Huh? How is this nonsense from the far left? Seems more like standard conspiracy theorist dogma more from an extreme Libertarian angle or even far right "small government, don't control me" nonsense.
The GPP is referring to slashdot itself. The cited site is definitely libertarian, but the standard position for/. is more traditional lefty-progressive. Note how most posts here tend towards "down with Chimpy BUSHitler" rather than the more typical libertarian cry of "down with government".
After that experience, the first thought that popped into my head was, "No wonder nobody uses Linux. That took me hours to figure out, and I kind of know what I'm doing!"
But then I thought about it a little more and realized that Windows does sh*t like that all the time - the difference is, it happens with smaller upgrades than a complete kernel upgrade, you get a blue screen and no further helpful diagnostic information to troubleshoot the problem
I have to agree with the Linux assessment, having gone through that drill numerous times, not to mention the horrors of chasing dependencies under something like Cobalt Linux; but I'm the largely unwilling tech support for scores of widely varied windows users with all manner of funky craptastic hardware and I can't say that I've ever seen an NT/2K/XP box bluescreen from an update.
The unix way (besides do one thing and do it well) however is to allow beginners and experts in, and help them leverage themselves so that they can be intelligent and productive in how they work.
Unfortunately, the way linux/unix helps people "leverage themselves" is by being utterly generic at its core and infinitely and endlessly configurable for anything beyond that. What this means is that there is an unavoidably steep learning curve right up front that bars entry to anyone without the time and/or desire to climb it. The tortured car analogy for this would be a kit car that can be built into any car you want-- race car, 4WD truck, mini van, luxury sedan-- but it only comes as an unassembled box of parts. People want to buy their stuff already built. As irritating as Mac-heads are with their "it just works" mantra, one must admit that they have a valid point: people don't want to build and configure software any more than they want to build and fix cars. They just want stuff to work out of the box. This is, unfortunately, the great strength of market driven closed-source OS's. They sacrifice infinite utility in exchange for hard-coded optimization for specific tasks the market demands.
If you're a Libertarian, this is just another case of the big bad government sticking its nose in other people's business.
Actually, it's a case of government (i.e. the FCC) refusing to stick its nose in other people's business. Massport wanted the FCC to nail the airline and they essentially said "nopem they're free to do whatever they want; that's what the unlicensed spectrum is FOR".
The pentagon does not pay $600 dollars for a toilet seat they never have and never will. What you see on those budget sheets was a quick and dirty accounting trick to hide where the funding for various black ops went.
No, that's a myth as well. How many "$600 toilet seats" do you think it would take to fund the development of something like the B-2 bomber? Black projects are funded right out in the open, with line items reading "Project CODENAME ---- $47 million" and no details. They don't have to hide the money from congress under the guise of hammers and toilet seats. The myth of the $600 hammer By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr is an excellent essay explaining how this peculiar accounting artifact comes about. Essentially, the "overpriced" items come as part of a large contracted package of stuff, some parts cheap and common, others somewhat expensive specialized equipment. To paraphrase Mr Freedberg, the engineering expenses for the entire package are amortized over all the individual items, thus a $15 hammer ends up having $420 worth of R&D expenses added on. A specially designed engine, also part of the same package, certainly took a larger proportionate amount of R&D over the hammer, and yet no one makes note of the great deal the government got at $420 R&D cost for the engine-- all we hear about is the $435 hammer!
Harm through negligence. Youtubes very existence has resulted in a lot of traffic to utube.com
Negligence? Don't be an idiot. What did they neglect to do? Teach morons to spell? They should be suing AOL because AIM makes dumbfucks think "you" is spelled "U".
The vast majority of evil in the world has been perpetrated by people who thought they were doing good.
True as far as it goes, but that's not actually saying much. Just about everyone sees themselves as "the good guy". People who do evil knowing they're doing evil, with the full intention of doing evil, they're fairly rare. Most people caught up in bad doings at least have the [common decency|vague flickering of conscience] to rationalize their actions or at least cower behind the excuse of "following orders".
this was the same problem that led zillions of Floridians to accidentally vote for Pat Buchanan
No, the Buchanan vote was caused by use of the "butterfly" ballot, where the names on the left page correspond to the odd numbered holes, and the names on the right correspond to the even. Instead of punching the hole next to the names, as indicated by the arrow, they were punching the hole next to the LINE above the names-- which happened to actually be a vote for the next guy down on the opposite page: Buchanan. Here, take a look. That's no parallax, that's just bad ballot design combined with nimrod voters.
It's true, the polygraph is not a valid scientific procedure for detecting lies. That's because they don't detect the lies so much as the responses of people. And I would consider the procedure for detecting and analysing such responses scientifically valid. Sure it isn't 100% successful, but it is enough to be reasonably sure.
It's not accurate enough to even be "reasonably sure" by ANY metric. The interpretation of "responses" is so subjective that it's more a game of the polygraph operator trying to make his own feelings about the subject's guilt fit the rather arbitrary variations of the squiggles he sees on the paper. Seriously, there is no way at all to tell the difference between "test anxiety" and "deception". The machine's response to someone thinking "OMG, the machine knows I lied" and "OMG, what if the machine thinks I lied" is exactly the same, and that is what the charlatan asking the question is looking at.
Erm so you're saying they did *not* deserve to be locked up for that? Out here there's a high school right next to the university, so carding before petting is pretty much standard practice. You don't screw around with that stuff, especially if they look borderline illegal. And wtf were they doing with "troubled teen boys" in the first place? Sounds like they deserve to be locked up. The polygraph thing is a pain and unconstitutional, but they should be serving what little jail time they received and not walking the streets. And the one time mistake line is really tiring. There are no do overs / reloads in life, as much as I wish there were. I have a (sealed) misdemeanor from my youth, so I have some idea of how frustrating it can be. You just have to accept that you can't do anything about it and move on. Or kill yourself and save taxpayers a few bucks, in the case of convicts.
No one was harmed by the incident, you sanctimonious fuck. The problem is with the idiotic puritanical zero-tolerance law that make no distinction between a) "children" and "teenagers", and b) sexual abuse vs. inappropriate but harmless sexual horseplay. And if you find the "one mistake" thing tiring, then you have no appreciation of how our legal system works. In all other areas of the law, people who screw up and end up in front of the judge are let off under the "one mistake" premise all the time. So long as it's clear that no harm was intended and the perp has no priors, a plea of no contest will generally result in a suspended sentence and the conviction disappears after a few years-- even in cases involving the horrors of DRUGS. But not SEX OFFENDERS, no. No room for leniency there. A 21 year old woman having sex with one of her 16 year old students is as FIENDISH a SEX CRIMINAL as a man who buggers 8 year old kids, right?
If you're going to open your mouth please make sure what you say at least makes sense. That being said, can you please explain how exactly the lie detector forces people to tell the truth? Last time I checked, they can say whatever they want, even when strapped to the machine.
You misunderstand. He said the idea of a machine that "forces" people to tell the truth is so appealing that the "lie detector" has been embraced enthusiastically, despite the fact that the polygraph actually does nothing at all, being just a prop in a bit of interrogation theater.
It appears to me that this could catch people who aren't trained intelligence agents, but were blackmailed or bribed into spying.
You don't have to be a trained intelligence agent to fool a polygraph examiner. Give me 10 minutes and I could teach anyone how to jigger the results simply by explaining the format and intent of the exam and how to react to it. You don't have to know any secret spy tricks for remaining calm; in fact, you can use extreme nervousness to much greater advantage.
According to the studies linked...it seems that while the test has a high false positive rate, the false negative rate is lower than one would expect of random chance....if the above is true it doesn't seem to me so unreasonable at all that it be used in the hiring of FBI and CIA agents and the like.
As clearly demonstrated by the above mentioned stats, the problem is that polygraphs achieve their low false negative by basically lowering the thresholds, casting a wider net of "guilt" and snaring more innocent people. I can guarantee a 0% false negative rate-- so long as you let me declare everyone who walks in the door "deceptive". Polygraph is just theater. It's pretty much bog-standard interrogation techniques dressed up with a few electronic props to trick people into essentially admitting guilt.
The truth is that the polygraph is a form of psychological testing. The results are meaningless unless the "operator" is a well trained psychologist. Even then, he may be unable to extract the "truth" from you; partly because "truth" is a subjective matter. In addition, some people don't do well (or do TOO well) under stress testing. So the results can be bogus in those cases. Basically, polygraphs are unreliable at best, and should never be counted on for accurate information.
Indeed, the best description I've heard of a polygraph test is that it's a little theatrical play designed to trick the gullible into confessing and/or acting guilty.
Actually, I think most console gamers buy consoles because they have the games they want to play, not because they're "deterred by complexity"
Worth noting, however, that "the games they want to play" are largely reflex-based twitch-fests with linear or para-linear storylines (if they have a plot at all!). So yeah, I'd agree that they're not deterred by complexity. I would say that they're simply not interested in complexity. Sophisticated, thinky games just aren't produced for consoles like they are for the keyboard-and-mouse PC set. Even GTA:SA, the most sophisticated "open" style game they have, is still slaved to a para-linear format (locked areas) driven by largely reflex-based missions (shoot the jamaicans, now shoot the puerto rickies). Nothing so strategic as anything from the later Civilization franchise.
Though if the militia wanted to effectively take down the government, they'd need to storm military facilities, and those are (literally and figuratively) the military's turf...
As a former member of the US Army, I can assure you that the only thing the military is prepared to do in garrison ("on its turf") is mow lawns and pick up litter. With the exception of a tiny contingent of MP's (the post's police force) an army post is essentially full of unarmed soldiers who have no means of accessing weapons in a timely manner, and no ammo readily available even if they could organize quickly enough to draw small arms from the armory. CONUS military bases aren't armed forts waiting for attack; they're "slack zones" where Generals have men march in pretty formations to gratify their tiny officer egos. With effective planning, an armed group of 2 dozen civilians could pretty easily take out the minimal MP presence and loot a sizable quantity of weaponry.
2. Cap the spending for campaigns at something like $100,000 for State and $1,000,000 for Federal.
Then instead you'll get a giant shitload of non-candidate-specific ads by the parties just generically saying "vote Democrat", or "vote Republican". We already see a little of this from McCain-Feingold. When you get right down to it, the 1st Amendment says you can't stop 500 "independent party supporters" from each buying a local market TV ad saying "Republicans rule! Wooo!"
I think that given the 'post-9/11' world we live in, there is no way the US government is going to allow Seagate to sell encryption technology that is totally under user control. When they are chasing down terrorists, why would they want to rely on the suspect for the key? Just call up Seagate and get it.
What fool modded this "insightful"? The closest the US gov't has come to regulating the domestic use of encryption was the aborted "clipper chip" fiasco. Traditionally government spooks have relied upon the eggheads at the NSA to be one step ahead of civilian encryption, not secretly leaning on manufacturers to force them to put in back doors.
Allow your wife to drive the car with your driver's licence. Just see how impressed the cops are when she explains that you aren't using it, so you should be able to transfer it at will between different users...
Of course, this ignores the whole fact that car analogies are about as useful as breasts on a bull when talking computers.
No, this simply ignores the fact that your analogy is horribly flawed. The appropriate driver's license analogy would be:
"This is like issuing you a driver's license to drive one particular car, and making you re-take the test and have your license re-issued if you get new 22" spinner wheels AND a boomin' stereo capable of blasting hip hop at 190db"
How are the weapons you mention effective against the government's fully automatic weapons?
Automatic weapons are not a magic firehose that mows down the enemy as you run by holding the trigger down, like in Commando. Automatic fire is used primarily for suppressive fire, keeping your opponent from "getting comfortable" and aiming at your unit while it maneuvers into position, or to keep a larger force from making a frontal assault. In asymmetrical warfare, particularly in an urban environment, the effectiveness of automatic fire is greatly reduced. There is no clear "front", and the ranges are far too close in to establish and clear a meaningful fire lane. No, other than training, there's really no great superiority to a squad of soldiers armed with standard small arms against a group of civilians armed with semi-auto rifles. The awkward thing about an insurgency is that the "enemy" is mixed in among the civilian population, so using laser guided bombs, artillery, or anything else beyond highly discriminate small arms (i.e. aimed rifles) is simply out of the question. Add in the fact that the "enemy" knows the neighborhood, outnumbers you, and more than likely contains a few military folks who have "switched sides", and you have a serious fight on your hands.
Slashdot Mirror
Here's why:
./configure -switch=whazis4 -mustbeTRUEtoinstallonaDell=true
tar xzvf application1.0.83-RC37.tar.gz
cd application1.0.83-RC37
make
make install
Pray your dependencies are in order.
(alternately)
rpm is a slight improvement, but not all things come in rpm packages, and dependency errors still happen
apt-get is good, but the library of "stable" stuff is like 2 years old...
Linux just has to come up with a universal installation system.
Link to the essay by Mr Freedberg, as I'm apparently too dumb to manage proper tag syntax for my hyperlinks:
http://www.govexec.com/dailyfed/1298/120798t1.htm
Moron. No wonder you post as AC.
don't get smrkt with me, young man!
"This is like issuing you a driver's license to drive one particular car, and making you re-take the test and have your license re-issued if you get new 22" spinner wheels AND a boomin' stereo capable of blasting hip hop at 190db"