1. Go with a conventional, mainstream distro. Sure, Kondera MNU/Linux (or pick-an-esoteric-distro) might have cool packaging, but good luck finding people who know its ins and outs, or, for that matter, ensuring there's an upgrade path.
2. I'd strongly recommend either Red Hat or Debian. Those two seem to have the largest market presence in North America, and Red Hat has a fairly nice pay-for-support deal going. Debian appears to be more stable, but it's a matter of degree. Red Hat 7.0 really isn't as buggy as people are making it out to be. Stormix Technologies has a distro, Storm Linux, which is based on Debian and is exquisitely cool.
3. Do a default, out-of-the-box install first. Then get some good books on security (UNIX System Administrator's Guide, Maximum Linux Security, Building Linux and OpenBSD Firewalls, etc.) and start locking down the box. Don't put it on the network until you're certain it's locked down tight enough for your purposes.
4. Document your installation process. You don't need to list every package that's installed; just start with your base install and detail the changes you made from there.
5. If you have to do something more than three times, write up a HOWTO for it. The HOWTO isn't for you; you already know how to do it, of course. But the people who come after you might not know how you did things originally, and leaving behind a trail of breadcrumbs in the form of HOWTOs is manna from heaven.
6. Keep a logbook. Make a log entry when you install new software, when you uninstall software, when you have problems with DHCP, when you get the problems fixed. This kind of detailed tracking is invaluable. Make sure the logbook is kept in a reasonably safe place, and make sure it's written down--floppies can go bad, drives can crash, etc.
"It's coming to America first
The cradle of the best and the worst
It's here they've got the range
And the machinery for change
And it's here they've got the spiritual thirst."
That's a snippet from Leonard Cohen's Democracy, which has always struck me as one of the best summaries of American life. I've done a fair bit of travel, from Canada to the UK to half of Europe.
The simple truth is that the US is a hell of a lot better than most places out there; if you think living in America is bad, I invite you to try Mogadishu or Chechnya. And if you think America is perfect, I'd invite you to try opening your eyes and seeing all the problems we've got.
You're confusing AC with JK. AC said something JK didn't like, and JK threatened to sue the pants off JK. It's JK who wants to restrict AC's speech.
Bzzt, thanks for playing. Restriction of speech is not the same as holding someone accountable for speech. We, as a society, have decided that libel is against the civil law. Jon felt that he'd been libeled, and was mentioning his legal, entirely justifiable recourse, namely the court system.
Learn to differentiate censorship and accountability, please. Until then, you're making yourself look like an ass.
It's real simple. JK said he isn't "into the law" and in the same breath threatened to sue.
Learn to read, too. Until then, you're making yourself look like an ass by asserting Jon said things he never did. He specifically said he wasn't going to, although he was tempted to.
Fact check: if you're smart enough to see the threat, it's not veiled. A veiled threat is one which requires Solomonic wisdom to perceive, or else the benefit of 20/20 hindsight. I've received a few of these.
Fact check: unless someone says I'm going to do this to you, and you won't like it one bit, it's not a threat.
So what's that statement? Answer: frustration. Frustration that the very people he's trying to talk to, the very people he's trying to communicate with, the very people who scream at the top of their lungs that nobody's listening to them, are refusing to listen to him.
Personally, I'd have done a lot more than that.
calls into question everything you've ever written about freedom, democracy, and dissent.
So now free speech is only free when it dovetails with what you want to hear? What about "I may not like what you say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it"? Doesn't Jon have the right to defend himself against his accusers, an equal right to that of his accusers to levy accusations?
If you really were not "into the law", you wouldn't even suggest this possibility.
I have zero faith in the law and I'd suggest that possibility. When someone's been maligned in a public forum, you can either take it on the chin, respond in a public forum, or take it to court and resolve it once and for all.
Just because someone talks about having their day in court doesn't make them an enemy of liberty. It makes them the friend of liberty. One of the most fundamental human rights is the right to be judged fairly.
And let me tell you, your judgment is far from fair.
You don't, you halfwit. For all you know his name is Mordecai McWhirters, and he's appropriating the name of Rolling Stone journalist Jon Katz in order to feed his own ego.
The Net is neither an anonymous medium or an identifiable one. Verifying someone's identity is just about as hard as making yourself anonymous.
The better question is, how do I know what's posted here as "original material" really is?
The answer is: you don't. But then again it doesn't matter, because how do you know your local paper is posting original material?
My scorn for the journalistic profession is at a pretty high level. For every decent, ethical journo out there who just wants to print the truth, there are a dozen journos who just want ratings (or readership, or pageviews). But my scorn is based on reason, not hypocrisy.
So far, while I often vigorously disagree with Jon's writings (just ask him--he's got an email box full of loud disagreement from me), I have not once had cause to doubt his ethics. I still don't have cause today.
Plagiarism is the worst charge you can file against a journo. It is also a charge which has a very clear definition: appropriating another's work as one's own. How can he "appropriate another's work as his own" when he linked to the original story?
If you really think he's a plagiarist, then you're also going to have to think he's the world's stupidest plagiarist, if he's going to plagiarize something and provide a link for all of us to see the original material.
The irony isn't lost on me, you addle-brained moron. The common cry on Slashdot is "geeks suffer prejudice! Geeks are discriminated against! Geeks are unfairly judged!" And what are you doing? You're turning around and unfairly judging someone else.
I don't like most of Jon's writings.
I don't agree with his political philosophy.
But, by God, I will be Goddamned before I stand around and watch someone be crucified by the very people who rant, scream and wail about how horrible crucifixions are!
The problem with language lawyers is that they forget there are such things as laws.:)
1. Correct, violation.
2. Correct, violation.
3. Not a violation, because no distribution of GPLed code exists by the author of C. C obtains A, but does not distribute A.
4. Not a violation, because no distribution of GPLed code exists.
5. Not a violation. The GPL restricts distribution, not use (hence C's use of A cannot be a violation); it restricts distribution, not obtaining (hence C obtaining A cannot be a violation).
6. Not a violation. This falls squarely into the category of reverse engineering, which is a legal right you possess which the GPL cannot deny you.
Where are the problems here?
A very wise lawyer once advised me that young lawyers study a problem for weeks, find every precedent and every detail, compose the most laborious briefs, and are totally wrong. Old lawyers look at what's really going on, the real conflict in question, and they resolve the subissue instead.
It's an attitude that's served me very well in coding, and in armchair legal analysis.
Fundamental question: what does the GPL restrict?
Fundamental answer: it restricts the terms by which you can make GPLed software (executables and/or code and/or data) available to others. Nothing more.
Therefore, unless there's an issue of you making code available to others, the GPL is a total nonissue.
Hypothetical situation: I'm a wealthy individual and I'm hiring artists to create works for me. I pay these artists a stipend for the duration of their productivity and my pleasure with their produce. If Piss Christ or Jeff Koonts' hello-look-it's-a-vacuum-cleaner-in-Lexan artwork comes along, I get a little irate. "What the hell are you doing?" I cry. "That's not what I want to see. I want to see things which inspire."
Nobody (nobody sane, at least) can give serious objection to this. It's my money. They're working on my behalf. Therefore, what they produce had better live up to my expectations or else I'm going to terminate my support for them.
Now apply the same thing to a government "of the people, by the people". Ought the people really be expected to subsidize art which the majority of them, as represented by their elected officials, find to be deeply offensive? By the same logic, the answer is no, they ought not. This isn't a free speech issue; this is a public funding issue.
There are certain things which are undoubtedly taboo for public funding. A painting portraying Christ's ascension into Heaven, surrounded by his disciples, would likely be considered to be a violation of the separation of church and state. So why is it that art which defames religion, such as Piss Christ (a piece of "art" which consists of a Mason jar filled with urine, with a crucifix floating in it), is not considered to be equally egregious? Defaming religion with public funds ought to be just as taboo as glorifying religion with public funds.
The other problem with introducing "shock art", for lack of a better term, is that it distracts people from the real debate. Of all the NEA monies disbursed to artists, less than one percent goes to fund such extremely poor-taste pursuits. For every Oh-look-I'm-having-sex-with-my-Italian-pornstar-wi fe piece of "art", there are a hundred other pieces of art which aspire to something greater, to making some statement about the human condition.
The evisceration of the NEA in recent years is just something I have a hard time understanding. Its budget is miniscule; there's no way the deficit will be balanced by breaking the NEA. The amount of public funds which go to these "shock artists" is infinitesimal, less than one percent of the NEA's already microscopic budget.
So why is it Piss Christ has become a rallying cry for increasing NEA funding?
Shouldn't we, instead, be pushing for more NEA funding because it goes to produce the sculptures you find in hospital waiting rooms--the odd piece of abstract sculpture that's in the city park--pays for the public showings at galleries?
Where is the line at which her app must be GPL'd? Note, she never distributes her app in any form, only the reports.
RTFLicense. The GPL doesn't apply to software until/unless it's distributed. There is no line at which her app must be GPLed in the scenario you just laid out, because it's never distributed.
How is this an example of the vagueness of the GPL? It's crystal clear to me.
You run into linguistic difficulties, unfortunately. While everything boils down to Turing machines in the end, certain language constructs are far easier and far more efficient in one language than another. While you might be able to write a _loop macro in C, I dare you to write one in JCL.:)
(For those who've never experienced the horror of JCL, JCL is the only language I'm aware of which has no loop constructs. None. I won't even go into how much fun it is to program in... blargh.)
Meta-programming (as you call it) already exists today in the form of generic programming; except there, the data is generic instead of the program itself. While meta-programming could be useful, it forces a lowest-common-denominator approach to programming. The JCL problem is just a very obvious one; many more subtle problems exist.
The same has been said about Pascal, C++, Ada95 and many other very successful languages. The C++ language spec takes up over a foot of space on my bookshelf, and yet C++ is my favorite language for serious programming. Perl, by comparison, is slim.
It's the first language of most new programmers and it shows.
Statistically, that honor belongs to Visual Basic. In college CompSci courses, Java is replacing the C family as the first-taught language.
Most every idiot I seen write perl web apps forget how to write simple function call
That's a problem of lousy programmers, not a lousy language. Don't blame Perl for human stupidity; the latter existed far before the former ever did.
probably because perl does not even supprot that well.
Perl supports functions just fine, thank you very much. Coming from a background of LISP, C, C++, Ada83, Ada95, PROLOG, Java and Fortran-95, I've got to say that Perl doesn't strike me as any more or less sensible than those languages.
Idiots manipulating globals and strings on the stack and such, what crap.
You can manipulate globals just as easily in C as you can with Perl. Again, this is a problem of lousy programmers, not a lousy language.
Interestingly enough, I don't like Perl very much. I can code in it, but it's not something I enjoy. Just because it doesn't float my boat, though, doesn't mean I'm going to baselessly slander it (and make myself look like an idiot in the process).
What, you think crack dealers force people at gunpoint to buy their product? Last time someone tried to sell me crack (I was walking through San Francisco's Tenderloin district), I just said "no, thanks" and walked on.
He said "no problem, man" and made a sale to the guy behind me.
The name "drug pusher" is misleading. Many of them don't push drugs at all--they sell drugs to a clientele who actively want drugs, who scream for drugs, who commit armed robbery to get the money for drugs. If you tell these drug dealers "no", they'll shrug and move on because they know that walking behind you is a guy who'll say "yes".
Now, saying no won't work against a real pusher--someone who wheedles and cajoles the unwary and naieve (kids and teenagers) into taking a free hit on the crack pipe. So Nancy Reagan's "Just Say No" campaign probably didn't help them all that much. I think "Just Run Like Hell" would've worked better, myself.
But saying no to drug dealers works a surprising amount of the time.
First, separate DARE from the larger issue of American drug policy. The latter is an unabashed, unarguable failure. The former is mostly a failure, but works surprisingly well in some localities.
DARE is, on one level, propaganda. Indoctrination. Brainwashing. Whatever you want to call it. Little kids are told that illegal drugs are bad, drugs prescribed by a doctor are good, and there's no in-between. They're taught to have an instinctive, knee-jerk reaction to drugs[*], a reaction which is for the most part a good one to have [**].
On another level, though, DARE can be incredibly effective. Two words: adult intervention. In DARE, it takes form most often in the role of a cop with a good heart (and yes, cynics beware, there are a lot of them out there--although not as many as I'd like). If the cop takes his job seriously, he's going to do more for those kids than just show up once a year to talk about how evil drugs are. He's going to show up at the school play, at band performances. He's going to talk to the kids and keep an eye on them, make sure that the kids know they can count on him, that if they have problems they can turn to him.
It's not important that a cop does this. It's important that someone does this. Teachers do this quite often, and they can frequently make a difference in their students' lives--but they're also spread out over several classes and tons of students. Any help they can get in the task of providing good role models, people who are actively interested in their kids' lives, is manna from heaven.
US drug policy is a total nightmare, and DARE is probably not a lot better. But--and this is a very big but--DARE sometimes gets another adult involved in children's lives.
The best preventative measure for drug abuse is to give children role models, people they can look up to, people they know who pay attention to them and are interested in their lives. This is not one of DARE's goals, but it's something that happens along the way.
Sometimes.
If you're lucky enough to have good cops in your DARE program.
[*] I'm of two minds on this. One part of me says that we want our kids to have a strong knee-jerk reaction against crack cocaine and I'm all in favor of indoctrination. Another part of me says that indoctrination is not education; education means teaching kids how to think clearly, critically and rationally, which goes entirely against the indoctrination aspects of DARE.
[**] The irony of DARE causes me no end of dark humor. DARE tells us that kids ought not take amphetamines, because drugs are bad. But if a kid is a little rambunctious in class, all it takes is five minutes with a school psychiatrist to get a recommendation for dexedrine, benzedrine or Ritalin. They're told that drug abuse is bad, and the school turns around and turns some of the kids into junior junkies just because they don't want to sit still.
You might as well briefly spell out what your credentials are...
Check out my "User Info" page for a big hint as to what my credentials are when it comes to email security. The reason why I don't spell them out is because I find it to be rude. My opinions ought to stand on their own merits, not because "I'm an expert and I say it's this way, so it must be this way".
The poster asked for...
The poster asked for the kind of setup that would make a security-paranoid person drool over. No such beast exists... anywhere. There are no email systems out there that make my mouth water. There are ones which I think don't suck--authenticated POP3 or IPSec, plus PGP encrypting the payload is probably enough to make people find easier ways of intercepting your email--but there's a world of difference between "non-suckage" and "makes my mouth water".
Other than twiddling over what high reliability means, and how much legal punching you expect an ISP to take, many ISPs provide all these things.
Name one, please. If they're that common, you should've been able to list a few offhand in your email. The answer is they aren't very common.
The reason why so many people are saying "DIY" is because the original poster is asking the impossible.
"How can I get to the Moon cheaply?"
"Do it yourself. Maybe mine ore in your back yard, run a smelter to make the metals, cast them into the proper shapes..."
Secure email is a hard subject. People study arcane protocols for years to try and come up with secure communications. I'll spare you my credentials, except to say that they're probably greater than most Slashdot readers', and I'm saying that I can't implement a universally secure email system. To people who know how hard the task is, my inability to succeed comes as no surprise at all.
SSH+POP (or other authenticated mail mechanisms), IPv6, IPSec, shell accounts, PGP... they're all great. But this poster asked for a universally secure email system, and no such beast exists yet.
When someone asks you how to do the impossible, "do it yourself" is a perfectly reasonable answer. I'll grant that it's not a very helpful answer, but if you ask a hundred people how to do something and they all look at you blankly and then say "do it yourself," that should be a strong hint you don't understand the question you asked them.
"Not permitted to store in unencrypted form" is the problem here. Even if you get so draconian as to forbid cut-and-paste into another window, then saving the new window to disk, it'll still be possible to open up an Emacs window and manually retype the cleartext, headers and all, then save that to disk.
Is it possible to create privacy-enhanced email systems, which only store plaintext to disk when the user makes a deliberate choice? Sure. In fact, I could be talked into working on a project to do just that. But I don't think that what you're talking about, where the user isn't permitted to store in plaintext, will ever work.
First, secure Email--without the use of PGP or PGP-like services such as Hushmail--is a crock. Even with the use of PGP or PGP-like services, secure email is secure only within narrow parameters.
If I want to get access to your email, no matter how secure your ISP is, I'm just going to find the people you regularly communicate with and get access on that end. Or I'll just plant packet sniffers on a network and grab your email as MTAs pass it off from here to there.
If you want secure email, use a good, reliable ISP; connect to it using IPv6 and IPSec, or SSH; use PGP as much as you can. If you want an ubermaildrop, roll your own. But don't have any expectation that it matters a damn if you aren't doing something to encrypt the mail to make sure only you and your intended recipient can read it.
PGP is the most obvious way to accomplish this, but there may well be other ways.
The fact is that governments, like corporations, partnerships and organizations... do not exist apart from the beliefs of some individuals.
"Reality, Elisa, exists only in the mind. That does not make reality any less real."
-- Doug Moensch
Money is also an artificial construct. That dollar bill in your pocket only has the value which you believe it does. If you don't believe your dollar is worth anything, you're more likely to use it for toilet paper than for purchases. (Don't laugh. This actually happened in China during the Second World War, in Europe after the Second World War, and in Russia today.) It's only your belief in the value of a dollar that gives the dollar any value.
And, in turn, other people's belief can affect your life. If the newspaper vendor on the street thinks a dollar is worthless, you aren't going to be able to buy a newspaper from him with it. You might have better luck offering English pounds or German deutschmarks or an Ecu or two. But if you want that newspaper and the newspaperman thinks your dollar is worthless... well, guess what; someone's belief has just affected your reality. The reality is, you don't have a newspaper.
Much of reality is created from our beliefs and has no existence, a priori, of those beliefs. Religion; currency; even basic civilization is all predicated on ideas and beliefs which are as, in the words of one theologian, "impossible to believe; yet without, belief is impossible".
Is government anything more than a collective hunch? No, not really. But then again, reality isn't anything more than a collective hunch, either. So if government isn't real, then it's built on the exact same foundation that reality is and may well be so close as makes no difference at all.
"It means humans, while versatile, will never be the best at anything because of the way we are built and designed. By extension, this also applies to ANY organism which can survive outside of specialized niches: primates makes likeable apes instead of Bengal tigers."
I may be nuts, but I think it's very possible for a "likeable mutt" to wind up being the best overall, far and away, because these "likeable mutts" have no real Achilles' heels. The Bengal tiger is nearly extinct; human beings are still undergoing population explosion.
If you look at television media you have anchors... the anchor is a very importent [sic] person. They are totally neutral about the news they report.
This is quite untrue. In the first place, anchors really aren't even journalists; they're actors. When was the last time you saw Dan Rather walking the streets of NYC with nothing more than his wits and a laptop, tracking down a story?
He doesn't do that anymore. Other people, real journalists, track down the stories and do the legwork. Dan Rather is just the guy who "presents" the story. There's a reason why anchors are called "talking heads".
Insofar as their bias... they are terribly, terribly biased. Ever heard of a movie called Network, or maybe Broadcast News? Both of them are reasonably accurate in their portrayal of TV anchors. They can be petty, bitter and vindictive with the best of them.
More than that, anchors don't write their own copy. Their own bias gets compounded with the bias of the copywriter. If the anchor happens to be a Democrat and the copywriter a Libertarian, you can figure out the kind of treatment a conservative Republican is going to get.
Anchors are also professional liars. Remember that: every anchor is a professional liar. When you see the evening news and one anchor makes a joke to the other, and the other anchor laughs at it like it's amusing... it's not amusing. They're about as excited as an organ donor. They rehearse those jokes and bon mots every day. They practice how to laugh so it sounds genuine. A lot of anchor teams who appear to have really good chemistry on-air really hate each other when the cameras are off.
Anchors aren't journalists; they're actors. They aren't honest; they're professional liars. They don't know beans about the stories they cover; they just read the text the copywriter gives them.
How is it you think that anchors are in any way neutral observers and reporters of events?
Should Slashdot be held to the same standard of journalistic ethics as print media? Sure. But that's not saying much--in fact, that's not saying anything at all.
A news outlet can say anything they want about any public figure just so long as they use the magic words "sources allege". (Newsflash: sources allege that Vice-President Gore is having an affair with a major cinema star, film at 11!)
They can do the same thing about private individuals, too, if the private individual is for some reason "newsworthy". If you're "newsworthy", it doesn't matter how private you are--your name can be slandered, drug through the muck, and every lie imaginable can be published about you, while you have no recourse whatsoever.
Ask Richard Jewell, the hero of the Atlanta Olympic bombing, if he asked to be turned into a criminal. Note that Jewell did nothing wrong, and the attorney's office eventually ended the investigation into him after concluding there was no evidence to substantiate any allegation against him. (That's DA speak for "either he's got a great lawyer who got our evidence thrown out, or else we were so totally wrong we deserve to be laughed at... so we're going to release a statement implying he's got a slick lawyer.")
Did Jewell ask the news media to pay a woman to go on a date with him, just so she could wear a wire and try and get him to say implicating things? No. Did they do it anyway? Yes.
The news media, as a whole, has one objective and two ways of achieving it. They want to make money--that's their ultimate objective. They know that people will buy newspapers if they write stories about a hero, or if they write stories about the fall of a hero.
That means the news media is in the business of creating heroes, just so they can destroy them again, just so they can sell more newspapers.
Think I'm making this up?
Ask yourself this: which major news outlets which, after completely destroying Jewell's life, bothered to print an apology and retraction? As far as I know, only one--and they did it as part of an out-of-court settlement to avoid a libel lawsuit, because Tom Brokaw once forgot to use the words "sources allege...".
Slashdot is, in my mind, one of the finest online news services there is. Because we know where Slashdot's bias is, we know that the stories are skewed and how the Slashdot staff skews them, and we know that, journalistically speaking, these guys are totally incompetent.
Their incompetency gives me a warm fuzzy feeling in the pit of my stomach. It tells me they probably haven't learned yet that they can get a lot more pageviews by following the make-and-break-a-hero cycle.
Right--it's not the existence of license termination clauses which bothers me, but the original poster's blanket statement that any license termination clause means the software is non-free. That assertion is pretty much groundless, as far as I can tell.
On the one hand I want to agree with you, but my brain says otherwise. If the target market for video games are overwhelmingly teenage boys, you're not only going to see an overwhelmingly large number of games targeted to teenage boys, but an overwhelmingly large number of good game developers are going to develop for teenage boys. Athena didn't suck because the industry has it out for women; it sucked because all of the good game developers were writing the latest Legend of Zelda sequel.
It's not sexist, just the naked pursuit of profit. Not that the one is any better than the other, though.
One question I'd rather see answered, rather than "why/how is it the gaming industry has these stereotypes, and how can they be changed?" is... "why is it the gaming industry has so critically few women engineers, and how can this be changed?"
The only engineer I can think of offhand who's seriously involved in game design is Bungie's Quin Denki (I may be misspelling her name). I'm excluding Stevie Case here, because I don't think an engineer needs to be famous for spanking someone in an FPS and posing nude for Playboy... I think an engineer needs to be respected for technical ability, which Denki definitely gets. Roberta Williams would make the list, but she's been Management for some time now and not Engineering.
There was a really good interview with Denki on the Bungie website a while ago; it may still be there for all I know. Had a lot of technical detail in it, but some very interesting opinions on the role of women in engineering and as women as gamers.
Insofar as Metroid goes, I prefer option 3--like a Stanley Kubrick film, they wanted to save the biggest head-twist for the last scene.:) I mean, I sat up and took notice when I discovered Samus Aran was a woman. I wasn't expecting that at all.
Considering that you don't discover the secret of The Crying Game until close to the end, does that prove either 1) that transvestism would negatively affect the movie sales, 2) it was a mere afterthought, or 3) they thought it would get people talking?
Slashdot Mirror
1. Go with a conventional, mainstream distro. Sure, Kondera MNU/Linux (or pick-an-esoteric-distro) might have cool packaging, but good luck finding people who know its ins and outs, or, for that matter, ensuring there's an upgrade path.
2. I'd strongly recommend either Red Hat or Debian. Those two seem to have the largest market presence in North America, and Red Hat has a fairly nice pay-for-support deal going. Debian appears to be more stable, but it's a matter of degree. Red Hat 7.0 really isn't as buggy as people are making it out to be. Stormix Technologies has a distro, Storm Linux, which is based on Debian and is exquisitely cool.
3. Do a default, out-of-the-box install first. Then get some good books on security (UNIX System Administrator's Guide, Maximum Linux Security, Building Linux and OpenBSD Firewalls, etc.) and start locking down the box. Don't put it on the network until you're certain it's locked down tight enough for your purposes.
4. Document your installation process. You don't need to list every package that's installed; just start with your base install and detail the changes you made from there.
5. If you have to do something more than three times, write up a HOWTO for it. The HOWTO isn't for you; you already know how to do it, of course. But the people who come after you might not know how you did things originally, and leaving behind a trail of breadcrumbs in the form of HOWTOs is manna from heaven.
6. Keep a logbook. Make a log entry when you install new software, when you uninstall software, when you have problems with DHCP, when you get the problems fixed. This kind of detailed tracking is invaluable. Make sure the logbook is kept in a reasonably safe place, and make sure it's written down--floppies can go bad, drives can crash, etc.
"It's coming to America first
The cradle of the best and the worst
It's here they've got the range
And the machinery for change
And it's here they've got the spiritual thirst."
That's a snippet from Leonard Cohen's Democracy, which has always struck me as one of the best summaries of American life. I've done a fair bit of travel, from Canada to the UK to half of Europe.
The simple truth is that the US is a hell of a lot better than most places out there; if you think living in America is bad, I invite you to try Mogadishu or Chechnya. And if you think America is perfect, I'd invite you to try opening your eyes and seeing all the problems we've got.
You're confusing AC with JK. AC said something JK didn't like, and JK threatened to sue the pants off JK. It's JK who wants to restrict AC's speech.
Bzzt, thanks for playing. Restriction of speech is not the same as holding someone accountable for speech. We, as a society, have decided that libel is against the civil law. Jon felt that he'd been libeled, and was mentioning his legal, entirely justifiable recourse, namely the court system.
Learn to differentiate censorship and accountability, please. Until then, you're making yourself look like an ass.
It's real simple. JK said he isn't "into the law" and in the same breath threatened to sue.
Learn to read, too. Until then, you're making yourself look like an ass by asserting Jon said things he never did. He specifically said he wasn't going to, although he was tempted to.
This veiled threat...
Fact check: if you're smart enough to see the threat, it's not veiled. A veiled threat is one which requires Solomonic wisdom to perceive, or else the benefit of 20/20 hindsight. I've received a few of these.
Fact check: unless someone says I'm going to do this to you, and you won't like it one bit, it's not a threat.
So what's that statement? Answer: frustration. Frustration that the very people he's trying to talk to, the very people he's trying to communicate with, the very people who scream at the top of their lungs that nobody's listening to them, are refusing to listen to him.
Personally, I'd have done a lot more than that.
calls into question everything you've ever written about freedom, democracy, and dissent.
So now free speech is only free when it dovetails with what you want to hear? What about "I may not like what you say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it"? Doesn't Jon have the right to defend himself against his accusers, an equal right to that of his accusers to levy accusations?
If you really were not "into the law", you wouldn't even suggest this possibility.
I have zero faith in the law and I'd suggest that possibility. When someone's been maligned in a public forum, you can either take it on the chin, respond in a public forum, or take it to court and resolve it once and for all.
Just because someone talks about having their day in court doesn't make them an enemy of liberty. It makes them the friend of liberty. One of the most fundamental human rights is the right to be judged fairly.
And let me tell you, your judgment is far from fair.
How do I know what is really jon
You don't, you halfwit. For all you know his name is Mordecai McWhirters, and he's appropriating the name of Rolling Stone journalist Jon Katz in order to feed his own ego.
The Net is neither an anonymous medium or an identifiable one. Verifying someone's identity is just about as hard as making yourself anonymous.
The better question is, how do I know what's posted here as "original material" really is?
The answer is: you don't. But then again it doesn't matter, because how do you know your local paper is posting original material?
My scorn for the journalistic profession is at a pretty high level. For every decent, ethical journo out there who just wants to print the truth, there are a dozen journos who just want ratings (or readership, or pageviews). But my scorn is based on reason, not hypocrisy.
So far, while I often vigorously disagree with Jon's writings (just ask him--he's got an email box full of loud disagreement from me), I have not once had cause to doubt his ethics. I still don't have cause today.
Plagiarism is the worst charge you can file against a journo. It is also a charge which has a very clear definition: appropriating another's work as one's own. How can he "appropriate another's work as his own" when he linked to the original story?
If you really think he's a plagiarist, then you're also going to have to think he's the world's stupidest plagiarist, if he's going to plagiarize something and provide a link for all of us to see the original material.
The irony isn't lost on me, you addle-brained moron. The common cry on Slashdot is "geeks suffer prejudice! Geeks are discriminated against! Geeks are unfairly judged!" And what are you doing? You're turning around and unfairly judging someone else.
I don't like most of Jon's writings.
I don't agree with his political philosophy.
But, by God, I will be Goddamned before I stand around and watch someone be crucified by the very people who rant, scream and wail about how horrible crucifixions are!
The problem with language lawyers is that they forget there are such things as laws. :)
1. Correct, violation.
2. Correct, violation.
3. Not a violation, because no distribution of GPLed code exists by the author of C. C obtains A, but does not distribute A.
4. Not a violation, because no distribution of GPLed code exists.
5. Not a violation. The GPL restricts distribution, not use (hence C's use of A cannot be a violation); it restricts distribution, not obtaining (hence C obtaining A cannot be a violation).
6. Not a violation. This falls squarely into the category of reverse engineering, which is a legal right you possess which the GPL cannot deny you.
Where are the problems here?
A very wise lawyer once advised me that young lawyers study a problem for weeks, find every precedent and every detail, compose the most laborious briefs, and are totally wrong. Old lawyers look at what's really going on, the real conflict in question, and they resolve the subissue instead.
It's an attitude that's served me very well in coding, and in armchair legal analysis.
Fundamental question: what does the GPL restrict?
Fundamental answer: it restricts the terms by which you can make GPLed software (executables and/or code and/or data) available to others. Nothing more.
Therefore, unless there's an issue of you making code available to others, the GPL is a total nonissue.
Hypothetical situation: I'm a wealthy individual and I'm hiring artists to create works for me. I pay these artists a stipend for the duration of their productivity and my pleasure with their produce. If Piss Christ or Jeff Koonts' hello-look-it's-a-vacuum-cleaner-in-Lexan artwork comes along, I get a little irate. "What the hell are you doing?" I cry. "That's not what I want to see. I want to see things which inspire."
i fe piece of "art", there are a hundred other pieces of art which aspire to something greater, to making some statement about the human condition.
Nobody (nobody sane, at least) can give serious objection to this. It's my money. They're working on my behalf. Therefore, what they produce had better live up to my expectations or else I'm going to terminate my support for them.
Now apply the same thing to a government "of the people, by the people". Ought the people really be expected to subsidize art which the majority of them, as represented by their elected officials, find to be deeply offensive? By the same logic, the answer is no, they ought not. This isn't a free speech issue; this is a public funding issue.
There are certain things which are undoubtedly taboo for public funding. A painting portraying Christ's ascension into Heaven, surrounded by his disciples, would likely be considered to be a violation of the separation of church and state. So why is it that art which defames religion, such as Piss Christ (a piece of "art" which consists of a Mason jar filled with urine, with a crucifix floating in it), is not considered to be equally egregious? Defaming religion with public funds ought to be just as taboo as glorifying religion with public funds.
The other problem with introducing "shock art", for lack of a better term, is that it distracts people from the real debate. Of all the NEA monies disbursed to artists, less than one percent goes to fund such extremely poor-taste pursuits. For every Oh-look-I'm-having-sex-with-my-Italian-pornstar-w
The evisceration of the NEA in recent years is just something I have a hard time understanding. Its budget is miniscule; there's no way the deficit will be balanced by breaking the NEA. The amount of public funds which go to these "shock artists" is infinitesimal, less than one percent of the NEA's already microscopic budget.
So why is it Piss Christ has become a rallying cry for increasing NEA funding?
Shouldn't we, instead, be pushing for more NEA funding because it goes to produce the sculptures you find in hospital waiting rooms--the odd piece of abstract sculpture that's in the city park--pays for the public showings at galleries?
(Oh, and by the way, I'm a Republican. *g*)
Where is the line at which her app must be GPL'd? Note, she never distributes her app in any form, only the reports.
RTFLicense. The GPL doesn't apply to software until/unless it's distributed. There is no line at which her app must be GPLed in the scenario you just laid out, because it's never distributed.
How is this an example of the vagueness of the GPL? It's crystal clear to me.
You run into linguistic difficulties, unfortunately. While everything boils down to Turing machines in the end, certain language constructs are far easier and far more efficient in one language than another. While you might be able to write a _loop macro in C, I dare you to write one in JCL. :)
(For those who've never experienced the horror of JCL, JCL is the only language I'm aware of which has no loop constructs. None. I won't even go into how much fun it is to program in... blargh.)
Meta-programming (as you call it) already exists today in the form of generic programming; except there, the data is generic instead of the program itself. While meta-programming could be useful, it forces a lowest-common-denominator approach to programming. The JCL problem is just a very obvious one; many more subtle problems exist.
The language is horrible and unmaintainable.
The same has been said about Pascal, C++, Ada95 and many other very successful languages. The C++ language spec takes up over a foot of space on my bookshelf, and yet C++ is my favorite language for serious programming. Perl, by comparison, is slim.
It's the first language of most new programmers and it shows.
Statistically, that honor belongs to Visual Basic. In college CompSci courses, Java is replacing the C family as the first-taught language.
Most every idiot I seen write perl web apps forget how to write simple function call
That's a problem of lousy programmers, not a lousy language. Don't blame Perl for human stupidity; the latter existed far before the former ever did.
probably because perl does not even supprot that well.
Perl supports functions just fine, thank you very much. Coming from a background of LISP, C, C++, Ada83, Ada95, PROLOG, Java and Fortran-95, I've got to say that Perl doesn't strike me as any more or less sensible than those languages.
Idiots manipulating globals and strings on the stack and such, what crap.
You can manipulate globals just as easily in C as you can with Perl. Again, this is a problem of lousy programmers, not a lousy language.
Interestingly enough, I don't like Perl very much. I can code in it, but it's not something I enjoy. Just because it doesn't float my boat, though, doesn't mean I'm going to baselessly slander it (and make myself look like an idiot in the process).
... of a marijuana activist loudly trumpeting that marijuana doesn't kill brain cells...
:)
... who then attributes the Galaxy Song to Monty Python, when they never came within a parsec of it.
(I think Tom Lehrer performed it, but don't quote me.)
What, you think crack dealers force people at gunpoint to buy their product? Last time someone tried to sell me crack (I was walking through San Francisco's Tenderloin district), I just said "no, thanks" and walked on.
He said "no problem, man" and made a sale to the guy behind me.
The name "drug pusher" is misleading. Many of them don't push drugs at all--they sell drugs to a clientele who actively want drugs, who scream for drugs, who commit armed robbery to get the money for drugs. If you tell these drug dealers "no", they'll shrug and move on because they know that walking behind you is a guy who'll say "yes".
Now, saying no won't work against a real pusher--someone who wheedles and cajoles the unwary and naieve (kids and teenagers) into taking a free hit on the crack pipe. So Nancy Reagan's "Just Say No" campaign probably didn't help them all that much. I think "Just Run Like Hell" would've worked better, myself.
But saying no to drug dealers works a surprising amount of the time.
First, separate DARE from the larger issue of American drug policy. The latter is an unabashed, unarguable failure. The former is mostly a failure, but works surprisingly well in some localities.
DARE is, on one level, propaganda. Indoctrination. Brainwashing. Whatever you want to call it. Little kids are told that illegal drugs are bad, drugs prescribed by a doctor are good, and there's no in-between. They're taught to have an instinctive, knee-jerk reaction to drugs[*], a reaction which is for the most part a good one to have [**].
On another level, though, DARE can be incredibly effective. Two words: adult intervention. In DARE, it takes form most often in the role of a cop with a good heart (and yes, cynics beware, there are a lot of them out there--although not as many as I'd like). If the cop takes his job seriously, he's going to do more for those kids than just show up once a year to talk about how evil drugs are. He's going to show up at the school play, at band performances. He's going to talk to the kids and keep an eye on them, make sure that the kids know they can count on him, that if they have problems they can turn to him.
It's not important that a cop does this. It's important that someone does this. Teachers do this quite often, and they can frequently make a difference in their students' lives--but they're also spread out over several classes and tons of students. Any help they can get in the task of providing good role models, people who are actively interested in their kids' lives, is manna from heaven.
US drug policy is a total nightmare, and DARE is probably not a lot better. But--and this is a very big but--DARE sometimes gets another adult involved in children's lives.
The best preventative measure for drug abuse is to give children role models, people they can look up to, people they know who pay attention to them and are interested in their lives. This is not one of DARE's goals, but it's something that happens along the way.
Sometimes.
If you're lucky enough to have good cops in your DARE program.
[*] I'm of two minds on this. One part of me says that we want our kids to have a strong knee-jerk reaction against crack cocaine and I'm all in favor of indoctrination. Another part of me says that indoctrination is not education; education means teaching kids how to think clearly, critically and rationally, which goes entirely against the indoctrination aspects of DARE.
[**] The irony of DARE causes me no end of dark humor. DARE tells us that kids ought not take amphetamines, because drugs are bad. But if a kid is a little rambunctious in class, all it takes is five minutes with a school psychiatrist to get a recommendation for dexedrine, benzedrine or Ritalin. They're told that drug abuse is bad, and the school turns around and turns some of the kids into junior junkies just because they don't want to sit still.
You might as well briefly spell out what your credentials are...
Check out my "User Info" page for a big hint as to what my credentials are when it comes to email security. The reason why I don't spell them out is because I find it to be rude. My opinions ought to stand on their own merits, not because "I'm an expert and I say it's this way, so it must be this way".
The poster asked for...
The poster asked for the kind of setup that would make a security-paranoid person drool over. No such beast exists... anywhere. There are no email systems out there that make my mouth water. There are ones which I think don't suck--authenticated POP3 or IPSec, plus PGP encrypting the payload is probably enough to make people find easier ways of intercepting your email--but there's a world of difference between "non-suckage" and "makes my mouth water".
Other than twiddling over what high reliability means, and how much legal punching you expect an ISP to take, many ISPs provide all these things.
Name one, please. If they're that common, you should've been able to list a few offhand in your email. The answer is they aren't very common.
The reason why so many people are saying "DIY" is because the original poster is asking the impossible.
"How can I get to the Moon cheaply?"
"Do it yourself. Maybe mine ore in your back yard, run a smelter to make the metals, cast them into the proper shapes..."
Secure email is a hard subject. People study arcane protocols for years to try and come up with secure communications. I'll spare you my credentials, except to say that they're probably greater than most Slashdot readers', and I'm saying that I can't implement a universally secure email system. To people who know how hard the task is, my inability to succeed comes as no surprise at all.
SSH+POP (or other authenticated mail mechanisms), IPv6, IPSec, shell accounts, PGP... they're all great. But this poster asked for a universally secure email system, and no such beast exists yet.
When someone asks you how to do the impossible, "do it yourself" is a perfectly reasonable answer. I'll grant that it's not a very helpful answer, but if you ask a hundred people how to do something and they all look at you blankly and then say "do it yourself," that should be a strong hint you don't understand the question you asked them.
"Not permitted to store in unencrypted form" is the problem here. Even if you get so draconian as to forbid cut-and-paste into another window, then saving the new window to disk, it'll still be possible to open up an Emacs window and manually retype the cleartext, headers and all, then save that to disk.
Is it possible to create privacy-enhanced email systems, which only store plaintext to disk when the user makes a deliberate choice? Sure. In fact, I could be talked into working on a project to do just that. But I don't think that what you're talking about, where the user isn't permitted to store in plaintext, will ever work.
First, secure Email--without the use of PGP or PGP-like services such as Hushmail--is a crock. Even with the use of PGP or PGP-like services, secure email is secure only within narrow parameters.
If I want to get access to your email, no matter how secure your ISP is, I'm just going to find the people you regularly communicate with and get access on that end. Or I'll just plant packet sniffers on a network and grab your email as MTAs pass it off from here to there.
If you want secure email, use a good, reliable ISP; connect to it using IPv6 and IPSec, or SSH; use PGP as much as you can. If you want an ubermaildrop, roll your own. But don't have any expectation that it matters a damn if you aren't doing something to encrypt the mail to make sure only you and your intended recipient can read it.
PGP is the most obvious way to accomplish this, but there may well be other ways.
The fact is that governments, like corporations, partnerships and organizations ... do not exist apart from the beliefs of some individuals.
"Reality, Elisa, exists only in the mind. That does not make reality any less real."
-- Doug Moensch
Money is also an artificial construct. That dollar bill in your pocket only has the value which you believe it does. If you don't believe your dollar is worth anything, you're more likely to use it for toilet paper than for purchases. (Don't laugh. This actually happened in China during the Second World War, in Europe after the Second World War, and in Russia today.) It's only your belief in the value of a dollar that gives the dollar any value.
And, in turn, other people's belief can affect your life. If the newspaper vendor on the street thinks a dollar is worthless, you aren't going to be able to buy a newspaper from him with it. You might have better luck offering English pounds or German deutschmarks or an Ecu or two. But if you want that newspaper and the newspaperman thinks your dollar is worthless... well, guess what; someone's belief has just affected your reality. The reality is, you don't have a newspaper.
Much of reality is created from our beliefs and has no existence, a priori, of those beliefs. Religion; currency; even basic civilization is all predicated on ideas and beliefs which are as, in the words of one theologian, "impossible to believe; yet without, belief is impossible".
Is government anything more than a collective hunch? No, not really. But then again, reality isn't anything more than a collective hunch, either. So if government isn't real, then it's built on the exact same foundation that reality is and may well be so close as makes no difference at all.
If you really believe the government is a fiction, may I respectfully suggest you stop paying your income tax?
When the IRS comes after you and turns your life into a living hell, it might change your mind.
Government's relative good or evil is certainly debatable, but its existence is not.
My dual PIII-800MHz screams along just fine. Then again, so does my K6-2/350, and so does my roommate's P-150.
Believe it or not, there was life before X and GNOME.
Restated:
"It means humans, while versatile, will never be the best at anything because of the way we are built and designed. By extension, this also applies to ANY organism which can survive outside of specialized niches: primates makes likeable apes instead of Bengal tigers."
I may be nuts, but I think it's very possible for a "likeable mutt" to wind up being the best overall, far and away, because these "likeable mutts" have no real Achilles' heels. The Bengal tiger is nearly extinct; human beings are still undergoing population explosion.
If you look at television media you have anchors ... the anchor is a very importent [sic] person. They are totally neutral about the news they report.
This is quite untrue. In the first place, anchors really aren't even journalists; they're actors. When was the last time you saw Dan Rather walking the streets of NYC with nothing more than his wits and a laptop, tracking down a story?
He doesn't do that anymore. Other people, real journalists, track down the stories and do the legwork. Dan Rather is just the guy who "presents" the story. There's a reason why anchors are called "talking heads".
Insofar as their bias... they are terribly, terribly biased. Ever heard of a movie called Network, or maybe Broadcast News? Both of them are reasonably accurate in their portrayal of TV anchors. They can be petty, bitter and vindictive with the best of them.
More than that, anchors don't write their own copy. Their own bias gets compounded with the bias of the copywriter. If the anchor happens to be a Democrat and the copywriter a Libertarian, you can figure out the kind of treatment a conservative Republican is going to get.
Anchors are also professional liars. Remember that: every anchor is a professional liar. When you see the evening news and one anchor makes a joke to the other, and the other anchor laughs at it like it's amusing... it's not amusing. They're about as excited as an organ donor. They rehearse those jokes and bon mots every day. They practice how to laugh so it sounds genuine. A lot of anchor teams who appear to have really good chemistry on-air really hate each other when the cameras are off.
Anchors aren't journalists; they're actors. They aren't honest; they're professional liars. They don't know beans about the stories they cover; they just read the text the copywriter gives them.
How is it you think that anchors are in any way neutral observers and reporters of events?
Should Slashdot be held to the same standard of journalistic ethics as print media? Sure. But that's not saying much--in fact, that's not saying anything at all.
A news outlet can say anything they want about any public figure just so long as they use the magic words "sources allege". (Newsflash: sources allege that Vice-President Gore is having an affair with a major cinema star, film at 11!)
They can do the same thing about private individuals, too, if the private individual is for some reason "newsworthy". If you're "newsworthy", it doesn't matter how private you are--your name can be slandered, drug through the muck, and every lie imaginable can be published about you, while you have no recourse whatsoever.
Ask Richard Jewell, the hero of the Atlanta Olympic bombing, if he asked to be turned into a criminal. Note that Jewell did nothing wrong, and the attorney's office eventually ended the investigation into him after concluding there was no evidence to substantiate any allegation against him. (That's DA speak for "either he's got a great lawyer who got our evidence thrown out, or else we were so totally wrong we deserve to be laughed at... so we're going to release a statement implying he's got a slick lawyer.")
Did Jewell ask the news media to pay a woman to go on a date with him, just so she could wear a wire and try and get him to say implicating things? No. Did they do it anyway? Yes.
The news media, as a whole, has one objective and two ways of achieving it. They want to make money--that's their ultimate objective. They know that people will buy newspapers if they write stories about a hero, or if they write stories about the fall of a hero.
That means the news media is in the business of creating heroes, just so they can destroy them again, just so they can sell more newspapers.
Think I'm making this up?
Ask yourself this: which major news outlets which, after completely destroying Jewell's life, bothered to print an apology and retraction? As far as I know, only one--and they did it as part of an out-of-court settlement to avoid a libel lawsuit, because Tom Brokaw once forgot to use the words "sources allege...".
Slashdot is, in my mind, one of the finest online news services there is. Because we know where Slashdot's bias is, we know that the stories are skewed and how the Slashdot staff skews them, and we know that, journalistically speaking, these guys are totally incompetent.
Their incompetency gives me a warm fuzzy feeling in the pit of my stomach. It tells me they probably haven't learned yet that they can get a lot more pageviews by following the make-and-break-a-hero cycle.
Right--it's not the existence of license termination clauses which bothers me, but the original poster's blanket statement that any license termination clause means the software is non-free. That assertion is pretty much groundless, as far as I can tell.
At great risk of sounding like a complete idiot--
:) I mean, I sat up and took notice when I discovered Samus Aran was a woman. I wasn't expecting that at all.
On the one hand I want to agree with you, but my brain says otherwise. If the target market for video games are overwhelmingly teenage boys, you're not only going to see an overwhelmingly large number of games targeted to teenage boys, but an overwhelmingly large number of good game developers are going to develop for teenage boys. Athena didn't suck because the industry has it out for women; it sucked because all of the good game developers were writing the latest Legend of Zelda sequel.
It's not sexist, just the naked pursuit of profit. Not that the one is any better than the other, though.
One question I'd rather see answered, rather than "why/how is it the gaming industry has these stereotypes, and how can they be changed?" is... "why is it the gaming industry has so critically few women engineers, and how can this be changed?"
The only engineer I can think of offhand who's seriously involved in game design is Bungie's Quin Denki (I may be misspelling her name). I'm excluding Stevie Case here, because I don't think an engineer needs to be famous for spanking someone in an FPS and posing nude for Playboy... I think an engineer needs to be respected for technical ability, which Denki definitely gets. Roberta Williams would make the list, but she's been Management for some time now and not Engineering.
There was a really good interview with Denki on the Bungie website a while ago; it may still be there for all I know. Had a lot of technical detail in it, but some very interesting opinions on the role of women in engineering and as women as gamers.
Insofar as Metroid goes, I prefer option 3--like a Stanley Kubrick film, they wanted to save the biggest head-twist for the last scene.
Considering that you don't discover the secret of The Crying Game until close to the end, does that prove either 1) that transvestism would negatively affect the movie sales, 2) it was a mere afterthought, or 3) they thought it would get people talking?