually got the damned things to work?
I had no problems with the drivers as installed by the /usr/ports/x11/nvidia-driver. Used it on FreeBSD-4, -5, and 6. Maybe, they have not updated for Xorg-7.2 yet — have not tried that...
If you were trying to install directly, rather than via port (pick the right one, to get the version of the driver, that supports your card), you ought to give port a try...
It seems, most of the critics of the closed-source drivers happily shut up, when they get drivers for their platform.
Manufacturers have learned this long ago — they release binary drivers for Linux/i386, and the criticism all but disappears. NVidia has gone farther than most by releasing Linux/amd64 and even FreeBSD/i386 binaries.
But FreeBSD/amd64 is not there... Nor are Open|NetBSD... Nor Linux/ppc.
I know, each additional platform costs plenty. But it is the source, I'm asking, not binaries. If — as the case may be — the most modern version of NVidia drivers can't be built on FreeBSD/amd64 due to feature FOO missing on the platform, I could #ifdef that feature out myself. Earlier versions of the driver weren't using FOO even on i386...
I thought, their ability to automatically parse the messages — so as to show users the relevant advertisements, was the reason, I am getting an unlimited mailbox with nice interface for free.
If all/most of my messages are encrypted, how will they know, what to peddle to me? Can't do much on Subjects alone... Or can they?
USA has never really been expanisionist in the same sense, but we can see they do like to make their influence felt strongly. In particular they want to trade on their terms and they want to be able to land their military in your country if they feel the need. And lately, there seems to be a much stronger push to force "little USAs" even if people don't actually want them. An assumption of moral superiority.
Well, unlike Russia's America's presence and influence are, actually, beneficial. Even when achieved by questionable means. Compare, for example, the developments in Chile (US-supported dictatorship) vs. Cuba (USSR-supported dictatorship). Chile is the Latin America's top economy, while Cuba is the very lowest. Or compare the USSR-supported North with the US-supported South Koreas... Or look at how the US-assisted Western Europe recovered after WW2 and then consider the USSR-controlled Eastern Europe (including Eastern Germany!)
These are just the most obvious cases...
Every culture wants its presence felt (just listen to all the noise the French are making). But America's empire is the benevolent one — and the "way of life" it (strongly) suggests is the one of prosperity and comfort. And not necessarily due to the benevolence of all Americans — simply because for us to prosper, it is better to have prosperous (and peaceful!) neighbors. And we are willing to shove that prosperity and peacefulness down a throat or two...
Russians, on the other hand, just want an empire for the sake of empire — yes, we have huge rates of alcoholism, our population is declining, our former subjects all hate us, AIDS is rising, natural resources are our only sources of currency. But we are citizens of a Great Empire, you see, and that is somehow comforting on its own...
Whatever wrong you can accuse Bush of doing, Chavez has verifiably done. I should add arm-twisting of the media to that list...
Except waging an actual war — Venezuela is too weak for that... He is the curse of the country — as soon as the oil price comes back down (and it will), Venezuela will turn into Zimbabwe.
Only if your terms make sense. If, for example, you said "nobody with a yellow shirt can use my software"... that would be your term, but it would be a stupid term and people would ignore it in all likelihood.
And they would be in violation of the license agreement. See? Agreement — you agree to not wear a yellow T-shirt, however stupid — you may feel — this requirement is. Wearing it anyway is a violation...
But the contention here is not whether the license is "stupid" — it is whether or not it is, in fact, violated.
Not a month goes by without seeing a double disk failure in a RAID-5 system from a customer site for either of these companies.
People die on highways every day too, you know... Yet most of us drive to work, however insane this may seem to some county coroner.
Most likely the failures you are seeing are correlated due to something like overheating. But with that correlation no amount of redundancy will help much — you'll see triple and quadruple disk failures too...
So the manufacturer says if you read the entire drive 12.5 times you will get 1 Nonrecoverable Read error.
This is an alarming problem, but it has nothing to do with disk-replacement. Even during routine operations, when everything is fine, a RAID5, as far as I know, does not verify the parity during reads the way registered RAM would — it is too expensive to do so. This means, even without disk-failures, there are periodic read-errors — often undetected.
No, I don't think my data is safe, but dedicating a drive as "hot-spare" so as to reduce the array-vulnerability window from 4 hours — 2 hours for disk replacement by your employer plus 2 hours for the array to rebuild itself — to just 2 hours for the latter makes no sense. That EMC recommends doing so is nothing short of a deceptive practice designed to sell more hardware...
It takes guts to challenge "vendors recommendations" and convince the boss, he takes much higher risk of a deadly accident on the way to work every morning, than the risk of losing data by simply using a (well-ventilated) RAID5. Most sysadmins would have neither the guts nor the Math to do that, and EMC is milking that for all they can...
A double disk failure may be very unlikely, but a disk failure combined with a read-error during rebuild isn't...
If the read-error is recoverable, then there is no problem. And if it is not, then you contradict yourself, for such an unrecoverable read-error would be a disk-failure, which you agreed is very unlikely to overlap the replacement process for an earlier failed disk.
Your link (and I'm rather hesitant to trust a storage vendor's advice to buy more storage, BTW) is not explicit — could it imply an undetected read error? These could happen any time (RAID or not, array-rebuild or not), and there ought to be means of detecting them...
Amazing... You are, actually, justifying Stalin's actions by Poland's "misbehavior" — Pinsk massacre, where 35 or so suspected Commies were executed without trial.
Outrageous as it might be, to bring this up even in the same post as Stalin is most ridiculous. 35 people executed without trial is an even, over which Stalin wouldn't even have been waken up by his staff.
For example, shortly after conquering its half of Poland (in full cooperation with the Nazis), Stalin's scumbags have executed between 2000 to 22000 people in Katyn — POWs and others.
To cover up the crime, KGB dachas were built on the site to keep the "inquiring minds" off, and Soviet propaganda made much of the (rather minor) Nazi war crime perpetrated in a village with a similar-sounding name. Hitler soldiers have burned 149 villagers alive in Khatyn...
Anyway you slice it, Russia's crimes always come out bigger and greater than anyone else's — and yet her apologetics dare to condescend on other nations as "misbehaving"...
The first problem with your gnuplot script is that you're assuming a Poisson distribution for HDD failures (which is incorrect). Statistical failure distribution follows a Weibull distribution with k roughly equivalent to 7.5. Unfortunately, because you build your argument off of a Poisson distribution approximation, the rest of the analysis doesn't make much sense.
Actually, I assumed evenly distributed failures, so there may still be some sense left in the analysis:-)
I did read the CMU's paper just yesterday (could not update my own little script) and was most frustrated, they stopped short of a formula for a RAID5's MTTF. No, they don't owe me anything, but this would've been the single most practical result of their research. With all the rest of their findings coming up with this last one would've been easy for them...
you need a file system that assumes and can work around node-level failure.
Absolutely — a system like that should be ready for one node going down for a short time. Yes. But handling multiple-disk failures will not give you that, if all of those disks happen to be inside that single node:-) for example. I'm sure, you (your company) has thought of that...
Now, are you gaining much from working at a file-system level, rather than offering a device (SCSI, FC, or SATA)? It seems like a lot more OS-specific drivers need to be written using a file-system approach? Is it worth it?
it can handle multiple catastrophic disk and machine failures.
I tried to crudely calculate a RAID5's MTTF recently, and even if I assume, the drive-manufacturers are exaggerating their drives' MTTFs ten times, I'm still getting MTTF of an array counted in centuries — assuming a failed-drive is replaced within a couple of days.
Here are my attempts (the text is the Gnuplot script, which produces the graphics), what do your company's experts say?
Even if my calculations are wrong, I suspect, the a failure of another disk, while the RAID is recovering from an earlier disk-failure is so improbable (even if the RAID spans dozens of drives), no efforts to reduce that already minuscule risk can possibly be justified. The companies peddling such reductions (RAID6 is how some solutions are called) are praying on their customers' being bad in Statistics...
Now, for RAIDs spanning many hundreds of drives — maybe...
Given how "well" Russian Government organizes things it'd be an utter failure.
I think, you are a bit too dismissive of the Russian Government's ability to organize certain things. Ending drunkenness may not be among them, but killing or imprisoning detractors they can do. Pressuring a neighbor economically? Sure — I remind you of the "alcohol-containing liquids" again... A cyber-attack? Yes, they can — far easier than putting polonium into somebody's tea in London.
If there was a symbol for all US soldiers that died in combat, that marked their graves in another country, and that country would then decided to just move it somewhere else, because they want to put a highway on top of that last resting place... Would Americans grin and bear it? No? Loud screams from politicians asking for sanctions? Regular people doing everything they can to protest it? Net bot herders making statement and then bragging about "squashing the embassy N servers" between themselves?
Would the US government have to encourage people to do it?
US government would not encourage people to do it. Russian would. That's my point.
Decent well-connected countries would not engage in this sort of things. Russia — busily turning itself back into an Evil Empire — denies "officially" organizing the attacks...
Whether it did officialy organize them, or not is irrelevant — so many things in the country happen unofficially (including the unofficial salaries — in dollars — paid to top government bureaucrats to keep them from leaving for the private sector), that the government's claims may even be nominally truthful this time.
What is important is the government's official reaction. For example, a Russian health official is on record concerning the health hazards of the Estonian sprats. Those who follow the region would recognize the tactics already applied against Georgia's major exports. Georgia's most excellent wines are now called "alcohol-containing liquids" in Russia and their import is banned "on health grounds".
Sprats are safe for now — unlike Georgia, Estonia is an EU (and NATO) member. But Russia — in sore need of something glorious in its sorry past (we liberated Estonia, not reconquered it, you see) — is still enraged. In a decent country such rage wouldn't be enough to break law and order, but Russia is another story. There is no doubt, the cyber-attacks against Estonia used Russian governmental resources, including hardware and human ones — these will most certainly not be prosecuted.
If they "protect" your port 25, they are morons, and you should complain or switch the ISP. If they are blocking your attempts to reach other people's port 25, they should be commended.
Your system may be immune, but hordes of "zombies" would be sending spam from your ISP's network. As things stand, the zombies are still infected, but can not send e-mails directly to victims, which throttles the rate a lot.
You can still run a server — just configure your ISP's server as the "smart host". There is no shame in that.
And well they should as they were attempting to sell, not share.
There is no difference — had the tried to simply give the secret away to Pepsi, they would still be criminals, even if the sentence could've been less harsh. AllofMP3, BTW, is selling...
Just as your family and friends freely passed their knowledge and culture to you, others will pass along theirs also. That has been the way information has been shared since the dawn of man and no law is going to change it.
Yes, of course — we would trade books, tapes, or CDs. Humans weren't able to create digitally-perfect copies of anything until fairly recently — less than a generation ago, yet you make it sound, like some "dawn-of-man" law of nature is being violated by these greedy *AA bastards.
Somebody's creation is that person's alone. It is not yours, nor the "society's", nor the "culture's". If that person chooses to sell the creation to a RIAA-member — it is their right to do so, and no attempts to expropriate that creation should be attempted. If they choose to give it away — great, but it is their choice, so keep off.
The only argument for copying is "fair use" — such as creating backups. Well, backups aren't sold (what AllofMP3 is doing), not traded with strangers — these are unfair use, and I support *AA's in their fight for their rights (much as I remain unenthusiastic about their offerings)... You should support them too — if you ever created anything worth copying, that is.
you can count on at least a few lesser jurisdictions (states, municipalities, etc.) to attempt to impose come crack-brained e-mail tax (or something similar)
But what if it is to benefit poor children? I can see it already: "Why is idontgno opposing help for the most vulnerable members of our society?!!" Uh-oh...
I say, a locality should be allowed any such idiocy (if its voters want it — via their elected representatives) — if only to prove, it is, in fact, an idiocy.
Sharing information is as natural a human trait as walking and talking.
Of course! What could possibly be wrong about this group's actions? Too bad, they are going to prison for 4-8 years each over their little "civil disobedience". Truly, America has lost its way!
It enables people to pass knowledge and culture from one generation to the next.
And if the right to do so is infringed, the important works of the entertainers will be completely lost on the next generations. Just think — your son might never know, who Britney Spears was... What unthinkable loss to humanity.
Fortunately, hundreds of millions of CDs produced by the entertainers will make sure, anyone, who wants to, can preserve the cherished memories. They just have to pay for each one.
Why? What connection is there between how Japan portrays it's military history and whether the Smithsonian's exhibits are correct
Because nobody is perfect — ratings are only meaningful in comparision. Japan today has (among Americans and Europeans anyway) this image of a hardworking benign nation, so comparing its prominent politically-funded museum with America's is quite proper.
Defending the fellow Asians from the racist Europeans.
Fortunately, when we torture and kill civilians today, we're "liberating them in the name of democracy", so it's totally different.
We did not go to Iraq to "torture and kill civilians" — it happened, but it was not the government's real intent. Naive as it may or may not be, we really did (and do) want to make Iraq a democracy. Japan's real intent was to capture the lands and the natural resources (ore, coal, oil, rubber, lumber, etc. — the shrine's museum lists it all in another section).
So, yes, it is "totally different". In the six weeks of the course of Nanking Massacrealone, Japanese Army has killed above 100000 Chinese non-combatants. But yes, please, do continue comparing it with, what, 50 victims of American troops' deliberate murder or torture (not all of it of civilians even) — keep showing the world how stupid your kind is. So good at seeing the other side, you lose all track of your own...
... in the US, it is appropriate for them to be concerned about standards in their own community first and foremost.
Yes, it is. But before any conclusions are made, it is important to put things into perspective. My post provided just that.
You should. Before accusing the US government of polishing up its record, check out what the kind, benign, "Hello Kitty" modern Japan is doing.
The annexation of Korea? Peaceful merger agreed upon by both countries.
Colonization (and attempts of same) of the rest of Asia? Defending the fellow Asians from the racist Europeans. (Yes, the same government, that for decades continued to deny citizenship to Koreans in Japan is accusing someone else of "racism")...
Murder of civilians? Impossible — because Japanese soldiers are the most disciplined in the world (and always have been, you see).
Every time a Japanese Prime Minister visits the shrine, there are shrieks of him, allegedly, "honoring the war-criminals". That's not true — the handful of criminals there are in a tiny minority among the people, who died furthering the government's conquests without committing any crimes.
It is the justification for the conquests presented in Yasukuni (and I was only able to see the English versions of them, native versions are, likely, even more extremist), that we should be objecting to...
As a final note, I think abortion should be legal until 18yrs of age. I bet we wouldn't have nearly as many stupid ass problems if the kids knew their parents could change their mind up until they became legal adults.
You had me until that point. What you suggest is downright inhuman. Suggesting that killing somebody might be the solution to family problems is more than just stupid.
The Western civilization claims to hail from Greeks, Romans, and Jews — Romans being the most recent major force.
Yet it Ancient Rome a male child remained his father's property until the father's death. A female child — until marriage. It was perfectly legal for the father to kill the child at any moment. Obviously, this was not practiced often, but it remained legal.
In other words, they believe whatever Bush tells them, even though they are super-smart. It's a crazy world.
Has it ever occured to you, that — just maybe — they are right at least on some of the things you listed? Neah, can't be, can it?
Let me first comfort you a bit, though — it is not, that we believe Bush. It is that we agree with what he is saying (wherever he got the information himself).
Let me now infuriate you back again, by rephrasing your list of issues our way (and earning a couple more flamebait and troll moderations):
we agree, that the concerns over global warming are frequently overblown;
we agree, that showing the world, that despite the Vietnam catastrophe, America is willing and able to sometimes (not often enough, perhaps) go after vicious tyrants;
we agree, that government should not be meddling in the market (including the for Internet Service Provision), even if some of us would accept such meddling given a compelling argument for it in a particular case;
we are also convinced, any risk to Roe vs. Wade is worth the increased likelihood of preserving the integrity of Constitution, threatened by the Justices behaving like philosopher-kings finding new "laws" in the Constitution that the oafs in Congress should've passed (practice often derided as "legislating from the bench").
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Sorry, that — the embargo — comes with the confiscations of property, mass executions of dissenters, and, most importantly, with inviting an openly hostile power to install nuclear missiles aimed at the US on your territory. Presumably — to fulfill your promise and desire to see the United States (or, at least, NYC) destroyed...
USSR has pumped a lot of resources into Cuba to compensate for the embargo. It was not enough — you can not compensate for the government, that is both bloody and incompetent...
Link? Oops...
When that top is derided daily as evidence of America's inherent evil, pointing out, that it is, in fact, a top is most appropriate. Awaiting links/names on those 12 countries suffering under the American boot...
I had no problems with the drivers as installed by the /usr/ports/x11/nvidia-driver . Used it on FreeBSD-4, -5, and 6. Maybe, they have not updated for Xorg-7.2 yet — have not tried that...
If you were trying to install directly, rather than via port (pick the right one, to get the version of the driver, that supports your card), you ought to give port a try...
It seems, most of the critics of the closed-source drivers happily shut up, when they get drivers for their platform.
Manufacturers have learned this long ago — they release binary drivers for Linux/i386, and the criticism all but disappears. NVidia has gone farther than most by releasing Linux/amd64 and even FreeBSD/i386 binaries.
But FreeBSD/amd64 is not there... Nor are Open|NetBSD... Nor Linux/ppc.
I know, each additional platform costs plenty. But it is the source, I'm asking, not binaries. If — as the case may be — the most modern version of NVidia drivers can't be built on FreeBSD/amd64 due to feature FOO missing on the platform, I could #ifdef that feature out myself. Earlier versions of the driver weren't using FOO even on i386...
I thought, their ability to automatically parse the messages — so as to show users the relevant advertisements, was the reason, I am getting an unlimited mailbox with nice interface for free.
If all/most of my messages are encrypted, how will they know, what to peddle to me? Can't do much on Subjects alone... Or can they?
Well, unlike Russia's America's presence and influence are, actually, beneficial. Even when achieved by questionable means. Compare, for example, the developments in Chile (US-supported dictatorship) vs. Cuba (USSR-supported dictatorship). Chile is the Latin America's top economy, while Cuba is the very lowest. Or compare the USSR-supported North with the US-supported South Koreas... Or look at how the US-assisted Western Europe recovered after WW2 and then consider the USSR-controlled Eastern Europe (including Eastern Germany!)
These are just the most obvious cases...
Every culture wants its presence felt (just listen to all the noise the French are making). But America's empire is the benevolent one — and the "way of life" it (strongly) suggests is the one of prosperity and comfort. And not necessarily due to the benevolence of all Americans — simply because for us to prosper, it is better to have prosperous (and peaceful!) neighbors. And we are willing to shove that prosperity and peacefulness down a throat or two...
Russians, on the other hand, just want an empire for the sake of empire — yes, we have huge rates of alcoholism, our population is declining, our former subjects all hate us, AIDS is rising, natural resources are our only sources of currency. But we are citizens of a Great Empire, you see, and that is somehow comforting on its own...
Whatever wrong you can accuse Bush of doing, Chavez has verifiably done . I should add arm-twisting of the media to that list...
Except waging an actual war — Venezuela is too weak for that... He is the curse of the country — as soon as the oil price comes back down (and it will), Venezuela will turn into Zimbabwe.
And they would be in violation of the license agreement. See? Agreement — you agree to not wear a yellow T-shirt, however stupid — you may feel — this requirement is. Wearing it anyway is a violation...
But the contention here is not whether the license is "stupid" — it is whether or not it is, in fact, violated.
People die on highways every day too, you know... Yet most of us drive to work, however insane this may seem to some county coroner.
Most likely the failures you are seeing are correlated due to something like overheating. But with that correlation no amount of redundancy will help much — you'll see triple and quadruple disk failures too...
This is an alarming problem, but it has nothing to do with disk-replacement. Even during routine operations, when everything is fine, a RAID5, as far as I know, does not verify the parity during reads the way registered RAM would — it is too expensive to do so. This means, even without disk-failures, there are periodic read-errors — often undetected.
No, I don't think my data is safe, but dedicating a drive as "hot-spare" so as to reduce the array-vulnerability window from 4 hours — 2 hours for disk replacement by your employer plus 2 hours for the array to rebuild itself — to just 2 hours for the latter makes no sense. That EMC recommends doing so is nothing short of a deceptive practice designed to sell more hardware...
It takes guts to challenge "vendors recommendations" and convince the boss, he takes much higher risk of a deadly accident on the way to work every morning, than the risk of losing data by simply using a (well-ventilated) RAID5. Most sysadmins would have neither the guts nor the Math to do that, and EMC is milking that for all they can...
If the read-error is recoverable, then there is no problem. And if it is not, then you contradict yourself, for such an unrecoverable read-error would be a disk-failure, which you agreed is very unlikely to overlap the replacement process for an earlier failed disk.
Your link (and I'm rather hesitant to trust a storage vendor's advice to buy more storage, BTW) is not explicit — could it imply an undetected read error? These could happen any time (RAID or not, array-rebuild or not), and there ought to be means of detecting them...
Is it just me, or does the above look like Prolog?..
It taketh me back...
Amazing... You are, actually, justifying Stalin's actions by Poland's "misbehavior" — Pinsk massacre, where 35 or so suspected Commies were executed without trial.
Outrageous as it might be, to bring this up even in the same post as Stalin is most ridiculous. 35 people executed without trial is an even, over which Stalin wouldn't even have been waken up by his staff.
For example, shortly after conquering its half of Poland (in full cooperation with the Nazis), Stalin's scumbags have executed between 2000 to 22000 people in Katyn — POWs and others.
To cover up the crime, KGB dachas were built on the site to keep the "inquiring minds" off, and Soviet propaganda made much of the (rather minor) Nazi war crime perpetrated in a village with a similar-sounding name. Hitler soldiers have burned 149 villagers alive in Khatyn...
Anyway you slice it, Russia's crimes always come out bigger and greater than anyone else's — and yet her apologetics dare to condescend on other nations as "misbehaving"...
Glorious past, indeed...
Actually, I assumed evenly distributed failures, so there may still be some sense left in the analysis :-)
I did read the CMU's paper just yesterday (could not update my own little script) and was most frustrated, they stopped short of a formula for a RAID5's MTTF. No, they don't owe me anything, but this would've been the single most practical result of their research. With all the rest of their findings coming up with this last one would've been easy for them...
Absolutely — a system like that should be ready for one node going down for a short time. Yes. But handling multiple-disk failures will not give you that, if all of those disks happen to be inside that single node :-) for example. I'm sure, you (your company) has thought of that...
Now, are you gaining much from working at a file-system level, rather than offering a device (SCSI, FC, or SATA)? It seems like a lot more OS-specific drivers need to be written using a file-system approach? Is it worth it?
I tried to crudely calculate a RAID5's MTTF recently, and even if I assume, the drive-manufacturers are exaggerating their drives' MTTFs ten times, I'm still getting MTTF of an array counted in centuries — assuming a failed-drive is replaced within a couple of days.
Here are my attempts (the text is the Gnuplot script, which produces the graphics), what do your company's experts say?
Even if my calculations are wrong, I suspect, the a failure of another disk, while the RAID is recovering from an earlier disk-failure is so improbable (even if the RAID spans dozens of drives), no efforts to reduce that already minuscule risk can possibly be justified. The companies peddling such reductions (RAID6 is how some solutions are called) are praying on their customers' being bad in Statistics...
Now, for RAIDs spanning many hundreds of drives — maybe...
I think, you are a bit too dismissive of the Russian Government's ability to organize certain things. Ending drunkenness may not be among them, but killing or imprisoning detractors they can do. Pressuring a neighbor economically? Sure — I remind you of the "alcohol-containing liquids" again... A cyber-attack? Yes, they can — far easier than putting polonium into somebody's tea in London.
US government would not encourage people to do it. Russian would. That's my point.
Decent well-connected countries would not engage in this sort of things. Russia — busily turning itself back into an Evil Empire — denies "officially" organizing the attacks...
Whether it did officialy organize them, or not is irrelevant — so many things in the country happen unofficially (including the unofficial salaries — in dollars — paid to top government bureaucrats to keep them from leaving for the private sector), that the government's claims may even be nominally truthful this time.
What is important is the government's official reaction. For example, a Russian health official is on record concerning the health hazards of the Estonian sprats. Those who follow the region would recognize the tactics already applied against Georgia's major exports. Georgia's most excellent wines are now called "alcohol-containing liquids" in Russia and their import is banned "on health grounds".
Sprats are safe for now — unlike Georgia, Estonia is an EU (and NATO) member. But Russia — in sore need of something glorious in its sorry past (we liberated Estonia, not reconquered it, you see) — is still enraged. In a decent country such rage wouldn't be enough to break law and order, but Russia is another story. There is no doubt, the cyber-attacks against Estonia used Russian governmental resources, including hardware and human ones — these will most certainly not be prosecuted.
If they "protect" your port 25, they are morons, and you should complain or switch the ISP. If they are blocking your attempts to reach other people's port 25, they should be commended.
Your system may be immune, but hordes of "zombies" would be sending spam from your ISP's network. As things stand, the zombies are still infected, but can not send e-mails directly to victims, which throttles the rate a lot.
You can still run a server — just configure your ISP's server as the "smart host". There is no shame in that.
There is no difference — had the tried to simply give the secret away to Pepsi, they would still be criminals, even if the sentence could've been less harsh. AllofMP3, BTW, is selling...
Yes, of course — we would trade books, tapes, or CDs. Humans weren't able to create digitally-perfect copies of anything until fairly recently — less than a generation ago, yet you make it sound, like some "dawn-of-man" law of nature is being violated by these greedy *AA bastards.
Somebody's creation is that person's alone. It is not yours, nor the "society's", nor the "culture's". If that person chooses to sell the creation to a RIAA-member — it is their right to do so, and no attempts to expropriate that creation should be attempted. If they choose to give it away — great, but it is their choice, so keep off.
The only argument for copying is "fair use" — such as creating backups. Well, backups aren't sold (what AllofMP3 is doing), not traded with strangers — these are unfair use, and I support *AA's in their fight for their rights (much as I remain unenthusiastic about their offerings)... You should support them too — if you ever created anything worth copying, that is.
But what if it is to benefit poor children? I can see it already: "Why is idontgno opposing help for the most vulnerable members of our society?!!" Uh-oh...
I say, a locality should be allowed any such idiocy (if its voters want it — via their elected representatives) — if only to prove, it is, in fact, an idiocy.
Municipal Wi-Fi comes to mind.
Of course! What could possibly be wrong about this group's actions? Too bad, they are going to prison for 4-8 years each over their little "civil disobedience". Truly, America has lost its way!
And if the right to do so is infringed, the important works of the entertainers will be completely lost on the next generations. Just think — your son might never know, who Britney Spears was... What unthinkable loss to humanity.
Fortunately, hundreds of millions of CDs produced by the entertainers will make sure, anyone, who wants to, can preserve the cherished memories. They just have to pay for each one.
Yes, because the right to share somebody else's creations with friends and strangers is unalienable.
Saharov and Ghandi would've been proud of your stand.
Because nobody is perfect — ratings are only meaningful in comparision. Japan today has (among Americans and Europeans anyway) this image of a hardworking benign nation, so comparing its prominent politically-funded museum with America's is quite proper.
We did not go to Iraq to "torture and kill civilians" — it happened, but it was not the government's real intent. Naive as it may or may not be, we really did (and do) want to make Iraq a democracy. Japan's real intent was to capture the lands and the natural resources (ore, coal, oil, rubber, lumber, etc. — the shrine's museum lists it all in another section).
So, yes, it is "totally different". In the six weeks of the course of Nanking Massacre alone, Japanese Army has killed above 100000 Chinese non-combatants. But yes, please, do continue comparing it with, what, 50 victims of American troops' deliberate murder or torture (not all of it of civilians even) — keep showing the world how stupid your kind is. So good at seeing the other side, you lose all track of your own...
Yes, it is. But before any conclusions are made, it is important to put things into perspective. My post provided just that.
You should. Before accusing the US government of polishing up its record, check out what the kind, benign, "Hello Kitty" modern Japan is doing.
The annexation of Korea? Peaceful merger agreed upon by both countries.
Colonization (and attempts of same) of the rest of Asia? Defending the fellow Asians from the racist Europeans. (Yes, the same government, that for decades continued to deny citizenship to Koreans in Japan is accusing someone else of "racism")...
Murder of civilians? Impossible — because Japanese soldiers are the most disciplined in the world (and always have been, you see).
Every time a Japanese Prime Minister visits the shrine, there are shrieks of him, allegedly, "honoring the war-criminals". That's not true — the handful of criminals there are in a tiny minority among the people, who died furthering the government's conquests without committing any crimes.
It is the justification for the conquests presented in Yasukuni (and I was only able to see the English versions of them, native versions are, likely, even more extremist), that we should be objecting to...
The Western civilization claims to hail from Greeks, Romans, and Jews — Romans being the most recent major force.
Yet it Ancient Rome a male child remained his father's property until the father's death. A female child — until marriage. It was perfectly legal for the father to kill the child at any moment. Obviously, this was not practiced often, but it remained legal.
See, we know history. Do you?..
Has it ever occured to you, that — just maybe — they are right at least on some of the things you listed? Neah, can't be, can it?
Let me first comfort you a bit, though — it is not, that we believe Bush. It is that we agree with what he is saying (wherever he got the information himself).
Let me now infuriate you back again, by rephrasing your list of issues our way (and earning a couple more flamebait and troll moderations):