You know, I was riding in the car today with two Malaysians, an African, and a New Zealander. We were talking about Zone X DVDs.
Turns out, one of the Malaysians purchased a 100% bonified good DVD (Final Fantasy, I think) and couldn't play it in his DVD player. The reason? His DVD player is region-free.
He commented that the pirated versions of the movies play just fine.
Then I said, and this really surprised myself: "I would like to be a DVD/CD pirate. No, not to make lots of money, but it seems like the right thing to do."
When I realised that I was serious, and that it really truly *IS* the right thing to do. Someone needs to ensure that when a guy buys a player and some media, that it will actually play.
What sort of idiots would allow a situation where someone can buy a player legitimately, buy some media legitimately, and not be able to use it? Talk about shooting yourself in the foot.
Sure. I'll bite. I went and read that article. Ten things you can do to make the UI faster.
I'll give you a number 11:
Allow keyboard shortcuts.
In every one of those questions, we learn how it's so fast to use a mouse to traverse menus to get to the item we want.
Whatever.
Alt-F - w - f
What does that do? It creates a new folder in Microsoft's Explorer. Takes me about 1/2 second on a bad day. 1/4 second on a good one. The best mouser I know takes at least a second to do it. (Let's ignore for a moment that Microsoft, the fscking bastards, changed the shortcut in Win2k)
How about Alt-I - i in Photoshop? Change image size. Almost instantaneous for me. Compare/contrast GIMP where I have to define some meaningless "Alt-Ctrl-Shift-O" or someething to bring up the resize dialogue. No hierarchical keyboard shortcuts at all.
Windows again, any window: Alt-space - s - right right right? I've just made my window bigger by about 100 pixels on the right edge. How long for any Mac or Windows fanatic to do that with their mouse?
Exactly.
I'm amazed that so many GUI experts, years in the field with abilities to make a mouse go 10x faster don't go the extra step to define a nice, standard way to let the user go 50x faster with the keyboard.
While I see your point about open source very well, I can't fully agree
Then you'd best re-read the point again. I have an nvidia card, and EVERY TIME I watch a DVD (using VLC) without fail, my system locks up hard, and I need to REBOOT in order to reset my video hardware.
EVERY TIME I play Q3A for more than about 45 minutes, my system will lock up and I need to REBOOT in order to reset my video hardware.
At least once a week my whole X subsystem gets a sig11 and crashes, killing my well-crafted 20-desktop layout of xterms, email, browsers, gimp, gqview, xmms, etc etc, and when I reboot stupid GNOME puts every single app on desktop one. Therefore I have to place everything manually again.
Sure, I can watch DVDs and play Q3A on my Linux system, and I get the EXACT SAME STABILITY OR WORSE than Windows 2000 now.
I've been Windows-free for four years, and now I'm right back to the reasons I left Windows in the first place.
Mark me as a troll or whatever, but why is this article even posted on Slashdot?
They have a product. It's not especially earthshattering. It's just a firewall product that you can buy.
I read the IRC logs that mwhahaha (apologies on spelling) posted, and yeh these WeakWall lamers seem like pricks. I read the rebuttal to the c't article, and it seems the article made some mistakes.
But no matter how you dice it, it's just a stupid little turf war that has no bearing on my geek life whatsoever.
Did these SmallWall guys pay to have this Slashdot article posted or is this just a pet project with one of the editors?
I'll second that. Series 7: The Contenders is a VERY GOOD rent. It is very much a brilliant 'dystopian future' sort of thing with reality television shows.
They've even edited down their footage so you get the exciting bits and miss out on the boring bits, which is good.
If you are a bit disturbed by reality TV, then this show will definitely have you ranting at the end.
This is 'old news' to me, but only because I have been following the greatest Open Source flight sim out there: Flight Gear.
IIRC, they also have a 'flying on Mars' flight model that was in development. Whether or not it was ever finished, you can find out by getting into the project.
Having full source to an OpenGL flight simulator is really nice. In the early days, I would modify the flight model to allow super-jet properties out of my little Navion (small propeller) plane. It was a bit unstable at 400 knots, but a lot of fun anyway.
In any case, you can hack a Mars flight model YOURSELF into this flight sim, and be happier for it.
I personally will never accept the 'gift' of the end of the reign of X on Unix. X has to be the best thought-out GUI design infrastructure EVER.
On top of X I can have every wizz-bang feature you can imagine, and at the same time I can start an X session here and watch it on the other side of the world.
Corporations care a lot about the legal process. They write letters and checks to their congresscritters. Do you really wonder why corporation-favouring legislation keeps getting passed?
If you don't like it, change the system. For example, make it hard for corporations to give money to congresscritters. Make it hard for corporations to use the legal system.
Ever thought how different things would be if having a corporation not only protected the founders from liability, but also limited their rights use the legal system? Say a special clause where if a corporation loses a case against an individual, that it has to pay 10x legal charges plus 5x the individual's normal yearly salary plus another two years of the individual's legal expenses in any case the individual decides to start?
No, no. Check out the urban legends sites and you'll find out that's a myth. Much like Gore inventing the internet and Sun selling an affordable CPU.
The actual story goes something like this:
Bill Gates visited Andy Grove at a stoner party in Oregon (halfway between Silicon Valley and Redmond, you see) and as they were smoking some seriously bad crack, Bill Gates remarked: "640k will be all any PC user ever needs!"
Andy Grove looked at him, surprised, and said: "They'll need that much?"
They both laughed a great deal. George Lucas simply scowled in the corner.
I'm not surprised to see you don't really understand the purpose of a teacher, and that your teachers are, in general, crap.
First, my qualifications. I spent the better part of 25 years with an elementary school teacher at least 5 hours daily. (That is, 7 days a week, 365 days a year) and he tended to try to teach me a lot, being as he was my father.
A teacher's purpose, first and foremost in life, is to let the students excel.
It does not matter one single little bit if your students are better, smarter, and quicker than you. As long as you can guide them in a positive direction, you are a successful teacher.
The best teachers I've ever had in my life knew about 1/100th as much as me about computers, math, English, or art. It was obvious my computer teachers would never think about computers outside the classroom, whereas I have been a full-on computer geek since 10 years old.
But you know what? IT JUST DIDN'T MATTER, because when they realised that I had obvious talent in these 4 little areas, they pointed out sources where I could learn more. They gave me guidance, much like a good art critic gives guidance on brilliant pieces of art that they themselves could never actually CREATE.
Your schools, and all schools, should accept every single piece of scrap hardware it can get its hands on. And every single copy of Windows and Linux it can get (for free).
And here's how the class should be run. Since the teacher obviously couldn't install Windows or Linux or anything, the teacher can print out the READMEs and the Windows docs, and give them to the students.
All the computers in the classroom are, you guessed it, BLANK. They have formatted, empty hard drives.
The students would install Windows on this machine, Linux on that machine. Oh! That machine has no CDROM, so the students would create net boot floppies and install Linux via HTTPd.
You think this is too tough for students? BULLS**T. I learned enough about installing Linux that I could do it on my own, using no outside guidance, in about the length of time of a single-semester course. Give the students a year to go from blank computers to a basic, functional Win2K, Mandrake, Debian, and Redhat.
Second year course can be configuring X servers, development environments, make, configure, word processors, spreadsheets, email, etc.
A lot of you probably don't have faith that students are as smart as I propose. You probably think what I propose is simply impossible, that no such course could possibly work.
For such doubters, it's time to do your research. One name. John Taylor Gatto. Google is your friend.
In common English, "There can be life if there's water" is generally considered the 'iff' equivalent, yes, so the commoner could be forgiven for thinking this implies "There cannot be life if there isn't water."
The science writers, if writing to a scientific audience, shouldn't worry too much about this. Their audience is, after all, educated in logic.
Slashdot was supposedly made up of scientific-minded souls, but the number of scientific-minded souls vs. common McDonald's employees is obviously quite different than in the past.
I use GNOME. I've used GNOME for more than a year. I never use KDE.
KDE rocks. KDE is wonderful. KDE is great.
This is not sarcasm. I will explain no further.
Re:Common Misinterpretation of 17 USC 602 (a)
on
Sony vs Modchips
·
· Score: 1
How the fuck do you get off calling playing games from different regions legitimate? It is ILLEGAL, dumbass!
I suspect you're referring to 17 USC 602 (a), which reads as follows:
Importation into the United States, without the authority of the owner of copyright under this title, of copies or phonorecords of a work that have been acquired outside the United States is an infringement of the exclusive right to distribute copies or phonorecords under section 106, actionable under section 501.
From reading your reply to the original poster, I think it's clear you're not speaking his native tongue. He probably didn't understand a word you wrote. Please allow me to translate your words into his native tongue.
Ahem.
You fuckwit. You are a lame loser that cannot comprehend simple law. You get your legal opinions from television and newspapers. Some of us have a clue and don't blather uninformed stupid baseless opinions in public.
The more clued of us that do venture to propose uninformed opinion at least do so with less strong language so that we won't look like complete morons.
So shut the fuck up and go back to your hole.
Ahem.
But then, I suspect you were just trying to not flame the flamer?
Many posters say put in extra drops because you can't think of everything.
No-one recommends putting a drop near the ceiling in each room.
Think about it. If you forget something in a room, and you have to string wire from one corner to the other, across a doorway, you don't want wire laying on the floor where you have to tape it down (ugly) or run it under the carpet (hard). Easiest is to run the wire up to the ceiling, over the door, and back down again at the appliance.
Why not reduce the ugliness by *STARTING* the drop at the ceiling, running it around the room, and then down to the appliance?
Wow. Read that link you called 'stalking your ex-spouse.'
If you change your SSN and identity, then you can no longer get a passport.
The United States has already completed its downward spiral to cold-war USSR standards. It imprisons people from other countries for political reasons. It numbers its citizens. It disallows travel to other countries with the right to return.
It's just amazing. I'm only 30 years old and I'm already old enough to remember all the propaganda from my childhood saying these things were bad and could never happen in the United States.
The Slashdot crowd is, for the most part, uninterested in action. Ditto for Kuro5hin crowd.
I've been going back through a lot of your postings on Slashdot, and you make
several references to the Anarchism FAQ, but when I go there (infotech,
right?) it gives me a timeout. Can't read it.
I see you're pretty well-read. At least you've read some of the authors I find
pretty influential. John Taylor Gatto sticks out in one of your posts.
Alfie Kohn is quite interesting as well.
So here's a question for you... what sort of action do you propose? I proposed some sort of
action but it was "work within the system" action that I figure is doomed to failure.
I've been thinking about this for about... oh... ten years, and I oscillate
between this and that and never do anything. Sort'f like most Slashdot/Kuro5hin folk.
It seems education is the place to start, but it looks like a huge shitfight
there. Alfie Kohn and JTG are a testament to that.
About the only thing I can come up with that has any chance of success is just
going out into my neighborhood, meeting people, teaching them whatever I know,
and basically trying to better the lives of 10 or 20 people.
Oh, by the way, you've cancelled your email account at usa.net! I tried to send you the bulk of this comment as email.
Ever since Sun came out with a statement saying they want a national ID card to prevent terrorism, I've decided they're no better than Oracle or Microsoft. Just another big corp that doesn't give a rat's behind about rights.
If these two Sun employees really care about our rights, they can show me by quitting Sun.
Re:You can customize Linux
on
Tiny Apps
·
· Score: 1
Both you and the parent miss the whole point of the Linux desktop.
First, you need a solid, extensible, accessible base to build on: Linux vs. DOS. (Try administering a DOS machine remotely)
Then, you need a solid CLI to work with your system. GNU vs. Microsoft's \win*\system.
Next, you need a solid networkable graphics subsystem. (X vs. Windows. I don't think I even need to comment here).
Next, you need solid, consistent GUIs. You can't get this anywhere except (and this is debateable) Apple.
I won't bother mentioning levels above this since Computer Science hasn't even progressed this far.
My point: GNOME/X/GNU/Linux gets you far further and you're much better off than with Windows/Windows/DOS/DOS.
I'd heard one way to get by this is simply login to the shell and set your prompt accordingly:
export PS1='C:\>'
This, I was told, will convince the guy everything's fine.
If he's a confused GUI guy, just run FVWM95 to make him happy.
If you don't have enough RAM to run XWindows on your laptop, have a JPEG screenshot of a Windows desktop and use your favourite console-mode JPEG viewer to bring it up.
Unfortunately, although everyone is 100x more paranoid now than they were before, they're absolutely no smarter, so you've got to play stupid games like this.
Don't think you're above these stupid games. If you can't give a security guy what he expects in his tiny little worldview, he will want to ass-search you.
Wow. What a great set of reasons why BeOS was/is perfect. Let me tell you *MY* story.
I installed it and booted it. First thing I did was change the colour scheme since black on grey is unacceptable (and for some ungodly reason seems to be the default in every GUI that exists). Some widgets took the colour change, others didn't. Now I have grey-background text on a green-background menu which is beyond ugly. Mind you, Linux (GNOME, my preference) is just as bad on this front, but Windows gets it right. I think KDE gets it right, too, but don't quote me on this.
I tried to change the font to something bigger since I was running 1280x1024 and 8-pt Ariel is impossible to read. Ditto with colour changes. Some places it worked, others not.
I dropped to a shell. The Unix interface was lacking. I'll apologise for not giving details since it's been literally about 1.5 years.
I went looking for an MP3 or MPEG player. A flight simulator. Sound editor. Video editor. Anything you would expect from an OS purported to be a 'multimedia' OS. I think there was a toy flight simulator I found which was seriously that: a toy.
So I went back to GNU/GHOME/Linux which, although very broken in a number of amazingly fundamental ways, at least can play MP3s and has FlightGear flight simulator.
Again I must state this was some 1.5 years ago. I don't claim to know how BeOS works recently. But you mentioned you need VLC to play DVDs on BeOS, which indicates at least one of my major gripes holds today. I have VLC for Linux.
Were pilots trained to hole up in the cockpit and land at the nearest airport (And possibly lower the cabin pressure to the point where everyone in the back passes out) when something like this is going on, this incident would never have happened.
Uhm... Your point (about complacency being bad) is good. This idea is bad. Four words: "People with respiratory problems."
Who wants to tell Grandma her grandkids are dead after some guy got belligerent and the pilot lowered the cabin pressure?
But I guess this is relatively unlikely. My immediate concern is how will I tell my grandchildren that the US is a police state with mind control worse than China simply because we were too lazy to actually keep an eye on what our elected officials were doing to us and the world?
... recalls when the United States government propaganda pointed out that the Soviet Union "gives every citizen a number that identifies them." Of course, it was implied that the United States was better than such a totalitarian regime that treats its citizens like sheep or automatons.
I'll bite. I've followed the Phil Zimmerman story for several years with some interest.
I'll summarise the other side of the story for you: the NSA and FBI don't want anyone to be in possession of cryptographic technology because it makes it harder to spy on U.S. citizens. They have consistently lied to congress to keep bad laws and regulations on the books. They have consistently harassed good citizens who are trying to get the useless laws and regulations changed.
The result? When I, a United States citizen currently residing in New Zealand want to download a copy of CFS (cryptographic filesystem) I can't, because of U.S. export restrictions (!).
Phil Zimmerman and people like him have made a slight dent in the stupidity, but it's not enough. Until the U.S. government lets go of its desire to spy on its own citizens, things will remain bad. In the meantime, non-US countries will be on the forefront of secure communications technology, because they're allowed to export their software.
Slashdot Mirror
You know, I was riding in the car today with two Malaysians, an African, and a New Zealander. We were talking about Zone X DVDs.
Turns out, one of the Malaysians purchased a 100% bonified good DVD (Final Fantasy, I think) and couldn't play it in his DVD player. The reason? His DVD player is region-free.
He commented that the pirated versions of the movies play just fine.
Then I said, and this really surprised myself: "I would like to be a DVD/CD pirate. No, not to make lots of money, but it seems like the right thing to do."
When I realised that I was serious, and that it really truly *IS* the right thing to do. Someone needs to ensure that when a guy buys a player and some media, that it will actually play.
What sort of idiots would allow a situation where someone can buy a player legitimately, buy some media legitimately, and not be able to use it? Talk about shooting yourself in the foot.
Sure. I'll bite. I went and read that article. Ten things you can do to make the UI faster.
I'll give you a number 11:
Allow keyboard shortcuts.
In every one of those questions, we learn how it's so fast to use a mouse to traverse menus to get to the item we want.
Whatever.
Alt-F - w - f
What does that do? It creates a new folder in Microsoft's Explorer. Takes me about 1/2 second on a bad day. 1/4 second on a good one. The best mouser I know takes at least a second to do it. (Let's ignore for a moment that Microsoft, the fscking bastards, changed the shortcut in Win2k)
How about Alt-I - i in Photoshop? Change image size. Almost instantaneous for me. Compare/contrast GIMP where I have to define some meaningless "Alt-Ctrl-Shift-O" or someething to bring up the resize dialogue. No hierarchical keyboard shortcuts at all.
Windows again, any window: Alt-space - s - right right right? I've just made my window bigger by about 100 pixels on the right edge. How long for any Mac or Windows fanatic to do that with their mouse?
Exactly.
I'm amazed that so many GUI experts, years in the field with abilities to make a mouse go 10x faster don't go the extra step to define a nice, standard way to let the user go 50x faster with the keyboard.
EVERY TIME I play Q3A for more than about 45 minutes, my system will lock up and I need to REBOOT in order to reset my video hardware.
At least once a week my whole X subsystem gets a sig11 and crashes, killing my well-crafted 20-desktop layout of xterms, email, browsers, gimp, gqview, xmms, etc etc, and when I reboot stupid GNOME puts every single app on desktop one. Therefore I have to place everything manually again.
Sure, I can watch DVDs and play Q3A on my Linux system, and I get the EXACT SAME STABILITY OR WORSE than Windows 2000 now.
I've been Windows-free for four years, and now I'm right back to the reasons I left Windows in the first place.
Mark me as a troll or whatever, but why is this article even posted on Slashdot?
They have a product. It's not especially earthshattering. It's just a firewall product that you can buy.
I read the IRC logs that mwhahaha (apologies on spelling) posted, and yeh these WeakWall lamers seem like pricks. I read the rebuttal to the c't article, and it seems the article made some mistakes.
But no matter how you dice it, it's just a stupid little turf war that has no bearing on my geek life whatsoever.
Did these SmallWall guys pay to have this Slashdot article posted or is this just a pet project with one of the editors?
I'll second that. Series 7: The Contenders is a VERY GOOD rent. It is very much a brilliant 'dystopian future' sort of thing with reality television shows.
They've even edited down their footage so you get the exciting bits and miss out on the boring bits, which is good.
If you are a bit disturbed by reality TV, then this show will definitely have you ranting at the end.
IIRC, they also have a 'flying on Mars' flight model that was in development. Whether or not it was ever finished, you can find out by getting into the project.
Having full source to an OpenGL flight simulator is really nice. In the early days, I would modify the flight model to allow super-jet properties out of my little Navion (small propeller) plane. It was a bit unstable at 400 knots, but a lot of fun anyway.
In any case, you can hack a Mars flight model YOURSELF into this flight sim, and be happier for it.
I personally will never accept the 'gift' of the end of the reign of X on Unix. X has to be the best thought-out GUI design infrastructure EVER.
On top of X I can have every wizz-bang feature you can imagine, and at the same time I can start an X session here and watch it on the other side of the world.
Corporations care a lot about the legal process. They write letters and checks to their congresscritters. Do you really wonder why corporation-favouring legislation keeps getting passed?
If you don't like it, change the system. For example, make it hard for corporations to give money to congresscritters. Make it hard for corporations to use the legal system.
Ever thought how different things would be if having a corporation not only protected the founders from liability, but also limited their rights use the legal system? Say a special clause where if a corporation loses a case against an individual, that it has to pay 10x legal charges plus 5x the individual's normal yearly salary plus another two years of the individual's legal expenses in any case the individual decides to start?
Hmmmm...
No, no. Check out the urban legends sites and you'll find out that's a myth. Much like Gore inventing the internet and Sun selling an affordable CPU.
The actual story goes something like this:
Bill Gates visited Andy Grove at a stoner party in Oregon (halfway between Silicon Valley and Redmond, you see) and as they were smoking some seriously bad crack, Bill Gates remarked: "640k will be all any PC user ever needs!"
Andy Grove looked at him, surprised, and said: "They'll need that much?"
They both laughed a great deal. George Lucas simply scowled in the corner.
Glad to set the record straight for you.
I'm not surprised to see you don't really understand the purpose of a teacher, and that your teachers are, in general, crap.
First, my qualifications. I spent the better part of 25 years with an elementary school teacher at least 5 hours daily. (That is, 7 days a week, 365 days a year) and he tended to try to teach me a lot, being as he was my father.
A teacher's purpose, first and foremost in life, is to let the students excel.
It does not matter one single little bit if your students are better, smarter, and quicker than you. As long as you can guide them in a positive direction, you are a successful teacher.
The best teachers I've ever had in my life knew about 1/100th as much as me about computers, math, English, or art. It was obvious my computer teachers would never think about computers outside the classroom, whereas I have been a full-on computer geek since 10 years old.
But you know what? IT JUST DIDN'T MATTER, because when they realised that I had obvious talent in these 4 little areas, they pointed out sources where I could learn more. They gave me guidance, much like a good art critic gives guidance on brilliant pieces of art that they themselves could never actually CREATE.
Your schools, and all schools, should accept every single piece of scrap hardware it can get its hands on. And every single copy of Windows and Linux it can get (for free).
And here's how the class should be run. Since the teacher obviously couldn't install Windows or Linux or anything, the teacher can print out the READMEs and the Windows docs, and give them to the students.
All the computers in the classroom are, you guessed it, BLANK. They have formatted, empty hard drives.
The students would install Windows on this machine, Linux on that machine. Oh! That machine has no CDROM, so the students would create net boot floppies and install Linux via HTTPd.
You think this is too tough for students? BULLS**T. I learned enough about installing Linux that I could do it on my own, using no outside guidance, in about the length of time of a single-semester course. Give the students a year to go from blank computers to a basic, functional Win2K, Mandrake, Debian, and Redhat.
Second year course can be configuring X servers, development environments, make, configure, word processors, spreadsheets, email, etc.
A lot of you probably don't have faith that students are as smart as I propose. You probably think what I propose is simply impossible, that no such course could possibly work.
For such doubters, it's time to do your research. One name. John Taylor Gatto. Google is your friend.
Go to it.
Splitting hairs.
In common English, "There can be life if there's water" is generally considered the 'iff' equivalent, yes, so the commoner could be forgiven for thinking this implies "There cannot be life if there isn't water."
The science writers, if writing to a scientific audience, shouldn't worry too much about this. Their audience is, after all, educated in logic.
Slashdot was supposedly made up of scientific-minded souls, but the number of scientific-minded souls vs. common McDonald's employees is obviously quite different than in the past.
I use GNOME. I've used GNOME for more than a year. I never use KDE.
KDE rocks. KDE is wonderful. KDE is great.
This is not sarcasm. I will explain no further.
Ahem.
You fuckwit. You are a lame loser that cannot comprehend simple law. You get your legal opinions from television and newspapers. Some of us have a clue and don't blather uninformed stupid baseless opinions in public.
The more clued of us that do venture to propose uninformed opinion at least do so with less strong language so that we won't look like complete morons.
So shut the fuck up and go back to your hole.
Ahem.
But then, I suspect you were just trying to not flame the flamer?
Many posters say put in extra drops because you can't think of everything.
No-one recommends putting a drop near the ceiling in each room.
Think about it. If you forget something in a room, and you have to string wire from one corner to the other, across a doorway, you don't want wire laying on the floor where you have to tape it down (ugly) or run it under the carpet (hard). Easiest is to run the wire up to the ceiling, over the door, and back down again at the appliance.
Why not reduce the ugliness by *STARTING* the drop at the ceiling, running it around the room, and then down to the appliance?
Just a thought.
Wow. Read that link you called 'stalking your ex-spouse.'
If you change your SSN and identity, then you can no longer get a passport.
The United States has already completed its downward spiral to cold-war USSR standards. It imprisons people from other countries for political reasons. It numbers its citizens. It disallows travel to other countries with the right to return.
It's just amazing. I'm only 30 years old and I'm already old enough to remember all the propaganda from my childhood saying these things were bad and could never happen in the United States.
What a sad state of affairs.
The patent system was designed to promote progress in our society.
It's obviously working quite well because here it is, 1992, and we're finally able to use an alpha channel.
What year is it again?
I've been going back through a lot of your postings on Slashdot, and you make several references to the Anarchism FAQ, but when I go there (infotech, right?) it gives me a timeout. Can't read it.
I see you're pretty well-read. At least you've read some of the authors I find pretty influential. John Taylor Gatto sticks out in one of your posts.
Alfie Kohn is quite interesting as well.
So here's a question for you... what sort of action do you propose? I proposed some sort of action but it was "work within the system" action that I figure is doomed to failure.
I've been thinking about this for about... oh... ten years, and I oscillate between this and that and never do anything. Sort'f like most Slashdot/Kuro5hin folk.
It seems education is the place to start, but it looks like a huge shitfight there. Alfie Kohn and JTG are a testament to that.
About the only thing I can come up with that has any chance of success is just going out into my neighborhood, meeting people, teaching them whatever I know, and basically trying to better the lives of 10 or 20 people.
Oh, by the way, you've cancelled your email account at usa.net! I tried to send you the bulk of this comment as email.
...who read that and brain automatically s/Sleepycat/VileCuecatCompany/ ???
It made my head spin.
Ever since Sun came out with a statement saying they want a national ID card to prevent terrorism, I've decided they're no better than Oracle or Microsoft. Just another big corp that doesn't give a rat's behind about rights.
If these two Sun employees really care about our rights, they can show me by quitting Sun.
First, you need a solid, extensible, accessible base to build on: Linux vs. DOS. (Try administering a DOS machine remotely)
Then, you need a solid CLI to work with your system. GNU vs. Microsoft's \win*\system.
Next, you need a solid networkable graphics subsystem. (X vs. Windows. I don't think I even need to comment here).
Next, you need solid, consistent GUIs. You can't get this anywhere except (and this is debateable) Apple.
I won't bother mentioning levels above this since Computer Science hasn't even progressed this far.
My point: GNOME/X/GNU/Linux gets you far further and you're much better off than with Windows/Windows/DOS/DOS.
export PS1='C:\>'
This, I was told, will convince the guy everything's fine.
If he's a confused GUI guy, just run FVWM95 to make him happy.
If you don't have enough RAM to run XWindows on your laptop, have a JPEG screenshot of a Windows desktop and use your favourite console-mode JPEG viewer to bring it up.
Unfortunately, although everyone is 100x more paranoid now than they were before, they're absolutely no smarter, so you've got to play stupid games like this.
Don't think you're above these stupid games. If you can't give a security guy what he expects in his tiny little worldview, he will want to ass-search you.
- I installed it and booted it. First thing I did was change the colour scheme since black on grey is unacceptable (and for some ungodly reason seems to be the default in every GUI that exists). Some widgets took the colour change, others didn't. Now I have grey-background text on a green-background menu which is beyond ugly. Mind you, Linux (GNOME, my preference) is just as bad on this front, but Windows gets it right. I think KDE gets it right, too, but don't quote me on this.
- I tried to change the font to something bigger since I was running 1280x1024 and 8-pt Ariel is impossible to read. Ditto with colour changes. Some places it worked, others not.
- I dropped to a shell. The Unix interface was lacking. I'll apologise for not giving details since it's been literally about 1.5 years.
- I went looking for an MP3 or MPEG player. A flight simulator. Sound editor. Video editor. Anything you would expect from an OS purported to be a 'multimedia' OS. I think there was a toy flight simulator I found which was seriously that: a toy.
So I went back to GNU/GHOME/Linux which, although very broken in a number of amazingly fundamental ways, at least can play MP3s and has FlightGear flight simulator.Again I must state this was some 1.5 years ago. I don't claim to know how BeOS works recently. But you mentioned you need VLC to play DVDs on BeOS, which indicates at least one of my major gripes holds today. I have VLC for Linux.
Such is life.
Who wants to tell Grandma her grandkids are dead after some guy got belligerent and the pilot lowered the cabin pressure?
But I guess this is relatively unlikely. My immediate concern is how will I tell my grandchildren that the US is a police state with mind control worse than China simply because we were too lazy to actually keep an eye on what our elected officials were doing to us and the world?
... recalls when the United States government propaganda pointed out that the Soviet Union "gives every citizen a number that identifies them." Of course, it was implied that the United States was better than such a totalitarian regime that treats its citizens like sheep or automatons.
Sigh.
I'll bite. I've followed the Phil Zimmerman story for several years with some interest.
I'll summarise the other side of the story for you: the NSA and FBI don't want anyone to be in possession of cryptographic technology because it makes it harder to spy on U.S. citizens. They have consistently lied to congress to keep bad laws and regulations on the books. They have consistently harassed good citizens who are trying to get the useless laws and regulations changed.
The result? When I, a United States citizen currently residing in New Zealand want to download a copy of CFS (cryptographic filesystem) I can't, because of U.S. export restrictions (!).
Phil Zimmerman and people like him have made a slight dent in the stupidity, but it's not enough. Until the U.S. government lets go of its desire to spy on its own citizens, things will remain bad. In the meantime, non-US countries will be on the forefront of secure communications technology, because they're allowed to export their software.