2) some third-party applications became very aggressive lately and can be unusable in their newest releases. Many people bash GNOME and/or KDE, myself my favorite target is Xorg. The Xorg server has caused the most headaches across all my Linux and FreeBSD machines in the last years.
Yes, the isolation of the upstream X maintainers, (whoever they are) is legendary. The appropriate response, however, is not for downstream to make excuses for the X people, and for said downstream to burden themselves further with what is rightfully the X project's work. Rather, it's to give the X project's people a (metaphorical, one hopes) motivational foot up the backside.
It is surely not an unreasonable expectation for X to work, out of the box, with the specific range of hardware that the X project has claimed compatibility with. This is same the standard which (in the past perhaps, at least) any other project has been held to.
If the X people can't manage this, then they either need to find more developers and testers, or lower their ambitions, in terms of the amount of hardware which is claimed to be supported.
There should not be a scenario where X.org is releasing a snarled, half-mangled pile of code which downstream is then expected to clean up and get working with their own system. Theo de Raadt mentioned that state of affairs in a BSDCan talk that he gave once, and it should not be accepted. If said scenario still exists, there needs to be some long, loud, and pointed complaining engaged in on X's mailing lists.
You make it sound as though that's a unique issue. There are a huge number of projects which wouldn't get used if the mental health of the lead maintainer was an issue. Glibc and cdrtools are the main two that immediately come to mind. Ulrich is fairly well known for being as mad as the proverbial March hare. I don't blame him for that, though; I've felt a certain wrench in my own sanity when I've tried to patch and compile Glibc for Linux From Scratch. I can't even begin to imagine what working on that code for years on end would do to a person, but it can't be anything good.;)
That type of question makes sense when asked about Microsoft, but doesn't even make sense when discussing Debian. "Why would Debian do this" is like a zen koan, until you're enlightened it makes no sense, or when it makes sense it means you're enlightened.
Why on Earth is this pretentious garbage modded +5, Insightful?
As for why Debian are starting to use different kernels, it's fairly simple.
A large number of the Debian developers are die hard Stallmanite/FSF/GNU fanatics. FreeBSD (as one example) is a system that has both kernel and userland. Using the kernel of other operating systems which already have their own userland, is basically an attempt to render the userlands of said other systems irrelevant.
GNU/kFreeBSD is an abomination, and I'm not the only FreeBSD user who thinks so. Most other FreeBSD users I've spoken to want to get (more) free of having to rely on FSF software, not less. The FSF are generally considered a plague by BSD users, and rightly so.
I consider the core Dragonlance series, classics. I'm talking about the three-book Chronicles, here; not the rest. Dragonlance was Pagan fantasy in the same sense that LOTR was vaguely Christian, IMHO.
You might want to look at CS Lewis in the Christian category, as well; he did both fantasy and SF, although truthfully in my own opinion he is somewhat overrated. Narnia was ok, but not as good as most people seem to think; I've read much better, and some of them (the Silver Chair primarily comes to mind) were difficult to get into at all.
The Never Ending Story was a much better book than the films suggested; the second film in particular was a hatchet job.
David Eddings is also good; the Elenium is fluidly written and a very easy read, comparitively speaking.
Can we pull the handful of competent web designers, that presumably once existed, out of retirement and have them clean up the major web sites?
HTML as a language has become more complex, over the last few versions.
To write it well, it is necessary, I feel, to go back to the earliest versions of it which current browsers will support; which I believe is 4 or so. Abstaining from DOM-oriented code, (
, and such) greatly helps.
There is enormous power in simplicity, but sadly, simplicity is not popular.
Neither Richard Stallman or Bradley Kuhn can use force to make you to listen to them, nor are they seeking a means of doing so;
They've actually proven that they *do* want said means. They proved that with the alterations made to version 3 of the GPL, as well as having spoken about wanting Novell (as a single entity) being banned from distributing software licensed with the GPL.
Your response to this will likely be to launch into a diversionary argument about how that was completely justified. That, however, is irrelevant.
The simple fact is that in those two individuals' minds, following the legal letter of the GPL by itself isn't enough. You also have to follow the "spirit," which as I said, translates into thinking exactly like them. They don't want people to merely comply with their license; they want members of a cult where their word is law.
But it would show that there is valid justification for their existence. Who started up a campaign to end software patents? It wasn't Novell, or Red Hat, or the Open Source Initiative; it was these folks. The FSF is willing to take unpopular hardline pro-freedom
If the FSF were themselves willing to accept the role of fringe legal attack dog, (and that *alone*) I'd be more than happy to recognise their part of the overall FOSS ecosystem on that basis.
The problem is that they're not. Stallman wants everyone to think the way he does.
We need to get rid of the cultic element, more than anything else. If they can legally help FOSS developers in an overall sense, and do it in a constructive way, that I have no issue with.
It is their hate, their fear, and their paranoia which need to go. I don't have a problem with Bradley Kuhn at all because he can be of legal benefit in protecting FOSS; I have a problem with him because he behaves like a rabid rottweiler/human hybrid, who apparently will not rest until everyone else on the planet thinks in exactly the same way he does.
I have grown to hate both the SFLC and the FSF, personally. The two organisations have proven themselves as breeding grounds for fanatical trolls (Bradley Kuhn, Stallman, and their followers) who harm the public image of FOSS, and who cause much division and conflict.
The problem with scenarios like these, is that they give people like Stallman and Kuhn the idea that there is valid justification for their existence. If the Supreme Court ends up making a beneficial decision here, you can be sure that the FSF and SFLC will take full credit for it.
This could, in turn, have the deeply undesirable outcome of giving the FSF renewed relevance and public favour, at a time when community opposition to them has never been higher. In terms of his public image, Richard Stallman is potentially on the ropes right now, and I do not want to see him given the opportunity to recover.
The end of software patents could only be a good thing, yes, but it needs to be a victory for software developers in general; not merely a PR or false moral victory for the FSF.
Quick! The boss is standing over you demanding that you convert a flat file into csv, add a header, prepend a unique id, and spit any lines with weird characters into a separate file. Here's the printout of the layout. You have ten minutes. There's a million lines in the file and they've got to build a marketing model before the client meeting in one hour.
Ah. When you mention weird characters there, you mean using perl compatible regular expressions, (among other things) yes?
Is that supposed to impress us? Slashdot is by far the most buggy and unstable website I visit.
To a large extent, the reason for that is because the editorial staff felt a need to "modernise," presumably due to pressure from the brainless Web 2.0 crowd.
Pre-2.0, the site was as solid as a rock. The editors should have ignored whoever was howling for cosmetic changes and stayed with their instincts.
I've found I can do pretty much everything I need with shell. I've also tended to find that I can store and retrieve whatever data I'm working with in flatfiles with awk, as well. Some people might find that horribly primitive, but truthfully flat text is a lot easier for me to understand and work with than XML.
I feel that awk has an excessively bad rap, to be honest. I know of some people who like it, but it doesn't seem to get used much. I find it very useful at times.
Imagine IRC. Ok now imagine you have fucking PICTURES in your irc client!! HOLY SHIT!!!111
Yeah. The sad part is that they went to the trouble of writing their own protocol from scratch, too.
This looks good, but Google could have bought a BSD license from whoever writes X chat, and hacked that to include a built in graphic viewer, and possibly XDCC for sending the files.
I'll probably at least give it a try, and maybe even like it, but you've gone to a lot more trouble here than you needed to, Google. We've known how to write IRC fserves for 14 years now. If you wanted one, all you had to do was ask.;)
How to pull 1 trillion dollars from businesses hiring developers.
It's nice to see good and responsible promotion of FOSS.
The part that's truly amusing, is that this effect is almost entirely due to the efforts of Comrade Stallman.
He wanted a license to reduce the amount of money circulating where software development was concerned. It might be true that less money is going in the direction of programmers, but the corporations are doing just fine. The fact that FOSS gives them the ability to outsource, actually means that they're saving money by being able to keep Asian programmers in sweatshops.
Let's try uptime? BSD vs Debian. No contest. When you can measure a debian servers uptime in years, not weeks, let me know.
Only if ctrl-alt-backspace zapping of X is re-enabled. I have a bad 3d card, (not FreeBSD's fault) with corrupt video ram, and it was causing X to lock up. Before I re-enabled the key combo, I had several instances where I had to reboot. *sigh*
If you want to use some half assed/cheapo/bargin bin hardware product, *BSD isn't what you want, thats not its focus and anyone who uses it will tell you so.
This is partly true, though not as much as you might think. My hardware is probably the most disgusting, low end crap you've ever seen (no, not quite including a dead cat, but close!;)) and FreeBSD runs on it just fine.
I'd suspect that the rule of thumb is more the age of what you've got. *New* cheap garbage won't work, but cheap garbage from probably more than two years out is pretty much guaranteed. I'm still waiting for NetBSD to release the analytical engine port.;)
I don't understand this. I tried using Ubuntu for six weeks before moving to FreeBSD. For me, it was a nightmare. Bloated, slow, horribly unstable. I've heard any number of horror stories about what the update process can do to a machine, as well.
That was eight months ago, and since installing FreeBSD I haven't looked back.
But today? Nobody knows. I'm not aware of any benchmarks that you can download that simulate memory stress and map the tradeoffs that the OS makes.
In general, the biggest obstacle to improve Linux, FreeBSD and everybody's else's OS performance is a lack of high-quality benchmarks.
The call for technical integrity here, and the use of %% as a seperator, implies to me that the author of the OP is (at least potentially) a member of the old school.
It causes me joy to know that there are still some of you left, and even more, that there are still some left here on Slashdot.
To both the FSF and Mark Shuttleworth, I can only say, do your worst. UNIX will survive.
Sorry but I don't subscribe to conspiracy theories.
So you only believe what you are officially told? I guess that makes sense; it's probably what you've been trained to do. It can be a dangerous tendency in certain contexts, however.
If the above is true, your faith in your superiors is admirable, but have you never wondered in the last few years...even once...if they truly deserve that level of faith?
EVERY non-secular muslim is against us, and "against us" in the sense that they'd like to massacre Americans.
This is a generalisation which the governments of three different countries (America, Britain, and Australia) currently rely on. I can understand why you'd believe it if you've fought Muslims directly, but Islam is a very large religion, in terms of population size.
As you've tried to say to me, the only way you could know that *every* Muslim on the planet wanted to kill you would be if you could ask every single one of them; which you can't do, because even if you lived for 70-80 years and started at around the age of 10, you still probably wouldn't be able to get to all of them.
Terrorism has such a long, long history in the middle east. So very long that people have absolutely internalized it.
Violent conflict has a history there going back around 4,000 years, yes.
Terrorism, though? Terrorism these days has become an entirely nebulous word; it is arbitrarily used by Western governments to mean whatever they want it to mean.
This article, of course, is in reference to protestors at the G20 conferences. The contemporary government could, if it wanted to, detain these protestors by claiming that they were "terrorists," and can do so without challenge. From what I've read, you going to a supermarket could get you detained as a "terrorist," if on the way there, a policeman saw you and decided that he didn't like your hairstyle.
The simple-but-dramatic solution: there should be a recognized right of secession. Communities should have the right to decide whether or not they wish to belong to a larger political entity. If they feel poorly served, they can go it alone, or agree to join some other political entity (Canada? Germany? Swaziland?).
This is true. I think it's been extremely thoroughly demonstrated at this point, that increasing population is almost the sole cause of virtually every human social and environmental problem. Even if it can't be argued as the direct cause, it can certainly be said that it doesn't help.
"According to Jefferson and Madison in 1825, the Declaration of Independence constituted an "act of Union of the States."
The above link essentially makes the case that, although of course revolution from England was desired, apparently the immediate establishment of a perpetual and insoluble federalism of their own was desired also.
Thomas Jefferson in particular, without attempting to attack him too harshly, was quite clearly an elitist. This can be shown by noting the creation of the electoral college, of which he was an advocate, and also that it was he who voiced the idea that limited republic rather than outright democracy was a necessary form of government.
The glowing summary of American foundational history generally consists almost exclusively, of the concept that the founders created a system allowing for an unprecedented degree of human freedom, while seeking virtually nothing for the government itself.
This, of course, sounds wonderful, and works particularly well as justification for foreign interventionism. Unfortunately however, when more thorough research is conducted, the situation becomes decidedly more murky.
To me there is more evidence to suggest that although, of course, there were considerably more legal restraints initially put in place, ultimately, a competing system with England was actually the real desire. We've seen the degree of imperialism which has become the contemporary result, as well.
I also just came across something else that is very interesting, relative to this discussion. Apparently there was the first of twelve amendments that were originally intended to be added to the Constitution, at the first Congress in 1789.
This amendment, apparently specifically sought to deal with the very issue of scaling population currently being discussed, and the Wikipedia article has a quote from James Madison to that effect.
It was never ratified; but as explained by Wikipedia, rather than creating an effect where the amount of representation within government actually scaled *up* with the population, with the proposed Amendment, it would actually be scaled further *down.* Current calculation of representative numbers, although not exactly using the Amendment system, is roughly the same.
Your problem would not be theoretical and academic with situations on far-off battlefields that you really don't have sufficient information to judge.
Ah. A soldier, sounds like. I'm actually very glad one of you has answered this. You're one of the groups of people (the other being cops) who I really want to talk to about this.
You're possibly right, though. I probably don't have sufficient information to judge. I hope, however, that you get given sufficient information before they send you over there, because from what I can see at least, they seem to be primarily interested in screwing both demographics of the population; yours *and* mine.
I'm actually also curious as to what additional information you might be given, because the information I'm able to get from here, tells me that both Afghanistan and Iraq are a scam.
Some of the information I've been able to get here has implied that at one point, bin Laden was very close to being captured in Tora Bora at one point, but was deliberately let go, because Bush wanted to be able to continue to use his Emmanuel Goldstein to scare the public.
Some of the other information I've been able to get here has very strongly implied that if bin Laden or Al Quaeda *did* have anything to do with 9/11, it was purely that they were outsourced; that the towers were actually brought down by controlled demolition, and the whole thing was done in order to give Bush and his underlings justification in front of the public, to then begin treating the Constitution like toilet paper, which he of course then did.
Might sound a bit outlandish to you, but think about it. Bush got a blank check after 9/11. He could basically do whatever he wanted, and to a large extent he did. You don't think a government isn't going to want that, if they could get it?
Bush was tight with the petroleum industry, too. Some of his friends were invested in Halliburton, even if he himself wasn't; you probably know about that though.
Another minor point; it turns out there's natural gas under Afghanistan. Not long after the invasion started, I heard a while back that they actually started putting in a pipeline for it. Afghanistan has one of the biggest opium poppy trades in the world, as well; lot of money there. There's history of the government using drug money as revenue, as well.
See, one of the advantages of living with only theoretical security concerns, like you mentioned, is that it gives me lots of time to read about what's going on in the world. So while it might be true that, only having access to the civilian Internet means that you've got a lot more info than I do, I'm still able to dig up certain bits and pieces; and believe me, some of them can be very interesting.
Why should anyone choose to die for you ? For your freedom ? If you can't answer that question... heh... guess what will happen when too much of the population cannot answer that question anymore.
They don't die for me, or for my freedom, though. That's entirely the point. They die so that the fuel cartels can make an extra few billion dollars next financial year. Not only that, but while said plutocrats are using you as cannon fodder overseas, depending on who you believe, they're also actually whacking inventors who try to come up with alternate fuel sources, so that the foreign wars might not even have to happen at all. Heard of Stanley Meyer, by any chance?
Of course, that will get shouted down by the atheists around here as schizophrenia on my part, but that's ok.
The point is, as ignorant as I may or may not be, I know one thing. When those protests happen, and there are a group of cops on one side, and civilian protesters on the other, when that scenario happens, both of those groups are actually getting screwed over by the guys in charge.
They play both of them off against each other. They also train you to take the very attitude you did w
Re:is there any other way to prevent crowd dispers
on
Revisiting DIY HERF Guns
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
It is, however, the one system that actually incorporates social/political change into its very structure. And that is something that countless people suffering under authoritarian or absolutist rulers find remarkably appealing.
a) Genuine democracy does not scale with current population levels. As someone else here said, the American Constitution was originally written for a population of 3 million, which is 1/100th of the population's current size.
b) Government now has sufficient control of the media that they don't need to play by the rules. They can kill whoever they want, whenever they want, and then call it terrorism, and the majority of the population will not challenge it.
c) Any attempt to displace the current government would result in unspeakably massive civilian casualties, and you can bet that the government knows that. They would be relying on the domestic population's reluctance to engage in large scale conflict, more than anything else.
It's also a very safe thing for them to rely on. The contemporary population of the entire Western world has been domesticated more chronically than at any other time in human history. Only very small percentages of that population have actually seen active combat. The rest of them would have less than no chance, and that includes you and me. Training and physical fitness aside, the single biggest problem is probably simply the extent to which we would not have the stomach for it.
Can't say I have the balls to put myself in the firing line, but I predict another "Kent State" within the next few years.
The real problem is simple tactical viability. Not only are the civilian population outgunned, but they are generally out-trained as well. You have a scenario in America now where the Blackwater mercenaries truly love to fight, and are very well trained and equipped for it. That is the entire reason, I strongly suspect, why they were brought in.
Any viable insurgency is going to need a very large percentage of the domestic population in order to have even a vague chance to succeed; and the civilian death rate would be truly horrific. The current government would fight to the death of the last man in order to retain power; I have no difficulty believing that.
Slashdot Mirror
2) some third-party applications became very aggressive lately and can be unusable in their newest releases. Many people bash GNOME and/or KDE, myself my favorite target is Xorg. The Xorg server has caused the most headaches across all my Linux and FreeBSD machines in the last years.
Yes, the isolation of the upstream X maintainers, (whoever they are) is legendary. The appropriate response, however, is not for downstream to make excuses for the X people, and for said downstream to burden themselves further with what is rightfully the X project's work. Rather, it's to give the X project's people a (metaphorical, one hopes) motivational foot up the backside.
It is surely not an unreasonable expectation for X to work, out of the box, with the specific range of hardware that the X project has claimed compatibility with. This is same the standard which (in the past perhaps, at least) any other project has been held to.
If the X people can't manage this, then they either need to find more developers and testers, or lower their ambitions, in terms of the amount of hardware which is claimed to be supported.
There should not be a scenario where X.org is releasing a snarled, half-mangled pile of code which downstream is then expected to clean up and get working with their own system. Theo de Raadt mentioned that state of affairs in a BSDCan talk that he gave once, and it should not be accepted. If said scenario still exists, there needs to be some long, loud, and pointed complaining engaged in on X's mailing lists.
The OSS developer appears to be schizophrenic.
Either that or they just don't care.
You make it sound as though that's a unique issue. There are a huge number of projects which wouldn't get used if the mental health of the lead maintainer was an issue. Glibc and cdrtools are the main two that immediately come to mind. Ulrich is fairly well known for being as mad as the proverbial March hare. I don't blame him for that, though; I've felt a certain wrench in my own sanity when I've tried to patch and compile Glibc for Linux From Scratch. I can't even begin to imagine what working on that code for years on end would do to a person, but it can't be anything good. ;)
That type of question makes sense when asked about Microsoft, but doesn't even make sense when discussing Debian. "Why would Debian do this" is like a zen koan, until you're enlightened it makes no sense, or when it makes sense it means you're enlightened.
Why on Earth is this pretentious garbage modded +5, Insightful?
As for why Debian are starting to use different kernels, it's fairly simple.
A large number of the Debian developers are die hard Stallmanite/FSF/GNU fanatics. FreeBSD (as one example) is a system that has both kernel and userland. Using the kernel of other operating systems which already have their own userland, is basically an attempt to render the userlands of said other systems irrelevant.
GNU/kFreeBSD is an abomination, and I'm not the only FreeBSD user who thinks so. Most other FreeBSD users I've spoken to want to get (more) free of having to rely on FSF software, not less. The FSF are generally considered a plague by BSD users, and rightly so.
Yeah. I've only discovered the joy of ed in the last month.
I feel like such a newb. ;)
I consider the core Dragonlance series, classics. I'm talking about the three-book Chronicles, here; not the rest. Dragonlance was Pagan fantasy in the same sense that LOTR was vaguely Christian, IMHO.
You might want to look at CS Lewis in the Christian category, as well; he did both fantasy and SF, although truthfully in my own opinion he is somewhat overrated. Narnia was ok, but not as good as most people seem to think; I've read much better, and some of them (the Silver Chair primarily comes to mind) were difficult to get into at all.
The Never Ending Story was a much better book than the films suggested; the second film in particular was a hatchet job.
David Eddings is also good; the Elenium is fluidly written and a very easy read, comparitively speaking.
Can we pull the handful of competent web designers, that presumably once existed, out of retirement and have them clean up the major web sites?
HTML as a language has become more complex, over the last few versions.
To write it well, it is necessary, I feel, to go back to the earliest versions of it which current browsers will support; which I believe is 4 or so. Abstaining from DOM-oriented code, (
, and such) greatly helps.
There is enormous power in simplicity, but sadly, simplicity is not popular.
Neither Richard Stallman or Bradley Kuhn can use force to make you to listen to them, nor are they seeking a means of doing so;
They've actually proven that they *do* want said means. They proved that with the alterations made to version 3 of the GPL, as well as having spoken about wanting Novell (as a single entity) being banned from distributing software licensed with the GPL.
Your response to this will likely be to launch into a diversionary argument about how that was completely justified. That, however, is irrelevant.
The simple fact is that in those two individuals' minds, following the legal letter of the GPL by itself isn't enough. You also have to follow the "spirit," which as I said, translates into thinking exactly like them. They don't want people to merely comply with their license; they want members of a cult where their word is law.
But it would show that there is valid justification for their existence. Who started up a campaign to end software patents? It wasn't Novell, or Red Hat, or the Open Source Initiative; it was these folks. The FSF is willing to take unpopular hardline pro-freedom
If the FSF were themselves willing to accept the role of fringe legal attack dog, (and that *alone*) I'd be more than happy to recognise their part of the overall FOSS ecosystem on that basis.
The problem is that they're not. Stallman wants everyone to think the way he does.
We need to get rid of the cultic element, more than anything else. If they can legally help FOSS developers in an overall sense, and do it in a constructive way, that I have no issue with.
It is their hate, their fear, and their paranoia which need to go. I don't have a problem with Bradley Kuhn at all because he can be of legal benefit in protecting FOSS; I have a problem with him because he behaves like a rabid rottweiler/human hybrid, who apparently will not rest until everyone else on the planet thinks in exactly the same way he does.
...it leaves a bitter taste in my mouth.
I have grown to hate both the SFLC and the FSF, personally. The two organisations have proven themselves as breeding grounds for fanatical trolls (Bradley Kuhn, Stallman, and their followers) who harm the public image of FOSS, and who cause much division and conflict.
The problem with scenarios like these, is that they give people like Stallman and Kuhn the idea that there is valid justification for their existence. If the Supreme Court ends up making a beneficial decision here, you can be sure that the FSF and SFLC will take full credit for it.
This could, in turn, have the deeply undesirable outcome of giving the FSF renewed relevance and public favour, at a time when community opposition to them has never been higher. In terms of his public image, Richard Stallman is potentially on the ropes right now, and I do not want to see him given the opportunity to recover.
The end of software patents could only be a good thing, yes, but it needs to be a victory for software developers in general; not merely a PR or false moral victory for the FSF.
The enemy of my enemy, is not my friend.
Quick! The boss is standing over you demanding that you convert a flat file into csv, add a header, prepend a unique id, and spit any lines with weird characters into a separate file. Here's the printout of the layout. You have ten minutes. There's a million lines in the file and they've got to build a marketing model before the client meeting in one hour.
Ah. When you mention weird characters there, you mean using perl compatible regular expressions, (among other things) yes?
I acknowledge; this was a dumb comment. I know Perl can be used as a CGI scripting language, and for any number of other things besides.
Let me clarify, however; what do people use Perl for, that they *wouldn't* write in another language?
Is that supposed to impress us? Slashdot is by far the most buggy and unstable website I visit.
To a large extent, the reason for that is because the editorial staff felt a need to "modernise," presumably due to pressure from the brainless Web 2.0 crowd.
Pre-2.0, the site was as solid as a rock. The editors should have ignored whoever was howling for cosmetic changes and stayed with their instincts.
I've found I can do pretty much everything I need with shell. I've also tended to find that I can store and retrieve whatever data I'm working with in flatfiles with awk, as well. Some people might find that horribly primitive, but truthfully flat text is a lot easier for me to understand and work with than XML.
I feel that awk has an excessively bad rap, to be honest. I know of some people who like it, but it doesn't seem to get used much. I find it very useful at times.
What do people use Perl for?
Imagine IRC. Ok now imagine you have fucking PICTURES in your irc client!! HOLY SHIT!!!111
Yeah. The sad part is that they went to the trouble of writing their own protocol from scratch, too.
This looks good, but Google could have bought a BSD license from whoever writes X chat, and hacked that to include a built in graphic viewer, and possibly XDCC for sending the files.
I'll probably at least give it a try, and maybe even like it, but you've gone to a lot more trouble here than you needed to, Google. We've known how to write IRC fserves for 14 years now. If you wanted one, all you had to do was ask. ;)
How to pull 1 trillion dollars from businesses hiring developers.
It's nice to see good and responsible promotion of FOSS.
The part that's truly amusing, is that this effect is almost entirely due to the efforts of Comrade Stallman.
He wanted a license to reduce the amount of money circulating where software development was concerned. It might be true that less money is going in the direction of programmers, but the corporations are doing just fine. The fact that FOSS gives them the ability to outsource, actually means that they're saving money by being able to keep Asian programmers in sweatshops.
Yep. Ubuntu is Linux.
That's only one of the reasons why those of us who want a real operating system, use BSD.
Not to mention a real license. :P
Let's try uptime? BSD vs Debian. No contest. When you can measure a debian servers uptime in years, not weeks, let me know.
Only if ctrl-alt-backspace zapping of X is re-enabled. I have a bad 3d card, (not FreeBSD's fault) with corrupt video ram, and it was causing X to lock up. Before I re-enabled the key combo, I had several instances where I had to reboot. *sigh*
If you want to use some half assed/cheapo/bargin bin hardware product, *BSD isn't what you want, thats not its focus and anyone who uses it will tell you so.
This is partly true, though not as much as you might think. My hardware is probably the most disgusting, low end crap you've ever seen (no, not quite including a dead cat, but close! ;)) and FreeBSD runs on it just fine.
I'd suspect that the rule of thumb is more the age of what you've got. *New* cheap garbage won't work, but cheap garbage from probably more than two years out is pretty much guaranteed. I'm still waiting for NetBSD to release the analytical engine port. ;)
But Ubuntu's my desktop.
I don't understand this. I tried using Ubuntu for six weeks before moving to FreeBSD. For me, it was a nightmare. Bloated, slow, horribly unstable. I've heard any number of horror stories about what the update process can do to a machine, as well.
That was eight months ago, and since installing FreeBSD I haven't looked back.
Which Ubuntu version are you using?
But today? Nobody knows. I'm not aware of any benchmarks that you can download that simulate memory stress and map the tradeoffs that the OS makes.
In general, the biggest obstacle to improve Linux, FreeBSD and everybody's else's OS performance is a lack of high-quality benchmarks.
The call for technical integrity here, and the use of %% as a seperator, implies to me that the author of the OP is (at least potentially) a member of the old school.
It causes me joy to know that there are still some of you left, and even more, that there are still some left here on Slashdot.
To both the FSF and Mark Shuttleworth, I can only say, do your worst. UNIX will survive.
Sorry but I don't subscribe to conspiracy theories.
So you only believe what you are officially told? I guess that makes sense; it's probably what you've been trained to do. It can be a dangerous tendency in certain contexts, however.
If the above is true, your faith in your superiors is admirable, but have you never wondered in the last few years...even once...if they truly deserve that level of faith?
EVERY non-secular muslim is against us, and "against us" in the sense that they'd like to massacre Americans.
This is a generalisation which the governments of three different countries (America, Britain, and Australia) currently rely on. I can understand why you'd believe it if you've fought Muslims directly, but Islam is a very large religion, in terms of population size.
As you've tried to say to me, the only way you could know that *every* Muslim on the planet wanted to kill you would be if you could ask every single one of them; which you can't do, because even if you lived for 70-80 years and started at around the age of 10, you still probably wouldn't be able to get to all of them.
Terrorism has such a long, long history in the middle east. So very long that people have absolutely internalized it.
Violent conflict has a history there going back around 4,000 years, yes.
Terrorism, though? Terrorism these days has become an entirely nebulous word; it is arbitrarily used by Western governments to mean whatever they want it to mean.
This article, of course, is in reference to protestors at the G20 conferences. The contemporary government could, if it wanted to, detain these protestors by claiming that they were "terrorists," and can do so without challenge. From what I've read, you going to a supermarket could get you detained as a "terrorist," if on the way there, a policeman saw you and decided that he didn't like your hairstyle.
But again, that's a conspiracy theory...right?
The simple-but-dramatic solution: there should be a recognized right of secession. Communities should have the right to decide whether or not they wish to belong to a larger political entity. If they feel poorly served, they can go it alone, or agree to join some other political entity (Canada? Germany? Swaziland?).
This is true. I think it's been extremely thoroughly demonstrated at this point, that increasing population is almost the sole cause of virtually every human social and environmental problem. Even if it can't be argued as the direct cause, it can certainly be said that it doesn't help.
"According to Jefferson and Madison in 1825, the Declaration of Independence constituted an "act of Union of the States."
-- Mackubin Thomas Owens, The Case Against Secession, The Claremont Institute.
The above link essentially makes the case that, although of course revolution from England was desired, apparently the immediate establishment of a perpetual and insoluble federalism of their own was desired also.
Thomas Jefferson in particular, without attempting to attack him too harshly, was quite clearly an elitist. This can be shown by noting the creation of the electoral college, of which he was an advocate, and also that it was he who voiced the idea that limited republic rather than outright democracy was a necessary form of government.
The glowing summary of American foundational history generally consists almost exclusively, of the concept that the founders created a system allowing for an unprecedented degree of human freedom, while seeking virtually nothing for the government itself.
This, of course, sounds wonderful, and works particularly well as justification for foreign interventionism. Unfortunately however, when more thorough research is conducted, the situation becomes decidedly more murky.
To me there is more evidence to suggest that although, of course, there were considerably more legal restraints initially put in place, ultimately, a competing system with England was actually the real desire. We've seen the degree of imperialism which has become the contemporary result, as well.
I also just came across something else that is very interesting, relative to this discussion. Apparently there was the first of twelve amendments that were originally intended to be added to the Constitution, at the first Congress in 1789.
This amendment, apparently specifically sought to deal with the very issue of scaling population currently being discussed, and the Wikipedia article has a quote from James Madison to that effect.
It was never ratified; but as explained by Wikipedia, rather than creating an effect where the amount of representation within government actually scaled *up* with the population, with the proposed Amendment, it would actually be scaled further *down.* Current calculation of representative numbers, although not exactly using the Amendment system, is roughly the same.
There is some very interesting information about this issue here:-
http://www.thirty-thousand.org./
Your problem would not be theoretical and academic with situations on far-off battlefields that you really don't have sufficient information to judge.
Ah. A soldier, sounds like. I'm actually very glad one of you has answered this. You're one of the groups of people (the other being cops) who I really want to talk to about this.
You're possibly right, though. I probably don't have sufficient information to judge. I hope, however, that you get given sufficient information before they send you over there, because from what I can see at least, they seem to be primarily interested in screwing both demographics of the population; yours *and* mine.
I'm actually also curious as to what additional information you might be given, because the information I'm able to get from here, tells me that both Afghanistan and Iraq are a scam.
Some of the information I've been able to get here has implied that at one point, bin Laden was very close to being captured in Tora Bora at one point, but was deliberately let go, because Bush wanted to be able to continue to use his Emmanuel Goldstein to scare the public.
Some of the other information I've been able to get here has very strongly implied that if bin Laden or Al Quaeda *did* have anything to do with 9/11, it was purely that they were outsourced; that the towers were actually brought down by controlled demolition, and the whole thing was done in order to give Bush and his underlings justification in front of the public, to then begin treating the Constitution like toilet paper, which he of course then did.
Might sound a bit outlandish to you, but think about it. Bush got a blank check after 9/11. He could basically do whatever he wanted, and to a large extent he did. You don't think a government isn't going to want that, if they could get it?
Bush was tight with the petroleum industry, too. Some of his friends were invested in Halliburton, even if he himself wasn't; you probably know about that though.
Another minor point; it turns out there's natural gas under Afghanistan. Not long after the invasion started, I heard a while back that they actually started putting in a pipeline for it. Afghanistan has one of the biggest opium poppy trades in the world, as well; lot of money there. There's history of the government using drug money as revenue, as well.
See, one of the advantages of living with only theoretical security concerns, like you mentioned, is that it gives me lots of time to read about what's going on in the world. So while it might be true that, only having access to the civilian Internet means that you've got a lot more info than I do, I'm still able to dig up certain bits and pieces; and believe me, some of them can be very interesting.
Why should anyone choose to die for you ? For your freedom ? If you can't answer that question ... heh ... guess what will happen when too much of the population cannot answer that question anymore.
They don't die for me, or for my freedom, though. That's entirely the point. They die so that the fuel cartels can make an extra few billion dollars next financial year. Not only that, but while said plutocrats are using you as cannon fodder overseas, depending on who you believe, they're also actually whacking inventors who try to come up with alternate fuel sources, so that the foreign wars might not even have to happen at all. Heard of Stanley Meyer, by any chance?
Of course, that will get shouted down by the atheists around here as schizophrenia on my part, but that's ok.
The point is, as ignorant as I may or may not be, I know one thing. When those protests happen, and there are a group of cops on one side, and civilian protesters on the other, when that scenario happens, both of those groups are actually getting screwed over by the guys in charge.
They play both of them off against each other. They also train you to take the very attitude you did w
It is, however, the one system that actually incorporates social/political change into its very structure. And that is something that countless people suffering under authoritarian or absolutist rulers find remarkably appealing.
a) Genuine democracy does not scale with current population levels. As someone else here said, the American Constitution was originally written for a population of 3 million, which is 1/100th of the population's current size.
b) Government now has sufficient control of the media that they don't need to play by the rules. They can kill whoever they want, whenever they want, and then call it terrorism, and the majority of the population will not challenge it.
c) Any attempt to displace the current government would result in unspeakably massive civilian casualties, and you can bet that the government knows that. They would be relying on the domestic population's reluctance to engage in large scale conflict, more than anything else.
It's also a very safe thing for them to rely on. The contemporary population of the entire Western world has been domesticated more chronically than at any other time in human history. Only very small percentages of that population have actually seen active combat. The rest of them would have less than no chance, and that includes you and me. Training and physical fitness aside, the single biggest problem is probably simply the extent to which we would not have the stomach for it.
Can't say I have the balls to put myself in the firing line, but I predict another "Kent State" within the next few years.
The real problem is simple tactical viability. Not only are the civilian population outgunned, but they are generally out-trained as well. You have a scenario in America now where the Blackwater mercenaries truly love to fight, and are very well trained and equipped for it. That is the entire reason, I strongly suspect, why they were brought in.
Any viable insurgency is going to need a very large percentage of the domestic population in order to have even a vague chance to succeed; and the civilian death rate would be truly horrific. The current government would fight to the death of the last man in order to retain power; I have no difficulty believing that.