your post seams to bring up points that would discourage "laymen" from ever getting involved with the system because it is "too complicated".
It depends on the issue. You don't want everyone to take neurosurgery as a hobby, would you?
currently there are those "inside" the power circle (those with a law degree), who are given special treatment over Joe Schmoe off the street.
If that is your meaning, then I would argue that (1) rich people and (2) politically connected people are much more "special" than lawyers.
The free exchange of information will ALWAYS equalize power
No. That's one of the illusions of the 'net. In real world information counts, but other things, like guns, often count for much more.
There was a test recently mentioned on Slashdot. One of the questions was (a brief version): "You are in North Korea and have eaten the last of your food yesterday. Today morning the soldiers came and took away your husband. Your small child is chewing on an old leather sole and crying. Suddenly airplanes come and drop small devices. You pick up one. The device talks to you and teaches you how to use it. You now have full access to the Internet, all the information in the world is yours to use. What do you do?"
I think there are two plausible answers: (1) In a couple of days you die from hunger; and (2) Soldiers come and shoot you for picking up the device.
Do we have to know everything a lawyer does in order to understand law well enough to make a difference?
No, but we should realize that we are not professionals in this field and thus limited in our understanding of it.
I think we can and should freely discuss law whenever we want.
Of course we can and we should. Nobody is arguing about it. My point is, really, that people should not try to make decisions or argue about issues that they have no clue about.
we shouldn't be afraid to try to understand it.
The question isn't whether we should be afraid. The question is whether you are willing to spend time and effort to understand it. Some people are and some people aren't. There is no universal solution here.
First, doctors have the same right. Doctor-patient relationship is just as confidential as the lawyer-client one.
Second, the fact that it comes from common law is irrelevant. In Anglo-American legal tradition a lot comes from common law, but that makes it neither sacred, nor "special". Most property laws, for example, derive from common law.
Incidentally law is one of three basic branches of the government of the USA. Therefore special rights with regards to the law are special rights with respect to the mechanisms of government.
Not true. Law is not a branch of the government any more that, say, foreign policy is a branch of the government. In the US there is judicial branch which does have a lot of power, and yes, you have to be a lawyer in order to be a judge. However the reverse is not true -- not every lawyer is a judge, and only a small minority of lawyers directly influence the working of the judicial branch.
I would agree that lawyers would like to see themselves as special and have successfully erected quite high barriers to entry. However I don't see anything they have that, say, doctors don't have.
For example, the Chernobyl reactor didn't "melt down", it caught fire. (It was a graphite-moderated design, it got hot enough for the graphite to catch fire. Nasty.)
Nope, it did melt down. As far as I recall the hot pile of reactor fuel (all that was left of the reactor after it went out of control) ended up burning its way several tens of meters into the ground. Contamination of ground water was one of big Chernobyl worries.
For instance lawyers cannot be made to testify about conversations with their clients.
Doctors have special powers: only they can prescribe medications. Car mechanics have special powers: only they can give me the "state inspection passed" sticker. Licensed electicians have special powers: only they can install wiring in the new wing of my house. Shall I continue?
Why do people always start off a statement with IANAL?
Because they don't want to look like idiots when their off-the-cuff comment turns out to have no relationship to reality.
It seems to me that we as a society have become dependant on lawyers to tell us what is right and what is wrong.
You are confused. If anybody has a habit of telling what is right and what is wrong, it is priests, ministers, rabbis, imams, etc. The (non-litigation) lawyers generally either (1) tell you what the legal consequences of certain actions are likely to be, or (2) tell you what to do in order to achieve a certain legal objective. This does not have anything to do with "right" and "wrong", but rather deals with interpretation of laws.
Now, imagine a government where all people were created equal. You didn't have a class of citizens that had "special powers" within the power structure that is the government. (talking about the lawyers here)
Huh? I have some lawyer friends. I am not aware that they had any "special powers" in the government. Guess, I should be more polite to them next time...:)
The internet is equalizing these powers by making information FREE and EASILY ACCESSABLE.
You might want to think about the difference between information and knowledge. The fact that all US laws are available for you to read adds squat to your ability to evaluate a legal point.
Don't be afraid to learn about, interpret and question law.
Sure. No problem. Learning, interpreting and questioning are good things. Keep in mind, though, that law is a complicated subject and demands significant intellectual efforts to master.
If smart people (like us programmers) learn how the system works, there is no reason we cannot deal with the system ourselves,
I'll skip the obvious comments on "smart people like us" (too easy) and only note that yes, you can perfectly well deal with the system yourself if you take the trouble to learn. The problem is that there is a lot of learning to be done. If you are willing to spend a great deal of your time learning about law, you might as well go to a law school. If you cannot afford all that time and effort, you will not be quite competent.
It's like repairing a car. For example, I can change the spark plugs myself -- it's not hard and I don't need to go to a mechanic to do it. On the other hand, I know I am not a good car mechanic, so if I need, say, to have my transmission disassembled, I would take my car to a professional. I *could* learn to do it myself, but I don't think it is a good use of my time.
Lawyers are members of a technical and complicated profession (that's part of the reason why there are so many bad lawyers). Saying that you can easily master this profession is, to put it very gently, misleading.
No, North Korea is what happens to communism over time
Er, no. Communist countries start out this way. Russia post-1917 was a very ugly place.
True, Marxist communism is simply the ultimate in socialism;
Ain't no such thing as true, Marxist communism, and maybe there is a reason for this, no? Besides, from what I've read of pre-Marx utopian socialists (Campanella, etc) the world they were describing was pretty horrible place. You wouldn't want to live there.
I believe you're confused. Democrats are, at least on the political scale, closer to socialists/communists (government for the total good of the people) than fascists/nazis (government for the regulation and repression of the people), whom the Republicans are closer to
I believe you are confused yourself. Communists are a government for the total good of the people??? As in North Korea, for example?
Both communists and fascists advocate overwhelmingly powerful, repressive, "Big Brother" government. The difference is that communists will not tolerate any private companies (rivals for power) and usually engage in for-the-good-of-the-working-class rhetoric. Fascists tend to coexists with big business (as long as it toes the line) but usually have a hang-up on racial lines. Fascists and communists are basically brothers.
Neither current US Democrats, nor Republicans are even close to them. From my (libertarian) point of view Democrats are usually more disgusting because they like the Big Brother government much more than the Republicans. On the other hand, once Republicans start talking about Christian (=family) value... [gags, stops for a few moments, recovers]. It is true that libertarians are orthogonal to the (largely artificial) Democrat - Republican line.
ATM fees are there on the screen "Do you want to pay and continue?" (No, I want to get MY money without a $3.00 charge for a $0.35 transaction.)
You want to get your money? Fine, then go back to the bank where you deposited it. It will give it back to you for free. What? You want to get your money from another bank's ATM? And why should that other bank of which you are not a customer, let its ATM give money to you?
Can you imagine the outrage if folks got all the pre-tax income on their paycheck and then each pay period had to write out the checks to pay taxes rather than the current direct-extraction? There'd be riots.
It actually happens to a lot of people, particularly those whose income (usually not a salary) varies widely from month to month. Once a quarter you have to send large checks to Uncle Sam. Yes, it is very depressing.
I'll give you a rough PC definition: a PC is a computer that is:
(1) single-user, or at least designed as such (2) affordable enough for individuals to buy it
The original definition of a PC was that of an Intel-based box, as opposed to Apples, Macs, Commodores, Ataris, etc. The term gradually mutated to mean any and all personal computers.
Is the internet as it is today much better as it was in '90 or '95 or even a year ago?
The answer, of course, depends on your value system, but for me and, probably, 99.9% of everybody, it is YES.
Is it a good thing to have a lot of bandwidth gobbled up by people sending instant messages(of any sort, AOL, MS, Yahoo, etc.), porn, spam, and going to sites that don't enrich anyone's life?
Again, yes. This is called freedom. I haven't seen any evidence of backbone bandwidth scarcity recently, so why should you care? And who is going to judge what enriches other people's life? Or do you want to enforce on the 'net your or somebody else's idea of what enriches a life and what doesn't?
IMHO, a good internet user is one who uses the internet for some good
First, this presupposes an agreement on what "good" is. Second, I believe that freedom is about being able to make choices, in particular without being restricted by what the society thinks is "good" or "bad". You, basically, want to make the 'net non-free and for what? To save bandwidth??
[re MS Office] OK, maybe I can give it a "miracle" award for the amount of crap that's completely unnecessary to running a word processor grafted onto it
it is a GREAT FALLACY to say that the GPL ensures the survival of good OS projects in the face of money (or any other threats).
But of course. GPL has nothing to do with success of a software project. All it does is govern what could be done with it after it already became useful.
Now, you ask, why would our loverly OS company like RH or VA linux want to kill off an OS project? Well, pretty damn obvious I'd say.
Well, you are basically saying that good brains are a scarce commodity, so companies like RedHat would be able to collect them for their own pet projects and thus deny these brains to other worthy open-source projects. Yes, so what? Unless you want to somehow centrally allocate people to projects what someone thinks worthy, that's the way the world works. I don't see anything particularly bad about it.
We're talking about a tool. I don't go out and buy a new hammer or jig saw because the one I have "look[s] more and more older."
Well, first of all tools do not exist in a vacuum. If a currently available jig saw weights half of yours, cuts twice as fast and its saw never dulls, then yes, I would say that your saw is "old". And regarding the Palm, I can be quite specific.
First, Palm has a 160x160 grayscale screen. I think that the resolution is too low, and the screen itself is too small. I see no point is separate character-entry area -- it exists to mask the fact that the screen is small. I understand the trade-off between battery power and color screens, so I am not going to insist that Palm has a color screen. But I do think that the screen is "old".
Second, Palm is memory-limited. Again, long time ago memory was (more) expensive and 2-4Mb seemed a lot. Not any more. I know how Palm apps have a smaller memory footprint, etc. etc., but I'm more concerned with applications' data space. To me the fact that Palm doesn't have much RAM says "old".
Third, there are now much better processors available for handhelds (again, look at Casio). Palm has an "old" processor which is worse.
Fourth, the Palm was designed as a replacement for appointement/phone book. Three years ago that was a miracle of technology. No longer. Now I don't want my PDA just to hold my phones and to-do notes -- for example I want it to play music. I also want it to be expandable. In a sense, Palm is too specialized for me. Palm is related to my ideal PDA like a word processor (as in electronic typewriter with a small LCD screen) related to a real multipurpose computer.
To repeat myself, Palm made a virtue out of its shortcomings. I would agree that for a lot of people Palms make sense. Unfortunately, I'm not one of these people.
Oh, come on. Everybody knows that Santa just forks himself as many times as needed. The gift-delivery process is perfectly parallelizable, so, assuming Santa has decent parallel hardware, he should have no problems at all.
The only issue, of course, is that all these Santas has to be reaped properly afterwards. After all, you don't want hordes of Santa zombies wandering around town...
Things should be as simple as possible, but not simpler.
I think Palm is becoming too simple. Palm made a virtue out of necessity -- they are using at least three-year-old technology without any major changes (I tend to view the wireless connection as overpriced gimmick). Thus they HAVE to be simple -- they cannot manage intelligent complexity. That is OK as long as their target market is suits -- suits, after all, have never been known for the ability to deal with sophisticated devices. But for me Palm is like Microsoft's DOS -- very simple, but not necessarily up-to-date. I'd rather play with flashier toys and tinker with more complicated things.
Three years ago Palms were great. Now they look more and more older. Leaving aside the horrible user interface of WinCE, look at the latest Casio model (E-100/105) -- it is color, it plays stereo sound, its accessories include a digital camera, a hard drive (340Mb in your handheld -- how about it?) and a ton of other goodies.
I think that Palm is outdated and only the deficiencies of WinCE keep it at the top.
Actually, with groceries this system makes more sense than with, say, hotel rooms. The big advantage is that you know exactly what you are going to get -- you bid for a specific brand-name item.
And there is no haggling -- you go through a web page checking off boxes...
P.S. No, I'm not a Priceline user, but I saw their grocery pages.
Unless you define marches, sit-ins and boycotts as disruptive.
I do. I think you are confusing "violent" and "disruptive". Disruptive means that the targets of the process cannot carry on as if nothing is happening. Sit-ins, for example, are usually highly disruptive.
Both Gandhi and Martin Luther King understood the effectiveness of highly disruptive non-violent protests.
We need "peaceful" protests -- not disruptive actions. Yes we have to fight for our freedom rights, but doing childish things like ping floods, etc., will only give a very bad image to people outside of our circle, and actually advance the cause of those who want to take away our freedom...[snip]... What we need is to protest in a non-disruptive way.
I am usually not in favor of incitement to riots, but this position goes a bit too far the other way. Peaceful and non-disruptive protests make sense only when the imbalance of power between the two sides isn't too great. If your position on the totem pole is several feet below its bottom, then all the non-disruptive protests in the world aren't going to do you and your cause any good. At best you'll politely told to fuck off and not bother important gentlemen busy with their important matters.
The proper criterion for protest is not how disruptive it is, but rather how effective it is in achieving its aims. Sometimes the best way is to be very, very polite. Other times, being polite is useless but being obnoxious and irritating works wonders. It all depends.
I am not in favor of ping-flooding etoys' servers -- this attack is ineffective and is not likely to make etoys see the light. The management will just tell their tech people to fix it, and fix it they will, it's not hard at all. On the other hand, I am also not in favor of wringing one's hand lamenting the horrible state of affairs and writing whiny letters to congresscritters. If you want to do something, do something effective instead of pissing in the wind.
Athlon really doesn't yet have a chipset to run with. Sure, there is the AMD chipset, but it is far from what could be done.
Once the KX133 chipset from VIA is available (provided it's not a complete dud) and once KX133 motherboards start to appear, Athlon's lead over Intel would look much uglier (for Intel). That should happen by Jan '00. I would expect that with the proper chipset the whole-system performance advantage of Athlons vs Pentiums would be very very noticeable.
Note to Intel: it's not time to panic yet, but recommend going on yellow alert.
Since the replies up to the time I started writing this were needlessly rude and unpleasent, I thought I'd answer you.
Thank you for unexpected civility (and on Slashdot, of all places! What the world is coming to?...). The assholes were rude and wrong.
A quote from the OpenBSD web page:
NOTE: OpenSSH does not have the ssh 1.2.27 rsa bug.
but also
SECURITY FIX: The USA version of the ssl library package, called sslUSA26, contained buffer overflows. A binary patch is available for people who installed before December 3.
and
The third ssh jumbo patch is now available. Numerous (non-security) additions/changes have been made to OpenSSH since the OpenBSD 2.6 release.
Regarding the question of where the right middle should be, it seems logical to me to define it as follows: If some or other mental problem (whether biological or psychological) is impairing your ability to be functional and/or to be happy, and that problem cannot be solved "just by working it out for yourself", then you should probably fall into the "mentally ill" category
You've just exchanged one set of definitions for another one. What does 'happy' and 'functional' mean? They clearly do mean different things to different people. 'Functional' especially is a very vague term and highly open to abuse.
Consider this: let's say I refuse to work as a corporate drone and instead flip burgers for food and spend most of my time programming the latest and greatest game/tool/app/etc. Moreover, from the point of view of my friends and family, this behavior is irrational, bad for me, and nothing good will come out of it. Am I functional? Probably not. Would you, then, claim that I am mentally ill? and should be treated with mind-altering drugs? That sounds like a classic 1984/Brave New World scenario to me.
Besides you seem to imply that being happy is somewhat of an obligation. If you are not happy enough (again, from whose point of view?), you are mentally sick and should be treated. Even ignoring non-trivial time (what if I am unhappy for a day? for a week? for a month?) and causal (what if I am unhappy because I have cancer or AIDS?) issues, I am very uncomfortable with mandating happiness.
I also don't believe at all that only maladjusted people are capable of great works
I never said this. If you want a technical formulation of my point, here it is: historically, in the population of geniuses, the percentage of maladjusted people is much higher than in general population. It does not mean that you have to be mentally ill in order to create a masterpiece, but it means that there is a connection (which looks quite reasonable to me) between abnormal working of the mind and breakthroughs in creativity.
There is also a question of ethics involved: if it was true that eliminating mental illness would mean "no more masterpieces", does that make it OK to leave people untreated,
Again, I never even implied this. In fact my point was in favor of individual choice -- I was and am arguing, basically, for the individual's right to be unhappy and non-functional without the society forcing mind-altering drugs down his throat. If you want to take Prozac -- go ahead. But if I don't want to -- don't force me.
I think we are already looking at a two-tiered structure: there are sites (that could be found through standard search engines) and then there are databases/archives inside those sites.
It is getting more and more so that to find an answer to a somewhat obscure question, I need first to find major sites on the topic, and then do a search through their databases or mailing list archives. I believe this reflects a real-life structuring of the Web and will have to be taken into account by next-generation search engines.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course, his only real rival is a Communist.
Of course, ALL of these guys used to be members in good standing of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
Kaa
your post seams to bring up points that would discourage "laymen" from ever getting involved with the system because it is "too complicated".
It depends on the issue. You don't want everyone to take neurosurgery as a hobby, would you?
currently there are those "inside" the power circle (those with a law degree), who are given special treatment over Joe Schmoe off the street.
If that is your meaning, then I would argue that (1) rich people and (2) politically connected people are much more "special" than lawyers.
The free exchange of information will ALWAYS equalize power
No. That's one of the illusions of the 'net. In real world information counts, but other things, like guns, often count for much more.
There was a test recently mentioned on Slashdot. One of the questions was (a brief version): "You are in North Korea and have eaten the last of your food yesterday. Today morning the soldiers came and took away your husband. Your small child is chewing on an old leather sole and crying. Suddenly airplanes come and drop small devices. You pick up one. The device talks to you and teaches you how to use it. You now have full access to the Internet, all the information in the world is yours to use. What do you do?"
I think there are two plausible answers: (1) In a couple of days you die from hunger; and (2) Soldiers come and shoot you for picking up the device.
Do we have to know everything a lawyer does in order to understand law well enough to make a difference?
No, but we should realize that we are not professionals in this field and thus limited in our understanding of it.
I think we can and should freely discuss law whenever we want.
Of course we can and we should. Nobody is arguing about it. My point is, really, that people should not try to make decisions or argue about issues that they have no clue about.
we shouldn't be afraid to try to understand it.
The question isn't whether we should be afraid. The question is whether you are willing to spend time and effort to understand it. Some people are and some people aren't. There is no universal solution here.
Kaa
[re client-attorney priviledge]
First, doctors have the same right. Doctor-patient relationship is just as confidential as the lawyer-client one.
Second, the fact that it comes from common law is irrelevant. In Anglo-American legal tradition a lot comes from common law, but that makes it neither sacred, nor "special". Most property laws, for example, derive from common law.
Incidentally law is one of three basic branches of the government of the USA. Therefore special rights with regards to the law are special rights with respect to the mechanisms of government.
Not true. Law is not a branch of the government any more that, say, foreign policy is a branch of the government. In the US there is judicial branch which does have a lot of power, and yes, you have to be a lawyer in order to be a judge. However the reverse is not true -- not every lawyer is a judge, and only a small minority of lawyers directly influence the working of the judicial branch.
I would agree that lawyers would like to see themselves as special and have successfully erected quite high barriers to entry. However I don't see anything they have that, say, doctors don't have.
Kaa
For example, the Chernobyl reactor didn't "melt down", it caught fire. (It was a graphite-moderated design, it got hot enough for the graphite to catch fire. Nasty.)
Nope, it did melt down. As far as I recall the hot pile of reactor fuel (all that was left of the reactor after it went out of control) ended up burning its way several tens of meters into the ground. Contamination of ground water was one of big Chernobyl worries.
Kaa
Time is already metric, of course.
?????
24 hours in a day. 60 minutes in an hour. 60 seconds in a minute. Metric???
Kaa
Bur lawyers do have special powers
For instance lawyers cannot be made to testify about conversations with their clients.
Doctors have special powers: only they can prescribe medications. Car mechanics have special powers: only they can give me the "state inspection passed" sticker. Licensed electicians have special powers: only they can install wiring in the new wing of my house. Shall I continue?
Kaa
Why do people always start off a statement with IANAL?
:)
Because they don't want to look like idiots when their off-the-cuff comment turns out to have no relationship to reality.
It seems to me that we as a society have become dependant on lawyers to tell us what is right and what is wrong.
You are confused. If anybody has a habit of telling what is right and what is wrong, it is priests, ministers, rabbis, imams, etc. The (non-litigation) lawyers generally either (1) tell you what the legal consequences of certain actions are likely to be, or (2) tell you what to do in order to achieve a certain legal objective. This does not have anything to do with "right" and "wrong", but rather deals with interpretation of laws.
Now, imagine a government where all people were created equal. You didn't have a class of citizens that had "special powers" within the power structure that is the government. (talking about the lawyers here)
Huh? I have some lawyer friends. I am not aware that they had any "special powers" in the government. Guess, I should be more polite to them next time...
The internet is equalizing these powers by making information FREE and EASILY ACCESSABLE.
You might want to think about the difference between information and knowledge. The fact that all US laws are available for you to read adds squat to your ability to evaluate a legal point.
Don't be afraid to learn about, interpret and question law.
Sure. No problem. Learning, interpreting and questioning are good things. Keep in mind, though, that law is a complicated subject and demands significant intellectual efforts to master.
If smart people (like us programmers) learn how the system works, there is no reason we cannot deal with the system ourselves,
I'll skip the obvious comments on "smart people like us" (too easy) and only note that yes, you can perfectly well deal with the system yourself if you take the trouble to learn. The problem is that there is a lot of learning to be done. If you are willing to spend a great deal of your time learning about law, you might as well go to a law school. If you cannot afford all that time and effort, you will not be quite competent.
It's like repairing a car. For example, I can change the spark plugs myself -- it's not hard and I don't need to go to a mechanic to do it. On the other hand, I know I am not a good car mechanic, so if I need, say, to have my transmission disassembled, I would take my car to a professional. I *could* learn to do it myself, but I don't think it is a good use of my time.
Lawyers are members of a technical and complicated profession (that's part of the reason why there are so many bad lawyers). Saying that you can easily master this profession is, to put it very gently, misleading.
Kaa
100 bugs in the code,
100 bugs in the code,
Squash a bug, type "make all",
...
101 bugs in the code,
101 bugs in the code...
Sorry, I haven't woken up yet.
Kaa
No, North Korea is what happens to communism over time
Er, no. Communist countries start out this way. Russia post-1917 was a very ugly place.
True, Marxist communism is simply the ultimate in socialism;
Ain't no such thing as true, Marxist communism, and maybe there is a reason for this, no? Besides, from what I've read of pre-Marx utopian socialists (Campanella, etc) the world they were describing was pretty horrible place. You wouldn't want to live there.
Kaa
I believe you're confused. Democrats are, at least on the political scale, closer to socialists/communists (government for the total good of the people) than fascists/nazis (government for the regulation and repression of the people), whom the Republicans are closer to
I believe you are confused yourself. Communists are a government for the total good of the people??? As in North Korea, for example?
Both communists and fascists advocate overwhelmingly powerful, repressive, "Big Brother" government. The difference is that communists will not tolerate any private companies (rivals for power) and usually engage in for-the-good-of-the-working-class rhetoric. Fascists tend to coexists with big business (as long as it toes the line) but usually have a hang-up on racial lines. Fascists and communists are basically brothers.
Neither current US Democrats, nor Republicans are even close to them. From my (libertarian) point of view Democrats are usually more disgusting because they like the Big Brother government much more than the Republicans. On the other hand, once Republicans start talking about Christian (=family) value... [gags, stops for a few moments, recovers]. It is true that libertarians are orthogonal to the (largely artificial) Democrat - Republican line.
Kaa
ATM fees are there on the screen "Do you want to pay and continue?" (No, I want to get MY money without a $3.00 charge for a $0.35 transaction.)
You want to get your money? Fine, then go back to the bank where you deposited it. It will give it back to you for free. What? You want to get your money from another bank's ATM? And why should that other bank of which you are not a customer, let its ATM give money to you?
Can you imagine the outrage if folks got all the pre-tax income on their paycheck and then each pay period had to write out the checks to pay taxes rather than the current direct-extraction? There'd be riots.
It actually happens to a lot of people, particularly those whose income (usually not a salary) varies widely from month to month. Once a quarter you have to send large checks to Uncle Sam. Yes, it is very depressing.
Kaa
the definition of a PC
I'll give you a rough PC definition: a PC is a computer that is:
(1) single-user, or at least designed as such
(2) affordable enough for individuals to buy it
The original definition of a PC was that of an Intel-based box, as opposed to Apples, Macs, Commodores, Ataris, etc. The term gradually mutated to mean any and all personal computers.
Is the internet as it is today much better as it was in '90 or '95 or even a year ago?
The answer, of course, depends on your value system, but for me and, probably, 99.9% of everybody, it is YES.
Is it a good thing to have a lot of bandwidth gobbled up by people sending instant messages(of any sort, AOL, MS, Yahoo, etc.), porn, spam, and going to sites that don't enrich anyone's life?
Again, yes. This is called freedom. I haven't seen any evidence of backbone bandwidth scarcity recently, so why should you care? And who is going to judge what enriches other people's life? Or do you want to enforce on the 'net your or somebody else's idea of what enriches a life and what doesn't?
IMHO, a good internet user is one who uses the internet for some good
First, this presupposes an agreement on what "good" is. Second, I believe that freedom is about being able to make choices, in particular without being restricted by what the society thinks is "good" or "bad". You, basically, want to make the 'net non-free and for what? To save bandwidth??
Kaa
[re MS Office] OK, maybe I can give it a "miracle" award for the amount of crap that's completely unnecessary to running a word processor grafted onto it
One word: Emacs
Kaa
it is a GREAT FALLACY to say that the GPL ensures the survival of good OS projects in the face of money (or any other threats).
But of course. GPL has nothing to do with success of a software project. All it does is govern what could be done with it after it already became useful.
Now, you ask, why would our loverly OS company like RH or VA linux want to kill off an OS project? Well, pretty damn obvious I'd say.
Well, you are basically saying that good brains are a scarce commodity, so companies like RedHat would be able to collect them for their own pet projects and thus deny these brains to other worthy open-source projects. Yes, so what? Unless you want to somehow centrally allocate people to projects what someone thinks worthy, that's the way the world works. I don't see anything particularly bad about it.
Kaa
We're talking about a tool. I don't go out and buy a new hammer or jig saw because the one I have "look[s] more and more older."
Well, first of all tools do not exist in a vacuum. If a currently available jig saw weights half of yours, cuts twice as fast and its saw never dulls, then yes, I would say that your saw is "old". And regarding the Palm, I can be quite specific.
First, Palm has a 160x160 grayscale screen. I think that the resolution is too low, and the screen itself is too small. I see no point is separate character-entry area -- it exists to mask the fact that the screen is small. I understand the trade-off between battery power and color screens, so I am not going to insist that Palm has a color screen. But I do think that the screen is "old".
Second, Palm is memory-limited. Again, long time ago memory was (more) expensive and 2-4Mb seemed a lot. Not any more. I know how Palm apps have a smaller memory footprint, etc. etc., but I'm more concerned with applications' data space. To me the fact that Palm doesn't have much RAM says "old".
Third, there are now much better processors available for handhelds (again, look at Casio). Palm has an "old" processor which is worse.
Fourth, the Palm was designed as a replacement for appointement/phone book. Three years ago that was a miracle of technology. No longer. Now I don't want my PDA just to hold my phones and to-do notes -- for example I want it to play music. I also want it to be expandable. In a sense, Palm is too specialized for me. Palm is related to my ideal PDA like a word processor (as in electronic typewriter with a small LCD screen) related to a real multipurpose computer.
To repeat myself, Palm made a virtue out of its shortcomings. I would agree that for a lot of people Palms make sense. Unfortunately, I'm not one of these people.
Kaa
Oh, come on. Everybody knows that Santa just forks himself as many times as needed. The gift-delivery process is perfectly parallelizable, so, assuming Santa has decent parallel hardware, he should have no problems at all.
The only issue, of course, is that all these Santas has to be reaped properly afterwards. After all, you don't want hordes of Santa zombies wandering around town...
Kaa
The correct form of the KISS principle is:
Things should be as simple as possible, but not simpler.
I think Palm is becoming too simple. Palm made a virtue out of necessity -- they are using at least three-year-old technology without any major changes (I tend to view the wireless connection as overpriced gimmick). Thus they HAVE to be simple -- they cannot manage intelligent complexity. That is OK as long as their target market is suits -- suits, after all, have never been known for the ability to deal with sophisticated devices. But for me Palm is like Microsoft's DOS -- very simple, but not necessarily up-to-date. I'd rather play with flashier toys and tinker with more complicated things.
Three years ago Palms were great. Now they look more and more older. Leaving aside the horrible user interface of WinCE, look at the latest Casio model (E-100/105) -- it is color, it plays stereo sound, its accessories include a digital camera, a hard drive (340Mb in your handheld -- how about it?) and a ton of other goodies.
I think that Palm is outdated and only the deficiencies of WinCE keep it at the top.
Kaa
who wants to haggle over a can of soup?
Actually, with groceries this system makes more sense than with, say, hotel rooms. The big advantage is that you know exactly what you are going to get -- you bid for a specific brand-name item.
And there is no haggling -- you go through a web page checking off boxes...
P.S. No, I'm not a Priceline user, but I saw their grocery pages.
Kaa
Unless you define marches, sit-ins and boycotts as disruptive.
I do. I think you are confusing "violent" and "disruptive". Disruptive means that the targets of the process cannot carry on as if nothing is happening. Sit-ins, for example, are usually highly disruptive.
Both Gandhi and Martin Luther King understood the effectiveness of highly disruptive non-violent protests.
Kaa
We need "peaceful" protests -- not disruptive actions. Yes we have to fight for our freedom rights, but doing childish things like ping floods, etc., will only give a very bad image to people outside of our circle, and actually advance the cause of those who want to take away our freedom ...[snip]... What we need is to protest in a non-disruptive way.
I am usually not in favor of incitement to riots, but this position goes a bit too far the other way. Peaceful and non-disruptive protests make sense only when the imbalance of power between the two sides isn't too great. If your position on the totem pole is several feet below its bottom, then all the non-disruptive protests in the world aren't going to do you and your cause any good. At best you'll politely told to fuck off and not bother important gentlemen busy with their important matters.
The proper criterion for protest is not how disruptive it is, but rather how effective it is in achieving its aims. Sometimes the best way is to be very, very polite. Other times, being polite is useless but being obnoxious and irritating works wonders. It all depends.
I am not in favor of ping-flooding etoys' servers -- this attack is ineffective and is not likely to make etoys see the light. The management will just tell their tech people to fix it, and fix it they will, it's not hard at all. On the other hand, I am also not in favor of wringing one's hand lamenting the horrible state of affairs and writing whiny letters to congresscritters. If you want to do something, do something effective instead of pissing in the wind.
Kaa
Athlon really doesn't yet have a chipset to run with. Sure, there is the AMD chipset, but it is far from what could be done.
Once the KX133 chipset from VIA is available (provided it's not a complete dud) and once KX133 motherboards start to appear, Athlon's lead over Intel would look much uglier (for Intel). That should happen by Jan '00. I would expect that with the proper chipset the whole-system performance advantage of Athlons vs Pentiums would be very very noticeable.
Note to Intel: it's not time to panic yet, but recommend going on yellow alert.
Kaa
Since the replies up to the time I started writing this were needlessly rude and unpleasent, I thought I'd answer you.
Thank you for unexpected civility (and on Slashdot, of all places! What the world is coming to?...). The assholes were rude and wrong.
A quote from the OpenBSD web page:
NOTE: OpenSSH does not have the ssh 1.2.27 rsa bug.
but also
SECURITY FIX: The USA version of the ssl library package, called sslUSA26, contained buffer overflows. A binary patch is available for people who installed before December 3.
and
The third ssh jumbo patch is now available. Numerous (non-security) additions/changes have been made to OpenSSH since the OpenBSD 2.6 release.
Kaa
Regarding the question of where the right middle should be, it seems logical to me to define it as follows: If some or other mental problem (whether biological or psychological) is impairing your ability to be functional and/or to be happy, and that problem cannot be solved "just by working it out for yourself", then you should probably fall into the "mentally ill" category
You've just exchanged one set of definitions for another one. What does 'happy' and 'functional' mean? They clearly do mean different things to different people. 'Functional' especially is a very vague term and highly open to abuse.
Consider this: let's say I refuse to work as a corporate drone and instead flip burgers for food and spend most of my time programming the latest and greatest game/tool/app/etc. Moreover, from the point of view of my friends and family, this behavior is irrational, bad for me, and nothing good will come out of it. Am I functional? Probably not. Would you, then, claim that I am mentally ill? and should be treated with mind-altering drugs? That sounds like a classic 1984/Brave New World scenario to me.
Besides you seem to imply that being happy is somewhat of an obligation. If you are not happy enough (again, from whose point of view?), you are mentally sick and should be treated. Even ignoring non-trivial time (what if I am unhappy for a day? for a week? for a month?) and causal (what if I am unhappy because I have cancer or AIDS?) issues, I am very uncomfortable with mandating happiness.
I also don't believe at all that only maladjusted people are capable of great works
I never said this. If you want a technical formulation of my point, here it is: historically, in the population of geniuses, the percentage of maladjusted people is much higher than in general population. It does not mean that you have to be mentally ill in order to create a masterpiece, but it means that there is a connection (which looks quite reasonable to me) between abnormal working of the mind and breakthroughs in creativity.
There is also a question of ethics involved: if it was true that eliminating mental illness would mean "no more masterpieces", does that make it OK to leave people untreated,
Again, I never even implied this. In fact my point was in favor of individual choice -- I was and am arguing, basically, for the individual's right to be unhappy and non-functional without the society forcing mind-altering drugs down his throat. If you want to take Prozac -- go ahead. But if I don't want to -- don't force me.
Kaa
What about OpenSSH from OpenBSD people? Is it affected as well?
Kaa
I think we are already looking at a two-tiered structure: there are sites (that could be found through standard search engines) and then there are databases/archives inside those sites.
It is getting more and more so that to find an answer to a somewhat obscure question, I need first to find major sites on the topic, and then do a search through their databases or mailing list archives. I believe this reflects a real-life structuring of the Web and will have to be taken into account by next-generation search engines.
Kaa