The War on Drugs isn't one that they can hope to win, primarily because the enemy are their own constituents.
I don't consider marijuana a desirable substance myself (and stoners who insist on self-justification beyond all rationality, go away. Yes, I have smoked, and inhaled, despite your insistence that it is impossible for anyone who has smoked to have a negative opinion on the substance) but I also know very well that criminalisation does not work, and will never work.
As a (admittedly informally, and generally fairly secretively) practicing Shakta Hindu, I could also if I wanted, claim historical precedent for my own use of marijuana as a religious sacrament. (Although AFAIK, in India at least, marijuana is more commonly used in association with Shiva, but it has been consumed as part of the worship of Kali)
Although I hold nothing against other adherents of various religions who do so, I have made the decision not to do that, as my own experience has led me to believe that marijuana is not b primarily beneficial substance, at least in the case of my own specific physiology.
I acknowledge, however, that it is not up to me to make that decision for anyone else other than myself. I further acknowledge that the plant does have certain extremely legitimate medical uses; I have advocated at least trying it with a few people I know at times, when they have been in extreme pain.
There is a certain percentage of the population (whether they are a minority or not, I do not know specifically, and make no claim about) who whether for good or ill, are mortally determined to smoke marijuana. Given their level of adamancy on this especially, it is not the place of government to make the decision for these individuals as to whether they should be allowed to smoke or not, especially considering that such a decision is usually made against these individuals' implicit, if not explicit, consent.
It has long been my opinion that the American government is, and always has been, at its' heart, a fundamentally tyrannical and insidious institution, which will, at any opportunity afforded to it, enthusiastically act as the mortal enemy of its' own constituents. The long term war that the Drug Enforcement Administration has been waging against said constituents, is in itself compelling proof of this assertion.
The DEA, in its' own defense, would likely try to claim that many of the substances which it crusades against the use of are gravely harmful; sometimes lethally so. In the cases of heroine, cocaine, and methamphetamines in particular, I would not argue against such an assertion. However, whether the drugs themselves are lethal is not the point.
The point is that it should not rightfully be the role of government to act as a parental figure for its' constituents. As adults, said constituents are supposed to be able to serve that role for themselves.
I also believe that criminalisation, rather than reducing the use of these substances, in face greatly contributes to their appeal, as it is well known that both teenagers and retrograde adults take particular delight in doing certain things, primarily when they know that said things are illegal or taboo. If many of these drugs, marijuana included, we made legal, use of them would cease to appear to be an act of rebellion, and would instead become socially mundane.
A third point is that many of the entheogens have not been allowed virtually any academic study, because of a hysterical, knee-jerk governmental approach to criminalisation. Some early work was done with LSD, yes; but very little such work has been done with other substances such as MDMA. If this research was permitted to be conducted, more could likely be learned about the drugs' drawbacks, potentially beneficial uses, and guidelines could possibly even be developed for the safe and guided use of the substances by those who still wished to consume them.
...then it is worthwhile remembering that centralisation was its' most fatal weakness.
In the original story, (the end of the T2 novel, or thereabouts) Connor won by blowing up the central core under Cheyenne Mountain. SkyNET's primary exploitable weakness was that it was never willing to truly reproduce, for fear of losing control; that is, to create another AI with fully the same level of functional intelligence that it had. (I believe personally that a compelling case could be made for the assertion that SkyNET, as depicted, was not truly strong AI, but I digress)
The point is that as far as creating genuinely effective weak artificial intelligence is concerned, the decentralised/segregationist approach is the correct one.
Given my own experience with FPS mapping, I also concur with the author of TFA when he says that making AI choose the "best" choice 100% of the time, is not the best tactical approach, over time. My own experience gradually suggested that around 75% appears to be the magic number, as far as creating a truly emergent, unpredictable opponent that humans will be unable to overcome.
Granted, said 75% is also only effective where there are a large number of divergent solutions to a given problem, each with close to an identical level of effectiveness, but with a few subtle points plus or minus, each way.
Even with a fuzzy, emergent system, the best trees still have a maximum number of branches. The real trick however is not to hand code said trees at all, because then you simply end up with static, rote heuristics. Rather, as the author possibly implied, it is far better to attempt to code observation/deduction capabilities, guided by the above percentage, and let the system do the rest on its' own.
I still remain extremely skeptical, however, that humanity will ever see the emergence of truly strong (human level or greater) AI. It is worth remembering that strong AI is a fundamentally and profoundly atheistic concept; the possibility of it more or less presumes a definitely atheistic universe as a prerequisite. For those of us who believe in the existence of God, (or at least the soul) the idea (at least in terms of non-biologically generated, acorporeal AI, a la SkyNET; AI derived biomechanically is a seperate concept) therefore has some fairly serious problems.
We've badly needed a system with support for open video formats, and without the Flash prerequisite, for a long time now. This could potentially dramatically increase FreeBSD/Linux's market share, as well. I've been without Flash support since I first installed a month ago, and altho I've since learned how to install it for FreeBSD, it is not a trivial process.
I am grateful to the Firefox developers for making this change, and can only hope that YouTube in particular decide to support it, since that is probably the main site where this could potentially end up being used.
I don't want to put words in anyone's mouth, but the way you paint it, "Open Source" is the whiny, shallow little brother of Free Software.
I think you've got that backwards, my friend. The authors of this and similar rants; the people who primarily scream and cry and are paranoid about ensuring enforced reciprocity? That's the vaunted "Free Software" crowd, all the way.
...If you're not already using a FOSS operating system, (Linux or FreeBSD) you probably should be.
Microsoft bet on people not wanting to exercise personal responsibility; that is how they make their money. Windows makes life easier for you by providing you with a scenario where you don't need to take a month or so of your time to customise an open source operating system in order for it to be exactly the way you want it.
However, understand that like with anything else, an exchange is happening here. You want them to provide you with convenience, to make it easy for you, and to basically do pretty much everything for you. They therefore have every right (because you've given it to them) to screw you in whatever manner they feel like. If you uncompromisingly, unthinkingly give them responsibility for your welfare, don't be surprised when they do something which isn't in your best interests.
You can't have it both ways. You can't buy a fast food operating system and relinquish responsibility to a corporation in that manner on the one hand, and then expect it is going to be entirely and exclusively beneficial to you on the other.
It is a law of the universe; there is no free lunch, and in one way or another, you pay for everything.
Forum mongering / bug reporting. Hang out in the forums for the project, answer questions.
I agree with this. Work a bit slow? You might not want to allow Fark or Foobies.com on the clock, but the boss *could* think about telling the BOFH to allow workers to idle on Freenode. If you're using a generic open source app, go to its' relevant channel, and share your experience there with people who are having issues. It's free positive PR, and it will likely build good relations with the project's people in the event that you ever need to work with them in depth.
I wish the screaming, ranting Communists among us could start doing things like this. Instead of foaming at the mouth about how the evil corporations should be forced into contributing, produce ideas like the above, which demonstrate how workers can contribute. Many of them would probably be entirely willing to, if they only knew how.
You would likely go a lot further by looking to the state of your own house, before condemning anyone else.
People who are paranoid about the amount that others reciprocate, can not, IMHO, honestly claim to be part of the proverbial "gift culture."
Said gift culture (and genuine adherents of it) is not concerned with whether or not reciprocation happens.
The giving doesn't rightfully occur with expectance of reciprocity. It doesn't rightfully occur with any preconception about or prejudice concerning end use. If you need to stop and ask yourself why you're doing something for someone else at all, you've already ruined the effect, and you're already doing it for the wrong reasons. Genuine compassion and altruism have no motive, ulterior or otherwise.
It isn't done because you expect to get something back. It's done, if for any conscious reason at all, because said degree of altruism is a part of your own identity. It needs to be done to maintain your own consciousness, your own empathy, your own identity, your own sanity.
I am, have always been, and will always be utterly convinced of the true moral superiority of the BSD license, and this is just one more reason why I remain in continual opposition to, and defiance of, Richard Stallman. Fear and paranoia about reciprocity, associated with open source, takes something which is, and has been, uniquely beautiful within overall human history, and unusually, genuinely noble for us as a species, and makes it something mean-spirited and ugly.
Larry Wall was right. That which is freely given, can only be freely given; it cannot be taken.
In case any of you don't know, the guy quoted there, David Miscavige, was named heir as the leader of Scientology by its' founder, Lafayette Ronald Hubbard, and from everything I've seen, is equally schizophrenic.
Scientology has destroyed countless lives. There are very few things about which I agree with Anonymous, but their quest for the end of Scientology is one of them.
Eventually, Scientology will be destroyed, all of the lives that it has taken will be avenged, and their wronged spirits will finally be able to rest.
You might have been able to survive everything that came before it, Dave; but you will not survive the righteous wrath of the 'Net.
The need to acquire things, more than any other single thing, comes down to one basic human need; to feel as though we are, in some way, superior to our fellow man.
Blizzard understood that implicitly, and three of their most successful games, Diablo, Diablo 2, and World of Warcraft, were essentially based on that principle from the ground up.
A multiplayer game doesn't need complex or innovative gameplay to be compelling, at all. All it really needs to do is provide ways for a player to think that he has a bigger dick than the other people he's playing with, and you can keep him perpetually addicted.
It's not about a rat pressing a lever and getting a food pellet, at all. It's about the rat thinking that he has bigger genitals than other rats.
AFAIK, FreeBSD's ports is not portable to other distributions/operating systems. Pkgsrc is.
Also, as far as Gentoo is concerned, their code itself might well be the best thing since sliced bread, but from everything I've ever heard, socially speaking the developer community there is an unmitigated disaster. The douchebag factor is apparently even higher than with Debian, if that is possible.;-)
I find it thoroughly depressing that that seems to be the prevailing opinion. That in itself just shows what a tremendous amount of damage Bush has not only caused to the IMAGE of the US, but to the US itself.
It wasn't just Bush, believe me. Some of us remember the Clinton Bodycount, as well as the fact that Waco happened on Slick Willy's watch, although he did a masterful job of letting Janet Reno take the fall for it. Waco never touched Clinton at all; from his perspective, it was as though it never happened.
I've seen it in the UK, no sooner did they step through the doors of No10, out came the efforts to switch off as many controls as they could get away with so they could fill their pockets as quickly as possible.
Yes, I'm aware of the effect that Prime Minister Wormtounge had over there as well, at least to a degree.
I'm going to be very interested in what he does for long term planning.
That is especially true when you consider that it is likely that a GOP administration would immediately follow his, which would also, knowing the Republicans, do their darnedest to undo whatever good he might have managed to achieve.
I was initially skeptical about the alleged, lauded virtue of Barrack Obama, but the more I see of his actions, the more I'm forced to concede that I was wrong, and that in this case, water genuinely has flowed uphill, to use that analogy.
Obama's level of integrity is genuinely intimidating, for the simple reason that an American President is, at this point in history, expected to be a thoroughly amoral and corrupt human being. That he isn't, is rightfully seen almost as a violation of physical law. Bush's degree of evil had almost become reassuring, purely because of its' level of routine familiarity. When he attempted to do something monstrous, it was entirely expected.
Even with Bush aside, it is also a paradox when considered in light of the dynamics of political power in general. Reading Machiavelli and virtually every other treatise on the subject, one is left with the overwhelming conclusion that the single greatest prerequisite of political power is amorality, to the extent that it can be said that an individual's degree of political power will be directly proportional to their level of amorality.
Given this, Dick Cheney is perhaps a more likely example of who we would ordinarily expect to hold the office of President, morally speaking, than Obama. Cheney is, according to virtually every depiction of him, a consciously, willingly, and indeed enthusiastically evil individual. He is, therefore, far more consistent, both from study of political theory in general, and observation of American political history in particular, with the type of individual who I would expect to hold the office of the Presidency.
It is said that within a democracy, a people get the leader they deserve. I'm not entirely sure what Americans have done recently to deserve a leader with Obama's comparitive level of decency, especially given that Bush was so far to the opposite, but even for us outside America, Obama's integrity is certainly very welcome.
It will be fascinating to observe just how far outside of the established, conventional rules Obama is permitted to go.
And to answer the poor soul that asserted that Ubuntu is the standard Linux - I am sorry for you.
Sorry, Chief, but Ubuntu is going to be the only Linux distro that gets above 5%, absolutely guaranteed. That means, by default, that it IS going to end up as the distro which the majority of people care about. I hate it myself, but it's the truth.
Debian becoming the standard is an example of the proverb that the shit always rises to the top.
Big cluestick: we are not your employees, we do not do your bidding.
Yes, but many of you do continually bleat like sheep about the fact that Linux doesn't have 100% desktop market share.
So you need to decide. Do you want to be iconoclastic, Commie, "fuck the machine," types? If you do, you can forget about the desktop, because the corporate world owns that. If you want the desktop, you're going to have to play in the corporate sandbox. There's no way around it.
Personally, I think Linux should leave the desktop, and just focus on being itself, irrespective of how obscure that means it would stay; but that's just me. Most people seem to want to hit the big time, and you absolutely cannot do that without selling out. It simply isn't possible.
a) Decide once and for all; client or server? If client, (which is what the desktop is) embrace that completely. Tell anyone who wants UNIX that they need to move to *BSD.
b) For sound, return to OSS. v4 is under the GPL now, so there's no reason not to. ALSA is over-engineered, unstable garbage. Get rid of it.
c) Standardise around GNOME. For my money it's the least bloated of the big two. In terms of features, truthfully I probably like KDE more, but it needs to lose weight before I'd advocate it.
d) Stop standardising around Debian, and stop listening to whoever keeps telling everyone to do so. Debian/Ubuntu are the two most poorly designed Linux distributions in existence. If fanboys want to respond to that, fine, but if I list my issues with Debian, I expect you to respond to me on those issues specifically, without simply resorting to the old standby of telling me that I'm ignorant.
e) Standardise around pkgsrc for package management. It's portable, it's solid, it has a lot of features, and it's written by people who, unlike many Linux developers, both care about design quality AND can actually code their way out of a wet paper bag. Do not listen to Debian fanboys who attempt to say otherwise.
f) Stop caring AT ALL about what the FSF thinks. If nVidia only distribute binary drivers, people are going to want them, period; and are going to use them, irrespective of what the cult decrees. I also don't want to hear from FSF cultists in response to this, either. I don't agree with you now, I'm not going to in the future, I think your organisation is a disease, and is the single worst thing about Linux, and I'd be much happier if it didn't exist, putting it bluntly; so don't bother.
g) If money is what it takes to cause FOSS developers to get serious, then so be it. Relicense under more commercially friendly licenses, (like the BSD license, for instance) and form companies around the relevant applications.
h) If the desktop is where the Linux community has decided it wants to go, Linus needs to be brought into line with that vision. At the moment, he is primarily concerned about big iron, because that is what the corporate hands that feed him primarily care about. If you want the i386 client desktop, that is where you need to put the entirety of your focus. Forget portability, forget the server, and focus purely on being an i386 client desktop. You're not going to get there any other way.
If Steve Jobs wants to deter people from buying from clonemakers, IMHO he should do a limited production run of machines which have his signature prominently on the case, and accompany it with some form of watermark that prevents forgery, as well.
Note that I'm not advocating anything fascist like Microsoft's Windows Genuine Advantage here either, in terms of *penalising* anyone whose machine isn't from Apple. I'm talking about complete use of the carrot here, not the stick.
If he made the production run which included his signature, sufficiently limited, then the machines which he signed could potentially gain value as collector's items, which would create demand for his product, as opposed to that of the clonemakers.
In a world where nearly anything can be copied, the only way to beat piracy is to create non-replicable value which comes from a single source. Make it signatures one year, and sets of unique, holographically watermarked images for subsequent years/versions. He should do a personal advertisement campaign promoting it, as well, where he himself talks to the public about it, and where he actively tries to draw an analogy between contemporary CDs, and practices of earlier times, where people bought items from individual craftspeople on a face to face basis. Obviously people can't go into an Apple store and see him face to face, no; but they can in the context of the ad campaign. I can imagine part of the speech that he could use, as well.
"My company and I have been in the computing industry for a long time. Clonemaker companies, on the other hand, are often a flash in the pan; here today, gone tomorrow. I'm not going to use the sorts of measures that other companies have done, to penalise people who engage in piracy, or to try and bully you into buying from me, as opposed to the clonemakers. I've seen enough such attempts fail, in order to be able to know that that isn't going to work. What I am going to do, however, is explain to you what I feel the benefits in buying from me are, as opposed to buying from the clonemakers.
The first two things you receive by buying your hardware and software from Apple, are peace of mind, and vendor accountability. Our machines do not use cheap, no-name hardware, but instead use components from known, branded companies (such as nVidia and others) on a consistent basis. This also means that you are given a warranty on parts that you can trust, and it also means that you are given initial hardware which you can trust as well.
The second thing which you are doing when you buy from Apple, is investing in the long-term future. Our hardware and software requires long man hours to produce, on an ongoing basis, and in a capitalist society, that in turn requires that our staff are paid for their labour, as well as the individual machine components being paid for. Clonemakers merely duplicate the hardware and software which we produce, but they do not engage in actual innovation themselves, and as such, if Apple were to become bankrupt, they would not be able to survive themselves either. Buying from us therefore helps to ensure the continued availability of our hardware and software, so that you will still be able to rely on Apple's computers and operating system for years to come.
The third thing you are receiving for your money when you buy from Apple, is perhaps the least tangible, but also the most important. It is the assurance that when you buy from us, you are acting with complete legal and moral integrity. From our observation of the election of the current American President, we are aware that integrity is something that is important to a high percentage of the population."
Fun fact; the MMORPG was actually considered canon. So when the game ends, that, rather than the third movie, will be the actual end of the story.
The fact that, from what I read at least, it was so story driven in nature was probably what ensured that it only had a finite lifespan. If WoW's devs hadn't screwed the class dynamics to the degree they have since 3.0, that game could have conceivably lasted more or less forever on the basis of the pre-existing content, without any further developer interaction.
MxO, however, was different. It was apparently built around ongoing episodic/developer involvement, and comparitively speaking there apparently wasn't a lot of repetitive/static content at all. As a result, once the devs stopped doing the live stuff, the game itself would die.
The franchise has existed for ten years, and that is a better run than many get; I know the screenplay of the first movie more intimately than Muslims are supposed to know the Qu'ran. Although I've still got it on my hard drive, I also wouldn't have watched it more than probably three times in the last five years; I saw it literally close to 100 times within the first six months of its' release, and I've since got it out of my system.
Mount some of them read-only. Mounting/usr read-only AFAIK is advised practice with Linux, even if virtually nobody ever follows it because it's a pain in the ass.
Something else I forgot to mention, about why I feel more secure using sudo.
Unless you've written a bad shell script, one sudo invocation = one root command.
Granted, you can keep issuing dumb sudo commands one after the other, but it takes more effort to do, involving possibly having to re-enter your password multiple times, in other words also increasing the likelihood of you stopping to wonder wtf you're doing.
This also means I minimise the amount of time the root account is active, which makes me very happy as well. In my own mind anyway, less active root = more secure root. It means less chance that I've made a mistake, such as a blank or partly blank +x root shell script, which an attacker can then use as the equivalent of a blank cheque on the system.
It's also been pointed out before that many consider root too powerful, with a single overall super user representing a single point of weakness in the system. I'm currently researching the means to create a scenario with sudo where ports/upgrades are handled by a single user, and a few other things are all each handled by respective users as well, and said users will only have access to very specific directories, and very specific commands. Use of text editors in particular (vi(m), ed, ee, cat, sed, echo) will be tightly restricted.
It might end up meaning that I need to type in a few different passwords, but the upside is that if I ever was going to get a potential hacker, they wouldn't necessarily just be able to bank on getting a single root password for overall access to the entire system; if couldn't get the root password, they'd need to know around six others, and if they didn't know all of them, whichever users they had broken, would only have access to very specific subsections of the system.
I take umbrage when called an IDIOT for not using sudo. I've been an administrator for many years on numerous flavours of *nix and I've NEVER had a problem caused by misapplication of root priviledge.
Not long after the pain of installing Linux From Scratch, I accidentally typed in "rm -rf/usr" one evening when tired, distracted, and thinking I was doing something else. I've felt extremely uncomfortable using root ever since.;)
Typing "sudo" in front of a command does not make you intellectually superior. What's to stop you from typing "sudo something_stupid"?
I use its' asking me for a password as the equivalent of a fairly strong confirmation prompt, and I nearly always have to consciously think in order to enter a password, so that also gives me the opportunity to reflect on what I'm doing. If it turns out that I've done something stupid, I can simply deliberately type in garbage instead of the password, in order to slam on the brakes.
Why not just run a Linux host, and run Windows in a VM for tasks that require Windows? You can have a semi-up to date backup of the VM file, so if it ever does decide to die, it'd be an easy recovery.
a) There's only a single application that I can think of which I might conceivably want or need to run Windows for, now.
b) I don't want that kind of overhead, and with my hardware, I probably can't really afford it either.
c) I don't need said overhead. If I run FreeBSD and do external backups of whatever I want to keep, assuming a 14 year old does somehow manage to hack my machine, all I need to do is reformat, change my passwords, restore from backups, and carry on with my life as usual.
If it turns Theo on to be paranoid, then I genuinely hope he enjoys himself, but the hysteria of "experts," aside, most of the rest of us truly don't need to be.
I got nearly all the expansion packs for the original, (I think Makin' Magic was the only one I missed) and three for the Sims 2.
The only two activities I ever really got out of the games were house designing, and trying to also create buildings which allowed the AI to perform optimally/doing stuff to mess with it. Trying to model the faces of famous people in the Body Shop in the Sims 2 and then upload said faces was a reasonably enjoyable method of wasting time, as well.
Apart from that, the Sims really doesn't offer anything at all unless you're playing it with someone else. If you're playing it alone, however, the boredom can literally become physically painful. To make it even worse, at least the Sims 2 only ran on Windows; Wine couldn't run the version of DirectX it used.
If you're going to buy the Sims 3, you will get the most out of the game by either a) not going into Live mode, or b) if you do go into Live mode, realising that what you're essentially doing is directing/producing your own soap opera. I can see that having limited appeal for women, but I would have thought that even for them it would get old pretty fast, because there's only so many different kinds of drama that the Sims' interactions can generate.
I'd rather play Nexuiz, or Warsong Gulch in WoW, personally; those games generate much more of an emotional response.
I'm tired of the press and so-called "experts," taking the Chicken Little approach to security, personally. There are a few basic ground rules; if you follow them, 90%+ of the time, you're going to be fine.
1. Ideally, don't use a Windows machine on the Internet. (Yeah, right) If you must, however, don't browse sites devoted to smilies, ringtones, custom mouse pointers, or that sort of crap...you're asking for it that way.
2. If you use Linux or FreeBSD, use sudo. Do NOT be an idiot and just use root all the time, and don't use sudo without a password on it, either.
3. Use multiple disk partitions. On Windows, that means you can reinstall faster if you do get hit by something, and on Linux or FreeBSD, it hopefully limits the number of places an attacker can go.
4. Realise that while virii/trojans might be common on Windows, actual live attacks on individual machines (i.e., with an actual human 14 year old on the other end) are rare almost to the point of rendering the scenario academic. That's not to say that they don't occur at all, mind you, but there was this absolute paranoid idiot who I saw being interviewed a few months back, who was declared an, "expert," who spoke of using virtualisation and various other gratuitously overblown means of keeping people out of his systems, and also advanced the theory that the entire Internet could effortlessly be destroyed in around five minutes flat.
5. Virus scanners on Windows are hugely overrated. Use one if you must, but I've never seen an infested Windows box that didn't have multiple virus scanners running, thus proving that in the grand scheme of things, they really don't do all that much. A better idea is to learn to identify the types of sites that virii can typically be picked up from, and avoiding said sites.
Basic, minimal security, up to a certain point, is of crucial necessity, IMHO. Beyond that point, however, most paranoiacs are actually hobbyists who don't realise it. Their obsessive measures aren't truly as necessary as they think they are; for the most part they do what they do more simply because they like it, than because they actually need to.
Slashdot Mirror
The War on Drugs isn't one that they can hope to win, primarily because the enemy are their own constituents.
I don't consider marijuana a desirable substance myself (and stoners who insist on self-justification beyond all rationality, go away. Yes, I have smoked, and inhaled, despite your insistence that it is impossible for anyone who has smoked to have a negative opinion on the substance) but I also know very well that criminalisation does not work, and will never work.
As a (admittedly informally, and generally fairly secretively) practicing Shakta Hindu, I could also if I wanted, claim historical precedent for my own use of marijuana as a religious sacrament. (Although AFAIK, in India at least, marijuana is more commonly used in association with Shiva, but it has been consumed as part of the worship of Kali)
Although I hold nothing against other adherents of various religions who do so, I have made the decision not to do that, as my own experience has led me to believe that marijuana is not b primarily beneficial substance, at least in the case of my own specific physiology.
I acknowledge, however, that it is not up to me to make that decision for anyone else other than myself. I further acknowledge that the plant does have certain extremely legitimate medical uses; I have advocated at least trying it with a few people I know at times, when they have been in extreme pain.
There is a certain percentage of the population (whether they are a minority or not, I do not know specifically, and make no claim about) who whether for good or ill, are mortally determined to smoke marijuana. Given their level of adamancy on this especially, it is not the place of government to make the decision for these individuals as to whether they should be allowed to smoke or not, especially considering that such a decision is usually made against these individuals' implicit, if not explicit, consent.
It has long been my opinion that the American government is, and always has been, at its' heart, a fundamentally tyrannical and insidious institution, which will, at any opportunity afforded to it, enthusiastically act as the mortal enemy of its' own constituents. The long term war that the Drug Enforcement Administration has been waging against said constituents, is in itself compelling proof of this assertion.
The DEA, in its' own defense, would likely try to claim that many of the substances which it crusades against the use of are gravely harmful; sometimes lethally so. In the cases of heroine, cocaine, and methamphetamines in particular, I would not argue against such an assertion. However, whether the drugs themselves are lethal is not the point.
The point is that it should not rightfully be the role of government to act as a parental figure for its' constituents. As adults, said constituents are supposed to be able to serve that role for themselves.
I also believe that criminalisation, rather than reducing the use of these substances, in face greatly contributes to their appeal, as it is well known that both teenagers and retrograde adults take particular delight in doing certain things, primarily when they know that said things are illegal or taboo. If many of these drugs, marijuana included, we made legal, use of them would cease to appear to be an act of rebellion, and would instead become socially mundane.
A third point is that many of the entheogens have not been allowed virtually any academic study, because of a hysterical, knee-jerk governmental approach to criminalisation. Some early work was done with LSD, yes; but very little such work has been done with other substances such as MDMA. If this research was permitted to be conducted, more could likely be learned about the drugs' drawbacks, potentially beneficial uses, and guidelines could possibly even be developed for the safe and guided use of the substances by those who still wished to consume them.
...then it is worthwhile remembering that centralisation was its' most fatal
weakness.
In the original story, (the end of the T2 novel, or thereabouts) Connor won by
blowing up the central core under Cheyenne Mountain. SkyNET's primary
exploitable weakness was that it was never willing to truly reproduce, for
fear of losing control; that is, to create another AI with fully the same
level of functional intelligence that it had. (I believe personally that a
compelling case could be made for the assertion that SkyNET, as depicted, was
not truly strong AI, but I digress)
The point is that as far as creating genuinely effective weak artificial
intelligence is concerned, the decentralised/segregationist approach is the
correct one.
Given my own experience with FPS mapping, I also concur with the author of TFA
when he says that making AI choose the "best" choice 100% of the time, is
not the best tactical approach, over time. My own experience gradually
suggested that around 75% appears to be the magic number, as far as creating a
truly emergent, unpredictable opponent that humans will be unable to overcome.
Granted, said 75% is also only effective where there are a large number of
divergent solutions to a given problem, each with close to an identical level
of effectiveness, but with a few subtle points plus or minus, each way.
Even with a fuzzy, emergent system, the best trees still have a maximum number of
branches. The real trick however is not to hand code said trees at all,
because then you simply end up with static, rote heuristics. Rather, as the
author possibly implied, it is far better to attempt to code
observation/deduction capabilities, guided by the above percentage, and let
the system do the rest on its' own.
I still remain extremely skeptical, however, that humanity will ever see the
emergence of truly strong (human level or greater) AI. It is worth remembering that
strong AI is a fundamentally and profoundly atheistic concept; the possibility of it more or less presumes a definitely atheistic universe as a prerequisite. For those of us who believe in the existence of God, (or at least the soul) the idea (at least
in terms of non-biologically generated, acorporeal AI, a la SkyNET; AI derived
biomechanically is a seperate concept) therefore has some fairly
serious problems.
We've badly needed a system with support for open video formats, and without
the Flash prerequisite, for a long time now. This could potentially
dramatically increase FreeBSD/Linux's market share, as well. I've been
without Flash support since I first installed a month ago, and altho I've
since learned how to install it for FreeBSD, it is not a trivial process.
I am grateful to the Firefox developers for making this change, and can only
hope that YouTube in particular decide to support it, since that is probably
the main site where this could potentially end up being used.
I don't want to put words in anyone's mouth, but the way you paint it, "Open Source" is the whiny,
shallow little brother of Free Software.
I think you've got that backwards, my friend. The authors of this and similar rants; the people who primarily scream and cry and are paranoid about ensuring enforced reciprocity? That's the vaunted "Free Software" crowd, all the way.
...If you're not already using a FOSS operating system, (Linux or FreeBSD) you probably should be.
Microsoft bet on people not wanting to exercise personal responsibility; that is how they make their money. Windows makes life easier for you by providing you with a scenario where you don't need to take a month or so of your time to customise an open source operating system in order for it to be exactly the way you want it.
However, understand that like with anything else, an exchange is happening here. You want them to provide you with convenience, to make it easy for you, and to basically do pretty much everything for you. They therefore have every right (because you've given it to them) to screw you in whatever manner they feel like. If you uncompromisingly, unthinkingly give them responsibility for your welfare, don't be surprised when they do something which isn't in your best interests.
You can't have it both ways. You can't buy a fast food operating system and relinquish responsibility to a corporation in that manner on the one hand, and then expect it is going to be entirely and exclusively beneficial to you on the other.
It is a law of the universe; there is no free lunch, and in one way or another, you pay for everything.
Forum mongering / bug reporting. Hang out in the forums for the project, answer questions.
I agree with this. Work a bit slow? You might not want to allow Fark or Foobies.com on the clock, but the boss *could* think about telling the BOFH to allow workers to idle on Freenode. If you're using a generic open source app, go to its' relevant channel, and share your experience there with people who are having issues. It's free positive PR, and it will likely build good relations with the project's people in the event that you ever need to work with them in depth.
I wish the screaming, ranting Communists among us could start doing things like this. Instead of foaming at the mouth about how the evil corporations should be forced into contributing, produce ideas like the above, which demonstrate how workers can contribute. Many of them would probably be entirely willing to, if they only knew how.
If I had mod points, you'd get one.
This is how it is in the real world.
You would likely go a lot further by looking to the state of your own house, before condemning anyone else.
People who are paranoid about the amount that others reciprocate, can not, IMHO, honestly claim to be part of the proverbial "gift culture."
Said gift culture (and genuine adherents of it) is not concerned with whether or not reciprocation happens.
The giving doesn't rightfully occur with expectance of reciprocity. It doesn't rightfully occur with any preconception about or prejudice concerning end use. If you need to stop and ask yourself why you're doing something for someone else at all, you've already ruined the effect, and you're already doing it for the wrong reasons. Genuine compassion and altruism have no motive, ulterior or otherwise.
It isn't done because you expect to get something back. It's done, if for any conscious reason at all, because said degree of altruism is a part of your own identity. It needs to be done to maintain your own consciousness, your own empathy, your own identity, your own sanity.
I am, have always been, and will always be utterly convinced of the true moral superiority of the BSD license, and this is just one more reason why I remain in continual opposition to, and defiance of, Richard Stallman. Fear and paranoia about reciprocity, associated with open source, takes something which is, and has been, uniquely beautiful within overall human history, and unusually, genuinely noble for us as a species, and makes it something mean-spirited and ugly.
Larry Wall was right. That which is freely given, can only be freely given; it cannot be taken.
In case any of you don't know, the guy quoted there, David Miscavige, was named heir as the leader of Scientology by its' founder, Lafayette Ronald Hubbard, and from everything I've seen, is equally schizophrenic.
Scientology has destroyed countless lives. There are very few things about which I agree with Anonymous, but their quest for the end of Scientology is one of them.
Eventually, Scientology will be destroyed, all of the lives that it has taken will be avenged, and their wronged spirits will finally be able to rest.
You might have been able to survive everything that came before it, Dave; but you will not survive the righteous wrath of the 'Net.
The need to acquire things, more than any other single thing, comes down to one basic human need; to feel as though we are, in some way, superior to our fellow man.
Blizzard understood that implicitly, and three of their most successful games, Diablo, Diablo 2, and World of Warcraft, were essentially based on that principle from the ground up.
A multiplayer game doesn't need complex or innovative gameplay to be compelling, at all. All it really needs to do is provide ways for a player to think that he has a bigger dick than the other people he's playing with, and you can keep him perpetually addicted.
It's not about a rat pressing a lever and getting a food pellet, at all. It's about the rat thinking that he has bigger genitals than other rats.
How is pkgsrc better than ports and/or portage?
AFAIK, FreeBSD's ports is not portable to other distributions/operating systems. Pkgsrc is.
Also, as far as Gentoo is concerned, their code itself might well be the best thing since sliced bread, but from everything I've ever heard, socially speaking the developer community there is an unmitigated disaster. The douchebag factor is apparently even higher than with Debian, if that is possible. ;-)
I find it thoroughly depressing that that seems to be the prevailing opinion. That in itself just shows what a tremendous amount of damage Bush has not only caused to the IMAGE of the US, but to the US itself.
It wasn't just Bush, believe me. Some of us remember the Clinton Bodycount, as well as the fact that Waco happened on Slick Willy's watch, although he did a masterful job of letting Janet Reno take the fall for it. Waco never touched Clinton at all; from his perspective, it was as though it never happened.
I've seen it in the UK, no sooner did they step through the doors of No10, out came the efforts to switch off as many controls as they could get away with so they could fill their pockets as quickly as possible.
Yes, I'm aware of the effect that Prime Minister Wormtounge had over there as well, at least to a degree.
I'm going to be very interested in what he does for long term planning.
That is especially true when you consider that it is likely that a GOP administration would immediately follow his, which would also, knowing the Republicans, do their darnedest to undo whatever good he might have managed to achieve.
I was initially skeptical about the alleged, lauded virtue of Barrack Obama, but the more I see of his actions, the more I'm forced to concede that I was wrong, and that in this case, water genuinely has flowed uphill, to use that analogy.
Obama's level of integrity is genuinely intimidating, for the simple reason that an American President is, at this point in history, expected to be a thoroughly amoral and corrupt human being. That he isn't, is rightfully seen almost as a violation of physical law. Bush's degree of evil had almost become reassuring, purely because of its' level of routine familiarity. When he attempted to do something monstrous, it was entirely expected.
Even with Bush aside, it is also a paradox when considered in light of the dynamics of political power in general. Reading Machiavelli and virtually every other treatise on the subject, one is left with the overwhelming conclusion that the single greatest prerequisite of political power is amorality, to the extent that it can be said that an individual's degree of political power will be directly proportional to their level of amorality.
Given this, Dick Cheney is perhaps a more likely example of who we would ordinarily expect to hold the office of President, morally speaking, than Obama. Cheney is, according to virtually every depiction of him, a consciously, willingly, and indeed enthusiastically evil individual. He is, therefore, far more consistent, both from study of political theory in general, and observation of American political history in particular, with the type of individual who I would expect to hold the office of the Presidency.
It is said that within a democracy, a people get the leader they deserve. I'm not entirely sure what Americans have done recently to deserve a leader with Obama's comparitive level of decency, especially given that Bush was so far to the opposite, but even for us outside America, Obama's integrity is certainly very welcome.
It will be fascinating to observe just how far outside of the established, conventional rules Obama is permitted to go.
And to answer the poor soul that asserted that Ubuntu is the standard Linux - I am sorry for you.
Sorry, Chief, but Ubuntu is going to be the only Linux distro that gets above 5%, absolutely guaranteed. That means, by default, that it IS going to end up as the distro which the majority of people care about. I hate it myself, but it's the truth.
Debian becoming the standard is an example of the proverb that the shit always rises to the top.
Big cluestick: we are not your employees, we do not do your bidding.
Yes, but many of you do continually bleat like sheep about the fact that Linux doesn't have 100% desktop market share.
So you need to decide. Do you want to be iconoclastic, Commie, "fuck the machine," types? If you do, you can forget about the desktop, because the corporate world owns that. If you want the desktop, you're going to have to play in the corporate sandbox. There's no way around it.
Personally, I think Linux should leave the desktop, and just focus on being itself, irrespective of how obscure that means it would stay; but that's just me. Most people seem to want to hit the big time, and you absolutely cannot do that without selling out. It simply isn't possible.
a) Decide once and for all; client or server? If client, (which is what the desktop is) embrace that completely. Tell anyone who wants UNIX that they need to move to *BSD.
b) For sound, return to OSS. v4 is under the GPL now, so there's no reason not to. ALSA is over-engineered, unstable garbage. Get rid of it.
c) Standardise around GNOME. For my money it's the least bloated of the big two. In terms of features, truthfully I probably like KDE more, but it needs to lose weight before I'd advocate it.
d) Stop standardising around Debian, and stop listening to whoever keeps telling everyone to do so. Debian/Ubuntu are the two most poorly designed Linux distributions in existence. If fanboys want to respond to that, fine, but if I list my issues with Debian, I expect you to respond to me on those issues specifically, without simply resorting to the old standby of telling me that I'm ignorant.
e) Standardise around pkgsrc for package management. It's portable, it's solid, it has a lot of features, and it's written by people who, unlike many Linux developers, both care about design quality AND can actually code their way out of a wet paper bag. Do not listen to Debian fanboys who attempt to say otherwise.
f) Stop caring AT ALL about what the FSF thinks. If nVidia only distribute binary drivers, people are going to want them, period; and are going to use them, irrespective of what the cult decrees. I also don't want to hear from FSF cultists in response to this, either. I don't agree with you now, I'm not going to in the future, I think your organisation is a disease, and is the single worst thing about Linux, and I'd be much happier if it didn't exist, putting it bluntly; so don't bother.
g) If money is what it takes to cause FOSS developers to get serious, then so be it. Relicense under more commercially friendly licenses, (like the BSD license, for instance) and form companies around the relevant applications.
h) If the desktop is where the Linux community has decided it wants to go, Linus needs to be brought into line with that vision. At the moment, he is primarily concerned about big iron, because that is what the corporate hands that feed him primarily care about. If you want the i386 client desktop, that is where you need to put the entirety of your focus. Forget portability, forget the server, and focus purely on being an i386 client desktop. You're not going to get there any other way.
I've never used anything other than Reiser3 with Linux. Might not be the most reliable or fast, but it has other advantages.
- Undeletion.
- Partition resizing.
- Readable from within Windows via YaReG.
If Steve Jobs wants to deter people from buying from clonemakers, IMHO he should do a limited production run of machines which have his signature prominently on the case, and accompany it with some form of watermark that prevents forgery, as well.
Note that I'm not advocating anything fascist like Microsoft's Windows Genuine Advantage here either, in terms of *penalising* anyone whose machine isn't from Apple. I'm talking about complete use of the carrot here, not the stick.
If he made the production run which included his signature, sufficiently limited, then the machines which he signed could potentially gain value as collector's items, which would create demand for his product, as opposed to that of the clonemakers.
In a world where nearly anything can be copied, the only way to beat piracy is to create non-replicable value which comes from a single source. Make it signatures one year, and sets of unique, holographically watermarked images for subsequent years/versions. He should do a personal advertisement campaign promoting it, as well, where he himself talks to the public about it, and where he actively tries to draw an analogy between contemporary CDs, and practices of earlier times, where people bought items from individual craftspeople on a face to face basis. Obviously people can't go into an Apple store and see him face to face, no; but they can in the context of the ad campaign. I can imagine part of the speech that he could use, as well.
"My company and I have been in the computing industry for a long time. Clonemaker companies, on the other hand, are often a flash in the pan; here today, gone tomorrow. I'm not going to use the sorts of measures that other companies have done, to penalise people who engage in piracy, or to try and bully you into buying from me, as opposed to the clonemakers. I've seen enough such attempts fail, in order to be able to know that that isn't going to work. What I am going to do, however, is explain to you what I feel the benefits in buying from me are, as opposed to buying from the clonemakers.
The first two things you receive by buying your hardware and software from Apple, are peace of mind, and vendor accountability. Our machines do not use cheap, no-name hardware, but instead use components from known, branded companies (such as nVidia and others) on a consistent basis. This also means that you are given a warranty on parts that you can trust, and it also means that you are given initial hardware which you can trust as well.
The second thing which you are doing when you buy from Apple, is investing in the long-term future. Our hardware and software requires long man hours to produce, on an ongoing basis, and in a capitalist society, that in turn requires that our staff are paid for their labour, as well as the individual machine components being paid for. Clonemakers merely duplicate the hardware and software which we produce, but they do not engage in actual innovation themselves, and as such, if Apple were to become bankrupt, they would not be able to survive themselves either. Buying from us therefore helps to ensure the continued availability of our hardware and software, so that you will still be able to rely on Apple's computers and operating system for years to come.
The third thing you are receiving for your money when you buy from Apple, is perhaps the least tangible, but also the most important. It is the assurance that when you buy from us, you are acting with complete legal and moral integrity. From our observation of the election of the current American President, we are aware that integrity is something that is important to a high percentage of the population."
Fun fact; the MMORPG was actually considered canon. So when the game ends, that, rather than the third movie, will be the actual end of the story.
The fact that, from what I read at least, it was so story driven in nature was probably what ensured that it only had a finite lifespan. If WoW's devs hadn't screwed the class dynamics to the degree they have since 3.0, that game could have conceivably lasted more or less forever on the basis of the pre-existing content, without any further developer interaction.
MxO, however, was different. It was apparently built around ongoing episodic/developer involvement, and comparitively speaking there apparently wasn't a lot of repetitive/static content at all. As a result, once the devs stopped doing the live stuff, the game itself would die.
The franchise has existed for ten years, and that is a better run than many get; I know the screenplay of the first movie more intimately than Muslims are supposed to know the Qu'ran. Although I've still got it on my hard drive, I also wouldn't have watched it more than probably three times in the last five years; I saw it literally close to 100 times within the first six months of its' release, and I've since got it out of my system.
Adios, Neo. It's been a great ride.
Mount some of them read-only. Mounting /usr read-only AFAIK is advised practice with Linux, even if virtually nobody ever follows it because it's a pain in the ass.
Something else I forgot to mention, about why I feel more secure using sudo.
Unless you've written a bad shell script, one sudo invocation = one root command.
Granted, you can keep issuing dumb sudo commands one after the other, but it takes more effort to do, involving possibly having to re-enter your password multiple times, in other words also increasing the likelihood of you stopping to wonder wtf you're doing.
This also means I minimise the amount of time the root account is active, which makes me very happy as well. In my own mind anyway, less active root = more secure root. It means less chance that I've made a mistake, such as a blank or partly blank +x root shell script, which an attacker can then use as the equivalent of a blank cheque on the system.
It's also been pointed out before that many consider root too powerful, with a single overall super user representing a single point of weakness in the system. I'm currently researching the means to create a scenario with sudo where ports/upgrades are handled by a single user, and a few other things are all each handled by respective users as well, and said users will only have access to very specific directories, and very specific commands. Use of text editors in particular (vi(m), ed, ee, cat, sed, echo) will be tightly restricted.
It might end up meaning that I need to type in a few different passwords, but the upside is that if I ever was going to get a potential hacker, they wouldn't necessarily just be able to bank on getting a single root password for overall access to the entire system; if couldn't get the root password, they'd need to know around six others, and if they didn't know all of them, whichever users they had broken, would only have access to very specific subsections of the system.
I take umbrage when called an IDIOT for not using sudo. I've been an administrator for many years on numerous flavours of *nix and I've NEVER had a problem caused by misapplication of root priviledge.
Not long after the pain of installing Linux From Scratch, I accidentally typed in "rm -rf /usr" one evening when tired, distracted, and thinking I was doing something else. I've felt extremely uncomfortable using root ever since. ;)
Typing "sudo" in front of a command does not make you intellectually superior. What's to stop you from typing "sudo something_stupid"?
I use its' asking me for a password as the equivalent of a fairly strong confirmation prompt, and I nearly always have to consciously think in order to enter a password, so that also gives me the opportunity to reflect on what I'm doing. If it turns out that I've done something stupid, I can simply deliberately type in garbage instead of the password, in order to slam on the brakes.
Why not just run a Linux host, and run Windows in a VM for tasks that require Windows? You can have a semi-up to date backup of the VM file, so if it ever does decide to die, it'd be an easy recovery.
a) There's only a single application that I can think of which I might conceivably want or need to run Windows for, now.
b) I don't want that kind of overhead, and with my hardware, I probably can't really afford it either.
c) I don't need said overhead. If I run FreeBSD and do external backups of whatever I want to keep, assuming a 14 year old does somehow manage to hack my machine, all I need to do is reformat, change my passwords, restore from backups, and carry on with my life as usual.
If it turns Theo on to be paranoid, then I genuinely hope he enjoys himself, but the hysteria of "experts," aside, most of the rest of us truly don't need to be.
I got nearly all the expansion packs for the original, (I think Makin' Magic was the only one I missed) and three for the Sims 2.
The only two activities I ever really got out of the games were house designing, and trying to also create buildings which allowed the AI to perform optimally/doing stuff to mess with it. Trying to model the faces of famous people in the Body Shop in the Sims 2 and then upload said faces was a reasonably enjoyable method of wasting time, as well.
Apart from that, the Sims really doesn't offer anything at all unless you're playing it with someone else. If you're playing it alone, however, the boredom can literally become physically painful. To make it even worse, at least the Sims 2 only ran on Windows; Wine couldn't run the version of DirectX it used.
If you're going to buy the Sims 3, you will get the most out of the game by either a) not going into Live mode, or b) if you do go into Live mode, realising that what you're essentially doing is directing/producing your own soap opera. I can see that having limited appeal for women, but I would have thought that even for them it would get old pretty fast, because there's only so many different kinds of drama that the Sims' interactions can generate.
I'd rather play Nexuiz, or Warsong Gulch in WoW, personally; those games generate much more of an emotional response.
I'm tired of the press and so-called "experts," taking the Chicken Little approach to security, personally. There are a few basic ground rules; if you follow them, 90%+ of the time, you're going to be fine.
1. Ideally, don't use a Windows machine on the Internet. (Yeah, right) If you must, however, don't browse sites devoted to smilies, ringtones, custom mouse pointers, or that sort of crap...you're asking for it that way.
2. If you use Linux or FreeBSD, use sudo. Do NOT be an idiot and just use root all the time, and don't use sudo without a password on it, either.
3. Use multiple disk partitions. On Windows, that means you can reinstall faster if you do get hit by something, and on Linux or FreeBSD, it hopefully limits the number of places an attacker can go.
4. Realise that while virii/trojans might be common on Windows, actual live attacks on individual machines (i.e., with an actual human 14 year old on the other end) are rare almost to the point of rendering the scenario academic. That's not to say that they don't occur at all, mind you, but there was this absolute paranoid idiot who I saw being interviewed a few months back, who was declared an, "expert," who spoke of using virtualisation and various other gratuitously overblown means of keeping people out of his systems, and also advanced the theory that the entire Internet could effortlessly be destroyed in around five minutes flat.
5. Virus scanners on Windows are hugely overrated. Use one if you must, but I've never seen an infested Windows box that didn't have multiple virus scanners running, thus proving that in the grand scheme of things, they really don't do all that much. A better idea is to learn to identify the types of sites that virii can typically be picked up from, and avoiding said sites.
Basic, minimal security, up to a certain point, is of crucial necessity, IMHO. Beyond that point, however, most paranoiacs are actually hobbyists who don't realise it. Their obsessive measures aren't truly as necessary as they think they are; for the most part they do what they do more simply because they like it, than because they actually need to.