While the explosion itself and resulting immediate effects might well wipe out anyone within a few hundred miles, the ash would stop a lot more than just helicopters. Yakima and other cities nearby spent huge amounts of time and money digging out from the ash after Mt St Helens erupted:
Fine-grained volcanic ash stops internal combustion engines, contaminates oil, clogs air filters and short-circuits electrical transformers, among other things. Imagine the volume of ash produced by a supervolcano eruption in Yellowstone spreading east along the gulf stream, and the impact that would have. Anything that uses an engine or pump, unless it's completely sealed from the air, would stop working. Power transmission stations would fail.
And how would you clean up ash when vehicles don't work and you don't have reliable power? How do you distribute food and water and medicine?
That's not just an inconvenience, that's death to a modern civilization. It'd be doubtful if you could restore enough agricultural production to feed even the people growing the crops, much less enough transportation to feed the rest of the population, or the rest of the world which buys and relies on US agribusiness.
If Yellowstone blows, within 18 months there will be nothing recognizable as the United States left on the North American continent.
I agree entirely with you about experience in fire-fighting. My problem is that when a customer is paying lots of money for "expert" support, they should be getting experts, not someone doing this for the first time. If you want to bring a newbie along so they can learn, that's cool, but for US$150+/hour, I expect someone who knows what they're doing and has done it before, not someone who's still reading TFM. If you're paying US$50/hour, that's a different issue.
I've worked with people who are good at putting out fires and get paid very well to do it. I'm not talking about CCNA-level network techs, or level 2 helpdesk support, or just about anyone who Dell employs:), but six-figure consultants who know their stuff and know how to fix problems. They can be hard to find, especially in the mix of people working in IT support and consulting, but there are customers willing to pay for that level of support, and companies and individuals who provide it.
Dell's professional services are, and I mean this in the nicest sense of the word, fucking clueless. We got one guy who had just "graduated" from field tech to storage engineer, and when he got called in to fix our (broken) Dell-badged SAN after it went down and lost several terabytes of data, sat there in front of the rack reading TFM for 2 hours. Yes, we were paying hundreds of dollars per hour for some goon who had never done this before, since that's who Dell sent us. The incident got escalated up to the VP level at Dell before it got fixed.
My advice for storage - go with EMC or NetApp or another vendor who manufactures their own gear instead of someone like Dell who just slaps their corporate logo on it. And if you need engineering or design support, look for a company who's been doing it well and has solid recommendations from other customers, not some fresh-off-the-street hires from Monster.com that ended up in the vendor's professional services division. Good support costs money, but it's worth every penny when stuff breaks.
That only works out to 2,628 minutes of downtime, on average, per year. Or just under 44 hours.
I mean, healthcare information doesn't have to be ready and available, like, every minute, does it?
Although from what I've seen of Kaiser healthcare in practice, making information available 99.5% of the time might be an improvement from the Hello-here's-your-new-doctor, don't-get-too-attached, whoops-there-they-go, Hello-here's-your-new-doctor standard they follow now.
I mean, it's not like upgrading a server-oriented distro where all you care about is if [Apache|MySQL|Tomcat|Postfix|Bind] comes back to life and acts properly on reboot. I upgraded from Dapper Drake to Edgy Eft on my Dell laptop, and it involved some breakage and googling and stuff, but it's not out of line from my experience with upgrading other desktop-oriented distros. At least there's a lot of community resources available for Ubuntu, and since it has a huge userbase, it's fairly likely that someone else has run into the same issue before.
Edgy Eft is definitely worth the try, but if you don't have a few hours to spend downloading updates, installing, rebooting, finding breakages and fixing 'em, then just use VMware Server or Workstation or some other VM package and plop it in there.
So let's say I'm a relative newbie to Linux, and I've just finished installing Ubuntu 6.06.1 LTS Dapper Drake on my laptop. I've read through the forums and have apt-gotten my way to a nice-looking Gnome or KDE desktop with 3D accelerated drivers for X, a bunch of useful apps and some games.
What does Slackware offer the newbie Linux user that something like Ubuntu doesn't?
Let's say I've been using Linux for years, and I'm a compulsive downloader and installer. I like trying out different OS's and desktop environments, everything from FreeDOS to CentOS to OpenBSD. I'm familiar enough with different package systems and administration styles to figure out how stuff works, but I don't want to spend a whole lot of time on something tedious and unrewarding.
What selling points does Slackware have for the interested & experienced Linux geek?
I happily signed up for WildBlue's satellite service about a year ago, since (1) they're not DirecWay or StarBand and (2) I was sick and tired of 26.4 (yes, 26.4, not 28.8 even, but 26.4) dialup service. My wife & I had moved from our happy happy DSL-connected (Verizon, technically, but on BBN/Genuity/Level3's old 4.0.0.0/8 network) townhome out into the boonies of VA since we could turn a 115% profit on selling our house and move closer to my work.
Soooo then the fun started. Don't get wrong, most of these problems are because of having satellite service in general, and not specifically because of WildBlue as a provider. I can normally get 550ms - 600ms ping times to WildBlue's NOC on the other end of the satellite connection, and 600ms - 700ms to most well-connected places on the 'net. But you get rain fade, intermittent signalling problems that pop up and then mysteriously go away, and occasional problems with the satellite modem itself where you need to power-cycle the beastie to get a usable signal back (don't forget to use a UPS or a filtering power strip at the very least, clean power saves you many headaches, especially in older houses).
The specific problem with WildBlue is that they've oversold their service (check out the WildBlue Uncensored forums for more gory technical details if you care), and you can get a fair amount of congestion during peak usage hours, depending which satellite beam (geographic area) and NOC you happen to be in. Plus all sorts of other fun stuff like flaky DHCP service, cable cuts at the NOC, slow DNS service, and all the assorted joys of using a residential ISP.
At least WildBlue's FAP (fair-access policy or bandwidth limitation) is not as draconian as their competition, but it's still annoying for me. I end up downloading ISOs, game demos, etc. off of other non-limited connections when I have the chance so I don't bust my 17GB monthly download quota.
I've also had friends who signed up for the Value or Select pack on the same beam complain about slow downloads (way below rated speeds) and super-high latency. After checking the signal, having a tech adjust the dish, check for obstructions, etc. they upgraded to the Pro pack and hey presto! problems went away. I've always had the Pro pack, so I can't say for sure, but it looks like WildBlue is using a QoS implementation to distinguish between users on different plans, along with the FAP.
World of Warcraft is kind of okay on WildBlue. You get about 800ms - 1200ms latency, and doing raids or other groups where you need lots of chatting + coordination is kinda painful, but it *is* playable in most situations.
Halo / Halo 2 on Xbox Live is just... um, don't even bother. It's an exercise in frustration. I ended up cancelling my Xbox Live subscription since I just didn't use it.
Oblivion is pretty cool!:)
The problem is that the latency involved with satellite completely eliminates entire categories of online games (FPS, RTS), leaving you with either MMORPGs or turn-based games. I've ended up playing a lot more current single-player games, old ROMs under emulation and digging out older classics (Starcraft, Baldur's Gate) to play through the single-player missions & stories again.
VPNs and interactive remote access (SSH, VNC, NX/FreeNX, Citrix, Tarantella, remote desktop) suck pretty hard on satellite too. You can get them to work most of the time, and some have latency-reduction features that can help, but it's still painful. Character-interactive logins and apps over a VPN on satellite feel like you're squeezing the bits through a 300 baud connection. Dialup or ISDN is far better for this sort of access, if you need it.
In short, if you have any kind of option for better landline service (ISDN, DSL, cable, fiber-to-the-home, T1) go for that instead. Satellite should only be your last resort.
I had lots of fun messing with dinky BASIC programs on a TI-99/4a and saving them to a tape recorder when I was a little kid, starting around maybe 6 years old. I had lots more fun messing with dinky BASIC and Pascal programs on an IBM Model 5051 PC. But I did all of this with my dad (who always had some kind of fun electronics around the house from being an EE), not locked in my bedroom alone. And we got a Nintendo, and me & my brother & my dad spent lots of time playing that too. And due in large part to my dad's involvement, I've developed a love of programmable computer systems and networks, and now get paid to play with them.
But despite being a nerdy little kid with glasses and braces, I still got outside and spent a good portion of my childhood on my bicycle, or fishing, or building forts in the woods, or having all-weekend water gun fights with the kids from the next street over, or playing pickup games of football and basketball.
What worries me about kids growing up now (and I hear the same comments echoed from my 16 year old brother-in-law) is that so many of them spend so much time indoors. It's not like TV and VCRs and videogames and computers didn't exist in the middle-class suburban neighborhood where I grew up, and most kids spent at least some time watching or playing with them, but on a sunny summer day the local basketball courts and baseball fields and streets and woods and parks had lots of kids outside playing. When I drive through a residential neighborhood on a nice day in the summer, and there's hardly anyone outside, or on the game fields at the local elementary or middle or high school, it worries me.
Even though this article is from the UK, I see the same sorts of pressures on parents here. Being a parent now, I'm concerned for the well-being of my kids, but that doesn't mean that fear and anxiety should govern your decisions. Kids are statistically safer from accidents now, but parents seem to be more and more paranoid about Something Happening To Your Kid. Kids should be free to play outside, raise hell, get into trouble and have unscheduled fun.
Not democracy. Individual rights and the rule of law is what differentiates the West from common oligarchies, kleptocracies, communism and dictatorship.
"Democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding on lunch. Liberty is a well-armed sheep contesting the vote."
Democracy in and of itself provides no protection for the 49% of the population who opposes the views of the majority 51%. Democracy in and of itself provides no protection against voter apathy, corporations buying off your representatives, or the vast majority of citizens passively allowing their privacy, their self-interest and their fundamental rights to be hijacked in the name of increased "safety".
The corporate state doesn't scare me half as much as elected leaders with little to no boundaries on what they can do, so long as they can sell it to the 10% of the population who regularly votes in local and state elections.
I only say this since I remember (fondly) running AfterStep around 1997, before WindowMaker came along, and it was pretty cool then, beat the hell out of fvwm2 with its horrid Win95 theme (or any of the other horrid themes that existed for it).
In all seriousness, I've played the what-wm-or-environment-do-I-want-this-week? game enough to have settled on KDE. I'm all done messing about with alternative desktops like ratpoison. I've tried Gnome and no I don't want more, thank you. I like my desktops, well, desktopy. I spend enough time inside of remote SSH sessions that I don't really *need* a WM, except that it's a pain configuring print + multimedia options from within a framebuffer console. KDE works, and it works well enough across different platforms that I just use that now. Sure it's big, and it can be bloated and a memory hog and slow to start up on old hardware, but it provides an acceptable alternative to what WinXP and MacOSX give you on the desktop.
Sometimes all you want to do is set up a printer. KDE, plus a decent distro like (K)Ubuntu, makes that really easy, and doesn't get in your way too much.
I've bought a lot of games sometimes - up to 8 titles per quarter - and can get really involved with mods/tweaks/custom maps for a particular game (Doom, Starcraft, Civ2, NWN, Morrowind, WoW); therefore I am (or have been) a power gamer!
I like to hang out and chat with random people in online games, and I've played a lot of multiplayer sports/FPS/fighting games (Madden, Halo, Street Fighter 2) with friends while we're hanging out; therefore I am (or have been) a social gamer!
I've spent lots of time playing "casual" titles (Bejeweled, Tetris, Puzzle Pirates, arrr!) and enjoy new, different games, especially ones that make me think in a new way; therefore I am (or have been) a leisure gamer!
There are often times where I can't spend more than 2-3 hours a week playing games, or when I choose to spend my free time on something other than manipulating bits on a display, yet I still enjoy gaming; therefore I am (or have been) a dormant gamer!
I've spent months playing specific games (WoW, Civ2, Civ3) just to have something to occupy my time with, even though it wasn't always terribly fun (although rambling on in the glorified chat client that is WoW is a good way to pass the time); therefore I am (or have been) an incidental gamer!
And I like playing Boggle, Scrabble and Monopoly too. Okay, so I don't play these on computers or consoles since I've always had 'em around in their physical incarnations, and they're easier to play with your friends + family face-to-face that way. But I'll also claim to be (or have been) an occasional gamer!
It's only 0818h EDT here, and there's already a completely incomprehensible write-up on Slashdot.
I mean, I played AD&D (2nd Ed w/ liberal additions from whatever 1st Ed source materials we had on hand) for a good solid 10 years plus some play-by-email campaigns afterwards, and I try to keep up with goings-on at WotC and the D&D universe in general, but... wow.
As many others here have pointed out, it's very common to have specific 'BAD' sites (fark, somethingawful, espn, playboy, thehun, hotmail - depending on your organization's definition of 'BAD') blocked even when the rest of the Internet gets through just fine. That's the result of people managing one-off problems: "Hey, these guys can get to ESPN and download sports videos." "We need to block that site ASAP!"
SurfControl and others that rely on accurate categorization of All The Stuff On The Internet ultimately just don't work. Somebody can always throw up a new site that simply mirrors an existing site, or provides proxy services, or has new interesting distracting content on it. And too often, especially in larger environments, the IT staff maintaining the filtering has to put in exceptions and workarounds to deal with "stuff that doesn't work" (I'm looking at you, update.microsoft.com). Just for kicks, see what happens in your carefully-monitored corporate network when you change your browser's user-agent string to impersonate the ActiveX controls used by Windows Update.
If you have decent desktop security to begin with, filtering out Bad Things from the Internet isn't going to improve your situation much; and if you don't, well, you're screwed anyway.
For some organizations, the time + effort of putting filtering in place is well worth it, compared to the reduction in liability and security exposure they gain; but honestly, it's a tech solution for a people problem. People goof off, waste time, and that's a problem that only their supervisors or managers can solve, not some security software on the network.
In my experience, the worse an organization is at people management and desktop management, the more intrusive, complex and byzantine its filtering setup becomes in order to compensate. And then it still doesn't work.:)
Okay, me and my Anglophile tendencies will bite on this one.
Let's take a similar span of history, say 1650 through 1940, in merry old Perfidious Albion. Since the German list includes a lot of people who lived prior to the birth of the modern German state in 1871, we'll include the rest of the British Isles along with England in our valuation. Yes, I know, that'll piss off the Irish and Scots, but hey, Freud was Austrian and Schopenhauer was born in what is now Poland.
Let's even restrict it to the same types of smart people (natural philosophers and scientists), leaving out artists, playwrights, authors, musicians, statesmen and the like.
Who's playing for the UK?
Isaac Newton The other inventor of calculus, plus some little things like optics and, um, Newtonian physics Robert Hooke First to observe cells through a microscope, among many other achievements David Hume Pre-emininent Scottish empiricist and natural philosopher John Locke The father of "natural rights" (Rousseau was a misguided proto-Communist), political and economic philosopher Adam Smith Father of modern economics John Stuart Mill Philosopher, logician, early supporter of women's sufferage Charles Darwin Father of evolutionary biology
Oh wait there's more, since this is Slashdot:
Charles Babbage Mechanical genius, came up with the idea of programmable computers Alan Turing Father of modern computer science
Newton vs Leibniz is a good argument - who's the better scientist/mathematician/philosopher? - and the English vs German philosophers definitely had their grudge matches going. My philosophical bias is towards political + economic theory, rather than metaphysics, so I'd argue that Locke, Hume and Mill are ultimately more influential than Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Kant. Classical Liberal ideas like natural rights (life liberty and property), the nature of individual freedom and the proper role of government and trade count for more than "the will to power", in my opinion. Maybe even more so than the categorical imperative, but hey, Jesus and Buddha beat Kant to that one by a good many centuries. Plus the UK's got Newtonian physics, optics, microbiology, evolutionary biology and economics along with a fair bit of modern computer science.
Slashdot Mirror
While the explosion itself and resulting immediate effects might well wipe out anyone within a few hundred miles, the ash would stop a lot more than just helicopters. Yakima and other cities nearby spent huge amounts of time and money digging out from the ash after Mt St Helens erupted:
n t_St._Helens
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980_eruption_of_Mou
Fine-grained volcanic ash stops internal combustion engines, contaminates oil, clogs air filters and short-circuits electrical transformers, among other things. Imagine the volume of ash produced by a supervolcano eruption in Yellowstone spreading east along the gulf stream, and the impact that would have. Anything that uses an engine or pump, unless it's completely sealed from the air, would stop working. Power transmission stations would fail.
And how would you clean up ash when vehicles don't work and you don't have reliable power? How do you distribute food and water and medicine?
That's not just an inconvenience, that's death to a modern civilization. It'd be doubtful if you could restore enough agricultural production to feed even the people growing the crops, much less enough transportation to feed the rest of the population, or the rest of the world which buys and relies on US agribusiness.
If Yellowstone blows, within 18 months there will be nothing recognizable as the United States left on the North American continent.
I agree entirely with you about experience in fire-fighting. My problem is that when a customer is paying lots of money for "expert" support, they should be getting experts, not someone doing this for the first time. If you want to bring a newbie along so they can learn, that's cool, but for US$150+/hour, I expect someone who knows what they're doing and has done it before, not someone who's still reading TFM. If you're paying US$50/hour, that's a different issue.
:), but six-figure consultants who know their stuff and know how to fix problems. They can be hard to find, especially in the mix of people working in IT support and consulting, but there are customers willing to pay for that level of support, and companies and individuals who provide it.
I've worked with people who are good at putting out fires and get paid very well to do it. I'm not talking about CCNA-level network techs, or level 2 helpdesk support, or just about anyone who Dell employs
Dell's professional services are, and I mean this in the nicest sense of the word, fucking clueless. We got one guy who had just "graduated" from field tech to storage engineer, and when he got called in to fix our (broken) Dell-badged SAN after it went down and lost several terabytes of data, sat there in front of the rack reading TFM for 2 hours. Yes, we were paying hundreds of dollars per hour for some goon who had never done this before, since that's who Dell sent us. The incident got escalated up to the VP level at Dell before it got fixed.
My advice for storage - go with EMC or NetApp or another vendor who manufactures their own gear instead of someone like Dell who just slaps their corporate logo on it. And if you need engineering or design support, look for a company who's been doing it well and has solid recommendations from other customers, not some fresh-off-the-street hires from Monster.com that ended up in the vendor's professional services division. Good support costs money, but it's worth every penny when stuff breaks.
That only works out to 2,628 minutes of downtime, on average, per year. Or just under 44 hours.
I mean, healthcare information doesn't have to be ready and available, like, every minute, does it?
Although from what I've seen of Kaiser healthcare in practice, making information available 99.5% of the time might be an improvement from the Hello-here's-your-new-doctor, don't-get-too-attached, whoops-there-they-go, Hello-here's-your-new-doctor standard they follow now.
I mean, it's not like upgrading a server-oriented distro where all you care about is if [Apache|MySQL|Tomcat|Postfix|Bind] comes back to life and acts properly on reboot. I upgraded from Dapper Drake to Edgy Eft on my Dell laptop, and it involved some breakage and googling and stuff, but it's not out of line from my experience with upgrading other desktop-oriented distros. At least there's a lot of community resources available for Ubuntu, and since it has a huge userbase, it's fairly likely that someone else has run into the same issue before.
Edgy Eft is definitely worth the try, but if you don't have a few hours to spend downloading updates, installing, rebooting, finding breakages and fixing 'em, then just use VMware Server or Workstation or some other VM package and plop it in there.
You mean like what could have easily happened in Florida around November 2000, and Ohio around November 2004?
It's not paranoia when they're actually out to get you.
So let's say I'm a relative newbie to Linux, and I've just finished installing Ubuntu 6.06.1 LTS Dapper Drake on my laptop. I've read through the forums and have apt-gotten my way to a nice-looking Gnome or KDE desktop with 3D accelerated drivers for X, a bunch of useful apps and some games.
What does Slackware offer the newbie Linux user that something like Ubuntu doesn't?
Let's say I've been using Linux for years, and I'm a compulsive downloader and installer. I like trying out different OS's and desktop environments, everything from FreeDOS to CentOS to OpenBSD. I'm familiar enough with different package systems and administration styles to figure out how stuff works, but I don't want to spend a whole lot of time on something tedious and unrewarding.
What selling points does Slackware have for the interested & experienced Linux geek?
Just curious, not trolling.
If it was, it'd be a DUPE.
:)
And we all know there are no dupes on Slashdot.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danger_UXB
:)
Laptop batteries, exploding or not, aren't the same as defusing un-exploded German bombs in London during the Blitz, but hey, the acronym works.
meaningful or YAGAAR (Yet Another Google-Apple Alliance Rumor)?
I happily signed up for WildBlue's satellite service about a year ago, since (1) they're not DirecWay or StarBand and (2) I was sick and tired of 26.4 (yes, 26.4, not 28.8 even, but 26.4) dialup service. My wife & I had moved from our happy happy DSL-connected (Verizon, technically, but on BBN/Genuity/Level3's old 4.0.0.0/8 network) townhome out into the boonies of VA since we could turn a 115% profit on selling our house and move closer to my work.
... um, don't even bother. It's an exercise in frustration. I ended up cancelling my Xbox Live subscription since I just didn't use it.
:)
Soooo then the fun started. Don't get wrong, most of these problems are because of having satellite service in general, and not specifically because of WildBlue as a provider. I can normally get 550ms - 600ms ping times to WildBlue's NOC on the other end of the satellite connection, and 600ms - 700ms to most well-connected places on the 'net. But you get rain fade, intermittent signalling problems that pop up and then mysteriously go away, and occasional problems with the satellite modem itself where you need to power-cycle the beastie to get a usable signal back (don't forget to use a UPS or a filtering power strip at the very least, clean power saves you many headaches, especially in older houses).
The specific problem with WildBlue is that they've oversold their service (check out the WildBlue Uncensored forums for more gory technical details if you care), and you can get a fair amount of congestion during peak usage hours, depending which satellite beam (geographic area) and NOC you happen to be in. Plus all sorts of other fun stuff like flaky DHCP service, cable cuts at the NOC, slow DNS service, and all the assorted joys of using a residential ISP.
At least WildBlue's FAP (fair-access policy or bandwidth limitation) is not as draconian as their competition, but it's still annoying for me. I end up downloading ISOs, game demos, etc. off of other non-limited connections when I have the chance so I don't bust my 17GB monthly download quota.
I've also had friends who signed up for the Value or Select pack on the same beam complain about slow downloads (way below rated speeds) and super-high latency. After checking the signal, having a tech adjust the dish, check for obstructions, etc. they upgraded to the Pro pack and hey presto! problems went away. I've always had the Pro pack, so I can't say for sure, but it looks like WildBlue is using a QoS implementation to distinguish between users on different plans, along with the FAP.
World of Warcraft is kind of okay on WildBlue. You get about 800ms - 1200ms latency, and doing raids or other groups where you need lots of chatting + coordination is kinda painful, but it *is* playable in most situations.
Halo / Halo 2 on Xbox Live is just
Oblivion is pretty cool!
The problem is that the latency involved with satellite completely eliminates entire categories of online games (FPS, RTS), leaving you with either MMORPGs or turn-based games. I've ended up playing a lot more current single-player games, old ROMs under emulation and digging out older classics (Starcraft, Baldur's Gate) to play through the single-player missions & stories again.
VPNs and interactive remote access (SSH, VNC, NX/FreeNX, Citrix, Tarantella, remote desktop) suck pretty hard on satellite too. You can get them to work most of the time, and some have latency-reduction features that can help, but it's still painful. Character-interactive logins and apps over a VPN on satellite feel like you're squeezing the bits through a 300 baud connection. Dialup or ISDN is far better for this sort of access, if you need it.
In short, if you have any kind of option for better landline service (ISDN, DSL, cable, fiber-to-the-home, T1) go for that instead. Satellite should only be your last resort.
I think my laptop needs a thorough cleaning to get rid of the Mountain Dew I just spewed all over it.
:)
Funniest thing I've read today!
I had lots of fun messing with dinky BASIC programs on a TI-99/4a and saving them to a tape recorder when I was a little kid, starting around maybe 6 years old. I had lots more fun messing with dinky BASIC and Pascal programs on an IBM Model 5051 PC. But I did all of this with my dad (who always had some kind of fun electronics around the house from being an EE), not locked in my bedroom alone. And we got a Nintendo, and me & my brother & my dad spent lots of time playing that too. And due in large part to my dad's involvement, I've developed a love of programmable computer systems and networks, and now get paid to play with them.
But despite being a nerdy little kid with glasses and braces, I still got outside and spent a good portion of my childhood on my bicycle, or fishing, or building forts in the woods, or having all-weekend water gun fights with the kids from the next street over, or playing pickup games of football and basketball.
What worries me about kids growing up now (and I hear the same comments echoed from my 16 year old brother-in-law) is that so many of them spend so much time indoors. It's not like TV and VCRs and videogames and computers didn't exist in the middle-class suburban neighborhood where I grew up, and most kids spent at least some time watching or playing with them, but on a sunny summer day the local basketball courts and baseball fields and streets and woods and parks had lots of kids outside playing. When I drive through a residential neighborhood on a nice day in the summer, and there's hardly anyone outside, or on the game fields at the local elementary or middle or high school, it worries me.
Even though this article is from the UK, I see the same sorts of pressures on parents here. Being a parent now, I'm concerned for the well-being of my kids, but that doesn't mean that fear and anxiety should govern your decisions. Kids are statistically safer from accidents now, but parents seem to be more and more paranoid about Something Happening To Your Kid. Kids should be free to play outside, raise hell, get into trouble and have unscheduled fun.
Not democracy. Individual rights and the rule of law is what differentiates the West from common oligarchies, kleptocracies, communism and dictatorship.
"Democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding on lunch. Liberty is a well-armed sheep contesting the vote."
Democracy in and of itself provides no protection for the 49% of the population who opposes the views of the majority 51%. Democracy in and of itself provides no protection against voter apathy, corporations buying off your representatives, or the vast majority of citizens passively allowing their privacy, their self-interest and their fundamental rights to be hijacked in the name of increased "safety".
The corporate state doesn't scare me half as much as elected leaders with little to no boundaries on what they can do, so long as they can sell it to the 10% of the population who regularly votes in local and state elections.
... and it wants its desktop environment back. :)
I only say this since I remember (fondly) running AfterStep around 1997, before WindowMaker came along, and it was pretty cool then, beat the hell out of fvwm2 with its horrid Win95 theme (or any of the other horrid themes that existed for it).
In all seriousness, I've played the what-wm-or-environment-do-I-want-this-week? game enough to have settled on KDE. I'm all done messing about with alternative desktops like ratpoison. I've tried Gnome and no I don't want more, thank you. I like my desktops, well, desktopy. I spend enough time inside of remote SSH sessions that I don't really *need* a WM, except that it's a pain configuring print + multimedia options from within a framebuffer console. KDE works, and it works well enough across different platforms that I just use that now. Sure it's big, and it can be bloated and a memory hog and slow to start up on old hardware, but it provides an acceptable alternative to what WinXP and MacOSX give you on the desktop.
Sometimes all you want to do is set up a printer. KDE, plus a decent distro like (K)Ubuntu, makes that really easy, and doesn't get in your way too much.
Brings a whole new meaning to "Area of Effect" damage. :)
Soooo:
I've bought a lot of games sometimes - up to 8 titles per quarter - and can get really involved with mods/tweaks/custom maps for a particular game (Doom, Starcraft, Civ2, NWN, Morrowind, WoW); therefore I am (or have been) a power gamer!
I like to hang out and chat with random people in online games, and I've played a lot of multiplayer sports/FPS/fighting games (Madden, Halo, Street Fighter 2) with friends while we're hanging out; therefore I am (or have been) a social gamer!
I've spent lots of time playing "casual" titles (Bejeweled, Tetris, Puzzle Pirates, arrr!) and enjoy new, different games, especially ones that make me think in a new way; therefore I am (or have been) a leisure gamer!
There are often times where I can't spend more than 2-3 hours a week playing games, or when I choose to spend my free time on something other than manipulating bits on a display, yet I still enjoy gaming; therefore I am (or have been) a dormant gamer!
I've spent months playing specific games (WoW, Civ2, Civ3) just to have something to occupy my time with, even though it wasn't always terribly fun (although rambling on in the glorified chat client that is WoW is a good way to pass the time); therefore I am (or have been) an incidental gamer!
And I like playing Boggle, Scrabble and Monopoly too. Okay, so I don't play these on computers or consoles since I've always had 'em around in their physical incarnations, and they're easier to play with your friends + family face-to-face that way. But I'll also claim to be (or have been) an occasional gamer!
/me casts Improved Zerg Rush
:)
"You have insufficient creep to cast that now."
5 Elite Protoss Zealots unstealth and gank you.
"LFG 3M marines, 1M medic"
Or seeing a cloud of Carriers or Mutalisks come screaming over the horizon, hell-bent on laying waste to your camp.
Wow.
... wow.
It's only 0818h EDT here, and there's already a completely incomprehensible write-up on Slashdot.
I mean, I played AD&D (2nd Ed w/ liberal additions from whatever 1st Ed source materials we had on hand) for a good solid 10 years plus some play-by-email campaigns afterwards, and I try to keep up with goings-on at WotC and the D&D universe in general, but
Puts a whole new meaning into "WTF".
And some of us are the ones in charge of the filtering. :)
As many others here have pointed out, it's very common to have specific 'BAD' sites (fark, somethingawful, espn, playboy, thehun, hotmail - depending on your organization's definition of 'BAD') blocked even when the rest of the Internet gets through just fine. That's the result of people managing one-off problems: "Hey, these guys can get to ESPN and download sports videos." "We need to block that site ASAP!"
:)
SurfControl and others that rely on accurate categorization of All The Stuff On The Internet ultimately just don't work. Somebody can always throw up a new site that simply mirrors an existing site, or provides proxy services, or has new interesting distracting content on it. And too often, especially in larger environments, the IT staff maintaining the filtering has to put in exceptions and workarounds to deal with "stuff that doesn't work" (I'm looking at you, update.microsoft.com). Just for kicks, see what happens in your carefully-monitored corporate network when you change your browser's user-agent string to impersonate the ActiveX controls used by Windows Update.
If you have decent desktop security to begin with, filtering out Bad Things from the Internet isn't going to improve your situation much; and if you don't, well, you're screwed anyway.
For some organizations, the time + effort of putting filtering in place is well worth it, compared to the reduction in liability and security exposure they gain; but honestly, it's a tech solution for a people problem. People goof off, waste time, and that's a problem that only their supervisors or managers can solve, not some security software on the network.
In my experience, the worse an organization is at people management and desktop management, the more intrusive, complex and byzantine its filtering setup becomes in order to compensate. And then it still doesn't work.
Pansies.
:)
Anyone conquering the world in less than 24 hours isn't challenging themselves.
Eh? Whatzat? Speak up louder, I can't hear ye.
Whatzhe goin on all 'bout, I dunno.
Maybe they're trying to beat out Sony this month.
Okay, me and my Anglophile tendencies will bite on this one.
:)
Let's take a similar span of history, say 1650 through 1940, in merry old Perfidious Albion. Since the German list includes a lot of people who lived prior to the birth of the modern German state in 1871, we'll include the rest of the British Isles along with England in our valuation. Yes, I know, that'll piss off the Irish and Scots, but hey, Freud was Austrian and Schopenhauer was born in what is now Poland.
Let's even restrict it to the same types of smart people (natural philosophers and scientists), leaving out artists, playwrights, authors, musicians, statesmen and the like.
Who's playing for the UK?
Isaac Newton The other inventor of calculus, plus some little things like optics and, um, Newtonian physics
Robert Hooke First to observe cells through a microscope, among many other achievements
David Hume Pre-emininent Scottish empiricist and natural philosopher
John Locke The father of "natural rights" (Rousseau was a misguided proto-Communist), political and economic philosopher
Adam Smith Father of modern economics
John Stuart Mill Philosopher, logician, early supporter of women's sufferage
Charles Darwin Father of evolutionary biology
Oh wait there's more, since this is Slashdot:
Charles Babbage Mechanical genius, came up with the idea of programmable computers
Alan Turing Father of modern computer science
Newton vs Leibniz is a good argument - who's the better scientist/mathematician/philosopher? - and the English vs German philosophers definitely had their grudge matches going. My philosophical bias is towards political + economic theory, rather than metaphysics, so I'd argue that Locke, Hume and Mill are ultimately more influential than Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Kant. Classical Liberal ideas like natural rights (life liberty and property), the nature of individual freedom and the proper role of government and trade count for more than "the will to power", in my opinion. Maybe even more so than the categorical imperative, but hey, Jesus and Buddha beat Kant to that one by a good many centuries. Plus the UK's got Newtonian physics, optics, microbiology, evolutionary biology and economics along with a fair bit of modern computer science.
Oh and you left out Marx.