I do love how you say "Obama really is for change"
Really. 'cos I've read my own message several times and not actually read anything of the sort. But, whatever. It doesn't kind of show you're following a script:
Right-wing Shill: "Obama only talks about change, he doesn't stand for anything"
Obvious response: "Er, Obama stands for a lot of things. What on Earth are you talking about? Why are you repeating this tired old meme that never had any basis in fact to begin with?"
Right-wing Shill: "Oh, so you're saying he stands for change huh? But I can find lots of policies where he stands for the same things that the current government doesn't but that many left wingers are in favour of and have been for a while."
The logical inconsistency of your position doesn't deter you from repeating the shilling points, and it wouldn't, because it's not your job to be logical: you're paid to spout stuff over and over again until it gets accepted as fact. Just don't think we don't know what you're doing.
You know, this whole "Obama just talks about change, he doesn't have any real policies" meme is getting tired. It was tired when Clinton first started spouting it, at a time when Obama would uses his speeches as an opportunity to inspire, while referring people to his record and policies on his website, and it's tired now. It's especially ridiculous to promote the meme in an article which is about John McCain's attempts to record changes of Obama's position by monitoring his website.
If you want to know what Obama stands for, you have numerous sources who will tell you, from general principles to policy specifics. And believe me, the vast majority of us who support - strongly or otherwise - Obama do so knowing what he stands for.
If you think doing something publicly is "doing all you can behind the scenes", then I'm afraid I don't understand what language you're speaking in. In English, the term "behind the scenes" is generally considered opposite to "doing something publicly". I assume they mean the same thing in your language. I speak English.
I'm furious at Obama for his capitulation over FISA.
However, to argue that FISA is the only issue and that the massive policy differences between Obama and McCain elsewhere somehow pale into insignificance because of that one issue is ridiculous.
While our trust in Obama may be weakened by what's happened, we can at least expect him not to involve the US in needless wars, to make a good-faith attempt to extricate us from Iraq, to not appoint right-wing zealots to SCOTUS, to manage the economy in a way that doesn't involve populist tax cuts without reductions in spending, and to know enough about Foreign policy to understand that Czechoslovakia is not a country and therefore Russia does not export oil to it, and what the difference is between the various Muslim factions in the Middle East.
Our trust in McCain should be at rock-bottom considering the massive number of flip-flops he's engaged in over the last few years, but we can trust him to continue - as he's promised - the occupation of Iraq. We can expect him to at least turn up the temperature in Iran, and quite possibly invade it needlessly rather than attempt to rebuild the pro-Democracy forces that were taking over Iran until the US invaded Iraq and started talking smack about Iran. We can expect him to continue Bush's deficit-growing policies. We can continue to expect him to muse about countries he wants to invade in public, mix up political groups, and work from an Atlas that apparently hasn't been updated since the end of the Cold War, if not earlier (I'm half expecting him to protest about the atrocities occurring in Rhodesia...) And we can expect him to appoint SCOTUS judges who care more about right-wing ideology, trying to undermine Congressional oversight, undermining the separation of Church and State inherent in the 1st Amendment, and attacking privacy and the right to control one's own body.
And you'll know it if you allow McCain to win, just as you did with Kerry, and just as you did with Gore.
A great many people believe that it's important to use the power you have to influence events even if people will make the worst assumptions about you. If Powell was doing all he could behind the scenes to prevent a needless war, and did so knowing full well that everyone on the outside would assume he was part of the conspiracy to wage the needless war, then he has integrity, and he has my respect.
RUSIA: Hmmm. Recording US Industry Association? Does the RIAA have competition now? And they have a Soviet counterpart huh? Would that organization have branches in... Russia?
It rather depends on the application. If the technology offers the right mix, yes, it will replace a different tech for the same application.
As a basic example: yes, a 160Gb MP3 player with a spinning, magnetic, disc may be the same price as a 16Gb flash MP3 player, but few people have any reason to pick the former over the latter. The latter is going to be smaller, will consume less power (or the same with a smaller battery, reducing device size further), and considerably more robust, as you need for a product that can expect to be knocked around. The former adds capacity but for little benefit given there are few people (outside of Slashdot) who have music libraries larger than 16Gb.
For laptops, it's not hard to see why a 32Gb flash system would be more advantageous than a 160Gb spinning disc (current prices for SATA 2.5" drives seem to give you around 160Gb for $100, and 2x16Gb SD cards also cost around $100.) Again, the application - a low power, quiet, portable device that takes knocks with "enough" capacity for a decent operating system, apps, and personal files - is well suited to the technology.
The thing that bothers me about a lot of people is that they get obsessed with a number rather than the full picture. It's easy to focus on one specific and forget that there's a wider picture out there. As an example, looking at DVD:
Is DVD's successor:
1. HD movies provided via Blu-ray discs?
2. Online movie libraries, at DVD or better quality, provided on an all-you-can-eat monthly subscription basis or as decently priced PPV?
HD enthusiasts get very upset when you suggest that picture quality might not be the be-all and end-all of a successor to DVD. VHS beat out Laserdisc, it was cheaper and recordable, and thus more in line with what consumers wanted at the time than expensive, read-only, discs. Betamax's perceived advantage over VHS (which historians question) was higher picture quality, but VHS had better capacity tapes and that, ultimately, won consumers over: Betamax just couldn't do what consumers actually wanted.
Don't get hung up on price-per-byte. If the cost for an acceptable amount of capacity is low enough, and the advantages of the technology for particular applications are considerable, people will use it.
There are a number of faults with your argument. First off, the DVD Forum's decision to go with a maximum of two (later three) layers for HD-DVD had absolutely nothing to do with what was technically possible at the time. It had everything to do with accommodating existing DVD production lines, all of which could (supposedly) produce HD-DVD discs with only minor changeover costs. This was supposed to give HD-DVD a production price advantage over Blu-ray, as Blu-ray production required a complete overhaul of production facilities.
Increasing the number of layers does not significantly add changeover costs, a fact HD-VMD's promoters are quick to point out. Indeed, given the fact the exact same equipment can be used to master DVDs and HD VMDs (which is not true of either HD DVD or Blu-ray), the changeover costs are significantly lower. In any case, given the choice was between Blu-ray (expensive readers, new disc duplication plant) and either blue-laser DVD (expensive readers, no new disc duplication plant), or a multilayer alternative (which you suggest, incorrectly, would be new disc duplication plant, but would definitely be cheap readers), the DVD Forum could still have settled upon multilayer technology and ended up ahead of Blu-ray, even if you'd been right about expensive plant replacement costs.
And why did Blu-ray require a complete overhaul of production facilities? Was it because of the use of a blue (violet, actually) laser? Nope. It was because of how Blu-ray was layered, with the data-bearing disc surface being much closer to the physical surface than DVD's. There were several reasons why Blu-ray chose this approach, but one of them was (drum roll please) to accommodate a larger number of layers in the disc while preserving the "standard DVD" thickness.
Blu-ray's decision to put the layers nearer the surface of the disk have nothing to do with adding layers. It's to do with increasing capacity. The reason why Blu-ray has around 66% more capacity than HD DVD per layer is due to the use of a different aperture, made possible by the change in location of the layer. That simple change means that the capacity per layer is significantly higher than it would otherwise be. I don't really need to point out the flaw with your belief: if it were to do with Blu-ray's backers wanting to make room for 8 layer discs that somehow would be unable to fit in a regular optical drive, then you might want to ask yourself how HD-VMD does it - that's a very real format that uses regular DVD pressing equipment.
HD DVD is cheaper (at a media level) than HD-VMD not because the equipment is cheaper - it's the same - but because adding layers adds costs directly at the media level. If it takes 10x as long to make a ten layer disc as a single layer disc, it's going to cost several times as much too, and that's exactly what happens here. Worse, as every layer's integrity matters to the final product, you're increasing the chances of a bad disk by 10x by increasing the number of layers this way.
If this was a viable technology, HD DVD would have used it with red lasers. It would have ended up ahead of the game. It's not viable not because of plant changeover costs (the costs are minimal, as with blue-laser HD DVD), but because you need to throw away four-eight times as many discs as you would a regular DVD or Blu-ray disc, and take four-eight times as long to make them.
And it's not really going to go anywhere. More layers = exponentially lower yields. Despite the increased packaging overhead, it's generally better to ship multiple discs.
If anyone doubts this is an issue, you might want to ask why anyone went with blue lasers for the HD formats in the first place. DVD can be increased to 50G just by making the discs 10-11 layers. Everyone's known how to do that for a while, there's even a (real, disks being pressed, players being made) HD format called HD-VMD that works exactly that way. The DVD Forum could have made HD DVD use that format, and would have thus killed Blu-ray's chances completely by making profitable sub-$100 players, in massive quantities. The only cost-adding modification you'd have to make to a DVD drive to make this work is to dampen the noise due to the 3-5X spin increase.
It didn't happen because the media itself is just too expensive in practice. It costs 10x as long to press a ten layer DVD as a single layer DVD, and if any of those layers are corrupt, then the entire effort was wasted.
And it's not available, except used and at a phenomenally expensive price. In practice, it might as well not exist. I appreciate Slashdot is the pedant's dream, but I never said AC hadn't been ported to GNU/Linux: what I said is that making the regular version work under Wine was (something I need.)
Can you please, please, please, get Alpha Centauri working! We have alternatives to Microsoft Office. But Alpha Centauri, the best game in the Civ stable evah, is unclonable. I think I speak for most people here, as well as most people on this planet, and, indeed, most intelligent beings in our Universe, both biological, silicon, and sub-ethereal, when I say this is probably the single most important issue affecting humanity, and life itself.
The constitution is supposed to be followed by everyone. There is no reason for any branch of government to say "We can get away with breaching the constitution, so we will." And SCOTUS was right, in this instance, as in many others, the judgment as to what constitutes the public interest is a local matter.
If you disagreed with the decision, the right thing to attack was the government.
Ok, are we seriously assuming at this point that there are two worlds here:
1. A world in which no honest person has a gun.
2. A world in which absolutely everybody has a gun, with them, at all times.
All you guys, pro- and anti-gun, really need to take a step back and review the situation, because your assumptions on both sides are getting increasingly absurd. Right now, most people don't even carry knives around with them, and knives are a hell of a lot more useful to have around than guns, the latter being fairly single purpose.
as they did when they allowed eminent domain for private purposes.
But they didn't. What they said is that the Supreme Court didn't have the power to make a judgment because eminent domain decisions are inherently local based upon local needs. From their point of view, it may well have been completely illegal, but they can't tell that.
Saying that they allowed it is like saying that the courts allow people to murder each other they've rejected cases in the past against murderers due to lack of evidence, or illegally collected evidence.
LTS means "Will be supported for a long time", that is, be receiving bug fixes and other updates for a while. It does not mean "First version works perfectly". Yes, people will be using Hardy for a long time, but they will not be using the version as released in April 2008, they'll be using the most recent version.
It works the opposite way to what you're suggesting: obviously, all bugs need to be avoided. But bugs in 7.10 are of considerably more concern because there's only a relatively short timescale in which fixes will come down the pipe. If you're using 7.10 next year, it's safe to say you're going to have to live with any bugs in the distribution.
This is not the same as 8.04 LTS. Not only are Canonical going to do what they can to squeeze the important bugs out of the system in the next few months, but will continue to do so for all of the other problems over the next three years.
My advice with any version of Ubuntu is never upgrade when it comes out anyway, unless you have a drop-dead issue you really must upgrade for. I'm running 7.10 on my work PC and home shared PC. I'll upgrade both once I'm comfortable 8.04 LTS is more stable than the generally excellent 7.10. There have been several times in the last month where I've considered doing that, and held of largely because I want to be doubly sure rather than because of any specific bug I'm running into.
For what it's worth, I'd put 8.04 right now as more stable than 7.04 was when I upgraded to 8.04 (May, I think.) Your mileage may vary depending upon your hardware factors and other similar stuff.
The GP was asking for ZFS to be released under the GPL. It already is open-sourced, just under the CDDL which is, unfortunately, incompatible with the de-facto standard copyleft license, the GPL.
SSL certificates perform two functions: they verify the credentials of the website you're connecting to, and they provide a secure key for communications between the webserver and you. The reason we combine the two into one certificate is to make man-in-the-middle attacks more difficult. As you suggest, there are ways to compromise the SSL system, however they require you attack in one of four specific places:
You compromise the web browser, providing a bogus list of authorities. Your web browser maker becomes liable in that instance.
You compromise the SSL certificate authority, creating a bogus certificate signed by the CA. In this instance, the authority is liable
You compromise the certificate holder, stealing the legitimate private certificate and redirecting traffic to and from their servers to your own (or hacking into their website to transfer the information to you.) In this case, the holder is liable
You compromise the user's PC, patching the web-browser to accept bogus credentials. In this case the user is at fault
At this point it should be obvious what the SSL certificate system provides you with, which is a clear chain of responsibility for breaches in security. Simply sticking a box between a client victim and server victim is not enough, you have to actively compromise one of the four groups above in order to spy on secured traffic. This creates incentives for each group to keep their part of the chain of accountability secure, and it ensures there's a starting point should there be a breach anyway.
Given the difficulty of sending legitimate certificates directly to participants on a mass scale, the CA system is about as secure as we're going to get, and while it's not perfect, that's not a legitimate reason to treat it equally with unsigned certificates. The chain of accountability makes a difference in terms of how you can recover from security breaches, and the likelihood of there being a breach in the first place.
Do you really think the average computer user is a "standard" sysadmin who knows "standard sysadmin stuff"?
Most people who buy computers want and expect it to "just work" rather than to spend time learning how to maintain the system. The ideal system, for them, is maintenance free. Funnily enough, one computer manufacturer in particular specializes in the whole "just works" concept. Their customers definitely do not expect to have to set up cronjobs to copy files across the network to a secure RAID server in the closet.
Personally, I'm in favour of something dramatic, like AT&T and Verizon being required to give a huge amount of their infrastructure to Qwest. Qwest didn't break the law and by all accounts they were penalized for it, with pre-arranged contracts suddenly dropped and legal sanctions used to prevent themselves from defending their previous forecasts - which were based on those contracts coming to fruition - to shareholders.
Holding a government to account cannot be left to politicians. If the government asks you to do something illegal, you should say no, just as you would if anyone else asked you to.
No one has ever claimed the NSA program listened in to anyone who didn't have some connection to terrorists and someone overseas
You say that like it's relevant. You might just as well issue apologia for a racist police precinct saying "No one has ever claimed the cops stopped and beat-up drivers who weren't criminals and drivers who weren't black".
Blanket, arbitrary, surveillance of calls made to or from overseas numbers by people who have no known terrorist connections to people who have no known terrorist connections is a massive invasion of privacy, and every bit as bad as surveillance of domestic calls are.
There really aren't that many consumer electronics items from the 1950s and 1960s in general use, even when they're compatible with "current" standards. The exception are a few items, like those you mention, that were expensive then and are expensive now. There were hundreds - possible thousands - of millions of radios and TVs made during that time, for example. These are 100% electronic items, unlikely to have failed due to mechanical problems (wear and tear), nor incompatible (in practice) with current standards and systems. Where are they now?
There are items made today that will still be in use in 40 years time, but the number is small, and as with the previous example, they'll be the obscure, highly priced, built-by-craftsmen objects. The "decline in quality" meme is a myth. If it's built in a factory, for the mass market, it isn't - and never has been - in the manufacturer's best interests to make it last for more than a decade. Exceptions exist - but they'll always exist. And, to be honest, there's a remarkable amount of stuff hitting landfills these days not because it fails to function as designed, but because it's obsolete. I suspect the number of 8088-based PCs that could still be working if their owners hadn't put them in the trash would probably number in the tens of millions. And that was hardly an industry where quality was considered a priority.
No, he'll define himself as a conservative, then describe his own opinions, and thus define anyone who disagrees as him as not conservative.
This is so totally unlike us Christians. It's such a shame Christianity has been hijacked by the "Jesus was the son of God" and "God really exists and created the Universe" element. True believes don't believe in a "God", those so-called Christians are making us look completely ridiculous and dragging the faith towards atheism, which I define as "Anything I don't like".
Anyway, I have to go now and do some work. I've been learning C++, and wrote my first C++ program today. Here it is:
PROGRAM HELLOW
WRITE(*,100) "HELLO WORLD" 100 FORMAT(A80)
END
I can't get it to compile though because the stupid C++ compiler doesn't understand true C++.
Slashdot Mirror
Really. 'cos I've read my own message several times and not actually read anything of the sort. But, whatever. It doesn't kind of show you're following a script:
Right-wing Shill: "Obama only talks about change, he doesn't stand for anything"
Obvious response: "Er, Obama stands for a lot of things. What on Earth are you talking about? Why are you repeating this tired old meme that never had any basis in fact to begin with?"
Right-wing Shill: "Oh, so you're saying he stands for change huh? But I can find lots of policies where he stands for the same things that the current government doesn't but that many left wingers are in favour of and have been for a while."
The logical inconsistency of your position doesn't deter you from repeating the shilling points, and it wouldn't, because it's not your job to be logical: you're paid to spout stuff over and over again until it gets accepted as fact. Just don't think we don't know what you're doing.
You know, this whole "Obama just talks about change, he doesn't have any real policies" meme is getting tired. It was tired when Clinton first started spouting it, at a time when Obama would uses his speeches as an opportunity to inspire, while referring people to his record and policies on his website, and it's tired now. It's especially ridiculous to promote the meme in an article which is about John McCain's attempts to record changes of Obama's position by monitoring his website.
If you want to know what Obama stands for, you have numerous sources who will tell you, from general principles to policy specifics. And believe me, the vast majority of us who support - strongly or otherwise - Obama do so knowing what he stands for.
If you think doing something publicly is "doing all you can behind the scenes", then I'm afraid I don't understand what language you're speaking in. In English, the term "behind the scenes" is generally considered opposite to "doing something publicly". I assume they mean the same thing in your language. I speak English.
I'm furious at Obama for his capitulation over FISA.
However, to argue that FISA is the only issue and that the massive policy differences between Obama and McCain elsewhere somehow pale into insignificance because of that one issue is ridiculous.
While our trust in Obama may be weakened by what's happened, we can at least expect him not to involve the US in needless wars, to make a good-faith attempt to extricate us from Iraq, to not appoint right-wing zealots to SCOTUS, to manage the economy in a way that doesn't involve populist tax cuts without reductions in spending, and to know enough about Foreign policy to understand that Czechoslovakia is not a country and therefore Russia does not export oil to it, and what the difference is between the various Muslim factions in the Middle East.
Our trust in McCain should be at rock-bottom considering the massive number of flip-flops he's engaged in over the last few years, but we can trust him to continue - as he's promised - the occupation of Iraq. We can expect him to at least turn up the temperature in Iran, and quite possibly invade it needlessly rather than attempt to rebuild the pro-Democracy forces that were taking over Iran until the US invaded Iraq and started talking smack about Iran. We can expect him to continue Bush's deficit-growing policies. We can continue to expect him to muse about countries he wants to invade in public, mix up political groups, and work from an Atlas that apparently hasn't been updated since the end of the Cold War, if not earlier (I'm half expecting him to protest about the atrocities occurring in Rhodesia...) And we can expect him to appoint SCOTUS judges who care more about right-wing ideology, trying to undermine Congressional oversight, undermining the separation of Church and State inherent in the 1st Amendment, and attacking privacy and the right to control one's own body.
And you'll know it if you allow McCain to win, just as you did with Kerry, and just as you did with Gore.
A great many people believe that it's important to use the power you have to influence events even if people will make the worst assumptions about you. If Powell was doing all he could behind the scenes to prevent a needless war, and did so knowing full well that everyone on the outside would assume he was part of the conspiracy to wage the needless war, then he has integrity, and he has my respect.
RUSIA: Hmmm. Recording US Industry Association? Does the RIAA have competition now? And they have a Soviet counterpart huh? Would that organization have branches in... Rus s ia?
It rather depends on the application. If the technology offers the right mix, yes, it will replace a different tech for the same application.
As a basic example: yes, a 160Gb MP3 player with a spinning, magnetic, disc may be the same price as a 16Gb flash MP3 player, but few people have any reason to pick the former over the latter. The latter is going to be smaller, will consume less power (or the same with a smaller battery, reducing device size further), and considerably more robust, as you need for a product that can expect to be knocked around. The former adds capacity but for little benefit given there are few people (outside of Slashdot) who have music libraries larger than 16Gb.
For laptops, it's not hard to see why a 32Gb flash system would be more advantageous than a 160Gb spinning disc (current prices for SATA 2.5" drives seem to give you around 160Gb for $100, and 2x16Gb SD cards also cost around $100.) Again, the application - a low power, quiet, portable device that takes knocks with "enough" capacity for a decent operating system, apps, and personal files - is well suited to the technology.
The thing that bothers me about a lot of people is that they get obsessed with a number rather than the full picture. It's easy to focus on one specific and forget that there's a wider picture out there. As an example, looking at DVD:
Is DVD's successor:
1. HD movies provided via Blu-ray discs?
2. Online movie libraries, at DVD or better quality, provided on an all-you-can-eat monthly subscription basis or as decently priced PPV?
HD enthusiasts get very upset when you suggest that picture quality might not be the be-all and end-all of a successor to DVD. VHS beat out Laserdisc, it was cheaper and recordable, and thus more in line with what consumers wanted at the time than expensive, read-only, discs. Betamax's perceived advantage over VHS (which historians question) was higher picture quality, but VHS had better capacity tapes and that, ultimately, won consumers over: Betamax just couldn't do what consumers actually wanted.
Don't get hung up on price-per-byte. If the cost for an acceptable amount of capacity is low enough, and the advantages of the technology for particular applications are considerable, people will use it.
Increasing the number of layers does not significantly add changeover costs, a fact HD-VMD's promoters are quick to point out. Indeed, given the fact the exact same equipment can be used to master DVDs and HD VMDs (which is not true of either HD DVD or Blu-ray), the changeover costs are significantly lower. In any case, given the choice was between Blu-ray (expensive readers, new disc duplication plant) and either blue-laser DVD (expensive readers, no new disc duplication plant), or a multilayer alternative (which you suggest, incorrectly, would be new disc duplication plant, but would definitely be cheap readers), the DVD Forum could still have settled upon multilayer technology and ended up ahead of Blu-ray, even if you'd been right about expensive plant replacement costs.
Blu-ray's decision to put the layers nearer the surface of the disk have nothing to do with adding layers. It's to do with increasing capacity. The reason why Blu-ray has around 66% more capacity than HD DVD per layer is due to the use of a different aperture, made possible by the change in location of the layer. That simple change means that the capacity per layer is significantly higher than it would otherwise be. I don't really need to point out the flaw with your belief: if it were to do with Blu-ray's backers wanting to make room for 8 layer discs that somehow would be unable to fit in a regular optical drive, then you might want to ask yourself how HD-VMD does it - that's a very real format that uses regular DVD pressing equipment.
HD DVD is cheaper (at a media level) than HD-VMD not because the equipment is cheaper - it's the same - but because adding layers adds costs directly at the media level. If it takes 10x as long to make a ten layer disc as a single layer disc, it's going to cost several times as much too, and that's exactly what happens here. Worse, as every layer's integrity matters to the final product, you're increasing the chances of a bad disk by 10x by increasing the number of layers this way.
If this was a viable technology, HD DVD would have used it with red lasers. It would have ended up ahead of the game. It's not viable not because of plant changeover costs (the costs are minimal, as with blue-laser HD DVD), but because you need to throw away four-eight times as many discs as you would a regular DVD or Blu-ray disc, and take four-eight times as long to make them.
And it's not really going to go anywhere. More layers = exponentially lower yields. Despite the increased packaging overhead, it's generally better to ship multiple discs.
If anyone doubts this is an issue, you might want to ask why anyone went with blue lasers for the HD formats in the first place. DVD can be increased to 50G just by making the discs 10-11 layers. Everyone's known how to do that for a while, there's even a (real, disks being pressed, players being made) HD format called HD-VMD that works exactly that way. The DVD Forum could have made HD DVD use that format, and would have thus killed Blu-ray's chances completely by making profitable sub-$100 players, in massive quantities. The only cost-adding modification you'd have to make to a DVD drive to make this work is to dampen the noise due to the 3-5X spin increase.
It didn't happen because the media itself is just too expensive in practice. It costs 10x as long to press a ten layer DVD as a single layer DVD, and if any of those layers are corrupt, then the entire effort was wasted.
And it's not available, except used and at a phenomenally expensive price. In practice, it might as well not exist. I appreciate Slashdot is the pedant's dream, but I never said AC hadn't been ported to GNU/Linux: what I said is that making the regular version work under Wine was (something I need.)
Had a native port. It's not really available in any practical sense.
The constitution is supposed to be followed by everyone. There is no reason for any branch of government to say "We can get away with breaching the constitution, so we will." And SCOTUS was right, in this instance, as in many others, the judgment as to what constitutes the public interest is a local matter.
If you disagreed with the decision, the right thing to attack was the government.
1. A world in which no honest person has a gun.
2. A world in which absolutely everybody has a gun, with them, at all times.
All you guys, pro- and anti-gun, really need to take a step back and review the situation, because your assumptions on both sides are getting increasingly absurd. Right now, most people don't even carry knives around with them, and knives are a hell of a lot more useful to have around than guns, the latter being fairly single purpose.
But they didn't. What they said is that the Supreme Court didn't have the power to make a judgment because eminent domain decisions are inherently local based upon local needs. From their point of view, it may well have been completely illegal, but they can't tell that.
Saying that they allowed it is like saying that the courts allow people to murder each other they've rejected cases in the past against murderers due to lack of evidence, or illegally collected evidence.
LTS means "Will be supported for a long time", that is, be receiving bug fixes and other updates for a while. It does not mean "First version works perfectly". Yes, people will be using Hardy for a long time, but they will not be using the version as released in April 2008, they'll be using the most recent version.
It works the opposite way to what you're suggesting: obviously, all bugs need to be avoided. But bugs in 7.10 are of considerably more concern because there's only a relatively short timescale in which fixes will come down the pipe. If you're using 7.10 next year, it's safe to say you're going to have to live with any bugs in the distribution.
This is not the same as 8.04 LTS. Not only are Canonical going to do what they can to squeeze the important bugs out of the system in the next few months, but will continue to do so for all of the other problems over the next three years.
My advice with any version of Ubuntu is never upgrade when it comes out anyway, unless you have a drop-dead issue you really must upgrade for. I'm running 7.10 on my work PC and home shared PC. I'll upgrade both once I'm comfortable 8.04 LTS is more stable than the generally excellent 7.10. There have been several times in the last month where I've considered doing that, and held of largely because I want to be doubly sure rather than because of any specific bug I'm running into.
For what it's worth, I'd put 8.04 right now as more stable than 7.04 was when I upgraded to 8.04 (May, I think.) Your mileage may vary depending upon your hardware factors and other similar stuff.
Yes, we don't have to worry about this law, because the next President will be trustworthy...
The GP was asking for ZFS to be released under the GPL. It already is open-sourced, just under the CDDL which is, unfortunately, incompatible with the de-facto standard copyleft license, the GPL.
So, er, what file system is Sun selling then? ;)
SSL certificates perform two functions: they verify the credentials of the website you're connecting to, and they provide a secure key for communications between the webserver and you. The reason we combine the two into one certificate is to make man-in-the-middle attacks more difficult. As you suggest, there are ways to compromise the SSL system, however they require you attack in one of four specific places:
At this point it should be obvious what the SSL certificate system provides you with, which is a clear chain of responsibility for breaches in security. Simply sticking a box between a client victim and server victim is not enough, you have to actively compromise one of the four groups above in order to spy on secured traffic. This creates incentives for each group to keep their part of the chain of accountability secure, and it ensures there's a starting point should there be a breach anyway.
Given the difficulty of sending legitimate certificates directly to participants on a mass scale, the CA system is about as secure as we're going to get, and while it's not perfect, that's not a legitimate reason to treat it equally with unsigned certificates. The chain of accountability makes a difference in terms of how you can recover from security breaches, and the likelihood of there being a breach in the first place.
Do you really think the average computer user is a "standard" sysadmin who knows "standard sysadmin stuff"?
Most people who buy computers want and expect it to "just work" rather than to spend time learning how to maintain the system. The ideal system, for them, is maintenance free. Funnily enough, one computer manufacturer in particular specializes in the whole "just works" concept. Their customers definitely do not expect to have to set up cronjobs to copy files across the network to a secure RAID server in the closet.
Can you guess which manufacturer that is?
Hey! There's no need to insult people who have a phobia about paying taxes and love loud, rhythmic, electronic music!
Both broke the law. Both need to be reined in.
Personally, I'm in favour of something dramatic, like AT&T and Verizon being required to give a huge amount of their infrastructure to Qwest. Qwest didn't break the law and by all accounts they were penalized for it, with pre-arranged contracts suddenly dropped and legal sanctions used to prevent themselves from defending their previous forecasts - which were based on those contracts coming to fruition - to shareholders.
Holding a government to account cannot be left to politicians. If the government asks you to do something illegal, you should say no, just as you would if anyone else asked you to.
You say that like it's relevant. You might just as well issue apologia for a racist police precinct saying "No one has ever claimed the cops stopped and beat-up drivers who weren't criminals and drivers who weren't black".
Blanket, arbitrary, surveillance of calls made to or from overseas numbers by people who have no known terrorist connections to people who have no known terrorist connections is a massive invasion of privacy, and every bit as bad as surveillance of domestic calls are.
There really aren't that many consumer electronics items from the 1950s and 1960s in general use, even when they're compatible with "current" standards. The exception are a few items, like those you mention, that were expensive then and are expensive now. There were hundreds - possible thousands - of millions of radios and TVs made during that time, for example. These are 100% electronic items, unlikely to have failed due to mechanical problems (wear and tear), nor incompatible (in practice) with current standards and systems. Where are they now?
There are items made today that will still be in use in 40 years time, but the number is small, and as with the previous example, they'll be the obscure, highly priced, built-by-craftsmen objects. The "decline in quality" meme is a myth. If it's built in a factory, for the mass market, it isn't - and never has been - in the manufacturer's best interests to make it last for more than a decade. Exceptions exist - but they'll always exist. And, to be honest, there's a remarkable amount of stuff hitting landfills these days not because it fails to function as designed, but because it's obsolete. I suspect the number of 8088-based PCs that could still be working if their owners hadn't put them in the trash would probably number in the tens of millions. And that was hardly an industry where quality was considered a priority.
No, he'll define himself as a conservative, then describe his own opinions, and thus define anyone who disagrees as him as not conservative.
This is so totally unlike us Christians. It's such a shame Christianity has been hijacked by the "Jesus was the son of God" and "God really exists and created the Universe" element. True believes don't believe in a "God", those so-called Christians are making us look completely ridiculous and dragging the faith towards atheism, which I define as "Anything I don't like".
Anyway, I have to go now and do some work. I've been learning C++, and wrote my first C++ program today. Here it is:
I can't get it to compile though because the stupid C++ compiler doesn't understand true C++.