The window manager for Sun's operating system (SunOS or Solaris, depending on where you split the hair) prior to CDE was called OpenWindows. "Windows" is a pretty generic term. I doubt this is the only example.
More and more I've moved from a pro-business stance to a pro-small business stance. Big businesses can (and do) to easily not give a damn about you if you provide < 0.0001% of their revenue stream. So I'm an AOHell/TW customer, I shell out $230/month, they dominate the market because "one stop shopping" is just THE thing to do, right? Now I have a problem. What am I going to do, cancel? If I do, will they even care? I already have Road Runner and they already don't give a damn about me as witnessed by their customer service. It's fun to call the 24 hour line to be told there's no one from RR in. Call back between foo and bar.
In short, I'm going to get my services from as many different places as I can, and as small a place as I can so they'll actually be motivated to CARE if I'm not happy with their service. If you want any decent quality of service, I strongly recommend you do the same.
My thought exactly. Anyone have a reference for just how much money the settlement would have really cost M$? As in the cost of printing a box, burning a CD, not the retail, education, OEM, or any other for-sale price on the software.
I guesstimated costs for software, support, etc. The physical box is only part of the costs, and given the drop in hardware prices across the board, generally they're not even most of the cost.
The *LAST* thing I want is a legislative "solution" to a problem the so called experts can't even agree on. Full disclosure or not, is scanning illegal, should it be, etc. Legislative solutions are far too often nothing more than new problems. Copyright violation is a problem. The DMCA is supposedly the solution. Terrorism is a problem. The solution, apparently, is to pass laws undercutting privacy and liberty in the states. Crime via computers is a problem, their solution was key escrow (thankfully not implemented), and now the FBI is writing computer viruses (Magic Lantern).
Thanks, but no thanks. I'd much rather stick to securing my boxes with the understanding that it's a hostile net out there than have my government tell me the One True Way to do so. Passing laws which only apply to less than 5% of the world's population will not make the net secure, and feel good legislation is something I can do without.
Why is that, every time a school cries out for computers or asks about how to better serve the students with what limited resources they have, everyone here rants about how technology should be more prevalent in schools. Now that yet another state has decided to actually get laptops for the kids, you all start bitching about how the money would be better spent? Please...get your opinions straight, people.
Because there's a difference, a gaping chasm, in fact, between responsible and effective use of technology and a wasteful "technology for technology's sake" approach. This is the latter. Transportation is important, too. We need our government to maintain roads, not give everyone a car.
If the state doesn't find a way to spend that money for the designated purpose, they lose it the next time the government comes around looking to hand out more cash.
I understand the concept all too well. The responsible and ethical thing to do would be to say "Thanks so much, but giving children laptops is not a productive use of $2k or so per student." As a taxpayer, I don't really care whether the money spent comes from my state or federal tax return. I care first whether it's something government even has any business being involved in, and second, if they're performing their role responsibly and with at least some semblance of efficiency. You don't have to be perfect, but you'd better not buy $800 hammers. Kindly stop looking at this as government money. It isn't. It's the money of thousands of hardworking taxpayers who had numerous productive uses they could have put the money to had it not been taken from them for this wasteful pet project.
Unlike the many urban folk that seem to live on/., less-populated states need to spend money on things like this just to help the kids in their states compete with the rest of the nation.
I disagree. The complaints you hear are from people (like me) who don't think using a computer is such an integral part of schooling that every student needs a computer 24x7. That's the wasteful part, and that's where it gets needlessly expensive. Computers simply don't add as much to the educational experience as you seem to believe. There are select exceptions (CompSci, some mathematics), and for those exceptions, "Students, please take a laptop on your way in to the classroom." or "This will be your laptop for the semester. Take care of it."
Also, even if Maine put up all of the money from the state's budget, which I seriously doubt, who cares? That kinda cash is a drop in the bucket compared to what most states spend on law enforcement and beurocratic bullshit. It's also a small amount compared to what many COUNTIES spend on their schools. And, unless you live in Maine yourselves, who cares? It's not your state deciding to spend the money.
It's hardly a drop in the bucket. Educating a student costs $4k-8k per year depending on your school system. Spending $2k or so on *each student* is therefore a rather massive increase. If it's justified and warranted AND we have the money, fine. When there's no established return on investment, I find it wasteful. I care when it happens elsewhere because other unwise politicians will emulate it.
Yes, they do realise that it will probably cost them a raise here and there
No it won't. Zero sum doesn't apply. Whine this year for laptops for everyone, whine next year for a raise. Voters have a hard time turning down more money for teachers. I happen to agree on that point. Most teachers aren't paid enough.
Many of them are just as concerned about the quality of education (or lack of) that they're being forced to give to students and how deficient the curriculums and materials are in the face of this tech-centric era.
Schools are not vocational education centers. They should teach you the academics. In other words, here's how to write a quality paper, not here's how to type in Word.
And what's to say that buying electronically published books to put on those laptops may not be cheaper in the long run than buying paper books themselves...
You're still missing the point. It isn't about dollars, its about effective use of a limited resource. Books remain a more friendly medium. It's easier to read a book, you won't get repetitive motion problems from a book, you won't get a headache from staring at a book all day. We have a nice, long history of students learning effectively from books. If you want to throw them out in favor of something else, PROVE (do a peer reviewed study) that something else works at least as well FIRST. Once you've shown that, only then do I even care whether it costs more or less.
Republicans were against strong central government. They still are compared to Democrats, but not in an absolute sense enough to be really meaningful. Both parties have pretty much devolved to protecting their own power base by pandering to one group or another. Fortunately, we have other choices.
We like to say the solution is largely policy based, but IMO that's largely wrong. What we too often end up with is policy that doesn't necessarily have technical merit. What we need is education, top to bottom, so the high level guys drafting policies write a good one, not one that makes those who push the buttons to implement it chuckle and the end users just work around it.
I think you're dead on that what's missing is intelligent human beings who can look at a particular instance and correctly apply security procedures, including but not limited to policies, to protect assets to the degree warranted by business needs.
While your point is a good one, call me pedantic but the loss of life in China is not the responsibility of the Nazis. It is Japan's.
Quite right. My intent was to say that they're responsible for some number between 6,000,000 and 53,000,000. I speculate that that number is substantially greater than 6,000,000, but I couldn't find a handy reference to tell me just who killed who in the few minutes I had available. My point was just that a lot of people lost their lives to Hitler and his Nazis. We do them a disservice to forget that they were not all Jewish civilians in Europe.
It does make you wonder about the wisdom of appeasing Hitler by France and Britain during his rise to power, though.
It doesn't make me wonder, it makes me think that might be one of the greatest blunders in history. Of course hindsight is 20/20. Still, I hope we learned something. That was a hell of a price to pay if we didn't.
I have heard of the Morris worm. I haven't heard of the Morris Virus, though. The Morris worm was released (accidentally, as I recall) in 1988. If you need to go back 13 years to find a counter to my claim, I think you're helping my argument, not yours.:) If I can help out, sadmind/IIS is a much more recent example, but still that's one and there have been multiple MSTDs since then. I'm still getting Nimda hits today.
I suppose you think that SendMail and BIND are that much more secure?
More secure than IIS? Absolutely. I base that on the empirical evidence that IIS has been hacked to bits this year. Neither Sendmail nor BIND has had the same record. Yes, both have had a checkered past, but neither is as bad as IIS.
MS DOES have a Virus problem-- I noticed this back when Concept came out, as did, I am sure, a whole lot of others.
I noticed back in the days of DOS. Concept, if I'm remembering correctly (excuse me for not verifying my facts here) just introduced us to widespread macro viruses. I'm still upset with Bill for invalidating the once common statement, "You can't get a virus through email."
However, open source does not NECESSARILY mean more secure. It just means that single security problems can be more rapidly patched. However, an insecurely designed program is inherently insecure.
I couldn't agree more. I've never bought into the many eyes theory. Millions may use sendmail, but I very seriously doubt more than a handful audit the code, and I'd bet fewer than 1% even go so far as to *look* at the code. Many eyes? No. Just many fingers typing./configure;make;sudo make install.
It comes to this, really. I see M$ boxes compromised en masse so routinely that its just sad. I'm not talking about which is more secure in theory, I'm just counting corpses.
There are no internet viruses. That's Microsoftese for MSTDs (MicroSoft Transmitted Diseases). These "internet viruses" are, for me, nothing more than academic interest as I watch them bounce harmlessly off software which isn't both bug ridden and misfeatured to the point that any script kiddie can run their code on your box.
Repeat after me. MSTDs. Lets get it to catch on. Just imagine how pissed Bill will be.:)
National Geographic had an article on this some years ago. Particles have been found. Not many, and not large, but they have been found. My memory is mainly of the picture, which IIRC, was of about 7 particles less than 1mm across.
Maybe, or maybe your sysadmin is so hopelessly overworked he can't possibly hold everyone's hand. It goes both ways. My position is basically, "I'm here to help you work better, faster, more securely, and in general hide the nasty side of computing so you see nothing but the good side." That said, there's still only so many hours in a day. It does happen that someone wants help and I can't help them because I'm busy helping 20 other people. Or I'm trying to manage security issues so we don't get hacked from here to next Tuesday, which, if it happens, means you'll get nothing whatsoever done until the mess is cleaned up.
To quote me (:P), "Every job is easy until its yours."
It takes more than programmers to make a quality project. In that particular example that bit of poor judgement should come out in code review and the nitwit developer told to knock it off. How about we start distributing paychecks by employee number, oh, and you don't get to know what your employee number is. You'll have to figure it out by context.
Evil or not, it hinders the utility of the software because it isn't policy-free. That's one of the software attributes which are commonly considered "good". Software shouldn't tell you what you can do any more than it has to. Word processing software shouldn't make it harder to write a blistering letter to the editor than to write a recipe. If it does, it isn't a good tool, and isn't properly serving you. If it's neither of those, why should you pay good money for it?
Previous attempts at this have failed. This one will too. They will try again with yet another plan. Loop until universe ends.
TV ratings and the V-Chip were a way to "save our children", Now the groups that pushed for them are upset that noone but them are using them to block what kids see.
Previous attempts have also worked. Take movie ratings. I have a pretty good idea of what will be in an R rated movie and know it isn't things I want my young kids to see, so I don't take them. If we're sitting down together watching TV and something comes on with a rating that makes me believe it won't be appropriate, I turn something else on.
I don't know what the groups which advocated this are doing, or are upset about, but I don't believe there's any necessity that automatic blocking be used. In fact, I'd say its harmful because it yet again lessens parental responsibility to take care of their kids. The TV isn't a babysitter. If you can't be bothered to supervise your kids TV watching, get rid of the TV or don't have kids.
That said, this isn't censorship. No one's saying you can't look at whatever you want. Personally, I welcome this system and would like a browser that can block based on content. If I'm at work and mistype www.whitehouse.com instead of www.whitehouse.gov I'd *much* rather have the site blocked.
Childhood is supposed to be a time to train children to be adults. What happens to these kids when they get out into the unfiltered world on their own? The answers seem to be overindulgence in the things that they were forbidden to do by their parents. This leads to a bunch of self-destructive adults.
Seems to me that filters are a panecia for parents who are afraid or unable to teach their children about the real world.
That couldn't be more untrue. Children aren't interchangeable blocks. There are things a 17 year old should be taught that would be meaningless to a 4 year old. Childhood isn't "supposed" to be anything, unless you have a copy of the design specs for the species. Childhood is a time when we're not particularly good at making responsible decisions during which we rely on adults to keep us from ruining our lives too badly. It is critically important to remember that they aren't just smaller, less experienced versions of us. Their capacity to learn and understand depends on where, developmentally, they are. One of the common examples of this is to take a quantity of water and put it in a clear container, then pour that exact same water into another clear container of wider diameter. Ask a young child (IIRC, I tried this on a 5 year old cousin) which container has more water in it. They'll invariably say its the one with the narrower diameter (and hence higher level). You will be absolutely unable to convince them otherwise even when you point out its the same water, so they must have the same amount (unless you get a child who gives whatever answer they think you want).
You can't just expose kids to sexuality, violence, war, terrorism (and no, I'm not saying they're equivalent) and just explain it and all's well. They are children, not adults. They aren't ready for all the nastiness in the modern adult world. That's not to say they won't cope in some way. They will. That they'll cope with it does not mean that it isn't harmful.
I see the reasoning but have never understood the logic. A bunch of shotguns is no match for the US government in any event... or have you been stockpiling nukes and not telling anyone? I fail to see how any collection of ordinary citizens is going to be "better armed" than the United States Army.
They can be better armed because there are many, many more of them. Imagining some provication which would cause the US populace to begin a revolution, I really wonder whether the US Army would happily go about killing off the population who are, after all, their brothers, sisters, parents, grandparents, etc. Put another way, they don't have to be better armed. They have to have the ability to pose some resistance.
An armed population is a deterrent. Without it (as in many countries) the government knows there is no effective remedy for the civilian population when their rights are violated. Take for example the recent "ethnic cleansing" in Serbia. Given the choice, had I been an Albanian living in Serbia, I'd want to meet the guys coming to kill my family gun in hand. Some chance is always better than no chance.
Some source I read described him as "(D-Disney)" which I though both appropriate and really funny.:)
If it makes you feel better, I think Republicans are bad, but Democrats worse. Last election I started calling them Republicrats because I couldn't figure out how their positions differed in any significant way. Both for prescription drug "gimme" programs, both for a tax cut, etc.
BTW, Flamebait? Somebody's warm, fuzzy, democrat feelings get hurt?
Of course, the competition come election time is usually pathetic, but that's a different story.
Yes, true. Run for office yourself.
Another thing, it seems to me that a good proportion of our population is technically illiterate.
True again. We should be educating the technically illiterate rather than snubbing them as we so often do. This does matter to Joe Sixpack, they just haven't the background to see how.
Excuse me, but the security community is not obligated to protect anyone but their clients. Where Microsoft is concerned, that's best accomplished by using something else. This reminds me of the asinine congresscritter who lambasted some poor antivirus guy for the perceived failure of the AV industry to protect us against the virus of the day (Melissa? It was before CR). These nitwits entirely fail to understand that the AV industry only exists because Microsoft, and ONLY Microsoft, deeply suck at writing secure code. Viruses are not a significant threat on Macs, nor or they on Unix. I can't think of any OS on which they're as endemic a problem as Windows. Its the same here. The problem isn't the security industry, the problem is that we NEED a security industry.
Poor Microsoft. They crush their competitors and still have the testicular fortitude to whine that we don't do their job for them.
Right now, the USA Act says that system administrators should be able to monitor anyone they deem a "computer trespasser."
And so should they. I'm more annoyed that, according to some interpretations of law, if you break into my computer and I try to find out what you're doing, I've committed an illegal wiretap. Scuse me? The law should recognized that networked computer systems are fundamentally different. Someone manages them, and as a part of this, checks for people who shouldn't be there, monitors performance, etc, and that this NECESSARILY involves collecting some minimal data about what you're doing. If my network goes to hell, I'm going to check the network traffic to see what's causing it and might happen to notice your system connected to slashdot.org:80 in addition to the DDoS attack. Using systems like this necessarily means the people who manage it will see what you're doing unless you take steps to prevent it. System owners do have a legitimate right and interest in seeing what happens on boxes they own. They have a legitimate right and interest in capturing all data an intruder sends in order that they can learn how they were compromised and prevent it in the future. To say otherwise is to assert that I should close my eyes if I notice you trying to break into my house, fumble my way to the phone, and call the police.
Uncle Sam, on the other hand, should have a court order in hand in order to prevent abuses which have been too often seen in the past.
My comments are directed to open source software in general, not Linux in particular. I haven't had problems getting the kernel to do anything I've needed it to do. I did feel the need to buy the book to write my own kernel modules, but I think that's reasonable. Some open source software has excellent documentation. Apache, for example, has never failed to answer any questions I've had in the documentation on their web site. OpenSSL, at least when I needed to figure it out, was virtually unusable unless you wanted to wade through examples and other existing code. That is *NOT* documentation. At one point, not too long ago, the documentation consisted of 3 barely written man pages. My point is that when you buy commercial software, you generally are guaranteed to get something. No such guarantee exists in OSS. You get whatever the developers feel like providing, because fundamentally they're writing something they want to use. It'll be good enough for their purposes, and as well documented as they want it to be. Sometimes that's not good enough. M$'s operating systems and applications won't generally garner praise from me, but I will say that its a virtual certainty that there is included documentation or a book to buy. You don't have to wait for it to become popular enough for O'Reilly to write one.
I guess I'm also saying pick which side of the fence you want to be on. Are we saying don't whine about what you get because you didn't pay anything for it and should therefore be expected to work harder to get it to work, or are we saying Open Source is a viable alternative to commercial software? You can't have it both ways. More to the point, your potential customers (users, if you prefer) won't let you have it both ways. People have work to do and killing a day or two of work to figure out how to make the software do something is very often not acceptable.
I'm not a huge Linux fan. I try to objectively analyze whether Linux is the right solution, but truthfully I'd rather support the guys who, like Sun, put money into making Unix something the OSS guys liked enough to copy. But you know, after a while the knife in the back starts to hurt just a little too much. Scott McNealy, I don't know who the hell you think you are to undermine or attempt to undermine my privacy in this boneheaded, useless idea, but you have, if nothing else, simplified my decision process in whether or not I should deploy s Sun solution.
I won't use open source software because it's inherently better. It isn't. I won't use it because it's morally better. It isn't. But I also won't use commercial software and hardware produced by companies who think their role in the world is not to produce products and services which fulfill my needs, but to twist the politial world into an image which furthers their ends, or is tailored to their personal political agendas or beliefs.
Put simply, and excuse me for being a bit annoyed at the moment, if you want my business, build a good box, write quality software, and shut your mouth. I resent you using the soapbox of your position in the industry, which you have ONLY because I and people like me buy your products, to promote your political agenda.
Slashdot Mirror
The window manager for Sun's operating system (SunOS or Solaris, depending on where you split the hair) prior to CDE was called OpenWindows. "Windows" is a pretty generic term. I doubt this is the only example.
In short, I'm going to get my services from as many different places as I can, and as small a place as I can so they'll actually be motivated to CARE if I'm not happy with their service. If you want any decent quality of service, I strongly recommend you do the same.
My thought exactly. Anyone have a reference for just how much money the settlement would have really cost M$? As in the cost of printing a box, burning a CD, not the retail, education, OEM, or any other for-sale price on the software.
I guesstimated costs for software, support, etc. The physical box is only part of the costs, and given the drop in hardware prices across the board, generally they're not even most of the cost.
Thanks, but no thanks. I'd much rather stick to securing my boxes with the understanding that it's a hostile net out there than have my government tell me the One True Way to do so. Passing laws which only apply to less than 5% of the world's population will not make the net secure, and feel good legislation is something I can do without.
Because there's a difference, a gaping chasm, in fact, between responsible and effective use of technology and a wasteful "technology for technology's sake" approach. This is the latter. Transportation is important, too. We need our government to maintain roads, not give everyone a car.
I understand the concept all too well. The responsible and ethical thing to do would be to say "Thanks so much, but giving children laptops is not a productive use of $2k or so per student." As a taxpayer, I don't really care whether the money spent comes from my state or federal tax return. I care first whether it's something government even has any business being involved in, and second, if they're performing their role responsibly and with at least some semblance of efficiency. You don't have to be perfect, but you'd better not buy $800 hammers. Kindly stop looking at this as government money. It isn't. It's the money of thousands of hardworking taxpayers who had numerous productive uses they could have put the money to had it not been taken from them for this wasteful pet project.
I disagree. The complaints you hear are from people (like me) who don't think using a computer is such an integral part of schooling that every student needs a computer 24x7. That's the wasteful part, and that's where it gets needlessly expensive. Computers simply don't add as much to the educational experience as you seem to believe. There are select exceptions (CompSci, some mathematics), and for those exceptions, "Students, please take a laptop on your way in to the classroom." or "This will be your laptop for the semester. Take care of it."
It's hardly a drop in the bucket. Educating a student costs $4k-8k per year depending on your school system. Spending $2k or so on *each student* is therefore a rather massive increase. If it's justified and warranted AND we have the money, fine. When there's no established return on investment, I find it wasteful. I care when it happens elsewhere because other unwise politicians will emulate it.
No it won't. Zero sum doesn't apply. Whine this year for laptops for everyone, whine next year for a raise. Voters have a hard time turning down more money for teachers. I happen to agree on that point. Most teachers aren't paid enough.
Schools are not vocational education centers. They should teach you the academics. In other words, here's how to write a quality paper, not here's how to type in Word.
You're still missing the point. It isn't about dollars, its about effective use of a limited resource. Books remain a more friendly medium. It's easier to read a book, you won't get repetitive motion problems from a book, you won't get a headache from staring at a book all day. We have a nice, long history of students learning effectively from books. If you want to throw them out in favor of something else, PROVE (do a peer reviewed study) that something else works at least as well FIRST. Once you've shown that, only then do I even care whether it costs more or less.
Republicans were against strong central government. They still are compared to Democrats, but not in an absolute sense enough to be really meaningful. Both parties have pretty much devolved to protecting their own power base by pandering to one group or another. Fortunately, we have other choices.
I think you're dead on that what's missing is intelligent human beings who can look at a particular instance and correctly apply security procedures, including but not limited to policies, to protect assets to the degree warranted by business needs.
Quite right. My intent was to say that they're responsible for some number between 6,000,000 and 53,000,000. I speculate that that number is substantially greater than 6,000,000, but I couldn't find a handy reference to tell me just who killed who in the few minutes I had available. My point was just that a lot of people lost their lives to Hitler and his Nazis. We do them a disservice to forget that they were not all Jewish civilians in Europe.
It doesn't make me wonder, it makes me think that might be one of the greatest blunders in history. Of course hindsight is 20/20. Still, I hope we learned something. That was a hell of a price to pay if we didn't.
I have heard of the Morris worm. I haven't heard of the Morris Virus, though. The Morris worm was released (accidentally, as I recall) in 1988. If you need to go back 13 years to find a counter to my claim, I think you're helping my argument, not yours.
More secure than IIS? Absolutely. I base that on the empirical evidence that IIS has been hacked to bits this year. Neither Sendmail nor BIND has had the same record. Yes, both have had a checkered past, but neither is as bad as IIS.
I noticed back in the days of DOS. Concept, if I'm remembering correctly (excuse me for not verifying my facts here) just introduced us to widespread macro viruses. I'm still upset with Bill for invalidating the once common statement, "You can't get a virus through email."
I couldn't agree more. I've never bought into the many eyes theory. Millions may use sendmail, but I very seriously doubt more than a handful audit the code, and I'd bet fewer than 1% even go so far as to *look* at the code. Many eyes? No. Just many fingers typing
It comes to this, really. I see M$ boxes compromised en masse so routinely that its just sad. I'm not talking about which is more secure in theory, I'm just counting corpses.
Repeat after me. MSTDs. Lets get it to catch on. Just imagine how pissed Bill will be.
Call me pedantic, but the Nazis are responsible for quite a few more than 6,000,000 deaths. Granted, that link lists totals for all of WWII, but I think we can be sure the Nazis are responsible for a bit more than 6,000,000 with over 52,000,000 total dead.
National Geographic had an article on this some years ago. Particles have been found. Not many, and not large, but they have been found. My memory is mainly of the picture, which IIRC, was of about 7 particles less than 1mm across.
To quote me (:P), "Every job is easy until its yours."
It takes more than programmers to make a quality project. In that particular example that bit of poor judgement should come out in code review and the nitwit developer told to knock it off. How about we start distributing paychecks by employee number, oh, and you don't get to know what your employee number is. You'll have to figure it out by context.
Evil or not, it hinders the utility of the software because it isn't policy-free. That's one of the software attributes which are commonly considered "good". Software shouldn't tell you what you can do any more than it has to. Word processing software shouldn't make it harder to write a blistering letter to the editor than to write a recipe. If it does, it isn't a good tool, and isn't properly serving you. If it's neither of those, why should you pay good money for it?
Previous attempts have also worked. Take movie ratings. I have a pretty good idea of what will be in an R rated movie and know it isn't things I want my young kids to see, so I don't take them. If we're sitting down together watching TV and something comes on with a rating that makes me believe it won't be appropriate, I turn something else on.
I don't know what the groups which advocated this are doing, or are upset about, but I don't believe there's any necessity that automatic blocking be used. In fact, I'd say its harmful because it yet again lessens parental responsibility to take care of their kids. The TV isn't a babysitter. If you can't be bothered to supervise your kids TV watching, get rid of the TV or don't have kids.
That said, this isn't censorship. No one's saying you can't look at whatever you want. Personally, I welcome this system and would like a browser that can block based on content. If I'm at work and mistype www.whitehouse.com instead of www.whitehouse.gov I'd *much* rather have the site blocked.
That couldn't be more untrue. Children aren't interchangeable blocks. There are things a 17 year old should be taught that would be meaningless to a 4 year old. Childhood isn't "supposed" to be anything, unless you have a copy of the design specs for the species. Childhood is a time when we're not particularly good at making responsible decisions during which we rely on adults to keep us from ruining our lives too badly. It is critically important to remember that they aren't just smaller, less experienced versions of us. Their capacity to learn and understand depends on where, developmentally, they are. One of the common examples of this is to take a quantity of water and put it in a clear container, then pour that exact same water into another clear container of wider diameter. Ask a young child (IIRC, I tried this on a 5 year old cousin) which container has more water in it. They'll invariably say its the one with the narrower diameter (and hence higher level). You will be absolutely unable to convince them otherwise even when you point out its the same water, so they must have the same amount (unless you get a child who gives whatever answer they think you want).
You can't just expose kids to sexuality, violence, war, terrorism (and no, I'm not saying they're equivalent) and just explain it and all's well. They are children, not adults. They aren't ready for all the nastiness in the modern adult world. That's not to say they won't cope in some way. They will. That they'll cope with it does not mean that it isn't harmful.
They can be better armed because there are many, many more of them. Imagining some provication which would cause the US populace to begin a revolution, I really wonder whether the US Army would happily go about killing off the population who are, after all, their brothers, sisters, parents, grandparents, etc. Put another way, they don't have to be better armed. They have to have the ability to pose some resistance.
An armed population is a deterrent. Without it (as in many countries) the government knows there is no effective remedy for the civilian population when their rights are violated. Take for example the recent "ethnic cleansing" in Serbia. Given the choice, had I been an Albanian living in Serbia, I'd want to meet the guys coming to kill my family gun in hand. Some chance is always better than no chance.
If it makes you feel better, I think Republicans are bad, but Democrats worse. Last election I started calling them Republicrats because I couldn't figure out how their positions differed in any significant way. Both for prescription drug "gimme" programs, both for a tax cut, etc.
BTW, Flamebait? Somebody's warm, fuzzy, democrat feelings get hurt?
Yes, true. Run for office yourself.
True again. We should be educating the technically illiterate rather than snubbing them as we so often do. This does matter to Joe Sixpack, they just haven't the background to see how.
Poor Microsoft. They crush their competitors and still have the testicular fortitude to whine that we don't do their job for them.
And so should they. I'm more annoyed that, according to some interpretations of law, if you break into my computer and I try to find out what you're doing, I've committed an illegal wiretap. Scuse me? The law should recognized that networked computer systems are fundamentally different. Someone manages them, and as a part of this, checks for people who shouldn't be there, monitors performance, etc, and that this NECESSARILY involves collecting some minimal data about what you're doing. If my network goes to hell, I'm going to check the network traffic to see what's causing it and might happen to notice your system connected to slashdot.org:80 in addition to the DDoS attack. Using systems like this necessarily means the people who manage it will see what you're doing unless you take steps to prevent it. System owners do have a legitimate right and interest in seeing what happens on boxes they own. They have a legitimate right and interest in capturing all data an intruder sends in order that they can learn how they were compromised and prevent it in the future. To say otherwise is to assert that I should close my eyes if I notice you trying to break into my house, fumble my way to the phone, and call the police.
Uncle Sam, on the other hand, should have a court order in hand in order to prevent abuses which have been too often seen in the past.
I thought she did his thing, but perhaps I'm misunderstanding.
I guess I'm also saying pick which side of the fence you want to be on. Are we saying don't whine about what you get because you didn't pay anything for it and should therefore be expected to work harder to get it to work, or are we saying Open Source is a viable alternative to commercial software? You can't have it both ways. More to the point, your potential customers (users, if you prefer) won't let you have it both ways. People have work to do and killing a day or two of work to figure out how to make the software do something is very often not acceptable.
I won't use open source software because it's inherently better. It isn't. I won't use it because it's morally better. It isn't. But I also won't use commercial software and hardware produced by companies who think their role in the world is not to produce products and services which fulfill my needs, but to twist the politial world into an image which furthers their ends, or is tailored to their personal political agendas or beliefs.
Put simply, and excuse me for being a bit annoyed at the moment, if you want my business, build a good box, write quality software, and shut your mouth. I resent you using the soapbox of your position in the industry, which you have ONLY because I and people like me buy your products, to promote your political agenda.