I'll repeat myself: my problem was not with your conclusion, but with how you arrived to it. In other words, I think communism would probably suck to live in, but I also think that faulty logic sucks, and sometimes I call people on it. (If False then True is logically consistent.)
Are you actually arguing that South Korea would have been better off had we just let the North invade and take over?
No. Where did you get that idea?
We tried isolationism in the earth 20th century. For outcomes see World War I and World War II.
Oh yeah, how could I forget that US isolationism was the cause of the world wars? Come on.
Your conclusion may be true, but your reasons for it are suspect.
You assume that the only reason North Korea is the way it is is because it's a "communist" country. That may be the case, but it may also be the case that they are they way they are in a reaction to events and people around them.
In other words, would they be in the same situation if they had been left alone? Maybe, but it's hardly given.
Lots of people would like to help in this way. The problem is that they simply don't care. The slashdot editors don't feel like they have to listen to their readers, and they never have.
There are sites where the editors do listen, although none of them have the same focus which slashdot does. Unfortunate.
It's frustrating every time I see some nitwit say "if yu want good grammer go to cnn," precisely because cnn, which usually grammatically correct, has lacks the focus that slashdot has. Oh, and it's cnn.
During my first year of university someone bought that game. I pointed out that it wasn't porn, and for some reason, this really bothered him.
I took advantage of that fact.
Me: "Hey guys, watch this, I'm going to get a rise out of Frank!"
Frank: "No you're not."
Me: "Frank, you know that Leisure Suit Larry isn't porn, right?"
Frank: "Goddamnit #!%!^#^%^%!$%#@ IT IS NOT PORN!"
It would probably work to this day, some 6 years later.
No, in Australia, the Liberal (and National) party is the more conservative party. Labor (it's spelt without a u) is somewhat more liberal. The genuinely liberal parties (that matter) are the Australian Democrats and the Greens, however.
IIRC (I'm not actually Australian, but I lived there for about three years, and was called an honourary Aussie a few times) the reason the Liberals are called the Liberals had to do with having relatively lax party discipline (at least compared to Labor) once upon a time. They're not very liberal in that regard either, anymore.
My point was that major political parties almost invariably want to stick with the status quo on most things. You're of course correct that they scaremonger a lot, though.
Oh, I guess people are less likely to contribute to the "Everything is A-OK" foundation.
Not so. They get plenty of funding. They just don't call themselves that. Instead, they call themselves (in the US) the Democrats and Republicans, (in Australia) Labor and Liberal, etc.
.\" Take this out and a Unix Demon will dog your steps from now until .\" the time_t's wrap around.
You can tune a file system, but you can't tune a fish.
I run RH7.2 (only one version behind, bub) and run Ximian Red Carpet and up2date regularly.
Red Hat 7.2 is still supported - had you applied updates to fix these problems, which were available through Red Carpet were available in late July or early August, you wouldn't have anything to worry about.
As for self-compiled software conflicting with stock RPMs - not necessarily so. I used that excuse myself for a long time, but recently decided it was time to learn how to build my own RPMs, to get the benefit of package management along with the benefit of a customised system. It's a shame that more people don't realise that they can do this - it isn't very hard to learn to do, and it's well worth the effort invested.
1) The number of security bigs in a piece of software only decreases when they are fixed.
I don't think you can assume this. While it may be true in the case of very simple security problems such as buffer overruns, it isn't necessarily true when the problem is more complex. Fixing one problem might very well expose others.
In one of the essays in TMMM, Brooks broke down the difficulties in software development into two basic categories: the incidentals and the fundamentals.
The incidental difficulties can be solved by using better languages, better development environments, better planning, etc. The fundamental challenge, though, remains the difficulty in designing large systems were many parts written by many people need to interface together.
Brooks then posits that attacking the incidentals, while worthwhile in its own right, doesn't solve the problem, and will not make an order of magnitude improvement in the way software is developed.
Having said that, I'd love to see him proven wrong - and I bet he would too. One thing Brooks also hints at is that solving many incidentals might yield an order of magnitude improvement, which would help a lot, although software development would remain very hard.
I've been doing Ask Slashdot for somewhere close to 5 years....
No, you haven't. Slashdot was first announced in late 1997. I can't remember exactly when, but at least I know the year. I was reading Chips n Dips prior to that.
Ask Slashdot didn't appear as a regular feature until considerably later.
No, not DNS timeout errors. I was running squid behind a NAT box, which was at the time on an unreliable Telstra ADSL connection. Squid would not start if the ADSL happened to be down at the same time. I'm not entirely sure why this was; I was running an internal DNS server.
It was a rare problem, but it did happen on occasion.
Explain. As far as I can tell, and I've spent plenty of time thinking about this, communism and freedom are points on different, orthogonal continua (continuums?). Instead, you should be placing, say, capitalism and communism or freedom and dictatorship opposed to each other.
Bear in mind that while I'm not fundamentally opposed to communism, I do think it's probably a bad idea. But what's a worse idea is being dishonest about it (about anything).
Technical advancement in the industry would grind to a halt. Sales of computers to private individuals would slow since (among other things) there wouldn't be any more commercial-quality software (especially games) to use.
If there is a market for technically advanced software, and if governments don't decide to outlaw technically advanced software, then technically advanced software will be available, although under arrangements different to (and, I've decided after devoting a lot of thought to the issue, probably better than) how it's available now.
I do agree that there'd be a painful shakeup between now and then (if it ever happens, which, sadly, I doubt), but the pain of it would be almost a memory by the time it's felt.
I don't view capitalism as any kind of panacea, but it should serve quite well in this case.
Slashdot Mirror
Hmm, I think you mean Kaporware.
Are you actually arguing that South Korea would have been better off had we just let the North invade and take over?
No. Where did you get that idea?
We tried isolationism in the earth 20th century. For outcomes see World War I and World War II.
Oh yeah, how could I forget that US isolationism was the cause of the world wars? Come on.
You assume that the only reason North Korea is the way it is is because it's a "communist" country. That may be the case, but it may also be the case that they are they way they are in a reaction to events and people around them.
In other words, would they be in the same situation if they had been left alone? Maybe, but it's hardly given.
There are sites where the editors do listen, although none of them have the same focus which slashdot does. Unfortunate.
It's frustrating every time I see some nitwit say "if yu want good grammer go to cnn," precisely because cnn, which usually grammatically correct, has lacks the focus that slashdot has. Oh, and it's cnn.
Our doom may be nigh, but it isn't upon us yet, for Soft-Updates are also referred to as softdeps. :)
I took advantage of that fact.
Me: "Hey guys, watch this, I'm going to get a rise out of Frank!"
Frank: "No you're not."
Me: "Frank, you know that Leisure Suit Larry isn't porn, right?"
Frank: "Goddamnit #!%!^#^%^%!$%#@ IT IS NOT PORN!"
It would probably work to this day, some 6 years later.
Maybe post-1.0 they'll offer features that would bring it up to the level of bitkeeper, but right now, that isn't their main goal.
Maybe Mr T is hungry.
Liberal=liberal
No, in Australia, the Liberal (and National) party is the more conservative party. Labor (it's spelt without a u) is somewhat more liberal. The genuinely liberal parties (that matter) are the Australian Democrats and the Greens, however.
IIRC (I'm not actually Australian, but I lived there for about three years, and was called an honourary Aussie a few times) the reason the Liberals are called the Liberals had to do with having relatively lax party discipline (at least compared to Labor) once upon a time. They're not very liberal in that regard either, anymore.
My point was that major political parties almost invariably want to stick with the status quo on most things. You're of course correct that they scaremonger a lot, though.
Not so. They get plenty of funding. They just don't call themselves that. Instead, they call themselves (in the US) the Democrats and Republicans, (in Australia) Labor and Liberal, etc.
You can tune a file system, but you can't tune a fish.
(From the BSD tunefs.8 manpage.)
You should have a file called prefs.js somewhere within your $HOME/.mozilla directory. You can set user_prefs there.
Red Hat 7.2 is still supported - had you applied updates to fix these problems, which were available through Red Carpet were available in late July or early August, you wouldn't have anything to worry about.
As for self-compiled software conflicting with stock RPMs - not necessarily so. I used that excuse myself for a long time, but recently decided it was time to learn how to build my own RPMs, to get the benefit of package management along with the benefit of a customised system. It's a shame that more people don't realise that they can do this - it isn't very hard to learn to do, and it's well worth the effort invested.
I have this feeling that you don't know what bandwidth means.
Here's a hint: it isn't the total quantity of data transferred over a period of time.
(Don't worry; most other people don't know what bandwidth actually means either.)
Woops!
I don't think you can assume this. While it may be true in the case of very simple security problems such as buffer overruns, it isn't necessarily true when the problem is more complex. Fixing one problem might very well expose others.
BTW, the word you want is "observations".
The incidental difficulties can be solved by using better languages, better development environments, better planning, etc. The fundamental challenge, though, remains the difficulty in designing large systems were many parts written by many people need to interface together.
Brooks then posits that attacking the incidentals, while worthwhile in its own right, doesn't solve the problem, and will not make an order of magnitude improvement in the way software is developed.
Having said that, I'd love to see him proven wrong - and I bet he would too. One thing Brooks also hints at is that solving many incidentals might yield an order of magnitude improvement, which would help a lot, although software development would remain very hard.
No, you haven't. Slashdot was first announced in late 1997. I can't remember exactly when, but at least I know the year. I was reading Chips n Dips prior to that.
Ask Slashdot didn't appear as a regular feature until considerably later.
It was a rare problem, but it did happen on occasion.
Unfortunately, squid isn't very robust in the face of full disks or dns problems. At least, it wasn't in my experience.
Uhh... do you know what "regression testing" is? It's definitely not the same thing as verifying that backported features work.
A good definition is here.
Anyone else notice that the tab for this window when abbreviated looks like (if you're not reading carefully) it says "Selling Your Wife"? :)
Explain. As far as I can tell, and I've spent plenty of time thinking about this, communism and freedom are points on different, orthogonal continua (continuums?). Instead, you should be placing, say, capitalism and communism or freedom and dictatorship opposed to each other.
Bear in mind that while I'm not fundamentally opposed to communism, I do think it's probably a bad idea. But what's a worse idea is being dishonest about it (about anything).
If there is a market for technically advanced software, and if governments don't decide to outlaw technically advanced software, then technically advanced software will be available, although under arrangements different to (and, I've decided after devoting a lot of thought to the issue, probably better than) how it's available now.
I do agree that there'd be a painful shakeup between now and then (if it ever happens, which, sadly, I doubt), but the pain of it would be almost a memory by the time it's felt.
I don't view capitalism as any kind of panacea, but it should serve quite well in this case.