I thought the android tables could be unlocked to install a normal Linux distro. Then you'd just install gimp.
Am I totally off base here?
Yes.
The point of doing something like this is not simply to have the best capabilities for the least effort. It's to jury-rig something that is arguably more efficient in a single respect, and arguably not less efficient in any other respects; thusly gaining massive GeekCred.
In this case the "more efficient" respect is that he doesn't have to actually bother with the crap that comes with software upgrades. Learning all of GIMP, getting a LINUX distro that will run on his phone, he won't have to do repeat five years from now when everyone's 3D-Phablet runs a completely different OS, etc. He'll still be using DOSBox/Old-Ass Photoshop (OAP). Since DOSBox is pretty much unhackable without first hacking the physical cell phone it runs on, the only program he has to keep up-to-date security-wise is said cell-phone.
Since he doesn't need the numerous features of any more modern program it's arguably not less efficient for him to give those up.
But a) many geeks have vast libraries of obsolete software (I, for example, have a 3.5 in disk version of OS/2 Warp in storage), and b) non-legal sources of ancient software are not hard to find. Abandonware sites, other geeks, bittorrent sites, etc. can get a DOSBox softwared up quick and cheap.
What, exactly, can I do with the latest stuff that wasn’t possible with the previous version?
For one thing, you can continue to use it after the hardware compatible with the previous version has failed. I've been told that a lot of new laptops sold with Windows 8 have Wi-Fi chips with no Windows 7 driver.
That's true, but it's not really relevant in this case. DOSBox gets ported to everything, which means that using an ancient version of Photoshop that is DOSBox and Win 3.1 compatible means you won't have to worry about upgrading your software until DOSBox goes away.
That won't happen until the millions upon millions of geeks who want to have the ability to fire up a copy of a circa-1990 DOS Computer game die.
And let's be honest here: that is not gonna happen in the foreseeable future. DOSBox will almost certainly be ported to anything created within the next 20-30 years.
For another, you can exchange documents with users of later versions. After a particular version of a program reaches its announced end of life, the program's publisher stops making plug-ins to read the latest version's file format. (Some publishers don't release such plug-ins at all.) Try opening a modern PSD in the old Photoshop for Windows 3.1 and see what error message doesn't pop up.
So?
If you're a pro trying to share Word Documents with an entire DevTeam using Word 95 is probably pretty damn stupid. If you're a guy who knows Word 95 really well, and doesn't want to bother learning the crap MS has added since then, then you'll be cool. Everyone will be able to read your plain.doc files, and if need to read their.docx files then you probably should have a copy of a slightly less primitive Word Processor, too.
Apparently Photoshop is even more forgiving, and this guy should be able to (in theory) open up other people's files fine.
For another, you can continue to use supported software on the public Internet even after a researcher has discovered security vulnerabilities because supported software gets patched.
It's not hard to simply not connect DOSBox to the internet. If you need to add a file to your DOSBox you can move it to DOSBox with your computer's native file system, not by firing up an ancient version of Netscape. If you want to share said file on Facebook you'll do it with your main computer's browser, not something from DOSBox.
It's not like you were likely to be working on a multi-million $ project using an emulator on your goddamn cell phone. It's not like DOSBox can have your bank passwords, or some attacker could get said passwords from your DOSBox without first hacking your main OS.
What you're mostly using it for is a) the ability to do simple tasks without using new software, and b) the ability to show your fellow geeks Rube-Goldberg-esqe software architecture that actually makes sense.
When the Romans/Byzantines owned it it was called Anatolia or Asia Minor. This is because the Turkish people were Steppe nomads similar to the Mongols when the Romans/Byzantines owned it. They only moved into Anatolia after beating multiple Emperors on the battle-field.
The region actually had large Greek and Armenian populations up until WW1. During the war either a) the Turkish Sultan used genocide to replace unreliable Christian Armenians with reliable Islamic Kurds, or b) the fortunes of war killed almost every Armenian but no Kurds. Which you take seriously depends on your point-of-view, and how much you want to work in Turkey. The Greeks fought Ataturk in a war to conquer ethnic Greek areas of Anatolia in the '20s, but they lost. Greece was still trying to figure out what it should do with the refugees at the start of WW2.
I hate it when this happens. I have to de-confusify this sentence: We had combat troops in 'Nam for a about that time (March '65-Jan '73), but during the first few years and last few years we didn't have a lot of troops engaged. We were only officially fighting the Vietnamese not the Laotians or Cambodians, so it was actually a smaller war.
Everybody does that. A statistically significant proportion of Serbs, for example, are convinced us Americans are part of a vast anti-Serb racist conspiracy due to the fact that a) Serbia sides with Russia lot and b) we side against Russia a lot. They call it Serbophobia. Their Balkan neighbors aren't much better.
In some ways Americans are actually worse then anyone else. For example we pay attention to WW2 because we won. France gave up early, so we call them Cheese-eating surrender monkeys. But in a little place called Indochina, which included Vietnam and several other countries, they almost for 8 years (Dec '46-Aug '54) and immediately started fighting another major war in Algeria which also lasted almost 8 years. We had combat troops in 'Nam for a about that time (March '65-Jan '73) and during the first few years and last few years we didn't have a lot of troops engaged and we were only officially fighting the Vietnamese not the Laotians or Cambodians. After we lost we were so broken-hearted we didn't fight any wars until Reagen invaded that great terrifying power Grenada.
In other words don't worry. The second you start paying attention to an ethnic group you'll find they think they are the center of the universe. The only reason you associate this behavior with Mid-Easterners today is Mid-Easterners are important enough that you actually pay attention to them.
There are 1 Billion Indians who get really confused when Americans pretend all Asian countries have coasts on the Pacific. There are several billion who get annoyed at the British for referring to Pakistanis and Indians as "Asian," but giving countries for everyone else. Asia is just a really big place, and the country boundaries don't really fit with the cultural boxes non-Asians insist on placing Asians in (Korean-Koreans, for example, are not happy that Korean Americans are in the same box as the Japanese just because us white boys have trouble telling a Korean face from a Japanese face), so it gets used confusingly.
You either live with it, or just stop using the word completely and hope everyone else follows suit. I'm in the latter category myself. As a word Asia is useful to Geologists, but to anyone else it's just a pain in the ass.
In non-North American English "Asian" and Oriental" do not mean yellow-skinned people from the Far East with a pronounced Epicanthic fold. It usually means Indian/Pakistani. The way this guy was using it is clearly referring to the Old Middle East -- ie: the bit of Asia that starts with Turkey and ends with Persia. This is why they called a train "Orient Express" despite the fact it only went as far east in Istanbul,Turkey.
I'm not saying he's right. I think he's an over-sensitive busy-body.
But I am saying that Scottish people are actually closer, both geographically and culturally, to the folks he was talking about then Koreans, or even most Chinese.
That's a comedian, a rapper, a guy I never heard of, and a has-been. The has-been seems to be Humanist or maybe even Christian. Epps is also listed as both islamic and Christian.
However it was divvied up into spheres of influence by the British and Russians.
In terms of never colonized you basically got Thailand/Siam, a half-dozen border-line cases where (for various reasons) the Westerners/ Europeans didn't bother officially conquering the country. Persia is one of those, and it was actually a lot more colonized then most of the others. Ethiopia, Afghanistan, the Saudis, Liberia, and the Chinese were all under much less Western influence during the Colonial period then Persia. The Japanese were under massive US influence and control for a few years, which Persia never was, but OTOH that only lasted a few years. The Anglo-Russian Convention was signed in 1907, it divided Persia into three zones, and the British didn't really give up control over their third until after WW2.
Then you get the Turks who may (or may not) be Colonizers.
"Never colonized" is actually a lot harder to figure out then you'd think. The only actual clear-cut case is Thailand/Siam.
Liberia technically counts, but it was a) an outpost of thoroughly Westernized African-Americans, and b) a de facto protectorate of the United States. Afghanistan was de facto a condominium between the Czar and the Brits, which was allowed technical autonomy to keep those two countries from fighting each-other. Within 5 years of figuring out that he no longer had to worry about the Romanovs their Amir decided that he was now prestigious enough to be a full-King, but as long as those Russian troops were on his northern frontier he was very careful to never say or do anything to offend them. Persia and China kept technical independence, but were cut up into competing spheres of influence. The only other countries to successfully fight off all attempts at Western colonization were the Japanese and Ethiopians, but the Japanese were basically colonized after WW2 and the Ethiopians were actually colonized during the War.
Depending on whether Turks count as European the Turks were a) never colonized by Euros/Westerners or b) are by definition colonized by themselves. The Saudis always maintained significant autonomy from the Sultan in Istanbul.
"Unable to rule out" in a scientific sense is a very meaningless phrase. I, for example, I am scientifically unable to rule out the hypothesis that the nation of Ecuador is populated by Gerbils because I've never been there. "Unable to rule out" means my imagination thought of something, and I have not bothered to do any experiments whatsoever to test it.
In this case it's particularly silly. Everyone has been eating this shit since 1995. No phenotype changes have been recorded due to Gene VI. No health problems due to an excess of this protein have been detected. The scientists who have approved this in the EU, US, Canada, etc. all knew this particular gene was present because the way they genetically engineer plants puts this gene in the plants genome. This is just not news. It's like saying "OMG Cars have wheels. I cannot rule out that one will crush your feet tomorrow."
Moreover even if it's true that having Gene VI is bad, how are non-GM crops better? The virus Monsanto used does this to non-GM plants all the time on it's own.
To repeat the quote from 3-4 posts up: “The attack made the College portal extremely unresponsive for its thousands of users. Had it not been countered, it would have put the College portal out of order for the entire students and teachers population of Dawson...."
The "attack" referred to was Ahmed's attempt to test the website using Acutenix.
I really wish Slashdot would actually link to a piece that includes the company and college's side of the story. As is everyone just reads the summary, which quotes the kid, and automatically assumes he's the victim of an evil conspiracy. He's not. He did something really stupid (using Acutenix on a live website without permission from the site's owners). His action hurt the system he was testing. He was specifically told not to try anything like this.
He sounds like a good kid whose very curious and doesn't understand that some rules have to be taken seriously. This is also the description of pretty much every hacker ever sent to prison, hounded to suicide by Ortiz, etc. So if you actually want this kid to have a real life, and not be sent to Sing-Sing for 40 years for pulling this shit on Microsoft...
They're not making any theatre out of this incident. They did not do a big press release announcing that Evil Hacker Ahmed had been apprehended. He used Acunetix to bring their system to a halt, they threw him out, he lost all his appeals, and then he went to the media in an apparent attempt to get another appeal. The "theatre" in this incident is all Ahmed.
I have no idea whether Skytech has fixed the actual bug. I know he's been offered an actual paid job by them, so if he actually wants to fix the bug (as opposed to merely talking about how great he is for finding it) he's got the opportunity.
According to Dawson College's site they had tried a tongue-lashing: "He was expelled for other reasons. Despite receiving clear directives not to, he attempted repeatedly to intrude into areas of College information systems that had no relation with student information systems."
So this was not the first time he was testing things he should not have been, and it was not the first time they'd told him to cut it out.
Some kids need to be shown that rules apply to them. Apparently Ahmed Al-Khabaz was one. He'll do fine out of this. Some other CEGAP will let him in, or maybe Skytech will give him a job. And hopefully he'll learn not to test the computer security of live systems he's been specifically told not to mess with.
As for the quote, his test wasn't causing problems for all 250k Omnivox users. It was causing problems for Dawson College, which is only 10,000.
When I talk about right vs. left I generally don't refer to actual Presidential policies, because in the US the President is so constrained. For example it would be fairly silly to say that expanding Medicare to everyone was not a left-wing policy, because left-wingers really love that idea; but no President has ever proposed it. In other words I'm referring to what people bitch about when they have no power, rather then what they do when they have power. When you have to get 60 votes in the Senate you have to do pretty much what the Bill Nelsons and Joe Liebermans of the world want, even if your dearest desire is to inform the Secret Service anyone who murders those guys gets both a pardon and a promotion.
It's pretty clear that a) many many left-wingers complain about violations of international law, excessive use of force, etc. when Bush did something analogous to drone strikes; and b) very few right-wingers complained about any of those things when Obama turned the dial to 11 on drone strikes. Some (very few, but some) left-wingers still complain about the drone strikes even when Obama does them.
BTW I did a check on military spending. Since WW2 at least military spending has tended to increase when we were at war and decrease when we were at peace. The only real exception seems to be Reagan. And he wasn't arguing that we need more tanks just because, he was arguing we could force the Soviets to over-invest in their military, which would gut their civilian economy, and it actually may have worked. The chart I used is the second one on this page: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/01/07/everything-chuck-hagel-needs-to-know-about-the-defense-budget-in-charts/
As for the Civil War we'll have to agree to disagree. My firm opinion is that slavery is the single most evil thing the United States has ever done, so no matter how terrible or unconstitutional the war was it was a great thing.
The CBC story has so many helpful details on this issue. It would be very nice if slashdot had chosen to quote it. As is everyone thinks "Oh he just made one unauthorized SQL request and the whole universe is freaking out, poor baby."
But it was a bit worse then that. Al Khabaz attempt to test the vulnerability was not harmless. It was basically a denial of service attack: “The attack made the College portal extremely unresponsive for its thousands of users. Had it not been countered, it would have put the College portal out of order for the entire students and teachers population of Dawson. The attack was traced, and it turns out that it came from one of the students who participated, earlier that week, in the discovery of the security flaw. We therefore decided to be clement, and not to report the attack to the authorities.”
The College Portal is used by roughly a quarter million students, so this is kind of a big deal. He did this using Acutenix, which is not supposed to be used on a live system for precisely this reason.
Granted he meant well, and he's a kid, so prison was not justified. But, OTOH, he's just a kid so now is the time to teach him lessons. And the lesson here is don't fuck around with high-level testing tools on live sites ever. If you have to do that shit, make sure the people who can punish you for doing so are cool with it or you will be punished. Defintily do not do this if you have been repeatedly warned not to do so. Dawson's front-page claims Al Khabaz was warned not to poke into systems where he wasn't authorized.
Expulsion from a low-level school seems about right (CEGAPs like Dawson grant a degree that's similar to an Associates degree, but somewhat more prestigious because they are required for admission to a University), particularly since he's likely gonna be able to use the publicity to get into a better school.
Unfortunately for Ahmed his method of verifying that the problem had been fixed was de facto a DOS attack: “The attack made the College portal extremely unresponsive for its thousands of users. Had it not been countered, it would have put the College portal out of order for the entire students and teachers population of Dawson. The attack was traced, and it turns out that it came from one of the students who participated, earlier that week, in the discovery of the security flaw. We therefore decided to be clement, and not to report the attack to the authorities.”
On the money issue you're just wrong. Google Matty Moroun if you don't believe me. Don't get me wrong. Money really helps in politics. Being able to credibly argue your fight is the same as other interest groups fights helps in politics. Guys like Moroun can do the first forever, they can do the second for awhile. But when their ideas are actually opposed by the electorate it just doesn't matter much.
As for my odds of success, they're about infinity times better then your plan, which is apparently to sit on your butt grumbling about third parties on the internet.
As for your last paragraph, how do you survive in society if every time somebody disagrees with you on the drug war you "tell them what corrupt lying pieces of shit they are?"
Political party platforms are not determined by God, never to change. Frequently they change radically.
In 1950 the Republicans could rightly claim to be the party of black voting rights. Today they are trying to ban Sunday voting, mostly on the basis that black people do it and we (Republicans) should not let them (Democrats) get easy votes. Parties are simply coalitions of people who have agreed to use each-other. If you change the coalition by joining it you will change the Party.
You're also not understanding the internal dynamics of the Democrats. The reason Dems side with Hollywood is the Hollywood unions side with Hollywood, the other unions defer to their brothers in Hollywood, and nobody else cares. If somebody else cared the unions would get ignored, just like they get ignored on Card Check and a half-dozen different issues. Pretty much the same thing happens in the GOP, except they have guys who actually bitch about copyright. Then Hollywood calls the Chamber, which calls House leadership, which crushes the dissent.
Let me put it to you this way: who in Michigan do you think would actually vote against an anti-Copyright candidate in a primary? Ohio? More importantly how does your third party get to enough support that anyone cares about it? The Greens and Libertarians have been trying this strategy for years, with larger potential pools of voters then an anti-copyright party, and nobody takes hem seriously.
The main reason food industry types oppose this is they're businessmen, and businessmen really hate the government telling them to do things.
The main reason I agree with them is that damn near everything would need to be labelled. It's very difficult to find foor that isn't a GMO, or been feed a GMO.
If the anti-GMO-types would release their own non-GM label, and enforce the standard, that would be fine. But as-is they're basically demanding I pay an extra fraction of a cent for everything I guy because everything will have that damned label on it.
You do realize that the way the Europeans found this out was by reading scientific articles we wrote? And that the way you insert a desired gene into a plant is toput it into a virus, and then have the virus insert the desired gene into the plant?
It's a lot like a) complaining helicopters are really dangerous because the blades could totally cut your head off and b) insisting that the fact you noticed a) proves you're a genius.
You do realize that if this protein were a) expressed differently in GMO crops, and b) had a measurable bad effect on people somebody probably would have noticed?
Monsanto released MON810 in in 1995. It's been used in Europe since 1998.
Do people actually suppose there are safeguards? There's no long-term testing done, while many of the GMO foods are of the type eaten several times a week for most of a person's lifetimes. (In the case of corn, many times a day, most days, for most of your life.) Then, of course, there's the issue of how invasive the GMO version is and how effectively we can "recall" a GMO version of a crop if it's determined to be dangerous.
And how do you propose we long-term test this kind of thing? Have an island of people who only eat GMO food, and then release it on the market if they go 30 years without something freaky happening?
And why would you do this to GM food, instead of naturally-grown food? After all, most naturally grown food is produced when sperm meets egg (or pollen meets seed), and the genes are re-jiggered. Unless you restrict all food to clones of known-good pigs you're island has to test every single beet for 30 years before it's considered safe.
Slashdot Mirror
I thought the android tables could be unlocked to install a normal Linux distro. Then you'd just install gimp.
Am I totally off base here?
Yes.
The point of doing something like this is not simply to have the best capabilities for the least effort. It's to jury-rig something that is arguably more efficient in a single respect, and arguably not less efficient in any other respects; thusly gaining massive GeekCred.
In this case the "more efficient" respect is that he doesn't have to actually bother with the crap that comes with software upgrades. Learning all of GIMP, getting a LINUX distro that will run on his phone, he won't have to do repeat five years from now when everyone's 3D-Phablet runs a completely different OS, etc. He'll still be using DOSBox/Old-Ass Photoshop (OAP). Since DOSBox is pretty much unhackable without first hacking the physical cell phone it runs on, the only program he has to keep up-to-date security-wise is said cell-phone.
Since he doesn't need the numerous features of any more modern program it's arguably not less efficient for him to give those up.
Neither are probably for sale legally, anywhere.
But a) many geeks have vast libraries of obsolete software (I, for example, have a 3.5 in disk version of OS/2 Warp in storage), and b) non-legal sources of ancient software are not hard to find. Abandonware sites, other geeks, bittorrent sites, etc. can get a DOSBox softwared up quick and cheap.
What, exactly, can I do with the latest stuff that wasn’t possible with the previous version?
For one thing, you can continue to use it after the hardware compatible with the previous version has failed. I've been told that a lot of new laptops sold with Windows 8 have Wi-Fi chips with no Windows 7 driver.
That's true, but it's not really relevant in this case. DOSBox gets ported to everything, which means that using an ancient version of Photoshop that is DOSBox and Win 3.1 compatible means you won't have to worry about upgrading your software until DOSBox goes away.
That won't happen until the millions upon millions of geeks who want to have the ability to fire up a copy of a circa-1990 DOS Computer game die.
And let's be honest here: that is not gonna happen in the foreseeable future. DOSBox will almost certainly be ported to anything created within the next 20-30 years.
For another, you can exchange documents with users of later versions. After a particular version of a program reaches its announced end of life, the program's publisher stops making plug-ins to read the latest version's file format. (Some publishers don't release such plug-ins at all.) Try opening a modern PSD in the old Photoshop for Windows 3.1 and see what error message doesn't pop up.
So?
If you're a pro trying to share Word Documents with an entire DevTeam using Word 95 is probably pretty damn stupid. If you're a guy who knows Word 95 really well, and doesn't want to bother learning the crap MS has added since then, then you'll be cool. Everyone will be able to read your plain .doc files, and if need to read their .docx files then you probably should have a copy of a slightly less primitive Word Processor, too.
Apparently Photoshop is even more forgiving, and this guy should be able to (in theory) open up other people's files fine.
For another, you can continue to use supported software on the public Internet even after a researcher has discovered security vulnerabilities because supported software gets patched.
It's not hard to simply not connect DOSBox to the internet. If you need to add a file to your DOSBox you can move it to DOSBox with your computer's native file system, not by firing up an ancient version of Netscape. If you want to share said file on Facebook you'll do it with your main computer's browser, not something from DOSBox.
It's not like you were likely to be working on a multi-million $ project using an emulator on your goddamn cell phone. It's not like DOSBox can have your bank passwords, or some attacker could get said passwords from your DOSBox without first hacking your main OS.
What you're mostly using it for is a) the ability to do simple tasks without using new software, and b) the ability to show your fellow geeks Rube-Goldberg-esqe software architecture that actually makes sense.
When the Romans/Byzantines owned it it was called Anatolia or Asia Minor. This is because the Turkish people were Steppe nomads similar to the Mongols when the Romans/Byzantines owned it. They only moved into Anatolia after beating multiple Emperors on the battle-field.
The region actually had large Greek and Armenian populations up until WW1. During the war either a) the Turkish Sultan used genocide to replace unreliable Christian Armenians with reliable Islamic Kurds, or b) the fortunes of war killed almost every Armenian but no Kurds. Which you take seriously depends on your point-of-view, and how much you want to work in Turkey. The Greeks fought Ataturk in a war to conquer ethnic Greek areas of Anatolia in the '20s, but they lost. Greece was still trying to figure out what it should do with the refugees at the start of WW2.
I hate it when this happens. I have to de-confusify this sentence:
We had combat troops in 'Nam for a about that time (March '65-Jan '73), but during the first few years and last few years we didn't have a lot of troops engaged. We were only officially fighting the Vietnamese not the Laotians or Cambodians, so it was actually a smaller war.
Everybody does that. A statistically significant proportion of Serbs, for example, are convinced us Americans are part of a vast anti-Serb racist conspiracy due to the fact that a) Serbia sides with Russia lot and b) we side against Russia a lot. They call it Serbophobia. Their Balkan neighbors aren't much better.
In some ways Americans are actually worse then anyone else. For example we pay attention to WW2 because we won. France gave up early, so we call them Cheese-eating surrender monkeys. But in a little place called Indochina, which included Vietnam and several other countries, they almost for 8 years (Dec '46-Aug '54) and immediately started fighting another major war in Algeria which also lasted almost 8 years. We had combat troops in 'Nam for a about that time (March '65-Jan '73) and during the first few years and last few years we didn't have a lot of troops engaged and we were only officially fighting the Vietnamese not the Laotians or Cambodians. After we lost we were so broken-hearted we didn't fight any wars until Reagen invaded that great terrifying power Grenada.
In other words don't worry. The second you start paying attention to an ethnic group you'll find they think they are the center of the universe. The only reason you associate this behavior with Mid-Easterners today is Mid-Easterners are important enough that you actually pay attention to them.
There are 1 Billion Indians who get really confused when Americans pretend all Asian countries have coasts on the Pacific. There are several billion who get annoyed at the British for referring to Pakistanis and Indians as "Asian," but giving countries for everyone else. Asia is just a really big place, and the country boundaries don't really fit with the cultural boxes non-Asians insist on placing Asians in (Korean-Koreans, for example, are not happy that Korean Americans are in the same box as the Japanese just because us white boys have trouble telling a Korean face from a Japanese face), so it gets used confusingly.
You either live with it, or just stop using the word completely and hope everyone else follows suit. I'm in the latter category myself. As a word Asia is useful to Geologists, but to anyone else it's just a pain in the ass.
In non-North American English "Asian" and Oriental" do not mean yellow-skinned people from the Far East with a pronounced Epicanthic fold. It usually means Indian/Pakistani. The way this guy was using it is clearly referring to the Old Middle East -- ie: the bit of Asia that starts with Turkey and ends with Persia. This is why they called a train "Orient Express" despite the fact it only went as far east in Istanbul,Turkey.
I'm not saying he's right. I think he's an over-sensitive busy-body.
But I am saying that Scottish people are actually closer, both geographically and culturally, to the folks he was talking about then Koreans, or even most Chinese.
Omar Sharif
Omar Epps
Dave Chappelle
Mos Def
That's a comedian, a rapper, a guy I never heard of, and a has-been. The has-been seems to be Humanist or maybe even Christian. Epps is also listed as both islamic and Christian.
However it was divvied up into spheres of influence by the British and Russians.
In terms of never colonized you basically got Thailand/Siam, a half-dozen border-line cases where (for various reasons) the Westerners/ Europeans didn't bother officially conquering the country. Persia is one of those, and it was actually a lot more colonized then most of the others. Ethiopia, Afghanistan, the Saudis, Liberia, and the Chinese were all under much less Western influence during the Colonial period then Persia. The Japanese were under massive US influence and control for a few years, which Persia never was, but OTOH that only lasted a few years. The Anglo-Russian Convention was signed in 1907, it divided Persia into three zones, and the British didn't really give up control over their third until after WW2.
Then you get the Turks who may (or may not) be Colonizers.
"Never colonized" is actually a lot harder to figure out then you'd think. The only actual clear-cut case is Thailand/Siam.
Liberia technically counts, but it was a) an outpost of thoroughly Westernized African-Americans, and b) a de facto protectorate of the United States. Afghanistan was de facto a condominium between the Czar and the Brits, which was allowed technical autonomy to keep those two countries from fighting each-other. Within 5 years of figuring out that he no longer had to worry about the Romanovs their Amir decided that he was now prestigious enough to be a full-King, but as long as those Russian troops were on his northern frontier he was very careful to never say or do anything to offend them. Persia and China kept technical independence, but were cut up into competing spheres of influence. The only other countries to successfully fight off all attempts at Western colonization were the Japanese and Ethiopians, but the Japanese were basically colonized after WW2 and the Ethiopians were actually colonized during the War.
Depending on whether Turks count as European the Turks were a) never colonized by Euros/Westerners or b) are by definition colonized by themselves. The Saudis always maintained significant autonomy from the Sultan in Istanbul.
"Unable to rule out" in a scientific sense is a very meaningless phrase. I, for example, I am scientifically unable to rule out the hypothesis that the nation of Ecuador is populated by Gerbils because I've never been there. "Unable to rule out" means my imagination thought of something, and I have not bothered to do any experiments whatsoever to test it.
In this case it's particularly silly. Everyone has been eating this shit since 1995. No phenotype changes have been recorded due to Gene VI. No health problems due to an excess of this protein have been detected. The scientists who have approved this in the EU, US, Canada, etc. all knew this particular gene was present because the way they genetically engineer plants puts this gene in the plants genome. This is just not news. It's like saying "OMG Cars have wheels. I cannot rule out that one will crush your feet tomorrow."
Moreover even if it's true that having Gene VI is bad, how are non-GM crops better? The virus Monsanto used does this to non-GM plants all the time on it's own.
To repeat the quote from 3-4 posts up:
“The attack made the College portal extremely unresponsive for its thousands of users. Had it not been countered, it would have put the College portal out of order for the entire students and teachers population of Dawson...."
The "attack" referred to was Ahmed's attempt to test the website using Acutenix.
I really wish Slashdot would actually link to a piece that includes the company and college's side of the story. As is everyone just reads the summary, which quotes the kid, and automatically assumes he's the victim of an evil conspiracy. He's not. He did something really stupid (using Acutenix on a live website without permission from the site's owners). His action hurt the system he was testing. He was specifically told not to try anything like this.
He sounds like a good kid whose very curious and doesn't understand that some rules have to be taken seriously. This is also the description of pretty much every hacker ever sent to prison, hounded to suicide by Ortiz, etc. So if you actually want this kid to have a real life, and not be sent to Sing-Sing for 40 years for pulling this shit on Microsoft...
They're not making any theatre out of this incident. They did not do a big press release announcing that Evil Hacker Ahmed had been apprehended. He used Acunetix to bring their system to a halt, they threw him out, he lost all his appeals, and then he went to the media in an apparent attempt to get another appeal. The "theatre" in this incident is all Ahmed.
I have no idea whether Skytech has fixed the actual bug. I know he's been offered an actual paid job by them, so if he actually wants to fix the bug (as opposed to merely talking about how great he is for finding it) he's got the opportunity.
According to Dawson College's site they had tried a tongue-lashing:
"He was expelled for other reasons. Despite receiving clear directives not to, he attempted repeatedly to intrude into areas of College information systems that had no relation with student information systems."
So this was not the first time he was testing things he should not have been, and it was not the first time they'd told him to cut it out.
Some kids need to be shown that rules apply to them. Apparently Ahmed Al-Khabaz was one. He'll do fine out of this. Some other CEGAP will let him in, or maybe Skytech will give him a job. And hopefully he'll learn not to test the computer security of live systems he's been specifically told not to mess with.
As for the quote, his test wasn't causing problems for all 250k Omnivox users. It was causing problems for Dawson College, which is only 10,000.
When I talk about right vs. left I generally don't refer to actual Presidential policies, because in the US the President is so constrained. For example it would be fairly silly to say that expanding Medicare to everyone was not a left-wing policy, because left-wingers really love that idea; but no President has ever proposed it. In other words I'm referring to what people bitch about when they have no power, rather then what they do when they have power. When you have to get 60 votes in the Senate you have to do pretty much what the Bill Nelsons and Joe Liebermans of the world want, even if your dearest desire is to inform the Secret Service anyone who murders those guys gets both a pardon and a promotion.
It's pretty clear that a) many many left-wingers complain about violations of international law, excessive use of force, etc. when Bush did something analogous to drone strikes; and b) very few right-wingers complained about any of those things when Obama turned the dial to 11 on drone strikes. Some (very few, but some) left-wingers still complain about the drone strikes even when Obama does them.
BTW I did a check on military spending. Since WW2 at least military spending has tended to increase when we were at war and decrease when we were at peace. The only real exception seems to be Reagan. And he wasn't arguing that we need more tanks just because, he was arguing we could force the Soviets to over-invest in their military, which would gut their civilian economy, and it actually may have worked. The chart I used is the second one on this page:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/01/07/everything-chuck-hagel-needs-to-know-about-the-defense-budget-in-charts/
As for the Civil War we'll have to agree to disagree. My firm opinion is that slavery is the single most evil thing the United States has ever done, so no matter how terrible or unconstitutional the war was it was a great thing.
The CBC story has so many helpful details on this issue. It would be very nice if slashdot had chosen to quote it. As is everyone thinks "Oh he just made one unauthorized SQL request and the whole universe is freaking out, poor baby."
But it was a bit worse then that. Al Khabaz attempt to test the vulnerability was not harmless. It was basically a denial of service attack:
“The attack made the College portal extremely unresponsive for its thousands of users. Had it not been countered, it would have put the College portal out of order for the entire students and teachers population of Dawson. The attack was traced, and it turns out that it came from one of the students who participated, earlier that week, in the discovery of the security flaw. We therefore decided to be clement, and not to report the attack to the authorities.”
The College Portal is used by roughly a quarter million students, so this is kind of a big deal. He did this using Acutenix, which is not supposed to be used on a live system for precisely this reason.
Granted he meant well, and he's a kid, so prison was not justified. But, OTOH, he's just a kid so now is the time to teach him lessons. And the lesson here is don't fuck around with high-level testing tools on live sites ever. If you have to do that shit, make sure the people who can punish you for doing so are cool with it or you will be punished. Defintily do not do this if you have been repeatedly warned not to do so. Dawson's front-page claims Al Khabaz was warned not to poke into systems where he wasn't authorized.
Expulsion from a low-level school seems about right (CEGAPs like Dawson grant a degree that's similar to an Associates degree, but somewhat more prestigious because they are required for admission to a University), particularly since he's likely gonna be able to use the publicity to get into a better school.
Unfortunately for Ahmed his method of verifying that the problem had been fixed was de facto a DOS attack:
“The attack made the College portal extremely unresponsive for its thousands of users. Had it not been countered, it would have put the College portal out of order for the entire students and teachers population of Dawson. The attack was traced, and it turns out that it came from one of the students who participated, earlier that week, in the discovery of the security flaw. We therefore decided to be clement, and not to report the attack to the authorities.”
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/story/2013/01/21/montreal-dawson-college-hack-hamed-al-khabaz.html
Gee, somebody's bitter.
On the money issue you're just wrong. Google Matty Moroun if you don't believe me. Don't get me wrong. Money really helps in politics. Being able to credibly argue your fight is the same as other interest groups fights helps in politics. Guys like Moroun can do the first forever, they can do the second for awhile. But when their ideas are actually opposed by the electorate it just doesn't matter much.
As for my odds of success, they're about infinity times better then your plan, which is apparently to sit on your butt grumbling about third parties on the internet.
As for your last paragraph, how do you survive in society if every time somebody disagrees with you on the drug war you "tell them what corrupt lying pieces of shit they are?"
Political party platforms are not determined by God, never to change. Frequently they change radically.
In 1950 the Republicans could rightly claim to be the party of black voting rights. Today they are trying to ban Sunday voting, mostly on the basis that black people do it and we (Republicans) should not let them (Democrats) get easy votes. Parties are simply coalitions of people who have agreed to use each-other. If you change the coalition by joining it you will change the Party.
You're also not understanding the internal dynamics of the Democrats. The reason Dems side with Hollywood is the Hollywood unions side with Hollywood, the other unions defer to their brothers in Hollywood, and nobody else cares. If somebody else cared the unions would get ignored, just like they get ignored on Card Check and a half-dozen different issues. Pretty much the same thing happens in the GOP, except they have guys who actually bitch about copyright. Then Hollywood calls the Chamber, which calls House leadership, which crushes the dissent.
Let me put it to you this way: who in Michigan do you think would actually vote against an anti-Copyright candidate in a primary? Ohio? More importantly how does your third party get to enough support that anyone cares about it? The Greens and Libertarians have been trying this strategy for years, with larger potential pools of voters then an anti-copyright party, and nobody takes hem seriously.
The main reason food industry types oppose this is they're businessmen, and businessmen really hate the government telling them to do things.
The main reason I agree with them is that damn near everything would need to be labelled. It's very difficult to find foor that isn't a GMO, or been feed a GMO.
If the anti-GMO-types would release their own non-GM label, and enforce the standard, that would be fine. But as-is they're basically demanding I pay an extra fraction of a cent for everything I guy because everything will have that damned label on it.
You do realize that the way the Europeans found this out was by reading scientific articles we wrote? And that the way you insert a desired gene into a plant is toput it into a virus, and then have the virus insert the desired gene into the plant?
It's a lot like a) complaining helicopters are really dangerous because the blades could totally cut your head off and b) insisting that the fact you noticed a) proves you're a genius.
You do realize that if this protein were a) expressed differently in GMO crops, and b) had a measurable bad effect on people somebody probably would have noticed?
Monsanto released MON810 in in 1995. It's been used in Europe since 1998.
The Monsanto shills are out in force today!
I've noticed that "Monsanto shills" tend to be named accounts, but anti-GMO people tend to be ACs.
I suspect there's one guy, probably in the pay of Europe's Big Ag, sitting at his computer in Brussels making these posts.
Do people actually suppose there are safeguards? There's no long-term testing done, while many of the GMO foods are of the type eaten several times a week for most of a person's lifetimes. (In the case of corn, many times a day, most days, for most of your life.) Then, of course, there's the issue of how invasive the GMO version is and how effectively we can "recall" a GMO version of a crop if it's determined to be dangerous.
And how do you propose we long-term test this kind of thing? Have an island of people who only eat GMO food, and then release it on the market if they go 30 years without something freaky happening?
And why would you do this to GM food, instead of naturally-grown food? After all, most naturally grown food is produced when sperm meets egg (or pollen meets seed), and the genes are re-jiggered. Unless you restrict all food to clones of known-good pigs you're island has to test every single beet for 30 years before it's considered safe.