If it were stagnant the US wouldn't be the most powerful nation on the face of the earth.
Our government has not changed form for over 200 years not because it is stagnant, but because it works.
If our government ever were to become stagnant as you suggest, we the people would have the power to change it. We would have that power because we would have the ability to use force to achieve that change.
The problem is that there is no way to un-invent the gun. As long as guns exist, gun related crimes will exist, and some of these crimes will be committed by the police and the military at the behest of would-be tyrants. All one has to do is look at the 3rd world on an average Wednesday to see atrocities committed in regimes where the average citizen has ZERO power and is at the mercy of the cleptocracy he or she has as a government.
The reason why the second amendment exists is because our founding fathers understood what Mao expressed so eloquently as "Political power comes from the barrel of a gun." The second amendment is the final check and balance put in place to ensure that should all the other checks and balances fail the people themselves would be able to defend themselves against tyrrany. This creates an inherent stability in our government that just isn't seen anywhere else. The US is the oldest continuous government on the face of the earth. Every other nation that existed in 1788 has either ceased to exist, seen its government overthrown, or seen it morph into something else.
The right to keep and bear arms is not some privilege or indulgence granted by the constitution, it is a fundamental right that exists regardless of whether it is acknowledged or not. The right and power to protect and defend one's person and one's rights as a free individual is not something that any government has the legitimate authority to restrict or deny.
As for the rest of "Anonymous Coward's" diatribe, all I can say is something my grandmother told me as a young child:
I spent most of yesterday rebuilding my Windows 2000 system at work. I did a raw copy of my windows partitions to a second drive using dd under Linux before I started the rebuild so I was able to preserve much of my data, but far from all of it. My outlook.pst file is the most painful loss so far, and who knows what else I'll find damaged beyond repair before I'm done.
Once upon a time I would be furious about this. Nowadays I've come to expect it. It seems we live in a world where sociopaths are given free reign to harm others without penalty or consequence. Worms like this are concrete proof of the existence of genuine evil. What kind of a person would write create something for the sole purpose of ruining other people's computers? Other people who they don't know and who have never done anything to hurt them? I'll tell you what kind, the kind I'd kill in a cold second. I hope and pray that they find the people behind this, and that they are in a place where our law enforcement can get at them. The best thing would be just to take them out someplace and shoot them, but short of that a nice long prison sentence will suit me just fine.
This worm has convinced me of the need to increase the steps we take in fighting people like this. The model where we work to protect our systems just doesn't work. Locking your door and windows and pulling the shades may keep an intruder out of your house most of the time, but it doesn't eliminate that intruder. It is far better to trap and kill a rabid animal than it is to simply put up barbed wire around your house. It is time that the would-be victims of these crackers went on the offensive. You wouldn't just stand there if someone was trying to beat you up. You'd fight back and if possible make sure your attacker hurt badly enough that they wouldn't be attacking anyone else anytime soon.
Crackers are a not a computer problem, they are a people problem. If computers didn't exist they would find some other way to be destructive and malicious. Crackers are no more a computer problem than carjackers are a problem with your car. The only difference is that carjackers run the risk of getting shot by their would-be victims and/or being sent to prison. Crackers essentially operate with impunity. The only way the cracker problem is going to be effectively handled is to make that change.
If I ever find out who is behind this worm and I'm in a position to do something about it... heaven help them because it will take an act of God to save them from me.
This is living proof that 50% of the population is of below average intelligence.
I'm dead serious when I say that too.
This kind of crap never made any sense to me when I was a kid, and it makes even less sense now. Who are these cretins who are so afraid of "bad words" anyway? What kind of bizarre "thoughts" go through their minds that would lead them to go as far as exerting political pressure on the government to protect them from these words?
I just don't get it. Even the "Its for the children!" argument doesn't hold water in my book. Kids need to be protected from many things, but words are not among them. Besides, if these words were truly evil or harmful in some way, they quite simply would have died out ages ago. No one would know them because our ancestors would have stopped using them. The very fact that they have persisted in our language proves that they are harmless. There is simply a legion of brain-dead morons who believe they are. The world would be a much better place if they didn't breed more of themselves.
You can mark this bullshit down under 'A' for absurd.
How about a virus that does nothing but try to spread as far and wide as possible without doing anything malicious. Then, after a pre-determined ammount of time it would announce its presence to the luser and provide both instructions for its removal and common sense advice on how to avoid being infected by viri in the first place.
Viruses spread due to stupidity, ignorance, and laziness on the part of users. A virus like this MIGHT help with the ignorance part.
Now please don't think I'm advising anyone to go out and write such a thing, I'm only saying that I think the idea would be interesting.
I think it would also be interesting to hunt down the creators of malicious viruses and have them drawn and quartered, preferably on live TV. Next their parents should be beat within an inch of their lives for not raising them right in the first place.
Lee
Proof that civilization defeats natural selection
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Junkie Loves His Spam
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· Score: 1
The only reason why people like this are alive in the first place is because civilization protects those who would not otherwise be able to meet the challenge of survival. Ever wonder where the people on Jerry Springer come from? Now you know. If it wasn't for civilzation people like that wouldn't live long enough to breed, let alone proliferate into an army of the genetically challenged.
In a perfect world foolishness and stupidity would be fatal past a certain point.
From what I've read today, the military doesn't WANT the draft in the first place. They are dead set against it. They want soldiers who signed up voluntarily, not someone who is there under protest. The most valuable lesson that was learned from Vietnam is that you can't win a war unless your soldiers are there to fight. Pulling some guy in off the street, sticking him in a uniform, shipping him to the other side of the world, handing him an M-14, and telling him to go kill Charlie just doesn't cut it. You need bloodthirsty killers who WANT to be in the jungle looking for Charlie (or Ivan, or Haibib).
I also found out that it was the left who initiated the idea of bringing back the draft. This is very clever on their part because the draft is where they derived a lot of their power during the Vietnam war. After we went to the all volunteer system the turn out at war protests all but dried up. Today the left is having to scream and bitch REALLY loud because most people who aren't dyed in the wool bolsheviks aren't listening.
I hope she's good in bed cause I'd never date someone that clueless unless she could make my toes curl, my eyes roll into the back of my head, and jets of steam shoot out of both ears.
If things ever get bad enough that we'll NEED to reinstitute the draft then I'm all for it. No one will be drafting me however since I'll have signed up to put bullets in barbarians long before then.
I think cases like this one call for a new form of punishment. The "Beat within an inch of your life" penalty. Human trash like this guy should be placed in a room with about six big burly bikers or maybe bouners who will then proceed to beat the shit out of him for as long as possible without causing permanent disfigurement or death. For more heinous crimes the penalty would be applied multiple times with the criminal given time in between to recover. The costs of the program could be paid for by broadcasting the ass whoppings on pay-per view. This penalty would be followed by a prison sentence of normal duration for the crime.
I don't know that this penalty would do much to lower crime, but it sure would be satisfying to see and hear people like this guy get beat half to death.. Spammers, virus writers,and crackers, would all benefit from a dose of knuckle sandwich justice.
Lee
Re:So they stick to the new license...
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XFree86 4.4 Released
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· Score: 5, Insightful
The problem is that this isn't a legal issue, its a political/ideological one. The fact that the FSF crowd coaches ideological arguments in legal terms doesn't mean there is a legal issue here.
The FSF doesn't like the new license and begins telling people that it is incompatible with the GPL. Does that mean they are right? Does the GPL mean whatever the FSF decides it means that week? Or, in a country governed by the rule of law, does it mean no more and no less that what it be proven to mean in court? I don't know about you, but I tend to believe the latter
More importantly, what exactly is the FSF supposed to do about people who don't agree with their current take and make use of Apache/XFree86-4.4 anyway? Are they going to sue them? Do they have the money, let alone the ability convince a court that the suit isn't frivilous? More importantly, can they afford the ill will that would result?
I personally don't understand why XFree considers this change so important, but neither do I see it as a harmful one. They are not attempting to make any changes to how anyone uses their code, only asking that they receive recognition for their work. Isn't that something that RMS has been whining about for years with his GNU/Linux nonsense? He "corrects" people for calling Linux Linux every chance he gets. In fact I read an article where the author claimed that RMS refused to give an interview unless the article used his preferred terminology.
Instead of "Dorm sex party" his website will have to say "Cell Block assrape festival." He's going to be passed around like a joint and won't be able to sit down for a week before they're done with him.
A difficult but viable solution to the problem of nuclear waste has existed for decades. It has not been implemented for political reasons ranging from the politics of the cold war to the current politics of environmentalism.
The problem is that in a country like the US most of the poor and disenfranchised have no one to blame but themselves. Every child is afforded a free and public education. Every child has educational and economic opportunities that people in the third world would do almost anything to take advantage of. Why do you think the US is a beacon of hope an prosperity to the rest of the world? Even those nations that hate and resent us do so because we represent everything that they are not. Resentment is the sincerest form of flattery.
The US is a meritocracy. Not a perfect one of course but what flaws we have are not fatal ones. Prosperity can be had by anyone who is willing and able to work for it. Most adults who live in poverty are losers plain and simple. Worrying about their welfare and quality of life when they won't take responsibility for these things themselves is an exercise in stupidity. There is a reason why some people are well off and others are not, and that boils down to a fundamental difference in the quality of their character and the level of their abilities. Losers lose, winners win. Do anything you want to the system within which these two groups exist and it won't make a damned bit of difference. You can't help those who won't help themselves. Trying to monkey with the social machinery to favor those who can't or won't produce just makes things worse for everyone.
I agree with you that birth control is the best hope for mankind. If losers and idiots can be discouraged from creating more of themselves the long term benefits for humanity are nearly limitless. I can't agree with you about religion however. Nature abhors a vacuum and religion is a powerful civilizing and socializing force. It is not perfect, but at least it does not deny human nature. Most leftest ideology is based upon the idea that evil is the result of social conditions/injustice, and simple misunderstandings. Man's nature is seen as both inherently good and infinitely malleable. It is believed that man can be made into something better through education and other social endeavors. The truth is that human nature is not inherently good and neither is terribly changable. Any system that denies the truth about human nature will be the victim of it. Communism is only one of the more horrific examples of this fundamental truth.
I understand why you're a socialist. You want to make the world a better place. What you need to understand is that not everyone can be helped and those who can are best served by providing them with the opportunity to help themselves.
The point of a 64-bit architecture boils down to two things really, memory and data size/precision.
An architecture with 32-bits of address space can directly address 2^32 or approximately 4 billion bytes of memory. There are many applications where that just isn't enough. More importantly, an architecture whose registers are 32-bits wide is far less efficient when it comes to dealing with values that require more than 32 bits to express. Many floating point values use 64 bits and being able to directly manipulate these in a single register is a lot more efficient than doing voodoo to combine two 32-bit registers.
So, if you have an problem where you're dealing with astronomical quantities of very large (or precise) values, then a 64-bit implementation is going to make a very big difference. If you're running a text editor and surfing the web then having a wider address bus and wider registers isn't going to do squat for you. Now that doesn't mean that there may not be other, somewhat unrelated, architectural improvements found in a 64-bit architecture that a 32-bit system is lacking. Those can make a big difference as well, but then you're talking about the overall efficiency of the design, which is a far less specific issue than whether 64-bits is better/worse than 32.
Lee
All in Wonder Radeon on an Athlon 2200
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Build Your Own PVR
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· Score: 2, Informative
I've had my Radeon All in Wonder working since mid 2002. It does a beautiful job of recording TV in both Mpeg2 and DivX format. I use a Pioneer DVD burner to create DVD's that I can play in any compatible console player. The only qualm I have with the it is that the included software to let you view TV listings doesn't work, or at least not without switching the input to the built-in tuner. I really don't know why the thing even has a tuner at this point. Who in their right mind is going to use an RF input instead of the composite or s-video?
Now some of you may be wondering how I'm doing this. Well I'm doing it under Windows 2000 is how. When there is a Linux solution that works as well I may switch, but I'm not going to go out of my way to avoid a good solution just because it runs on top of Windows. People who make choices based upon emotionally driven ideology instead of practical considerations usually don't get as far as people who do the opposite. So while I may prefer Linux to Windows in general, my preference is based upon the technical and social merits of Linux, not upon some quasi-religious hatred of Windows.
I work with someone who is at least as good as I am with Unix, and is most likely far better. Her superiors are wanting her to support Windows now as well and she is fit to be tied. Her hatred of M$ and Windows is such that she just can't do it. Unfortunately Windows is not going anywhere. Refusing to deal with it doesn't make it go away, it just makes its presence that much more of a problem. It is better to keep your friends close and your enemies closer. If I can't make windows jump then that makes me that much less powerful a hacker (!=Cracker) and that much less valuable to whomever I work for.
I think having a Linux PVR solution would be great, but going out of one's way to use alpha and beta quality stuff that is a pain to get configured and working just to avoid using Windows is pretty damned silly unless you're one of the developers.
I don't have any children yet. Any children I may have one day won't be seeing porn at 5 because I don't watch it myself. If my 5 year old is smart enough to know how to go look for it himself then I doubt I'll do anything to stop him. If anything I'd use it as an opportunity to educate him about sex, if I hadn't already done so. I find almost all porn to be distasteful because it doesn't depict sexuality in a healthy way. Even so I've never seen it as something inherently harmful. Now there are people who seem to have some sort of quasi-addiction to it. They have taken it into their lives and made it into a significant influence over them. People like that are sick in my opinion. I would not want such a fate to befall my child, but I'm not foolish enough to think that I can protect my child if that is the fate they choose.
As for movies that depict violence, I don't really think it matters. If a movie or a television program has more impact upon my child's psyche than I do then I'm doing a piss poor job as a parent. Besides, human beings are not walking tape recorders. The idea that children are "impressionable" is absurd. They evaluate the things they see and hear to the best of their abilities based upon their experience. The conclusions they draw are constantly re-evaluated on the basis of new information and new experiences. The only way that seeing violence (or anything) could have long-term effects upon a kid is if that was all they ever saw. As long as a person's experiences are well-rounded they too will be well-rounded. So trying to "protect" someone of any age from seeing something is useless as well as futile. They're going to see it anyway, and the fact that they do is of no consequence.
There is enough in the world that children need to be protected from without creating imaginary dangers. If anything the sheltered child is ill prepared both intellectually and emotionally to take their place in the adult world when the time comes. They may be perfectly prepared for the fairy-tale world their parents and community have presented as reality, but that hardly prepares them for the real world.
I never cease to be amazed that the time, energy, and money people will spend trying to "protect" young people from the things they don't want them to see.
The reason for these efforts is simple, information control is the only effective means of mind control. Control what people see and hear and you control what they think. Much of child rearing seems to be institutionalized brainwashing. This made no sense to me when I was a child or a teenager and it makes even less sense to me now at 31, or at least no rational sense.
There is no rational reason to want to hide things from your children. There are plenty of irrational (and downright sick) reasons I can think of though, most of which are a combination of stupidity and insanity.
Unfortunately I don't think this will ever change because that would require human nature with all its failing and weaknesses to be improved and that hasn't happened in 10,000 years or more.
Between the police-state Republicans and the welfare-state Democrats, I really don't see how I'm supposed to be able to vote for anyone who isn't out to screw me in some way.
It sickens me how the law encroachment community is using the threat of terrorism to obtain the powers that they have been trying to obtain for as long as I can remember. Every time you turn around the justice department asks congress for these kinds of powers, only now congress is giving it to them. All in the name of safety. Well I'll tell you what, I'm far more afraid of government agents than I'll ever be of the ignorant inbred religious zealots that pollute the middle east. Whatever problems we might have with terrorism can be solved by bombing the shit out of the people who are doing it, not by giving the feds more power to spy oun our own people. The purpose of law enforcement is to provide security to honest people and ensure that genuine criminals are not allowed to victimize our communities. This purpose is derived from the will of the people. Whenever the police seek power above and beyond the minimum required to fulfill this purpose it is a clear sign that not only is abuse of that power possible, it is inevitable because these are the kinds of people who will make war on the American people in the name of enforcing the law.
All I can say is to fight for the first and second amendments and be careful who you vote for.
...that the market for commodity systems is already saturated.
Trying to compete with companies like Dell only makes sense if you're the star of Brewster's Millions.
There is certainly money to be made in the computer industry. But the days when hardware firms could be started out of someone's garage are long, long gone.
Of course I'm sure there will be a whole army of dreamers and wet-behind-the-ears schmucks lined up to argue with me about this for the simple reason that the truth I speak is a threat to their pipe dream. Well I say they need to put that crack pipe down and start looking for sectors and markets that don't already have dozens of 800 pound gorillas stomping about. Just because you have a love for something doesn't mean you can turn it into a successful business, especially when that business would be servicing a competitive market with razor-thin margins.
The most anyone could hope for would to eek out a marginal existance selling highly customized systems built from hand-picked components for gamers and similar enthusiasts. (Most of whom can do it themselves, or at least think they can)
The best way to stop doing something is to stop doing it. If you want to cut back on your caffiene intake then do so. Just because other people drink a lot of caffiene where you work doesn't mean that you have to. If someone is pushing you to drink coffee to meet some deadline or whatever then that is a sign of other problems within the organization.
I don't know how much coffee etc you drink, but I'd start out by cutting down. Try half-caf coffee instead of the full strength stuff. Drink less. Keep track of how much you are drinking and work to lower that ammount week by week. Eventually you should switch to decaf coffee and either drink sprite or drop soda altogether.
I do hope no one mods me up to "insightful." Nothing I've said here is anything other than obvious.
The founding fathers had it right over 200 years ago. They created a system of government based upon the rule of law where the power of the state was both limited and widely distributed between the local, state, and federal levels. The powers that would arise and attempt to subvert the system and take power for themselves were forced to fight with one another, thereby neutralizing them.
This system depends upon one thing more than any other, and that is an informed citizenry made up of individuals that make the preservation of freedom and individual sovereignty their personal responsibility. If the US were made up of people like this then what a glorious nation we would make.
....considering the fact that the Prime Minister of New Zealand is a neo-bolshevik schmuck who has done everything she can to cripple their military. If you think the left in the US is bad, wait till you see what crawls out from under rocks in other countries.
When I hear about things like this it reminds of just how unusual and fragile freedom is in the world. It also makes me fearful because so few people in America are dedicated to the preservation of freedom. Instead they're either disinterested in what goes on or dedicated to furthering some ill-concieved and short sighted political agenda that they usually don't even understand. The rights and freedoms this country was founded upon are far more important to our collective future than red-herring issues like abortion. The abortion debate iself is little more than a battle-front in the cultural wars between the loony left and the religious right. As long as there are unwanted children being conceived abortion will exist regardless of whether it is legal or not. Arguing about something that cannot be stopped is futile and even counterproductive. Its like arguing about how people should wipe their asses. Its impossible to force anyone to follow whatever conclusions are reached, so why argue about it? Laws against abortion will work about as well as laws against Marijuana or Alcohol. Marijuana can be easily grown, alcohol can be easily fermented and distilled, and an abortion is only a coat-hanger away. The laws regarding all are in reality little more than proclamations of what the government would prefer you do. People get all worked up over abortion because it is a stand-in for all the other issues that don't get argued about directly. Ideological points that have been disproven or discredited but which the left or right doesn't want to let go of. It doesn't suprise me that so many people have forsaken the political process. If the choice is between a closet communist and a someone who is either a theocrat or owned by a bunch of fat-cats, there isn't really any way to make a good choice. So people don't vote and in doing so forfeit the very power that MUST be held by the people for democracy to truly exist. Every time a person disinvolves themselves from the political process they're letting the fate of this country be determined by idiots and ideologues. People who are either stupid or crazy or both.
If things keep going like this then America is doomed to die from collapse from within. Unfortunately for all our "friends" in other places who would like to see that happen, America's collapse will likely pull them in with it, or at least place them upon the very precipice of collapse just like the collapse of Rome sent all of Western Europe into the dark ages, only this time on a global scale.
Slashdot Mirror
If it were stagnant the US wouldn't be the most powerful nation on the face of the earth.
Our government has not changed form for over 200 years not because it is stagnant, but because it works.
If our government ever were to become stagnant as you suggest, we the people would have the power to change it. We would have that power because we would have the ability to use force to achieve that change.
The problem is that there is no way to un-invent the gun. As long as guns exist, gun related crimes will exist, and some of these crimes will be committed by the police and the military at the behest of would-be tyrants. All one has to do is look at the 3rd world on an average Wednesday to see atrocities committed in regimes where the average citizen has ZERO power and is at the mercy of the cleptocracy he or she has as a government.
The reason why the second amendment exists is because our founding fathers understood what Mao expressed so eloquently as "Political power comes from the barrel of a gun." The second amendment is the final check and balance put in place to ensure that should all the other checks and balances fail the people themselves would be able to defend themselves against tyrrany. This creates an inherent stability in our government that just isn't seen anywhere else. The US is the oldest continuous government on the face of the earth. Every other nation that existed in 1788 has either ceased to exist, seen its government overthrown, or seen it morph into something else.
The right to keep and bear arms is not some privilege or indulgence granted by the constitution, it is a fundamental right that exists regardless of whether it is acknowledged or not. The right and power to protect and defend one's person and one's rights as a free individual is not something that any government has the legitimate authority to restrict or deny.
As for the rest of "Anonymous Coward's" diatribe, all I can say is something my grandmother told me as a young child:
Resentment is the sincerest form of flattery.
I spent most of yesterday rebuilding my Windows 2000 system at work. I did a raw copy of my windows partitions to a second drive using dd under Linux before I started the rebuild so I was able to preserve much of my data, but far from all of it. My outlook .pst file is the most painful loss so far, and who knows what else I'll find damaged beyond repair before I'm done.
Once upon a time I would be furious about this. Nowadays I've come to expect it. It seems we live in a world where sociopaths are given free reign to harm others without penalty or consequence. Worms like this are concrete proof of the existence of genuine evil. What kind of a person would write create something for the sole purpose of ruining other people's computers? Other people who they don't know and who have never done anything to hurt them? I'll tell you what kind, the kind I'd kill in a cold second. I hope and pray that they find the people behind this, and that they are in a place where our law enforcement can get at them. The best thing would be just to take them out someplace and shoot them, but short of that a nice long prison sentence will suit me just fine.
This worm has convinced me of the need to increase the steps we take in fighting people like this. The model where we work to protect our systems just doesn't work. Locking your door and windows and pulling the shades may keep an intruder out of your house most of the time, but it doesn't eliminate that intruder. It is far better to trap and kill a rabid animal than it is to simply put up barbed wire around your house. It is time that the would-be victims of these crackers went on the offensive. You wouldn't just stand there if someone was trying to beat you up. You'd fight back and if possible make sure your attacker hurt badly enough that they wouldn't be attacking anyone else anytime soon.
Crackers are a not a computer problem, they are a people problem. If computers didn't exist they would find some other way to be destructive and malicious. Crackers are no more a computer problem than carjackers are a problem with your car. The only difference is that carjackers run the risk of getting shot by their would-be victims and/or being sent to prison. Crackers essentially operate with impunity. The only way the cracker problem is going to be effectively handled is to make that change.
If I ever find out who is behind this worm and I'm in a position to do something about it... heaven help them because it will take an act of God to save them from me.
Lee
This is living proof that 50% of the population is of below average intelligence.
I'm dead serious when I say that too.
This kind of crap never made any sense to me when I was a kid, and it makes even less sense now. Who are these cretins who are so afraid of "bad words" anyway? What kind of bizarre "thoughts" go through their minds that would lead them to go as far as exerting political pressure on the government to protect them from these words?
I just don't get it. Even the "Its for the children!" argument doesn't hold water in my book. Kids need to be protected from many things, but words are not among them. Besides, if these words were truly evil or harmful in some way, they quite simply would have died out ages ago. No one would know them because our ancestors would have stopped using them. The very fact that they have persisted in our language proves that they are harmless. There is simply a legion of brain-dead morons who believe they are. The world would be a much better place if they didn't breed more of themselves.
You can mark this bullshit down under 'A' for absurd.
How about a virus that does nothing but try to spread as far and wide as possible without doing anything malicious. Then, after a pre-determined ammount of time it would announce its presence to the luser and provide both instructions for its removal and common sense advice on how to avoid being infected by viri in the first place.
Viruses spread due to stupidity, ignorance, and laziness on the part of users. A virus like this MIGHT help with the ignorance part.
Now please don't think I'm advising anyone to go out and write such a thing, I'm only saying that I think the idea would be interesting.
I think it would also be interesting to hunt down the creators of malicious viruses and have them drawn and quartered, preferably on live TV. Next their parents should be beat within an inch of their lives for not raising them right in the first place.
Lee
The only reason why people like this are alive in the first place is because civilization protects those who would not otherwise be able to meet the challenge of survival. Ever wonder where the people on Jerry Springer come from? Now you know. If it wasn't for civilzation people like that wouldn't live long enough to breed, let alone proliferate into an army of the genetically challenged.
In a perfect world foolishness and stupidity would be fatal past a certain point.
Lee
From what I've read today, the military doesn't WANT the draft in the first place. They are dead set against it. They want soldiers who signed up voluntarily, not someone who is there under protest. The most valuable lesson that was learned from Vietnam is that you can't win a war unless your soldiers are there to fight. Pulling some guy in off the street, sticking him in a uniform, shipping him to the other side of the world, handing him an M-14, and telling him to go kill Charlie just doesn't cut it. You need bloodthirsty killers who WANT to be in the jungle looking for Charlie (or Ivan, or Haibib).
I also found out that it was the left who initiated the idea of bringing back the draft. This is very clever on their part because the draft is where they derived a lot of their power during the Vietnam war. After we went to the all volunteer system the turn out at war protests all but dried up. Today the left is having to scream and bitch REALLY loud because most people who aren't dyed in the wool bolsheviks aren't listening.
I hope she's good in bed cause I'd never date someone that clueless unless she could make my toes curl, my eyes roll into the back of my head, and jets of steam shoot out of both ears.
Lee
If things ever get bad enough that we'll NEED to reinstitute the draft then I'm all for it. No one will be drafting me however since I'll have signed up to put bullets in barbarians long before then.
Lee
I think cases like this one call for a new form of punishment. The "Beat within an inch of your life" penalty. Human trash like this guy should be placed in a room with about six big burly bikers or maybe bouners who will then proceed to beat the shit out of him for as long as possible without causing permanent disfigurement or death. For more heinous crimes the penalty would be applied multiple times with the criminal given time in between to recover. The costs of the program could be paid for by broadcasting the ass whoppings on pay-per view. This penalty would be followed by a prison sentence of normal duration for the crime.
,and crackers, would all benefit from a dose of knuckle sandwich justice.
I don't know that this penalty would do much to lower crime, but it sure would be satisfying to see and hear people like this guy get beat half to death.. Spammers, virus writers
Lee
The problem is that this isn't a legal issue, its a political/ideological one. The fact that the FSF crowd coaches ideological arguments in legal terms doesn't mean there is a legal issue here.
The FSF doesn't like the new license and begins telling people that it is incompatible with the GPL. Does that mean they are right? Does the GPL mean whatever the FSF decides it means that week? Or, in a country governed by the rule of law, does it mean no more and no less that what it be proven to mean in court? I don't know about you, but I tend to believe the latter
More importantly, what exactly is the FSF supposed to do about people who don't agree with their current take and make use of Apache/XFree86-4.4 anyway? Are they going to sue them? Do they have the money, let alone the ability convince a court that the suit isn't frivilous? More importantly, can they afford the ill will that would result?
I personally don't understand why XFree considers this change so important, but neither do I see it as a harmful one. They are not attempting to make any changes to how anyone uses their code, only asking that they receive recognition for their work. Isn't that something that RMS has been whining about for years with his GNU/Linux nonsense? He "corrects" people for calling Linux Linux every chance he gets. In fact I read an article where the author claimed that RMS refused to give an interview unless the article used his preferred terminology.
What's good for the goose is good for the gander.
Lee
Instead of "Dorm sex party" his website will have to say "Cell Block assrape festival." He's going to be passed around like a joint and won't be able to sit down for a week before they're done with him.
A difficult but viable solution to the problem of nuclear waste has existed for decades. It has not been implemented for political reasons ranging from the politics of the cold war to the current politics of environmentalism.
http://www.npl.washington.edu/AV/altvw79.html
The problem is that in a country like the US most of the poor and disenfranchised have no one to blame but themselves. Every child is afforded a free and public education. Every child has educational and economic opportunities that people in the third world would do almost anything to take advantage of. Why do you think the US is a beacon of hope an prosperity to the rest of the world? Even those nations that hate and resent us do so because we represent everything that they are not. Resentment is the sincerest form of flattery.
The US is a meritocracy. Not a perfect one of course but what flaws we have are not fatal ones. Prosperity can be had by anyone who is willing and able to work for it. Most adults who live in poverty are losers plain and simple. Worrying about their welfare and quality of life when they won't take responsibility for these things themselves is an exercise in stupidity. There is a reason why some people are well off and others are not, and that boils down to a fundamental difference in the quality of their character and the level of their abilities. Losers lose, winners win. Do anything you want to the system within which these two groups exist and it won't make a damned bit of difference. You can't help those who won't help themselves. Trying to monkey with the social machinery to favor those who can't or won't produce just makes things worse for everyone.
I agree with you that birth control is the best hope for mankind. If losers and idiots can be discouraged from creating more of themselves the long term benefits for humanity are nearly limitless. I can't agree with you about religion however. Nature abhors a vacuum and religion is a powerful civilizing and socializing force. It is not perfect, but at least it does not deny human nature. Most leftest ideology is based upon the idea that evil is the result of social conditions/injustice, and simple misunderstandings. Man's nature is seen as both inherently good and infinitely malleable. It is believed that man can be made into something better through education and other social endeavors. The truth is that human nature is not inherently good and neither is terribly changable. Any system that denies the truth about human nature will be the victim of it. Communism is only one of the more horrific examples of this fundamental truth.
I understand why you're a socialist. You want to make the world a better place. What you need to understand is that not everyone can be helped and those who can are best served by providing them with the opportunity to help themselves.
Lee
The point of a 64-bit architecture boils down to two things really, memory and data size/precision.
An architecture with 32-bits of address space can directly address 2^32 or approximately 4 billion bytes of memory. There are many applications where that just isn't enough. More importantly, an architecture whose registers are 32-bits wide is far less efficient when it comes to dealing with values that require more than 32 bits to express. Many floating point values use 64 bits and being able to directly manipulate these in a single register is a lot more efficient than doing voodoo to combine two 32-bit registers.
So, if you have an problem where you're dealing with astronomical quantities of very large (or precise) values, then a 64-bit implementation is going to make a very big difference. If you're running a text editor and surfing the web then having a wider address bus and wider registers isn't going to do squat for you. Now that doesn't mean that there may not be other, somewhat unrelated, architectural improvements found in a 64-bit architecture that a 32-bit system is lacking. Those can make a big difference as well, but then you're talking about the overall efficiency of the design, which is a far less specific issue than whether 64-bits is better/worse than 32.
Lee
I've had my Radeon All in Wonder working since mid 2002. It does a beautiful job of recording TV in both Mpeg2 and DivX format. I use a Pioneer DVD burner to create DVD's that I can play in any compatible console player. The only qualm I have with the it is that the included software to let you view TV listings doesn't work, or at least not without switching the input to the built-in tuner. I really don't know why the thing even has a tuner at this point. Who in their right mind is going to use an RF input instead of the composite or s-video?
Now some of you may be wondering how I'm doing this. Well I'm doing it under Windows 2000 is how. When there is a Linux solution that works as well I may switch, but I'm not going to go out of my way to avoid a good solution just because it runs on top of Windows. People who make choices based upon emotionally driven ideology instead of practical considerations usually don't get as far as people who do the opposite. So while I may prefer Linux to Windows in general, my preference is based upon the technical and social merits of Linux, not upon some quasi-religious hatred of Windows.
I work with someone who is at least as good as I am with Unix, and is most likely far better. Her superiors are wanting her to support Windows now as well and she is fit to be tied. Her hatred of M$ and Windows is such that she just can't do it. Unfortunately Windows is not going anywhere. Refusing to deal with it doesn't make it go away, it just makes its presence that much more of a problem. It is better to keep your friends close and your enemies closer. If I can't make windows jump then that makes me that much less powerful a hacker (!=Cracker) and that much less valuable to whomever I work for.
I think having a Linux PVR solution would be great, but going out of one's way to use alpha and beta quality stuff that is a pain to get configured and working just to avoid using Windows is pretty damned silly unless you're one of the developers.
Lee
I don't have any children yet. Any children I may have one day won't be seeing porn at 5 because I don't watch it myself. If my 5 year old is smart enough to know how to go look for it himself then I doubt I'll do anything to stop him. If anything I'd use it as an opportunity to educate him about sex, if I hadn't already done so. I find almost all porn to be distasteful because it doesn't depict sexuality in a healthy way. Even so I've never seen it as something inherently harmful. Now there are people who seem to have some sort of quasi-addiction to it. They have taken it into their lives and made it into a significant influence over them. People like that are sick in my opinion. I would not want such a fate to befall my child, but I'm not foolish enough to think that I can protect my child if that is the fate they choose.
As for movies that depict violence, I don't really think it matters. If a movie or a television program has more impact upon my child's psyche than I do then I'm doing a piss poor job as a parent. Besides, human beings are not walking tape recorders. The idea that children are "impressionable" is absurd. They evaluate the things they see and hear to the best of their abilities based upon their experience. The conclusions they draw are constantly re-evaluated on the basis of new information and new experiences. The only way that seeing violence (or anything) could have long-term effects upon a kid is if that was all they ever saw. As long as a person's experiences are well-rounded they too will be well-rounded. So trying to "protect" someone of any age from seeing something is useless as well as futile. They're going to see it anyway, and the fact that they do is of no consequence.
There is enough in the world that children need to be protected from without creating imaginary dangers. If anything the sheltered child is ill prepared both intellectually and emotionally to take their place in the adult world when the time comes. They may be perfectly prepared for the fairy-tale world their parents and community have presented as reality, but that hardly prepares them for the real world.
Lee
I never cease to be amazed that the time, energy, and money people will spend trying to "protect" young people from the things they don't want them to see.
The reason for these efforts is simple, information control is the only effective means of mind control. Control what people see and hear and you control what they think. Much of child rearing seems to be institutionalized brainwashing. This made no sense to me when I was a child or a teenager and it makes even less sense to me now at 31, or at least no rational sense.
There is no rational reason to want to hide things from your children. There are plenty of irrational (and downright sick) reasons I can think of though, most of which are a combination of stupidity and insanity.
Unfortunately I don't think this will ever change because that would require human nature with all its failing and weaknesses to be improved and that hasn't happened in 10,000 years or more.
Lee
Between the police-state Republicans and the welfare-state Democrats, I really don't see how I'm supposed to be able to vote for anyone who isn't out to screw me in some way.
It sickens me how the law encroachment community is using the threat of terrorism to obtain the powers that they have been trying to obtain for as long as I can remember. Every time you turn around the justice department asks congress for these kinds of powers, only now congress is giving it to them. All in the name of safety. Well I'll tell you what, I'm far more afraid of government agents than I'll ever be of the ignorant inbred religious zealots that pollute the middle east. Whatever problems we might have with terrorism can be solved by bombing the shit out of the people who are doing it, not by giving the feds more power to spy oun our own people. The purpose of law enforcement is to provide security to honest people and ensure that genuine criminals are not allowed to victimize our communities. This purpose is derived from the will of the people. Whenever the police seek power above and beyond the minimum required to fulfill this purpose it is a clear sign that not only is abuse of that power possible, it is inevitable because these are the kinds of people who will make war on the American people in the name of enforcing the law.
All I can say is to fight for the first and second amendments and be careful who you vote for.
Lee
...that the market for commodity systems is already saturated.
Trying to compete with companies like Dell only makes sense if you're the star of Brewster's Millions.
There is certainly money to be made in the computer industry. But the days when hardware firms could be started out of someone's garage are long, long gone.
Of course I'm sure there will be a whole army of dreamers and wet-behind-the-ears schmucks lined up to argue with me about this for the simple reason that the truth I speak is a threat to their pipe dream. Well I say they need to put that crack pipe down and start looking for sectors and markets that don't already have dozens of 800 pound gorillas stomping about. Just because you have a love for something doesn't mean you can turn it into a successful business, especially when that business would be servicing a competitive market with razor-thin margins.
The most anyone could hope for would to eek out a marginal existance selling highly customized systems built from hand-picked components for gamers and similar enthusiasts. (Most of whom can do it themselves, or at least think they can)
Lee
The best way to stop doing something is to stop doing it. If you want to cut back on your caffiene intake then do so. Just because other people drink a lot of caffiene where you work doesn't mean that you have to. If someone is pushing you to drink coffee to meet some deadline or whatever then that is a sign of other problems within the organization.
I don't know how much coffee etc you drink, but I'd start out by cutting down. Try half-caf coffee instead of the full strength stuff. Drink less. Keep track of how much you are drinking and work to lower that ammount week by week. Eventually you should switch to decaf coffee and either drink sprite or drop soda altogether.
I do hope no one mods me up to "insightful." Nothing I've said here is anything other than obvious.
....the eco-nuts now have a problem with WIND POWER too?
The founding fathers had it right over 200 years ago. They created a system of government based upon the rule of law where the power of the state was both limited and widely distributed between the local, state, and federal levels. The powers that would arise and attempt to subvert the system and take power for themselves were forced to fight with one another, thereby neutralizing them.
This system depends upon one thing more than any other, and that is an informed citizenry made up of individuals that make the preservation of freedom and individual sovereignty their personal responsibility. If the US were made up of people like this then what a glorious nation we would make.
Lee
....considering the fact that the Prime Minister of New Zealand is a neo-bolshevik schmuck who has done everything she can to cripple their military. If you think the left in the US is bad, wait till you see what crawls out from under rocks in other countries.
Lee
When I hear about things like this it reminds of just how unusual and fragile freedom is in the world. It also makes me fearful because so few people in America are dedicated to the preservation of freedom. Instead they're either disinterested in what goes on or dedicated to furthering some ill-concieved and short sighted political agenda that they usually don't even understand. The rights and freedoms this country was founded upon are far more important to our collective future than red-herring issues like abortion. The abortion debate iself is little more than a battle-front in the cultural wars between the loony left and the religious right. As long as there are unwanted children being conceived abortion will exist regardless of whether it is legal or not. Arguing about something that cannot be stopped is futile and even counterproductive. Its like arguing about how people should wipe their asses. Its impossible to force anyone to follow whatever conclusions are reached, so why argue about it? Laws against abortion will work about as well as laws against Marijuana or Alcohol. Marijuana can be easily grown, alcohol can be easily fermented and distilled, and an abortion is only a coat-hanger away. The laws regarding all are in reality little more than proclamations of what the government would prefer you do. People get all worked up over abortion because it is a stand-in for all the other issues that don't get argued about directly. Ideological points that have been disproven or discredited but which the left or right doesn't want to let go of. It doesn't suprise me that so many people have forsaken the political process. If the choice is between a closet communist and a someone who is either a theocrat or owned by a bunch of fat-cats, there isn't really any way to make a good choice. So people don't vote and in doing so forfeit the very power that MUST be held by the people for democracy to truly exist. Every time a person disinvolves themselves from the political process they're letting the fate of this country be determined by idiots and ideologues. People who are either stupid or crazy or both.
If things keep going like this then America is doomed to die from collapse from within. Unfortunately for all our "friends" in other places who would like to see that happen, America's collapse will likely pull them in with it, or at least place them upon the very precipice of collapse just like the collapse of Rome sent all of Western Europe into the dark ages, only this time on a global scale.
Lee