Eh, nope. I travel widely and have done so almost full-time for 25 years (including years in Italy, Nigeria, Iraq, China, Libya: you name it, I've spent time there). I always hold on to my docs. I have copies. I never have them together except just after crossing customs (as I just did when this happened).
Sometimes you have to have things in a case, as no wallet is big enough to carry all my credit cards, 8 passports (all of us dual nationals), etc. You then hold on to the case religoiusly -as I did. These were professional thieves (a microsecond is enough) and believe me: if they got me they can get you.
Sorry, I thought you were trying to make a point. Yes, no doubt being involved in crime skews your viewpoint - very understandably, and that's why we use cops, juries and judges. I had my briefcase stolen recently: I would have gladly broken the thief's skull on the sidewalk to watch his brains leak out - thank God I did not get the chance to do that.
(Re Security check - yes, but only if done cleverly. I fly 120,000 miles a year and feel that most so-called security does not provide any real security.)
Last month, while travelling to Amsterdam my briefcase was stolen at the airport and I lost all my ID. Everything. Money, Credit cards, driver's license, passports, social insurance card, tickets - everything.
It was an eye-opener. NO-ONE can do anything for you. Amex ($400 a year platinum card with "concierge service") would not send me a new card because I had no ID. The cops would not initially write a report because you need to show ID. A new passport at the Canadian embassy was very difficult when you have no ID and have lost your citizenship certificate as well (though they were helpful). Try to check into a hotel without credit cards or ID - it cannot be done. Try to rent a car - same. Try to buy lunch. Nope. If I had not had a support network in place (relatives living there) I would have slept in the street.
The moral of all this: nice to have ID at the basis of everything, but just wait until you slip off the road.
Not sure anyone would want to go through what I went through in that week. Before you say "normal people should have nothing to fear from having to show ID" - wait until you lose it.
NO-ONE here is defending terrorists or terrorism, or calling them anything but vile evil bastards, if I can use laguage like that for a moment.
I just think you will find that most people on the side of preserving our freedoms believe that throwing out these freedoms is giving these people exactly what they want.
The sad thing is that our freedoms (let's call them that, not the charged term "rights") disappear bit by bit. Until you suddenly realise what you used to have.
For instance, in my lifetime (I am now 45), I have lost the following freedoms, among many:
Anonymous travel
Anonymously buying a car
Secrecy of my communications, unless a judge decides my letters need to be opened
Paying cash for a car (soon: anything)
Carrying $10,000 in cash around
Board an airplane by walking onto it
Travel without regularly having shoes, belt removed (whoich used to be for criminals)
Travel without being fingerprinted (if I want to travel to the US and I am now a US citizen)
The right to just walk to an airport and take a flying lesson, without lots of prior paper
The right to walk the streets without being filmed continuously, if I live in the UK
None of these rights in themselves are a giant deal; but together, they make life a lot less free than it was. We are always talking about "spreading freedom" - how is any of this freedom? And it is the insidiousness that gets me - as well as the fact WE did this. Not some idiot terrorists - this is all of our making.
Seems that due to our collective apathy we have lost that battle - the police state is here to stay, and my children will have a much more 1984-like life as a result. I remember the days when the term "police state" meant a bad thing!
Surely we all know that "DNS" comes at the top of the list of the Internet's vulnerabilities? Tunneling data; many bugs in DNS software over the years; vulnerability to DOS: Surely we all know this already - why is this news?
DNS was an afterthought - but it seems to me a very necessary one, and one we will have to continue to live with.
You are right: MS owns Asia lock, stock and barrel. But here are a few things to realise:
a) For the embedded stuff, big in Taiwan, MS is nowhere - it's all Linux.
b) Java is making some minor inroads. I used to be channel sales director for a Canadian software company selling Java tools, and fought hard against MS tools - am now being told by my Japanese ex-customers that I was right to insist patience would pay off with Java.
c) Malaysia is rather rabidly anti-western and anti-American. This would not happen in Japan, for instance.
Michael
Re:OT: Silly spelling rants
on
Who Wrote Linux?
·
· Score: 3, Funny
Eh, that would be "existence", not "existance". And "communist", not "comunist".
Spelling convention is not just power exercised by published writers. Not at all, in fact. It is simply a way that we agree words ought to be written so we all have the same understanding. Yes, language lives; but no, the fact a lot of people write something a certain way does not make it right.
I.e. it is variable, but within limits. Today, in 2004, a sentence like
"In there wisdom, the school's principles wrote this sentance while standing in the quue. Its true that in it's previous live, the school bored had no moral principals"....is just utter nonsense, whether 100 million people write it all that way or not. I presume you would agree? Yet I have seen all those mistakes made, recently.
Best technology magazine is not even a technology magazine, namely The Economist., Don't miss the technology section every week, the Tech Quarterly every quarter, and the regular Linux articles in the business section.
If I oculd only read one magazine, this would be it.
I learned that too (so I am totally puzzled by this article), and I was in Holland, which has never used inches. This stuff should be common grade-school knowledge. Frightening how Americans know so little about the rest of the world.
Having said that: according to the article, 2.54cm is not *exactly* right. I always thought it was. So I am not as omniscient as I thought I was, and the article seems to have been not entirely a waste of all our cycles.
I still have one, a 16 MB machine, in my basement. It runs Linux (Redhat 5.2) and for years now has been my packet radio machine. It sits there all day and you know what? 16 million clock cycles per second is plenty to send a few bytes per second through the (iamginary) ether utterly reliably and with plenty of power to spare.
And: - No cooling fan to break - Very low power
The 486 was a fantastic chip, and is still great today.
My laptop is a Windows machine, and my desktop is a Linux box. So I think I see both sides, and no religion drives my decisions, I think - just the facts as I see them.
WINDOWS:
I need the Windows box - no way around it - because I need applications like Adobe Photoshop (not an option to do without); Pagemaker; and Outlook to synch my Sony/Ericsson P900 phone (it has no PIM). Not Office: I use OOo only. Anyway, no way around the other apps. Also I quite like the integrated desktop: a font added works in all apps rather than in just some. The control panel is great. Media work (no "no quicktime" errors etc). The HP printer (Grr) needs a Win box. Etc.
Dislikes: I just had to reinstall Win on the laptop to bring running processes down from 38 to 19. Typical Win issues. Registry hell.
LINUX:
The desktop is great - a Redhat 9 box. No re-installs. Fast. Multiple desktops. I can (and do!) shell into it from work (using putty). Proper multitasking. Opensource so it is free (as in speech). All the usual Linux advantages. Very few virus attacks. Can you say "ROCK SOLID STABLE".
Dislikes: I never know how to set screen res (unless I go into Xfree86.conf manually). Fonts are haphazard and never work in all apps. Cut/paste is always a gamble. Installing a new app can take an entire evening and often does (can you say 'dependency hell'). The typical Linux desktop issues.
Two answer to this (from a 25-year IT user who has switched to OOo fully):
a) OOo is really very similar to office. My son switched in minutes. For 99% of the usage, you will never see the difference. (And try to export a PDF from Word!).
b) Students do not learn rote monkey skills - they learn to use IT applications in general. Know one app, know them all. I could switch in an hour to WordPerfect, I am sure, or to any other word processor. Learning OOo is a perfectly good way to learn to use Word processors. A student who cannot switch to Office easily after using OOo is not sa student I would hire, personally.
Sure, it needs to be learned. But the effect is not all bad - actually it works both ways. I am an avid amateur photographer who has swapped his SLR's for digital SLR's. All digital now and loving it. Here's the compensating effects:
- I shoot ten times more so the chance of great pics is ten times higher. I actually produce a lot more good shots now.
- Four letters: PS CS. Photoshop CS allows you to take raw images that are terribly underexposed, and push them to get excellent exposures. Also, skin blemishes, things that you just did not notice in th epicture, etc: all vanish with Photoshop.
Andyes, the printing press alloed bad writers to write, and the same will happen here - but the net effect will be a hack of a lot more great photos worldwide.
Ah, but BT is not a private company in that sense - as the article says (I assume you read it), this is all being done in close cooperation with the Home Office (that's the government).
So this is a government initiative more than a BT shareholder initiative, and in that sense it is "about a government suppressing ideas it does not like". And yes, child porn is bad, but that is not the argument.
Banks almost all run *NIX o some sort, and when a bank runs AIX on their web servers, it is pretty much a given that they do not run Solaris on their transactional systems. This is an assumption yes, but it is a proper management assumption, not an improper one.
We can all sympathise with not wanting access to pedo sites, bomb-making instructions and anti-jewish hate sites. But there are, I think, several reasons why this is not at ALL a good thing.
a) Practical reasons. How on earth are they going to decide which sites are child porn sites? Do these sites announce themselves as such with a special logo? Or will the government employ 1,000 people who search google all day for new sites? Or will all sites that refer to "child" and "vagina" in the same sentence be blocked (I guess that includes nudist sites and anti-childporn sites as well)? For these practical reasons and many more, this idea will not be practical.
b) The slippery slope. OK, child porn is obviously bad. And so is antisemitism. And bomb making. So, the PLO site is soon to be banned too? All newsgroups that ever discuss bombs? Sites that sell radar detectors? Web sites taht discuss and encourage tax cheating? Anti-government sites? Exam cheat sites? When you accept that the government can decide what we are allowed to read online, this is a dangerous state of affairs.
c) Drawing attention bad. It will no doubt make it a challenge to get to the forbidden sites.
Censorship has never worked. My kids watch only shows that are rated "mature". While I sympathise with the intention here, the idea of a wise government that bans access to information is one that has never worked in the past and will not work now. It seems to me that enforcing existing laws against child porn (producers, viewers) would be a much better course of action; one more likely to lead to real results.
>>>The problem is that these Photoshop users are used to photoshop
I disagree with that. I just switched to PS after years of using Corel Photopaint and the GIMP - and it took me three minutes to see that PS is very much superior. Much as I would have liked to NOT say that , because now I need to do all my photo work on the Windows PC, But it's no contest.
Yes. We use Progeny support and have found it to be fair, simple and reliable - and very affordable. Hats off to Progeny for jumping in here.
We support many 7.2, 7.3 and 8.0 servers and this is the way to keep them simply up to date. No need to switch. We've been using this since 7.x went out of support some months ago. Experience all good (and no we are not in any way related with them!)
Me: In other countries it IS a ruleimposed by their equivalent of the FAA.
You: But it's for the same reason: cell tower disruption, not plane disruption.
Ah, it's semantics.. I agree with you that SHOULD be the reason, for it is valid, but on fact most authorities and airlines impose the ban becuase of danger to the aircraft. For the most part this is imagined danger based on nothing (or on urban myth), but having said that, a phone can indeed upset instruments.
(Though having said THAT, as a private pilot and radio ham I have been "aeronautical mobile" with 5W UHF and VHF handies in Cessnas without any problem. And having said THAT, whether I would do that when flying IFR is another question!)
Slashdot Mirror
hey,
>> Some one has to say it: You are a dumbass.
Eh, nope. I travel widely and have done so almost full-time for 25 years (including years in Italy, Nigeria, Iraq, China, Libya: you name it, I've spent time there). I always hold on to my docs. I have copies. I never have them together except just after crossing customs (as I just did when this happened).
Sometimes you have to have things in a case, as no wallet is big enough to carry all my credit cards, 8 passports (all of us dual nationals), etc. You then hold on to the case religoiusly -as I did. These were professional thieves (a microsecond is enough) and believe me: if they got me they can get you.
Mike
Sorry, I thought you were trying to make a point. Yes, no doubt being involved in crime skews your viewpoint - very understandably, and that's why we use cops, juries and judges. I had my briefcase stolen recently: I would have gladly broken the thief's skull on the sidewalk to watch his brains leak out - thank God I did not get the chance to do that.
(Re Security check - yes, but only if done cleverly. I fly 120,000 miles a year and feel that most so-called security does not provide any real security.)
Last month, while travelling to Amsterdam my briefcase was stolen at the airport and I lost all my ID. Everything. Money, Credit cards, driver's license, passports, social insurance card, tickets - everything.
It was an eye-opener. NO-ONE can do anything for you. Amex ($400 a year platinum card with "concierge service") would not send me a new card because I had no ID. The cops would not initially write a report because you need to show ID. A new passport at the Canadian embassy was very difficult when you have no ID and have lost your citizenship certificate as well (though they were helpful). Try to check into a hotel without credit cards or ID - it cannot be done. Try to rent a car - same. Try to buy lunch. Nope. If I had not had a support network in place (relatives living there) I would have slept in the street.
The moral of all this: nice to have ID at the basis of everything, but just wait until you slip off the road.
Not sure anyone would want to go through what I went through in that week. Before you say "normal people should have nothing to fear from having to show ID" - wait until you lose it.
I just think you will find that most people on the side of preserving our freedoms believe that throwing out these freedoms is giving these people exactly what they want.
For instance, in my lifetime (I am now 45), I have lost the following freedoms, among many:
- Anonymous travel
- Anonymously buying a car
- Secrecy of my communications, unless a judge decides my letters need to be opened
- Paying cash for a car (soon: anything)
- Carrying $10,000 in cash around
- Board an airplane by walking onto it
- Travel without regularly having shoes, belt removed (whoich used to be for criminals)
- Travel without being fingerprinted (if I want to travel to the US and I am now a US citizen)
- The right to just walk to an airport and take a flying lesson, without lots of prior paper
- The right to walk the streets without being filmed continuously, if I live in the UK
None of these rights in themselves are a giant deal; but together, they make life a lot less free than it was. We are always talking about "spreading freedom" - how is any of this freedom? And it is the insidiousness that gets me - as well as the fact WE did this. Not some idiot terrorists - this is all of our making.Seems that due to our collective apathy we have lost that battle - the police state is here to stay, and my children will have a much more 1984-like life as a result. I remember the days when the term "police state" meant a bad thing!
MW
Surely we all know that "DNS" comes at the top of the list of the Internet's vulnerabilities? Tunneling data; many bugs in DNS software over the years; vulnerability to DOS: Surely we all know this already - why is this news?
DNS was an afterthought - but it seems to me a very necessary one, and one we will have to continue to live with.
You are right: MS owns Asia lock, stock and barrel. But here are a few things to realise:
a) For the embedded stuff, big in Taiwan, MS is nowhere - it's all Linux.
b) Java is making some minor inroads. I used to be channel sales director for a Canadian software company selling Java tools, and fought hard against MS tools - am now being told by my Japanese ex-customers that I was right to insist patience would pay off with Java.
c) Malaysia is rather rabidly anti-western and anti-American. This would not happen in Japan, for instance.
Michael
Eh, that would be "existence", not "existance". And "communist", not "comunist".
Spelling convention is not just power exercised by published writers. Not at all, in fact. It is simply a way that we agree words ought to be written so we all have the same understanding. Yes, language lives; but no, the fact a lot of people write something a certain way does not make it right.
I.e. it is variable, but within limits. Today, in 2004, a sentence like
"In there wisdom, the school's principles wrote this sentance while standing in the quue. Its true that in it's previous live, the school bored had no moral principals".
Thanks (not "thank's") for reading...
Michael
Best technology magazine is not even a technology magazine, namely The Economist., Don't miss the technology section every week, the Tech Quarterly every quarter, and the regular Linux articles in the business section.
If I oculd only read one magazine, this would be it.
Michael
Well, come on, I use 15l/100km, and that's driving a European vehicle. Driving a heavy SUV and carting around heavy stuff all the time talkes fuel.
Note that US gallons (3.6l) are different from imeperial gallons (4.5l), so that can lead to some confusion between UK and US posters!
MW
I learned that too (so I am totally puzzled by this article), and I was in Holland, which has never used inches. This stuff should be common grade-school knowledge. Frightening how Americans know so little about the rest of the world.
:)
Having said that: according to the article, 2.54cm is not *exactly* right. I always thought it was. So I am not as omniscient as I thought I was, and the article seems to have been not entirely a waste of all our cycles.
PS I am in Canada now too.
I still have one, a 16 MB machine, in my basement. It runs Linux (Redhat 5.2) and for years now has been my packet radio machine. It sits there all day and you know what? 16 million clock cycles per second is plenty to send a few bytes per second through the (iamginary) ether utterly reliably and with plenty of power to spare.
And:
- No cooling fan to break
- Very low power
The 486 was a fantastic chip, and is still great today.
My laptop is a Windows machine, and my desktop is a Linux box. So I think I see both sides, and no religion drives my decisions, I think - just the facts as I see them.
WINDOWS:
I need the Windows box - no way around it - because I need applications like Adobe Photoshop (not an option to do without); Pagemaker; and Outlook to synch my Sony/Ericsson P900 phone (it has no PIM). Not Office: I use OOo only. Anyway, no way around the other apps. Also I quite like the integrated desktop: a font added works in all apps rather than in just some. The control panel is great. Media work (no "no quicktime" errors etc). The HP printer (Grr) needs a Win box. Etc.
Dislikes: I just had to reinstall Win on the laptop to bring running processes down from 38 to 19. Typical Win issues. Registry hell.
LINUX:
The desktop is great - a Redhat 9 box. No re-installs. Fast. Multiple desktops. I can (and do!) shell into it from work (using putty). Proper multitasking. Opensource so it is free (as in speech). All the usual Linux advantages. Very few virus attacks. Can you say "ROCK SOLID STABLE".
Dislikes: I never know how to set screen res (unless I go into Xfree86.conf manually). Fonts are haphazard and never work in all apps. Cut/paste is always a gamble. Installing a new app can take an entire evening and often does (can you say 'dependency hell'). The typical Linux desktop issues.
So there - each have their place.
Michael
Two answer to this (from a 25-year IT user who has switched to OOo fully):
a) OOo is really very similar to office. My son switched in minutes. For 99% of the usage, you will never see the difference. (And try to export a PDF from Word!).
b) Students do not learn rote monkey skills - they learn to use IT applications in general. Know one app, know them all. I could switch in an hour to WordPerfect, I am sure, or to any other word processor. Learning OOo is a perfectly good way to learn to use Word processors. A student who cannot switch to Office easily after using OOo is not sa student I would hire, personally.
Michael
Sure, it needs to be learned. But the effect is not all bad - actually it works both ways. I am an avid amateur photographer who has swapped his SLR's for digital SLR's. All digital now and loving it. Here's the compensating effects:
- I shoot ten times more so the chance of great pics is ten times higher. I actually produce a lot more good shots now.
- Four letters: PS CS. Photoshop CS allows you to take raw images that are terribly underexposed, and push them to get excellent exposures. Also, skin blemishes, things that you just did not notice in th epicture, etc: all vanish with Photoshop.
Andyes, the printing press alloed bad writers to write, and the same will happen here - but the net effect will be a hack of a lot more great photos worldwide.
Ah, but BT is not a private company in that sense - as the article says (I assume you read it), this is all being done in close cooperation with the Home Office (that's the government).
So this is a government initiative more than a BT shareholder initiative, and in that sense it is "about a government suppressing ideas it does not like". And yes, child porn is bad, but that is not the argument.
Banks almost all run *NIX o some sort, and when a bank runs AIX on their web servers, it is pretty much a given that they do not run Solaris on their transactional systems. This is an assumption yes, but it is a proper management assumption, not an improper one.
We can all sympathise with not wanting access to pedo sites, bomb-making instructions and anti-jewish hate sites. But there are, I think, several reasons why this is not at ALL a good thing.
a) Practical reasons. How on earth are they going to decide which sites are child porn sites? Do these sites announce themselves as such with a special logo? Or will the government employ 1,000 people who search google all day for new sites? Or will all sites that refer to "child" and "vagina" in the same sentence be blocked (I guess that includes nudist sites and anti-childporn sites as well)? For these practical reasons and many more, this idea will not be practical.
b) The slippery slope. OK, child porn is obviously bad. And so is antisemitism. And bomb making. So, the PLO site is soon to be banned too? All newsgroups that ever discuss bombs? Sites that sell radar detectors? Web sites taht discuss and encourage tax cheating? Anti-government sites? Exam cheat sites? When you accept that the government can decide what we are allowed to read online, this is a dangerous state of affairs.
c) Drawing attention bad. It will no doubt make it a challenge to get to the forbidden sites.
Censorship has never worked. My kids watch only shows that are rated "mature". While I sympathise with the intention here, the idea of a wise government that bans access to information is one that has never worked in the past and will not work now. It seems to me that enforcing existing laws against child porn (producers, viewers) would be a much better course of action; one more likely to lead to real results.
HPUX and AIX, at least on their web servers, and no doubt also on their critical systems.
c om
See nextcraft: http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph?site=www.rbc.
MW
>>>The problem is that these Photoshop users are used to photoshop
I disagree with that. I just switched to PS after years of using Corel Photopaint and the GIMP - and it took me three minutes to see that PS is very much superior. Much as I would have liked to NOT say that , because now I need to do all my photo work on the Windows PC, But it's no contest.
I therefore doubt it is just UI unfamiliarity.
Michael
Yes. We use Progeny support and have found it to be fair, simple and reliable - and very affordable. Hats off to Progeny for jumping in here.
We support many 7.2, 7.3 and 8.0 servers and this is the way to keep them simply up to date. No need to switch. We've been using this since 7.x went out of support some months ago. Experience all good (and no we are not in any way related with them!)
Michael
Or UN dates:
03 May 2004
31 Jan 2005
03 Oct 2004
Even if you do those in another language, the meaning is still much clearer than 03/05/04
Michael
I personally prefer Kernel Sanders. Or perhaps Kernel Ghadaffi.
Me: In other countries it IS a ruleimposed by their equivalent of the FAA.
You: But it's for the same reason: cell tower disruption, not plane disruption.
Ah, it's semantics.. I agree with you that SHOULD be the reason, for it is valid, but on fact most authorities and airlines impose the ban becuase of danger to the aircraft. For the most part this is imagined danger based on nothing (or on urban myth), but having said that, a phone can indeed upset instruments.
(Though having said THAT, as a private pilot and radio ham I have been "aeronautical mobile" with 5W UHF and VHF handies in Cessnas without any problem. And having said THAT, whether I would do that when flying IFR is another question!)
Cheers
Michael (VA3MVW)
Agreed, you may have misunderstood what I was trying to say.
Random searches are good!
But random RULES are not. Either a radio needs the battery IN for safety, or it needs the battery OUT for safety - and so on.
Michael