From experience, slashdot is the perfect place to get misinformation on legal matters.
Haven't read through all the comments yet, but I wouldn't be surprised if the misinformation here costs him more time with his lawyer by having his lawyer untangle all the misinformation mess he's received here.
Well seriously, if the only options are going back to stone age and mass extinction, I'd choose not to think about it.
And if the options are not that extreme, then I have no qualms trying to cut down on my impact on the environment. It's just that it's sometimes good to keep things in perspective and to use rational thought and argument. I mean, even if humanity is wiped out, so what? People die sooner or later, species go extinct sooner or later. I'm not going to go back to stone age (and probably die anyway because modern man is just not adapted to that life) just for some "forecast" of catastrophe.
Then the reason would be - He shouldn't get preferential treatment because he's just a person, and not "because I don't like the war".
Besides, it's not like the OP was asking about *normal* crappy customer service. It was a freaking warzone in a third world country.
I do get your point though, but I don't really see it as preferential treatment. I think it's a genuine question asked by a guy who's in a tight situation. Relatively speaking there are lots of other "ask slashdot" articles without merit. Stupid [XXX] tricks? How to speak with your manager? And while strictly speaking not an "ask slashdot" item, the story where of the 60 line knights tour solution in python is magnitudes more lame.
Of course, people bitch anyways, I'm not exactly new here:-)
If it's caused by the sun, we need to back way the hell off, back to the stone age, and even farther, perhaps with some sort of technology to shade the earth, and attempt to weather it out without hitting the tipping point in several of the systems that would push us past no recovery.
Great. I'm so much comforted with the thought that going back to the stone age is a solution to global warming!!! It doesn't matter if life expectancy is around 20 years and I'm expected to be dead already. Woo! All for the greater good of the Earth, and it doesn't matter that billions will die because we just "backed off" and discarded all our technology to the point that tigers can eat us for lunch!
As it now is, you'll have to bribe me *very* generously before you could persuade me to use that Visual Studio sht. When developing with Vim and the UNIX CLI, I can do pretty much everything without my hands off the home row, and VS forces me to click menus, icons, press function keys, etc, just to do basic development.
Where's my regular expressions, (fast) grep, occasional perl scripts, uncluttered IDE (I spend most of my time staring at a fullscreen xterm with a Vim, my monitor isn't that large), and generally the power of UNIX. And for debugging, I'll want my where's my gdb, strace, lsof, netcat, netstat, and whatnot.
Tell me of a simple equivalent in VS.
And of course, if you wanted a more "integrated" IDE Emacs would be a great choice. I never "got" Emacs myself but I know people who do well in it.
Seems Linux is now held to a higher standard. Again, what a dope. Outside of the VMS crowd, I've not seen a huge outpouring of demand for this feature. Having said that, I do believe a versioning FS is in the works and for all I know, some may already be available. Realistically, few people want this and most have no clue what it even means. For the general use case, RC-software already exists to fill this niche. His complaint is empty.
It's called git and it's written by Linus (what more could you want?). I'm sure he could technically have tacked it onto ext3 if he wanted to, but what's the point...
How is healthy food more expensive than bad food? Bad food is always processed food. Processing costs money. Always.
Conspiracy theories aside, not even the evil corporations want you to eat crappy food if healthier food can be made as cheaply. A lot of the commercial processing is to make the food last longer for storage, so that storage and shipment costs can be lower. So that the food products can be produced in bulk. Which means less expensive.
The lack of explicit typing not only stings when dealing with other people's code, in my experience it also makes debugging my own code harder.
Since python does most type checking at runtime, you need to run your program (possibly for a few times), as compared to a simple compilation, to look for type-related bugs.
So goes the saying: "It compiles! Ship it!". Might actually worked for languages like C++ or Java, but with python, don't even think about it.
Disclaimer: python is actually my choice scripting language.
People get into the military for various reasons. Probably a few get in because of "idiotic" reasons, but many do so due to a lack of other economic means. Don't judge before you know anything about that guy.
And I'm a "non-American" who utterly despises the US Administration's foreign policy, and disgusted about the wars they've initiated. That shouldn't mean we shouldn't treat their soldiers with respect and human dignity. In fact, quite the opposite. The US's foreign policy, its failure on the wars, are precisely due to unfettered arrogance, apathy and disrespect to other people's cultures, hardships and circumstances. If you're really against that, there's no reason not to give the guy a more sympathetic treatment.
What's the problem with GP's solution? (Or "agenda" as you call it)
The argument of "we've been doing it since the country was founded" is bullshit. Your president incumbent ran a campaign on "change" doesn't strike you that maybe, just *maybe*, America will stop fighting pointless wars? (OK maybe you didn't vote for him, but that doesn't mean half the country didn't). Even if it isn't immediately possible, wouldn't it be a noble goal to get the world to stop fighting pointless wars anyway? What's wrong with that?
Until you develop technology to replace humans with robots on the battlefield, people will get killed no matter how much money you spend on the military.
If you're talking about a spam bot, look for sustained unexplained internet traffic using the indicator lights on your modem. Spam bots usually use up a sizable chunk of your pipe to send spam, so it should be quite noticeable if you bothered to look.
Otherwise, forget it. There are so many theoretical ways malicious code can reside and hide on your computer that unless you've built your computer from the ground up, using trusted parts from trusted vendors, and never connected to the internet, you don't know for sure.
Between those two extremes there are lots of info out there, and it's rightly offtopic. Just STFW.
I believe in liberty and equality and raising living standards for Americans, and trading with other nations so that they have the freedom to choose what they want to produce, not the "freedom" to sign up for another round of exploitation by Fortune 500 companies
It seems that you want to have your cake and eat it too.
The "other nations", unless intimidated by the US military or other political forces, already do have freedom to choose what they want to produce. Unless you believe people of other nations are idiots, they naturally chose the most profitable goods to produce, and your Fortune 500 companies buy them. The only way living standards for Americans will rise is when your Fortune 500 companies can buy labor from developing countries at dirt cheap prices, without that supply the prices of commodities will soar sky high, and you'll have to do the grunt work that the developing countries have been doing for decades.
So either you pay a lot more for your "made in China" products you buy, or you work in a factory stamping "made in USA" labels (which I presume do not increase the average living standard for Americans), things will go on as it always have been.
No expert on the matter, but I think the "POSIX shell" doesn't necessary include tab completion. The minimal-yet-POSIX-compliant shells don't. (eg. ash, the BSD/bin/sh, etc.)
I've seen on a few places (including/.), and I (think) I never ran it, but here's one of the most obscure fork bombs:
:(){:|:& };:
(Warning: Don't do this on a production machine -- and if you did it and it hoses the machine, the blame lies on the sysadmin)
Since I haven't gone through the lower scored posts I might be -1 redundant, so I might as well mention ulimit (bash builtin) and limits.conf(5) which when properly configured can limit the damage caused by these kind of rogue code.
also worth mentioning is the "time" utility. It's usually a shell builtin that shows the time used for running the command (eg. time gzip BIGFILE)
I've been messing with Linux for about 7 years, admined some small servers (as a volunteer for some small non-commercial entities) and have been using Linux as my main desktop since around 2002. I've never understood how to use "info" (probably due to the fact that I never "got" emacs, being a VI person), but man pages (at least on Debian) are pretty nice to use.
They aren't the thing you look for when you are completely new to the command, or perhaps the toolset in general, but typically it's the best thing you have other than the source.
For the basic command line scripting stuff man pages are usually quite complete as a reference. If you don't know which command to use, chances are that you should read a book on the subject, or at least read some intro on the web.
A friend and I help admin the computers in my (former) high school. Due to security the doors were locked during off hours, and I'm not a frequent helper so I don't have the keys, but my friend did.
There was once when I was basically stranded in the computer lab, and my friend was in the server room (where the cell phone signals didn't reach). I don't know what he was doing at that time, but "walls" (on the linux machines) and "net sends" (to the Windows servers) didn't seem to work, so I ran a script to open and close the CD tray hoping to catch his attention.
I got a message asking "wtf are you doing?" a few minutes later:)
Depending on your filesystem layout, rm -rf / could be having its first run on/usr, which might actually save you, since it will take some time and depending on what you're doing, trash your system to the point that you'll reboot before it gets to/home.
Slashdot Mirror
From experience, slashdot is the perfect place to get misinformation on legal matters.
Haven't read through all the comments yet, but I wouldn't be surprised if the misinformation here costs him more time with his lawyer by having his lawyer untangle all the misinformation mess he's received here.
(Who modded you funny?)
Well seriously, if the only options are going back to stone age and mass extinction, I'd choose not to think about it.
And if the options are not that extreme, then I have no qualms trying to cut down on my impact on the environment. It's just that it's sometimes good to keep things in perspective and to use rational thought and argument. I mean, even if humanity is wiped out, so what? People die sooner or later, species go extinct sooner or later. I'm not going to go back to stone age (and probably die anyway because modern man is just not adapted to that life) just for some "forecast" of catastrophe.
Then the reason would be - He shouldn't get preferential treatment because he's just a person, and not "because I don't like the war".
Besides, it's not like the OP was asking about *normal* crappy customer service. It was a freaking warzone in a third world country.
I do get your point though, but I don't really see it as preferential treatment. I think it's a genuine question asked by a guy who's in a tight situation. Relatively speaking there are lots of other "ask slashdot" articles without merit. Stupid [XXX] tricks? How to speak with your manager? And while strictly speaking not an "ask slashdot" item, the story where of the 60 line knights tour solution in python is magnitudes more lame.
Of course, people bitch anyways, I'm not exactly new here :-)
If it's caused by the sun, we need to back way the hell off, back to the stone age, and even farther, perhaps with some sort of technology to shade the earth, and attempt to weather it out without hitting the tipping point in several of the systems that would push us past no recovery.
Great. I'm so much comforted with the thought that going back to the stone age is a solution to global warming!!! It doesn't matter if life expectancy is around 20 years and I'm expected to be dead already. Woo! All for the greater good of the Earth, and it doesn't matter that billions will die because we just "backed off" and discarded all our technology to the point that tigers can eat us for lunch!
I'm not sure you understood the GP.
As it now is, you'll have to bribe me *very* generously before you could persuade me to use that Visual Studio sht. When developing with Vim and the UNIX CLI, I can do pretty much everything without my hands off the home row, and VS forces me to click menus, icons, press function keys, etc, just to do basic development.
Where's my regular expressions, (fast) grep, occasional perl scripts, uncluttered IDE (I spend most of my time staring at a fullscreen xterm with a Vim, my monitor isn't that large), and generally the power of UNIX. And for debugging, I'll want my where's my gdb, strace, lsof, netcat, netstat, and whatnot.
Tell me of a simple equivalent in VS.
And of course, if you wanted a more "integrated" IDE Emacs would be a great choice. I never "got" Emacs myself but I know people who do well in it.
native file versioning
Seems Linux is now held to a higher standard. Again, what a dope. Outside of the VMS crowd, I've not seen a huge outpouring of demand for this feature. Having said that, I do believe a versioning FS is in the works and for all I know, some may already be available. Realistically, few people want this and most have no clue what it even means. For the general use case, RC-software already exists to fill this niche. His complaint is empty.
It's called git and it's written by Linus (what more could you want?). I'm sure he could technically have tacked it onto ext3 if he wanted to, but what's the point...
Last time I looked (two years ago) at NX it was a bitch to setup.
Any better now?
You would assign scientists to each slot, and that's what their career is. If they can't get it done, then replace them...
You just don't know how laughable this statement is, do you?
Quit thinking like a baby. Wake up, this is real life, not the whatever fantasy land you're living in, where things happen as you say so.
Let me summarize your approach in 3 lines.
1. Record all data
2. ???
3. Cure!
I'd mod you you if I had mod points.
Except for this tiny tidbit -
How is healthy food more expensive than bad food?
Bad food is always processed food. Processing costs money. Always.
Conspiracy theories aside, not even the evil corporations want you to eat crappy food if healthier food can be made as cheaply. A lot of the commercial processing is to make the food last longer for storage, so that storage and shipment costs can be lower. So that the food products can be produced in bulk. Which means less expensive.
Amen.
The lack of explicit typing not only stings when dealing with other people's code, in my experience it also makes debugging my own code harder.
Since python does most type checking at runtime, you need to run your program (possibly for a few times), as compared to a simple compilation, to look for type-related bugs.
So goes the saying: "It compiles! Ship it!". Might actually worked for languages like C++ or Java, but with python, don't even think about it.
Disclaimer: python is actually my choice scripting language.
People get into the military for various reasons. Probably a few get in because of "idiotic" reasons, but many do so due to a lack of other economic means. Don't judge before you know anything about that guy.
And I'm a "non-American" who utterly despises the US Administration's foreign policy, and disgusted about the wars they've initiated. That shouldn't mean we shouldn't treat their soldiers with respect and human dignity. In fact, quite the opposite. The US's foreign policy, its failure on the wars, are precisely due to unfettered arrogance, apathy and disrespect to other people's cultures, hardships and circumstances. If you're really against that, there's no reason not to give the guy a more sympathetic treatment.
What's the problem with GP's solution? (Or "agenda" as you call it)
The argument of "we've been doing it since the country was founded" is bullshit. Your president incumbent ran a campaign on "change" doesn't strike you that maybe, just *maybe*, America will stop fighting pointless wars? (OK maybe you didn't vote for him, but that doesn't mean half the country didn't). Even if it isn't immediately possible, wouldn't it be a noble goal to get the world to stop fighting pointless wars anyway? What's wrong with that?
Until you develop technology to replace humans with robots on the battlefield, people will get killed no matter how much money you spend on the military.
If you're talking about a spam bot, look for sustained unexplained internet traffic using the indicator lights on your modem. Spam bots usually use up a sizable chunk of your pipe to send spam, so it should be quite noticeable if you bothered to look.
Otherwise, forget it. There are so many theoretical ways malicious code can reside and hide on your computer that unless you've built your computer from the ground up, using trusted parts from trusted vendors, and never connected to the internet, you don't know for sure.
Between those two extremes there are lots of info out there, and it's rightly offtopic. Just STFW.
Aha! That explains the limbless blind beggars on the streets of Central!
I believe in liberty and equality and raising living standards for Americans, and trading with other nations so that they have the freedom to choose what they want to produce, not the "freedom" to sign up for another round of exploitation by Fortune 500 companies
It seems that you want to have your cake and eat it too.
The "other nations", unless intimidated by the US military or other political forces, already do have freedom to choose what they want to produce. Unless you believe people of other nations are idiots, they naturally chose the most profitable goods to produce, and your Fortune 500 companies buy them. The only way living standards for Americans will rise is when your Fortune 500 companies can buy labor from developing countries at dirt cheap prices, without that supply the prices of commodities will soar sky high, and you'll have to do the grunt work that the developing countries have been doing for decades.
So either you pay a lot more for your "made in China" products you buy, or you work in a factory stamping "made in USA" labels (which I presume do not increase the average living standard for Americans), things will go on as it always have been.
You're just proving the point.
International aggressor and fighting with your neighbours is a very different thing.
My favorite solution:
Not exactly cross platform, but on most modern Unices it does the job :)
No expert on the matter, but I think the "POSIX shell" doesn't necessary include tab completion. The minimal-yet-POSIX-compliant shells don't. (eg. ash, the BSD /bin/sh, etc.)
I've seen on a few places (including /.), and I (think) I never ran it, but here's one of the most obscure fork bombs:
(Warning: Don't do this on a production machine -- and if you did it and it hoses the machine, the blame lies on the sysadmin)
Since I haven't gone through the lower scored posts I might be -1 redundant, so I might as well mention ulimit (bash builtin) and limits.conf(5) which when properly configured can limit the damage caused by these kind of rogue code.
also worth mentioning is the "time" utility. It's usually a shell builtin that shows the time used for running the command (eg. time gzip BIGFILE)
Holy crap, you're still using FTP?!
(Yes, I'm aware there are valid uses for FTP...)
I've been messing with Linux for about 7 years, admined some small servers (as a volunteer for some small non-commercial entities) and have been using Linux as my main desktop since around 2002. I've never understood how to use "info" (probably due to the fact that I never "got" emacs, being a VI person), but man pages (at least on Debian) are pretty nice to use.
They aren't the thing you look for when you are completely new to the command, or perhaps the toolset in general, but typically it's the best thing you have other than the source.
For the basic command line scripting stuff man pages are usually quite complete as a reference. If you don't know which command to use, chances are that you should read a book on the subject, or at least read some intro on the web.
True story.
A friend and I help admin the computers in my (former) high school. Due to security the doors were locked during off hours, and I'm not a frequent helper so I don't have the keys, but my friend did.
There was once when I was basically stranded in the computer lab, and my friend was in the server room (where the cell phone signals didn't reach). I don't know what he was doing at that time, but "walls" (on the linux machines) and "net sends" (to the Windows servers) didn't seem to work, so I ran a script to open and close the CD tray hoping to catch his attention.
I got a message asking "wtf are you doing?" a few minutes later :)
You mean "do not try this at /home". :)
Depending on your filesystem layout, rm -rf / could be having its first run on /usr, which might actually save you, since it will take some time and depending on what you're doing, trash your system to the point that you'll reboot before it gets to /home.
News for nerds, stuff that matters
There's an ambiguity on whether the intended conjunction operator is "AND" or "OR" (probably not "XOR"), but this is definitely stuff that matters.