Here at Wake Forest, we have a program where all students receive IBM laptops through the university (it's included in tuition). These come preloaded with a lot of expensive commercial software that most students couldn't afford to purchase legally if they weren't going through the university. The interesting thing is that this gives the university a great deal of control over the initial setup of students' machines (including those who are non-CS majors). We can customize them all we want or delete Windows and put Linux on there but the vast majority of students are just using what comes on there.
Until now, the Windows machines were actually all set up to use Netscape 4.79 and its mail client and to hide IE and especially Outlook. This was done (I assume) for security reasons, especially considering that virtually all the virus email I've received from on-campus mailing lists, etc is from people who ignored the preconfigured setup and installed Outlook Express anyway.
This fall, they are moving to Mozilla 1.4 (I'm guessing that the reason is the similary to the old Netscape interface). They decided that Mozilla 1.4 was superior to the newer Netscapes and are deploying it over a year on about 5,500 installations.
Combined with another new pilot program to preinstall Linux dual-boot setups for CS students here (and give us bigger hard disks than other students), open source seems to be on the rise here.
That's what they do in Japan as far as I can tell. Beer is sold in 500 mL cans, not 568, and I rarely noticed anything being sold in uneven increments.
I'd call penicillin-based antibiotics more of an achievement of a mold than of mankind. After all, they are the ones that evolved the bacterial-nuking chemicals as a survival mechanism...
I saw them on a CD bought in Japan. They were only 56 kbps (!) WMA files.
This means that you are screwed if you don't use Windows, and it also means they sound awful. I couldn't play them at all in Linux (even with Wine), so I fired up WinXP on a family member's computer to try it out.
They were so tinny and scratchy from the severe compression artifacts that they sounded much worse than FM radio. I wouldn't call that allowing us to listen to legally purchased CDs in any way we choose... On top of that, the only way to play them is with a small player application (.exe of course) that is included on the CD. This player installs spyware (or at least an OCX control, dunno what it does but I'm suspicious and confirmed that it copied it to windows/system32 on my test). It does this the second the CD is inserted into the drive if you have autoplay enabled in Windows, and without asking.
Wonder if any sort of data security/intrusion charges could be brought against the execs who greenlighted this one...
In most areas of the law, I agree with you 100%. I usually fully support the right of people to sue over various grievances. Unfortunately however I think that in this particular case that right has been spoiled by a large number of people abusing the system. IMO the legal system only works fairly when people in general show some restraint in who they sue and for what reasons.
These suits should be reserved for the cases where serious harm has in fact been the result of real negligence, not these cases where someone is trying to cash in on some minor or imagined harm. If people were more reasonable about this and lawyers were less greedy, then this wouldn't be a problem and bad doctors would get punished without burdening all the good ones too badly on insurance costs. That's what really pisses me off about it - not only are frivolous lawsuits stealing from me when I pay for healthcare, they are also punishing all the doctors who are NOT negligent but still have to protect themselves from these TV lawyers who try to sell patients on the promise of easy money. This also erodes the ability of people who have REAL cases of serious harm to actually seek redress.
Your idea of income percentage may have some merit - but I think that in the case of medical malpractice cases we need a firm limit just to stop some of the sillier cases from ever being brought.
OK, I didn't mean to come off so forceful on the exact dollar amount. I think that's certainly quite debatable. However, I still think there needs to be some sort of a hard limit on damages. Here's my reasoning:
In the end, NO amount of money could compensate for the pain someone feels when they lose a loved one. And it's not okay for doctors who truly are practicing bad medicine to keep on doing it. But I think that this sort of thing should be dealt with in a non-monetary way, because money makes people greedy and creates a motive for abuse of the system. If a doctor is repeatedly causing injury, perhaps he should face review on whether he should keep a medical license. But this review should be done by other doctors, not by a jury. Juries obviously are not going to be knowledgeable enough to make a real judgment about negligence in the majority of non-blatent cases. "Expert" witnesses paid by lawyers may be their only source of information.
My main concern is a pragmatic one. I'm not saying that people don't necessarily *deserve* some sort of compensation for real malpractice. But I question whether anyone should get so much money in damages that the system becomes insolvent. It's just money, in the end - it's not going to replace your loved one if you get $500,000 more dollars. I don't want to fund other people's malpractice suits everytime I go to a "good" doctor who has to pay exorbitant sums to protect himself from the legal sharks. The problem with the system as it stands is that, as usual, everyone pays the price of the legal wars - not just the offenders.
Your mother's life is priceless. No one could put a dollar figure on that. Just don't bankrupt the system for the rest of us while trying to get through your grief.
There absolutely should be a limit in damages, and it shouldn't be more than about $50,000, no matter what. Doctors DO make mistakes, because they are human. It's completely unreasonable to expect them to never make a mistake, especially considering that most medical cases are a total judgement call and not as cut and dry as you somehow imagine them.
Also consider that a huge percentage of medical malpractice cases are in fact frivolous. People (Americans) like to blame someone else when something bad happens to them. In fact it's usually the patient who is at fault for their own bad health. Doctors are an easy target for unethical money-grubbing lawyers because there is usually no way to prove whether they were actually at fault for something or simply made the wrong decision in a case where it would be impossible to know enough to make the RIGHT decision. You don't deserve money just because your doctor didn't know about a health problem you had.
Finally, consider that when you file a medical malpractice suit for a massive amount of money, you are indirectly stealing from everyone else who pays for healthcare. Doctors, contrary to popular belief, often do not make massive incomes when insurance costs are factored in. What income they do make is well-deserved since they work long hours, at a stressful and potentially legally risky job, and have much more education than you likely do. Moreover, when you sue a doctor your case will likely just be settled by the liability insurance company out of court. This just drives up insurance costs and therefore the cost of healthcare. Think about that the next time you have to pay a high doctor's bill.
I'm not saying that people don't deserve some compensation for medical mistakes. But it needs to be limited in scope. Otherwise, you're looking at a breakdown of the affordability of medical care in the near future.
Bowling for Columbine is completely wrong about the causes of violence in America. I'm not sure if it's willfully wrong, but it very well may be given Mr. Moore's radical agenda and track record of lies. I'm sick and tired of hearing people praise him and his foolish movie just because it agrees with their political agenda and therefore validates their own beliefs. Not to mention that Michael Moore is an asshole for verbally abusing a clearly senile Charlton Heston after using deception to enter the man's house. We're supposed to applaud him for such childish, greedy, self-serving behavior just because he confronts the Evil NRA?
Bowling for Columbine also selectively chooses anecdotal evidence to make its case for this mythical "climate of fear" that Moore says pervades America but actually only exists in his fantasy world. He doesn't present any real evidence proving his assertation about "Canadians not locking their doors", not to mention that such data would be fiendishly difficult to collect in any sort of reliable way. Are we simply supposed to take Mr. Moore's word for it that this is true? I'm personally not inclined to believe a proven serial liar with a stated radical political bias.
Even if the evidence above were really true (which I doubt), there is NO evidence to suggest the link between violence and the media that is being postulated. This is obviously a case where the "documentary" film maker came in with a preconceived notion of what he wanted to prove and tried to collect anecdotal evidence supporting his conclusion rather than following any sort of scientific methodology. Rather than immediately concluding that the media is responsible, I would look at OTHER much more significant ways that the US and Canada are different culturally, economically, or socially. Some big ones off the top of my head are heightened racial tensions, much more significant poverty (for instance in the American South), more gang activities, and the fear of oppressive police officers in US cities.
What was the real tragedy of Columbine had nothing to do with guns and nothing to do with the media. People who suggest that, like Michael Moore, are shamelessly using the tragedy to promote their radical anti-human-responsibility agenda. Columbine was about an abusive youth culture at the school, and it was about the poor choice of two mentally disturbed young people. Guns were simply the tool, not the root problem. Media exposure was simply a coincidence, not the cause. I think that people need to suck it up and stop blaming anyone other than those two boys and the classmates who pissed them off to the point that they were pushed off the edged.
While I was getting a little extreme with the poster I was originally responding to, I stand by most of what I said. I mostly added in the part about regressive taxation because I knew it would stir the pot a bit;)
I just wanted to add to what Bald Wookie said: Productivity is not just work for wages. Productivity also includes the investment of capital, something that is done mostly by the wealthy class so scorned by the left. The free flow of money into new ventures is crucial to maintance of the high US standard of living that we enjoy. And believe me, even the most poor people in the US are better off than vast swaths of the world population.
I'd just caution those who support a party that would kill the goose that laid the golden egg for some short term political gain. Handouts seem nice at the time but are very bad for our economy longterm.
You're absolutely wrong that the rest of us are subsidizing the wealthiest people in this society. It is exactly the other way around. There is a large part of our society that does not earn enough to pay significant taxes, and yet leftists still want to give the tax breaks to these individuals, who are by definition the most nonproductive individuals in society. How can you be given a tax cut when you already don't pay taxes?? The Democrats don't want to just cut taxes for the "poor", they just want to take other people's money and hand out to those who do not deserve it and didn't earn it.
Your arguments are fundamentally flawed in that you seem to believe that all wealth is owned by the government, not the people who generate it, and that all members of society are equal in their productive capacity and therefore somehow "deserve" an equal amount of money. This is so completely false that it's not even funny. The uneducated low wage earners are a drain on society if anything, and they threaten to destroy the economy if too much of our country's wealth is "redistributed" to them. I'm sorry, someone who didn't graduate from high school absolutely does not deserve to make more than a small fraction of what someone who sacrificed to pay for college and/or professional school and the tax system should be structured accordingly. You don't deserve anything just for being born; you need to contribute in a positive way to get anything. I personally think that the income tax should be made flat or even regressive to penalize those who don't contribute.
Sorry about the troll thing, I believe I misjudged you there. Thanks for replying in a calm manner. It's just so hard to separate the decent posters from the morons here.
As for medical benefits from sharks: I have in fact heard (and another poster in this story brought it up) that sharks have some interesting cancer-preventing abilities and quite developed immune systems for a fish. I found a little more info here, which was the first result returned by searching Google for "sharks cancer". Disease fighting chemicals useful against virtually all disease exist in natural genetic resivores; the problem is that we are losing that genetic diversity before we can study the benefits. It may be (mostly) speculation at this point, but that's precisely why we should protect natural diversity: so we have time to research it for useful substances and genes.
As for elasticity of ecosystems, you are correct up to a point. Yes, if we wiped out sharks, other animals would step into their ecological niche. But diversity is the source of this elasticity, and it is not bottomless. If we wipe out too many key species like sharks, the elasticity will disappear and the whole thing will start to break down. At that point a large part of the species in existence will disappear and over millions of years new ones will take their place. This process takes much longer than all of human history so far.
I'm guessing you're trolling, but I'll respond anyway. I'm not saying that sharks are an animal that I'd love to meet up with but I don't think it's ethical for us to wipe them off the face of the earth for no reason. They are extremely advanced creatures that have survived on earth for far longer than we have as a species.
Moral objections aside, it's also extremely stupid from a pragmatic standpoint for us to destroy a species either intentionally or through negligence. How do we know that the cure for cancer or AIDS is not held in shark genes? How do we know that sharks are not necessary to the survival of the oceanic planktons that produce most of the oxygen on earth?
The issue is much bigger than just the extinction of one species. The issue is that when many species become extinct all at the same time the entire ecosystem destabilizes. The metaphor I've seen is that the ecosystem is like a pyramid of life - the structure is ok if you remove a limited number of blocks, but if you take out too many the whole thing topples. If that happens as it appears to be at the moment, then we humans will have much bigger problems than sharks. The disappearance of these predators is a sign of large-scale sickness of the oceanic environment.
Re:It's just natural selection. Wake up, people.
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Sharks in Serious Danger
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Y'know, it's just not as simple as you think it is. Sharks, by virtue of being at the top of the oceanic food change, are especially vulnerable to large scale changes in the ecosystem upon which they depend. The fact that their population is falling so rapidly should be a major wake-up call about the health of our oceans (especially given the hugely long time that sharks have existed on Earth.) It is fact, not opinion, that humans are rapidly decreasing the biodiversity of the planet at this moment. While this is a normal part of the Earth's natural cycles if you look at it on a geologic timescale, what we are in effect creating is tantamount to a mass extinction. Mass extinctions generally occur because some species or event has destabilized the Earth's overall ecosystem. Due to the huge level of interconnectedness of biological systems things tend to snowball and major dominant species are wiped out and replaced by newcomers. This has happened before (trilobites, dinosaurs) and it will happen again. Soon if we don't make a concerted effort to stop it as an intelligent, self-aware species.
If you think about it, humans occupy a similar sort of ecological niche to that of sharks. Like them, we are incredibly efficient predators who have spread across most of the earth and occupy a seemingly untouchable position in the food chain. I think if we're not careful and responsible we may soon find ourselves in the same position as the sharks.
Once we initiate large scale ecological change by wiping out a dominant predator like sharks, there is no turning back. I think we cannot even imagine the vastness of the consequences such an event would have on the biodiversity of the oceans.
I'm astounded at how many posters like you in this article actually believe that this is inconsequential or right somehow. We as humans need to wake up and make a concerted, united effort to stop wasteful and shortsighted practices that hasten such environmental change. The Chinese (for example) should not be allowed to harvest unlimited numbers of sharks for dorsal fin soup. The Americans (for example) should not be allowed to dump unlimited amounts of carbon into the atmosphere. The potential difference between us and the dinosaurs is that we KNOW that we are making ourselves extinct (yes, I think it's possibly that serious.) We need to gain some species-wide sense of restraint if we don't want to lose OUR niche at the top of the food-chain.
I sort of agree with most of your points, but the font resizes fine for me in Mozilla when I press control-+. What exactly did you mean by "unresizable"?
It may well be true that Mandrake is that easy; I haven't tried it so I don't know. The main problem I've had with GUI utilities in Linux is that they work fine most of the time and for most cases, but they don't offer the flexibility or reliability of the command line. Granted, Windows definitely suffers from that problem as well; there are lots of options in Windows that are inaccessible from the GUI, and you're basically stuck if the GUI malfunctions or breaks.
My point is that by using Linux with a GUI only, you're ignoring most of its strengths over Windows. I personally think that Linux GUIs have a ways to go before they are as polished as the commercial OSes. But Windows can't touch Linux for command line flexibility. I just think you should learn to use tools the way they work best if you want to be a really effective user.
I don't think that people who don't want to learn to use the CLI will ever be happy with Linux in its present state. These types of users should just stick with Windows or MacOSX if they aren't willing to try to learn the CLI.
You have to learn the CLI if you want to use Linux in any sort of reasonable fashion. How could you possibly deal with, for instance, securing Linux without the CLI?
GUIs in general are pretty clunky for quite a few tasks (Linux GUIs especially), and the CLI is not. We should be teaching newbies to use each when it's appropriate, not to rely on clicking some magic boxes.
I'd also mention that it appears to be useless for BSD or Gentoo-like systems as well. BSD because it's built form source and the fingerprints won't always match, and Gentoo because there's already something like this built directly into the system, at least for verifying source tarballs.
Gentoo checks the md5sum of each tarball against another file containg the known value every time it installs something. The md5sums and the sources are obtained from different servers, so a lot of the risk of trojans is removed. Granted, this doesn't do continuous monitoring like this does, but it helps ensure you don't install something bad. The biggest worry now with this system could be vulnerable if several mirrors are hacked. They're working to replace it with a private-key signed system, which is much better than and md5 based system. The reason being that, that you can verify _who_ created the checksum in addition to that the checksum matches the file.
So, I'm not sure what the real benefit of this system is. It seems to be duplicating a lot of features that really should be built into the package manager ideally. Maybe someday we'll have package managers that actually watch their packages in realtime w/ strong crypto to make sure things are still good. That would be very cool.
Yes, but only because this whole system is pretty weak cryptographically. What should be done is that the binary should be signed with a private key only available to the legitimate developers. This notion of having md5sums to verify integrity is useless if the hash value and the actual binary are stored on the same server, where both can be compromised at the same time.
Does that mean it's legal for me to copy for "sharing purposes" with my friends from a DVD as long as I pass it through an analog format before reconverting it to digital? If the only distinction is the fact that it's digital I think the law has no ground to stand on.
Agreed, I was thinking of DOA2 there. Several girls I know got really interested in that game despite complete lack of desire to play other fighting games. My guess is that it's a combination of the control system and the lack of blood: I don't think they go for the bloody games as much as guys do.
I've actually noticed this phenomenon as well, and I don't think it has anything to do with guys "letting her win". Give the girl some credit! I think that first of all it's just that girls play the game in a different style from guys who've been playing forever, throwing off their rhythm. Also, the guy may be..."distracted" by playing a girl as well, even if he's not letting her win. Besides, I imagine the beginner's button mashing approach is nearly as effective as a skilled player when said skilled player is drunk;)
I think that was just poor wording on the part of the submitter. A better way to put it would be 'unsurprising' and I'm pretty sure that's what he meant based on the context.
yeah, it really is a rumor-mongering article. What disturbed me most about that quote was the attitude of the analyst, not so much MS' plans. I doubt that MS really thinks that Palladium will solve all their security problems; but that's how they are planning to sell it to the managment types. They've simply decided that thanks to all the "terrorism" uproar coupled with increasing criticism of their own track record, that security is an excellent marketing point to use these days. They are going to use talk of threats to enact hardware enforced DRM while at the same time selling this as a "security" feature to those who don't know better.
What I was criticizing was the wholesale manner in which the analyst appears to have bought into that marketing strategy. I'm disturbed that someone who could be my boss may be reading reports like that and believing them.
"This could bring a higher level of security than anything we've ever seen. It will almost completely prevent the platform from being compromised."
I sure hope he isn't talking about security in general, because I sincerely doubt that Palladium will yield any kind of increased security other than security for MS's bottom line. The ignorance of that statement is astounding. Even if Palladium-esque code signing does increase security the added complexity is sure to keep the security people busy for years to come.
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Here at Wake Forest, we have a program where all students receive IBM laptops through the university (it's included in tuition). These come preloaded with a lot of expensive commercial software that most students couldn't afford to purchase legally if they weren't going through the university. The interesting thing is that this gives the university a great deal of control over the initial setup of students' machines (including those who are non-CS majors). We can customize them all we want or delete Windows and put Linux on there but the vast majority of students are just using what comes on there.
Until now, the Windows machines were actually all set up to use Netscape 4.79 and its mail client and to hide IE and especially Outlook. This was done (I assume) for security reasons, especially considering that virtually all the virus email I've received from on-campus mailing lists, etc is from people who ignored the preconfigured setup and installed Outlook Express anyway.
This fall, they are moving to Mozilla 1.4 (I'm guessing that the reason is the similary to the old Netscape interface). They decided that Mozilla 1.4 was superior to the newer Netscapes and are deploying it over a year on about 5,500 installations.
Combined with another new pilot program to preinstall Linux dual-boot setups for CS students here (and give us bigger hard disks than other students), open source seems to be on the rise here.
That's what they do in Japan as far as I can tell. Beer is sold in 500 mL cans, not 568, and I rarely noticed anything being sold in uneven increments.
I'd call penicillin-based antibiotics more of an achievement of a mold than of mankind. After all, they are the ones that evolved the bacterial-nuking chemicals as a survival mechanism...
This means that you are screwed if you don't use Windows, and it also means they sound awful. I couldn't play them at all in Linux (even with Wine), so I fired up WinXP on a family member's computer to try it out.
They were so tinny and scratchy from the severe compression artifacts that they sounded much worse than FM radio. I wouldn't call that allowing us to listen to legally purchased CDs in any way we choose... On top of that, the only way to play them is with a small player application (.exe of course) that is included on the CD. This player installs spyware (or at least an OCX control, dunno what it does but I'm suspicious and confirmed that it copied it to windows/system32 on my test). It does this the second the CD is inserted into the drive if you have autoplay enabled in Windows, and without asking.
Wonder if any sort of data security/intrusion charges could be brought against the execs who greenlighted this one...
Canada? :)
In most areas of the law, I agree with you 100%. I usually fully support the right of people to sue over various grievances. Unfortunately however I think that in this particular case that right has been spoiled by a large number of people abusing the system. IMO the legal system only works fairly when people in general show some restraint in who they sue and for what reasons.
These suits should be reserved for the cases where serious harm has in fact been the result of real negligence, not these cases where someone is trying to cash in on some minor or imagined harm. If people were more reasonable about this and lawyers were less greedy, then this wouldn't be a problem and bad doctors would get punished without burdening all the good ones too badly on insurance costs. That's what really pisses me off about it - not only are frivolous lawsuits stealing from me when I pay for healthcare, they are also punishing all the doctors who are NOT negligent but still have to protect themselves from these TV lawyers who try to sell patients on the promise of easy money. This also erodes the ability of people who have REAL cases of serious harm to actually seek redress.
Your idea of income percentage may have some merit - but I think that in the case of medical malpractice cases we need a firm limit just to stop some of the sillier cases from ever being brought.
OK, I didn't mean to come off so forceful on the exact dollar amount. I think that's certainly quite debatable. However, I still think there needs to be some sort of a hard limit on damages.
Here's my reasoning:
In the end, NO amount of money could compensate for the pain someone feels when they lose a loved one. And it's not okay for doctors who truly are practicing bad medicine to keep on doing it. But I think that this sort of thing should be dealt with in a non-monetary way, because money makes people greedy and creates a motive for abuse of the system. If a doctor is repeatedly causing injury, perhaps he should face review on whether he should keep a medical license. But this review should be done by other doctors, not by a jury. Juries obviously are not going to be knowledgeable enough to make a real judgment about negligence in the majority of non-blatent cases. "Expert" witnesses paid by lawyers may be their only source of information.
My main concern is a pragmatic one. I'm not saying that people don't necessarily *deserve* some sort of compensation for real malpractice. But I question whether anyone should get so much money in damages that the system becomes insolvent. It's just money, in the end - it's not going to replace your loved one if you get $500,000 more dollars. I don't want to fund other people's malpractice suits everytime I go to a "good" doctor who has to pay exorbitant sums to protect himself from the legal sharks. The problem with the system as it stands is that, as usual, everyone pays the price of the legal wars - not just the offenders.
Your mother's life is priceless. No one could put a dollar figure on that. Just don't bankrupt the system for the rest of us while trying to get through your grief.
Your view in no way cooresponds to reality.
There absolutely should be a limit in damages, and it shouldn't be more than about $50,000, no matter what. Doctors DO make mistakes, because they are human. It's completely unreasonable to expect them to never make a mistake, especially considering that most medical cases are a total judgement call and not as cut and dry as you somehow imagine them.
Also consider that a huge percentage of medical malpractice cases are in fact frivolous. People (Americans) like to blame someone else when something bad happens to them. In fact it's usually the patient who is at fault for their own bad health. Doctors are an easy target for unethical money-grubbing lawyers because there is usually no way to prove whether they were actually at fault for something or simply made the wrong decision in a case where it would be impossible to know enough to make the RIGHT decision. You don't deserve money just because your doctor didn't know about a health problem you had.
Finally, consider that when you file a medical malpractice suit for a massive amount of money, you are indirectly stealing from everyone else who pays for healthcare. Doctors, contrary to popular belief, often do not make massive incomes when insurance costs are factored in. What income they do make is well-deserved since they work long hours, at a stressful and potentially legally risky job, and have much more education than you likely do. Moreover, when you sue a doctor your case will likely just be settled by the liability insurance company out of court. This just drives up insurance costs and therefore the cost of healthcare. Think about that the next time you have to pay a high doctor's bill.
I'm not saying that people don't deserve some compensation for medical mistakes. But it needs to be limited in scope. Otherwise, you're looking at a breakdown of the affordability of medical care in the near future.
Bowling for Columbine is completely wrong about the causes of violence in America. I'm not sure if it's willfully wrong, but it very well may be given Mr. Moore's radical agenda and track record of lies. I'm sick and tired of hearing people praise him and his foolish movie just because it agrees with their political agenda and therefore validates their own beliefs. Not to mention that Michael Moore is an asshole for verbally abusing a clearly senile Charlton Heston after using deception to enter the man's house. We're supposed to applaud him for such childish, greedy, self-serving behavior just because he confronts the Evil NRA?
Bowling for Columbine also selectively chooses anecdotal evidence to make its case for this mythical "climate of fear" that Moore says pervades America but actually only exists in his fantasy world. He doesn't present any real evidence proving his assertation about "Canadians not locking their doors", not to mention that such data would be fiendishly difficult to collect in any sort of reliable way. Are we simply supposed to take Mr. Moore's word for it that this is true? I'm personally not inclined to believe a proven serial liar with a stated radical political bias.
Even if the evidence above were really true (which I doubt), there is NO evidence to suggest the link between violence and the media that is being postulated. This is obviously a case where the "documentary" film maker came in with a preconceived notion of what he wanted to prove and tried to collect anecdotal evidence supporting his conclusion rather than following any sort of scientific methodology. Rather than immediately concluding that the media is responsible, I would look at OTHER much more significant ways that the US and Canada are different culturally, economically, or socially. Some big ones off the top of my head are heightened racial tensions, much more significant poverty (for instance in the American South), more gang activities, and the fear of oppressive police officers in US cities.
What was the real tragedy of Columbine had nothing to do with guns and nothing to do with the media. People who suggest that, like Michael Moore, are shamelessly using the tragedy to promote their radical anti-human-responsibility agenda. Columbine was about an abusive youth culture at the school, and it was about the poor choice of two mentally disturbed young people. Guns were simply the tool, not the root problem. Media exposure was simply a coincidence, not the cause. I think that people need to suck it up and stop blaming anyone other than those two boys and the classmates who pissed them off to the point that they were pushed off the edged.
While I was getting a little extreme with the poster I was originally responding to, I stand by most of what I said. I mostly added in the part about regressive taxation because I knew it would stir the pot a bit ;)
I just wanted to add to what Bald Wookie said: Productivity is not just work for wages. Productivity also includes the investment of capital, something that is done mostly by the wealthy class so scorned by the left. The free flow of money into new ventures is crucial to maintance of the high US standard of living that we enjoy. And believe me, even the most poor people in the US are better off than vast swaths of the world population.
I'd just caution those who support a party that would kill the goose that laid the golden egg for some short term political gain. Handouts seem nice at the time but are very bad for our economy longterm.
You're absolutely wrong that the rest of us are subsidizing the wealthiest people in this society. It is exactly the other way around. There is a large part of our society that does not earn enough to pay significant taxes, and yet leftists still want to give the tax breaks to these individuals, who are by definition the most nonproductive individuals in society. How can you be given a tax cut when you already don't pay taxes?? The Democrats don't want to just cut taxes for the "poor", they just want to take other people's money and hand out to those who do not deserve it and didn't earn it.
Your arguments are fundamentally flawed in that you seem to believe that all wealth is owned by the government, not the people who generate it, and that all members of society are equal in their productive capacity and therefore somehow "deserve" an equal amount of money. This is so completely false that it's not even funny. The uneducated low wage earners are a drain on society if anything, and they threaten to destroy the economy if too much of our country's wealth is "redistributed" to them. I'm sorry, someone who didn't graduate from high school absolutely does not deserve to make more than a small fraction of what someone who sacrificed to pay for college and/or professional school and the tax system should be structured accordingly. You don't deserve anything just for being born; you need to contribute in a positive way to get anything. I personally think that the income tax should be made flat or even regressive to penalize those who don't contribute.
Sorry about the troll thing, I believe I misjudged you there. Thanks for replying in a calm manner. It's just so hard to separate the decent posters from the morons here.
As for medical benefits from sharks: I have in fact heard (and another poster in this story brought it up) that sharks have some interesting cancer-preventing abilities and quite developed immune systems for a fish. I found a little more info here, which was the first result returned by searching Google for "sharks cancer". Disease fighting chemicals useful against virtually all disease exist in natural genetic resivores; the problem is that we are losing that genetic diversity before we can study the benefits. It may be (mostly) speculation at this point, but that's precisely why we should protect natural diversity: so we have time to research it for useful substances and genes.
As for elasticity of ecosystems, you are correct up to a point. Yes, if we wiped out sharks, other animals would step into their ecological niche. But diversity is the source of this elasticity, and it is not bottomless. If we wipe out too many key species like sharks, the elasticity will disappear and the whole thing will start to break down. At that point a large part of the species in existence will disappear and over millions of years new ones will take their place. This process takes much longer than all of human history so far.
I'm guessing you're trolling, but I'll respond anyway. I'm not saying that sharks are an animal that I'd love to meet up with but I don't think it's ethical for us to wipe them off the face of the earth for no reason. They are extremely advanced creatures that have survived on earth for far longer than we have as a species.
Moral objections aside, it's also extremely stupid from a pragmatic standpoint for us to destroy a species either intentionally or through negligence. How do we know that the cure for cancer or AIDS is not held in shark genes? How do we know that sharks are not necessary to the survival of the oceanic planktons that produce most of the oxygen on earth?
The issue is much bigger than just the extinction of one species. The issue is that when many species become extinct all at the same time the entire ecosystem destabilizes. The metaphor I've seen is that the ecosystem is like a pyramid of life - the structure is ok if you remove a limited number of blocks, but if you take out too many the whole thing topples. If that happens as it appears to be at the moment, then we humans will have much bigger problems than sharks. The disappearance of these predators is a sign of large-scale sickness of the oceanic environment.
Y'know, it's just not as simple as you think it is. Sharks, by virtue of being at the top of the oceanic food change, are especially vulnerable to large scale changes in the ecosystem upon which they depend. The fact that their population is falling so rapidly should be a major wake-up call about the health of our oceans (especially given the hugely long time that sharks have existed on Earth.) It is fact, not opinion, that humans are rapidly decreasing the biodiversity of the planet at this moment. While this is a normal part of the Earth's natural cycles if you look at it on a geologic timescale, what we are in effect creating is tantamount to a mass extinction. Mass extinctions generally occur because some species or event has destabilized the Earth's overall ecosystem. Due to the huge level of interconnectedness of biological systems things tend to snowball and major dominant species are wiped out and replaced by newcomers. This has happened before (trilobites, dinosaurs) and it will happen again. Soon if we don't make a concerted effort to stop it as an intelligent, self-aware species.
If you think about it, humans occupy a similar sort of ecological niche to that of sharks. Like them, we are incredibly efficient predators who have spread across most of the earth and occupy a seemingly untouchable position in the food chain. I think if we're not careful and responsible we may soon find ourselves in the same position as the sharks.
Once we initiate large scale ecological change by wiping out a dominant predator like sharks, there is no turning back. I think we cannot even imagine the vastness of the consequences such an event would have on the biodiversity of the oceans.
I'm astounded at how many posters like you in this article actually believe that this is inconsequential or right somehow. We as humans need to wake up and make a concerted, united effort to stop wasteful and shortsighted practices that hasten such environmental change. The Chinese (for example) should not be allowed to harvest unlimited numbers of sharks for dorsal fin soup. The Americans (for example) should not be allowed to dump unlimited amounts of carbon into the atmosphere. The potential difference between us and the dinosaurs is that we KNOW that we are making ourselves extinct (yes, I think it's possibly that serious.) We need to gain some species-wide sense of restraint if we don't want to lose OUR niche at the top of the food-chain.
I sort of agree with most of your points, but the font resizes fine for me in Mozilla when I press control-+. What exactly did you mean by "unresizable"?
It may well be true that Mandrake is that easy; I haven't tried it so I don't know. The main problem I've had with GUI utilities in Linux is that they work fine most of the time and for most cases, but they don't offer the flexibility or reliability of the command line. Granted, Windows definitely suffers from that problem as well; there are lots of options in Windows that are inaccessible from the GUI, and you're basically stuck if the GUI malfunctions or breaks.
My point is that by using Linux with a GUI only, you're ignoring most of its strengths over Windows. I personally think that Linux GUIs have a ways to go before they are as polished as the commercial OSes. But Windows can't touch Linux for command line flexibility. I just think you should learn to use tools the way they work best if you want to be a really effective user.
I don't think that people who don't want to learn to use the CLI will ever be happy with Linux in its present state. These types of users should just stick with Windows or MacOSX if they aren't willing to try to learn the CLI.
You have to learn the CLI if you want to use Linux in any sort of reasonable fashion. How could you possibly deal with, for instance, securing Linux without the CLI?
GUIs in general are pretty clunky for quite a few tasks (Linux GUIs especially), and the CLI is not. We should be teaching newbies to use each when it's appropriate, not to rely on clicking some magic boxes.
I'd also mention that it appears to be useless for BSD or Gentoo-like systems as well. BSD because it's built form source and the fingerprints won't always match, and Gentoo because there's already something like this built directly into the system, at least for verifying source tarballs.
Gentoo checks the md5sum of each tarball against another file containg the known value every time it installs something. The md5sums and the sources are obtained from different servers, so a lot of the risk of trojans is removed. Granted, this doesn't do continuous monitoring like this does, but it helps ensure you don't install something bad. The biggest worry now with this system could be vulnerable if several mirrors are hacked. They're working to replace it with a private-key signed system, which is much better than and md5 based system. The reason being that, that you can verify _who_ created the checksum in addition to that the checksum matches the file.
So, I'm not sure what the real benefit of this system is. It seems to be duplicating a lot of features that really should be built into the package manager ideally. Maybe someday we'll have package managers that actually watch their packages in realtime w/ strong crypto to make sure things are still good. That would be very cool.
Yes, but only because this whole system is pretty weak cryptographically. What should be done is that the binary should be signed with a private key only available to the legitimate developers. This notion of having md5sums to verify integrity is useless if the hash value and the actual binary are stored on the same server, where both can be compromised at the same time.
Does that mean it's legal for me to copy for "sharing purposes" with my friends from a DVD as long as I pass it through an analog format before reconverting it to digital? If the only distinction is the fact that it's digital I think the law has no ground to stand on.
Agreed, I was thinking of DOA2 there. Several girls I know got really interested in that game despite complete lack of desire to play other fighting games. My guess is that it's a combination of the control system and the lack of blood: I don't think they go for the bloody games as much as guys do.
I've actually noticed this phenomenon as well, and I don't think it has anything to do with guys "letting her win". Give the girl some credit! I think that first of all it's just that girls play the game in a different style from guys who've been playing forever, throwing off their rhythm. Also, the guy may be ..."distracted" by playing a girl as well, even if he's not letting her win. Besides, I imagine the beginner's button mashing approach is nearly as effective as a skilled player when said skilled player is drunk ;)
I think that was just poor wording on the part of the submitter. A better way to put it would be 'unsurprising' and I'm pretty sure that's what he meant based on the context.
yeah, it really is a rumor-mongering article. What disturbed me most about that quote was the attitude of the analyst, not so much MS' plans. I doubt that MS really thinks that Palladium will solve all their security problems; but that's how they are planning to sell it to the managment types. They've simply decided that thanks to all the "terrorism" uproar coupled with increasing criticism of their own track record, that security is an excellent marketing point to use these days. They are going to use talk of threats to enact hardware enforced DRM while at the same time selling this as a "security" feature to those who don't know better.
What I was criticizing was the wholesale manner in which the analyst appears to have bought into that marketing strategy. I'm disturbed that someone who could be my boss may be reading reports like that and believing them.
I sure hope he isn't talking about security in general, because I sincerely doubt that Palladium will yield any kind of increased security other than security for MS's bottom line. The ignorance of that statement is astounding. Even if Palladium-esque code signing does increase security the added complexity is sure to keep the security people busy for years to come.