It's a bunch of people who have to accept and send documents to a bunch of backward places like the United States. No other office would be more hounded and pressed by the idiots sending everything from wordstar to Microsoft.docx files.
Given the amount of effort Microsoft makes to make sure that they can use other formats but nobody else can use theirs fully, it is no wonder that the one place where the German government rubs up against the rest of the world the most often would have the most problems avoiding Microsoft contamination.
This is not an indictment of Linux at all, it is further proof that Microsoft secret innards should be considered harmful to all comers.
Interoperability of _Microsoft_ products with all others is _extremely_ low. And training anybody, let alone a bunch of diplomats, exactly how to hop through all the hoops to access a readable version of a.docx file sent from abroad is a non-trivial task.
It is easy to blame the fix (Linux and Open Office et al) for the woes of the common but broken (secret Microsoft document standards) that flood you when you use the fix. And really, while I use Open Office almost exclusively for my own work, it _isn't_ exactly the best piece of software I have ever seen. It is just as quirky and annoying as virtually every other word processor I have ever used. [To date, WordPerfect has been the best word processor I have ever used, but it is dead and there is no pining for the past.]
And scanner support in Linux is not as sane (pun!) as you would hope. This is not a "Linux flaw", its a scanner vendor flaw, as even the good "hp printer drivers" don't include any kind of decent "hp scanner facility" under Linux. And my outstanding Cannon mf9170c at home has no Linux drivers at all so it took non-trivial effort to discover that cups 1.4+ and the generic PCL6 support drivers was the magic combination that _still_ borks up if I put it in the (unnecessary, but you know a diplomat is going to use it) "high quality mode". So the people to blame for bad "Linux printer and scanner driver support" is the manufacturers of the printers and scanners.
In fact the whole "looking for drivers" issue is a red herring. I have spent hundreds of professional man hours looking for Windows drivers for hardware in my lifetime and I am not alone. Every vendor always puts their drivers in odd and bizarre places. And since everybody is non-root on a linux box by default they can't just pull off the normal "cram in everything I can find till something works" techniques people use to get stuff to work under Windows.
In all computing, changing the interface of an implementation is the hardest part. And in international document exchange, that interface is going to be the foreign office of a major government. I am disappointed sure, but they gave it a good run and I would expect this office to fail on the first go.
Changing OS is like quitting smoking. Some failures and restarts are to be expected. But when they start coughing up blood again they'll try quitting again.
As stated in the lead, this is a comedic ploy used my many comedians. Inter-cutting video to mislead into a comic result is done all the time. (Watch Fox "News" entertainment some time.)
The only "rape" here is that some kid's parents didn't get paid and so they complained.
Oh, and the guy is getting raped by the system.
Someone go better arrest the Tosh.0 staff and the daily show etc... oh wait, those kids were properly prostituted to TV by their parents so it's okay.
"Children", "Drugs" and "Terror" are the root passwords to the U.S. Constitution.
In the information age, the modem is mightier than the cable franchise?
Honestly we need to start "backing up the Internet" by restoring the dial-up BBS infrastructure with some hard coper wire.
Also everybody should have references to some safe international DNS roots etc.
I am kind of stunned actually that the pirates havn't gone to sending their wares over the net strongly encrypted and using modem+BBS drop boxen for the key distribution just to ensure the stronger wire tapping law coverage. But thieves are never smart, its part of believing in theft.
Whatever we all come up with to back up and replace the Internet, we must carefully name it something else and ensure we don't use words like "digital" (computers are not actually "digital" [base 10] they are TTL discrete [base 2] technology) so that we can get a fresh go at all the laws that constrain those words. 8-)
I used to live near DC. A presidential motorcade involves snarling the city to a freaking stop sometimes for hours. People stuck in their cars. Motorcycle cops blocking intersections. Fleet of cars. Random circuitous routes. I think direct point-to-point transport in Marine 1 is probably a _huge_ carbon footprint win.
Now how about moving the President in a commercial jet? His security staff and regular staff, and the news outlets that invariably pursue would use up a non-trivial number of the seats (like all of them). If any were left over, would you want to go through the screening to join that flight? And they would have to strip-search the planes for bombs. And don't get me started international flight delays when, say, most or all of the terminals for whichever airports he passed through would be traumatized. I'm pretty sure that Airforce 1 isn't much of a waste in carbon or money or time once you look at the whole picture.
Course he could drive cross country in that motorcade. Yea, that would be interesting. With armed military escort vehicles and disruptions of every city and township passed through or worse, stopped within.
If we lived in a world where the President could hop into a Ford Festia and just drive off safe in his person, then sure the Presidential aircraft would be wasteful.
Funny. Obama has been in office two years, and most of the things hes stuck funding are legacy items that are required to be funded by law. Another big chunk was the bailout, which wasn't exactly optional being a last-moment action of Bush the Lesser et al. and a direct feature of the G.W. leadership in gutting all forms of financial regulation.
Then there was the whole Republican Filibuster Rampage for two years to prevent any meaningful action by the government to undo the G.W. era "tax cuts" ensuring that the whole Republican Borrow and Spend *ahem* fiscal responsibility *ahem* was the only way to keep the government open and functioning.
I also must mention the war in Iraq, which had _nothing_ to do with anything regarding terrorism or valid international policy. Bush, having made a horrific financial boondoggle out of our entire economy under the waving banner of terrorism, where Iraq had _nothing_ to do with international terrorism, we rational analysts can not fairly lay that ongoing cost at Obama's feet. Sure we want out of Iraq, but we do have a moral responsibility to clean up as much of the spilled milk as possible before we go. Plus see the RFR mentioned above for exacerbating contributions to these issues.
Yes, your approbation of Obama, who meanwhile has met something like 84% of his election promises in the first two years of office and largely repaired our international reputation, is a tad misplaced. Perhaps even "convenient self deception" is involved here when you point at the last two years and bemoan the inability of the current administration to undo eight years of legislative, fiscal, and social damage done by the previous administration.
By getting the rich to buy enough to bring the price down. Thats how.
At one point the Ammana Radar Range cost thousands of dollars, now a microwave oven can be had for $150. Same for DVD players and Gawd knows how many other things.
The rest of your post is equally poor in reasoning and understanding.
Emissions reduction, and conversion of the fleet to non-petrol is the point. It isn't about saving you money in the short term. Since we have arguably passed peak oil, and since we will need that oil for plastics and medicine, it is _vital_ that we stop burning it for transportation.
My Prius, for example, is tuned for emissions. That means that the gas mileage is "very good" by default, but there are times when the total system could be better for mileage but instead of laboring the engine it revs the enginge and "saves the extra". That conversion from mechanical to electrical to chemical potential, and its eventual reconverstion from chemical potential to electrical and then to kinetic energy is lossy. Very lossy. But it is "better than" belching up partially burned hydrocarbons from a laboring engine.
Efficiency isn't about your wallet. Neither is greater good. Its about your lungs, and your ability to get medicine and clean water in for the rest of your life.
Everybody knows that the Republican Borrow and Spend technique is the only fiscally responsible choice. Paying down debt is un-American. Only a deadbeat pays principle. And how dare he tax rich people on parity with the poor! The poor exist to make the lives of the rich better! Damn him for creating more jobs in two years than Bush the Lesser created in four, maybe eight. And meeting 84% of his election promises in two years? That's a some sort of Kenyan Konspiracy!
Based on nothing but the odd legal theories being projected against Hotz, I would bet that there is no technical difference between 3.55 and 3.56 and all the actual diffs are in the license agreement.
You know, this is an SCO-esque attempt by SCE (a Japaneese corporation) to conflate its rights to have SCEA (and American LLC) sue you if they don't like you for any purpose, and to have you double-agree that you agree to whatever agreements they want to say you did. (Check groklaw, this one about whatever agreements they say you are bound by bit is in there for real.)
The possibility that this firmware update rewrites the TPM is somewhat unlikely.
You cannot meaningfully use the MAC addresses in a JumpStart kind of situation as you don't know at jump-start creation which adapter will be which in the MAC address sort order, particularly when you are using insert cards.
I use udev, but then I edit the persistent rules it generates to rename my interfaces "intX" and "extX" (internal and external interfaces) for making firewall rules and so on.
The problem is that there is no real "right answer" for naming devices berfore you identify them explicitly.
Oddly enough, once you are part of "a system" (q.v. a network or server farm) the problem can be magically moot. IPV6 will solve most of your internal/external network topology questions once you have established your anchor machines (routers). Explicit naming of media (Volume Labels, LVM names, metadevice names) will solve the media topology issues. etc.
The only "impossible" topology is dynamic USB as the standard doesn't provide any means for tagging, say, which of which serial adapters are connected to what devices. They get ttyUSB(X) names in probed-then-plugged order and there are several semi-universal chips used to connect a large number of devices (touch screens, GPS, raw serial adapters, etc) that all report just the serial chip's vendor and part id's.
All of the solutions that involve implicit tagging by arbitrary value (MAC) or bus topology (PCI bus ID, USB bus ID, SCSI bus LUN, etc) will have just as many drawbacks as arbitrary naming, but they won't seem to have those drawbacks until after they get instituted as policy and _then_ they bite you.
Bad information, especially when it is only occasionally bad, is always worse than no information.
Has been relevant only since the discovery of oil. Saudi Arabia has passed peak oil, and so has passed peak relevancy. When they can no longer afford the pyramid scheme that is their economy, their state will collapse back on itself instantly.
Remember that the House of Saud has been promising it's people that Trickle Down Economics will pay off for the little guy for like 50 years. Just another year or two and everybody in the country will be rich etc. We know how exactly what trickles down in that scheme.
Right now the extremists can afford to look abroad and say our presence in their lives is the root of their problems. In thirty years or so we will stop having any presence in their lives. Between now and then, they will continue to try to make us go away, and we will have to play along with their various national agendas. But we are their Jews as much as the actual Jews are their Jews. We are someone to blame for how the dream of oil has not made daily life better. We also back Israel because it is the only actually stable state in the region. We will need some sort of foot-hold from which to deal with that mess when the oil runs out. For a brief period of time there will be a lot of arms and a lot of angry people. Those two will cancel each other out left to their own.
The only reason the west supports the House of Saud is because they can keep the country together and functioning well enough to keep the oil flowing. The reason the individual members of the House of Saud invest outside their own country so heavily is because some of them are not so dumb.
But really, once the sand and oil cocktail is just sand again, and now that we no longer really have to worry about the mid-east waterways for the well-being of Europe, the whole area is a write-off. Nobody needs that sand.
Were the House of Saud actually smart in the general sense they would have modernized their country and they would already be establishing solar and bio-fuel infrastructure. Even if the technology _sucks_ relatively, they own a huge expanse of unoccupied dry land under cloudless sky at or near the equator. Sure-as-shootin someone will solve the solar-to-storage problem sooner or later. Then Saud could be selling us its sunlight energy.
But they'll collapse first, into a nice and irrelevant pile of sand and dust.
Most GPL violations are solved with a quick appology and direct remediation of the violation. Typically the violation is the failure to disclose source and such disclosure then happens. Damaged or headers are not uncommon, and in case of individual stupidity (not every guy checking stuff into version control is a jet-fuel genius) or honest mistake (not every guy checking stuff into version control is fully versed in copyright law), then reasonable people just go "eh, dude, that needs to be fixed" and then someone else replies "ok, cool, I'll fix that".
So the change of license was wrong, and needs to be fixed. Neither license is particularly incompatible with the other. Reasonable people, finding an issue _this_ minor are expected to act reasonably.
Of course Orace is involved so that's expecting rather a lot.
For the most part, if the actual complaint was this mis-licensing, between typical and reasonable GPL entities, then there would have been a check-in with the corrected headers.
So no matter what the other facts may be, the damage threshold is nascent to non-existent, and the "reasonable behavior" test has not been met by Oracle.
This whole thing is Oracle FUD to damage Android for no apparent reason than the fact that Oracle doest that kind of thing.
I have worked in shops using Microsoft code bases where the shop has paid for a massive fix, only to have the next release of windows restore the error and then Microsoft charged us (admittedly less) for the new windows with the old fix.
And it _was_ a fix.
Go ahead and wander through the microsoft knowledge base and look for all the fixes that aren't available to the general public.
It's not that no possible developer of proprietary code can pleas a customer. Its that if ANY developer of PROPRIETARY CODE decides NOT TO PLEASE YOU then you are farked.
See it's not that hard to see the distinction between "having a choice" and "not having a choice". It this case the choice to fix things the vendor doesn't care to.
Any small number of "that's not how I run _my_ business" anecdotes don't change the measurable fact that, the proven fact, that if I bought your product, whatever it may be, I wouldn't be able to do anything to it that you didn't _let_ me do, including fixing on-the-spot a critical flaw that brings my operation to a halt while you are off on vacation or whatever.
As for your "stunned silence", you really don't understand language do you? you cannot enunciate silence without putting the lie to your "silence".
Plus you must be new to slashdot if you think this isn't _exactly_ the forum for making war-related digressions in the name of metaphor. (I am 35.4 MILLION user id numbers senior to you here, so I think I know how this forum works, thank you very much...8-)
Yes, having found a problem, and then found a solution you have to maintain or share that solution. The horrors!
I non-open code you have the choice of paying potentially millions of dollars to get a fix from the vendor, and having paid that sum, you receive one fix once, with no promise that your fix will become part of the product line's subsequent release. So when that subsequent release is made and it _doesn't_ have your fix, you get to pay all that money _again_ even though they already know the problem and solution. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.
With open source you don't have to "fork" just to retain the patch and reapply it, usually with virtually no effort since, if someone is working on the code you patched, they likely used your fix, something like your fix, or didn't touch the lines you patched in any meaningful way.
I have had a kernel patch to "smarten up" termios for years. I submitted it and it was rejected for reasons like "we are about to change that code anyway" and "someone might have written code that _uses_ the fact that you can end up blocking on a one-byte read, waiting for one byte to be received, despite the fact that there is more than one byte in the buffer".
With every subsequent release of the kernel I just apply the patch and move on. I didn't "fork the kernel" etc. Nothing ever so daunting.
It is an obvious truth that exploring an option and making use of an opportunity is _always_ more effort and "clear expense" then just throwing up ones hands and living with no choice in the matter.
The costs of surrender are always hidden, prorated, long term. [Ask the French, their defense against Germany was sabatoged, as it always was, by Belgium's habit of buckling like a belt when threatened no matter how much the promised to do their part as a key point in the defense of europe. Nobody blames Belgium for being the useless twits they always are, but to this day France takes a load of shit for their surrender once their entire north flank went for strudel.]
Agree with Microsoft? I suggest you read up on "Plays4Sure"... and every single "microsoft preferred partner" in history.
with business concerns in mind but without concern to the citizenry!
Regulatory Capture of the FCC is kind of a given at this point.
The Worshipers of the Grand Free Market (except where the tariffs and controls prevent others from competing with the Grand Free Established and Entrenched) are full force and full on in genesis of this decay.
Sure the FCC makes stupid token actions in terms of the indecency of seeing aging female nipple or any male appendage over the airwaves to keep the proles feeling "protected" from the evils of the flesh (and coincidentally bolstering the closed and captured pay-per-view and [ahem] "premium-package providers" in the cash), but beyond that token public good with its fully coincidental cash windfall to the cable companies, it should surprise nobody that the FCC demonstrates purient action in favor of its corporate owners.
No need for a conspiracy theory here. Money talks, unfunded speech doesn't even get a "protest zone" for the President of the United States.
System Subverters worry about system subversion obsessively, just as nobody is as paranoid about being stolen from as a thief.
When I find myself working for a person who is repeatedly asking how "we" are going to make sure that (some guy) doesn't have too much power I immediately ask two questions: (1) Does (some guy) already have too much power that he is apparently ready to misuse [kinda common] so obviously that he has already implicitly threatened the good function of the office; and (2) is the person asking the question engaged in personal entrenchment and bad dealing to a degree that they are expressing the worry that others are able to do to them what they are already doing to others [far more common that item 1].
Both conditions are toxic. The question itself is a warning sign of bad things to come.
A good system admin will have _already_ established some kind of key escrow and should already be training his replacement by the end of day one on the job. That's because a good system administrator knows that he doesn't want to be called at all hours of the day and night for pointless tasks, nor does he want to be so indefensible that he will never be able to advance out of his current position.
There are plenty of acceptable system admins out there who don't have these personal policies, and that isn't that bad.
But when your boss doesn't trust, that is usually a sign that your boss is not worthy of trust himself. This isn't always the case, but it is the safest bet to make.
Besides, "disempowring" users or admins _never_ really works. It just leads to multiplied consequences. Set up a mail retention policy that discards mail after ninety days? You'll find people saved their mail all over the place by dragging it out of the mail system. Lock down your USB ports and you will get things emailed will-he nill-he and find burnt CDs everywhere. Try to lock out your administrators and they will spread undocumented hacks all through your system. All this just so these people can meet the minimum requirements of their jobs.
"The more you tighten your grip, the more systems will slip through your fingers" -- This is a truth, not just a Star Wars quote.
_hardware_ manufactures who think they want to be in the _software_ maintenance market.
The difference between calling an API to render color fast, and knowing that cramming a 0x721 into a register at 0x3392 to render color fast isn't particularly a hemorrhaging of 'intellectual property'.
Granted, it does let us know where the API is "cheating".
So while the example of one byte in one register is reductio ad absurdem, and the process is more about laying out memory buffers and such, who cares. Sure the manufactures may be worried about nock-off hardware, but that hardware almost certainly be nock-off quality. Think of all the SoundBlaster knock offs that have ever been made. Compare that to Creative's bottom line. Those third party cards, which are _still_ on the market made SoundBlaster a universal name. Creative has been reclined upon those laurels for years now.
It is horrifically stupid on the part of the hardware manufacturers to be palying so close to the vest. They should _want_ everybody scrambling to be compatible with _their_ hardware interface, making them the leader that the market has to chase.
First big name out of the gate with a fully open graphics hardware platform would own the segment anew for years.
But "companies" have no smarts and that "isn't the way (that) business is done" so here we languish on in a half-realized market.
(As for the "getting drivers" thing I have spent hundreds of hours of my professional and personal career "getting drivers" for windows machines. Only the "you'll damn well eat what we serve you" hardware platforms like Apple can remove the quest for drivers. And woe betide you if you want to use old gear from those guys. So the whole plaintive "waah, I had to look for drivers" complaint rings a little false.)
A union of people for the good of the people is the definition of socialism. The USA was formed as a socialist nation. As in We the People... establish justice... domestic tranquility... common defense... general welfare... ourselves and our posterity...
A union of people for the good of the Nation/State is "National Socialism" and is what we fought against in world war II. If you have ever said "my country, right or wrong" you were being un-american as you were (at the risk of Goodwining myself) practicing National Socialism.
A union of the people for the good of the bureaucracy is Soviet Socialism, which is what "the cold war" was about.
Fascism is a belief or _worship_ of the state as divine power of right. It typically requires uniformity of behavior in some areas the state has deemed universally desirable, and an individual conformity in the details by individual. It is National Socialism raised to a near religion. It is "father knows best".
So anybody who complains about Socialist Policies or Polities in U.S. actions or positions failed "U.S. Constitution 101".
Sadly none of our political options available in this country are in line with the countries inherently socialist ideals. The Socialist parties are either National Socialist, or Fascist. The libertarians are psudo-anarchists and anti-socialists with no understanding of the economies of scale that make their life possible [stupid-idealist to-the-right]. Both the Republicans and Democrats are Corporatist and Paternalist (e.g. National Socialist to Proto-Fascists ["government knows best"] underpinning ["money talks" popularism]). Communists claim to believe in no government at all (in theory) which would work just great if there were no humans involved.
Now if we could get _all_ the closet republicans out of the Democratic party, and then remove "person-hood" from corporations, and then prevent "popular elections" and substitute in "topical elections" (such as requiring people to vote for a platform, with no personal knowledge of who would then take the office, only knowledge that that person wrote and holds to particular positions), or some other pie-in-sky transaction like that...
_Then_ we can have government of, by, and for the people.
Basically we need a president that has no power to "front for us" and a body governmental that is perhaps appointed at random (drafted, as in via the draft, from the roles of educational graduation), paid at shite wages, and given orders by topical ballot (not by "polling" but by initiative). Basically the entire legislative branch should be a paramilitary organization that cannot be joined by choice, only by draft.
At that point you start getting _close_ to what is needed. But in essence anybody who wants public office should be banned from public office.
When we describe a social system that has collapsed into meaningless clique reenforcement we say that it has just become a "popularity contest."
The cleche of that derision makes it no less true. Our political system, with its popular media basis and its easy sound-bytes, is the very definition of a popularity contest.
Unfortunately good leaders are rarely popular _before_ they lead. Many good leaders become popular as they retire because they were "tough but fair" etc. Our cart is before our horse here.
Our disneyesque imagineers manufacture the sock-puppet most likely to attract files, and make sure there is enough excrement around to keep the flies feeding and buzzing. The the guy covered with the most fly-specks gets the job.
So Fox News was inevitable, and "democracy is the means, by which we ensure, we are governed _no_ _better_ than we deserve" (attribution lost).
In my fantasy world we would appoint people almost at random and then decide between death, sanction, retirement, cash bonus, or another term when their term is up. By definition nobody who _wants_ the job of leadership should be allowed to have it.
#3 The idea that the military is better off retaining the idiots who cannot process the implicit order "don't kill, assault, or sabotage your comrades in arms just because you don't like them" is somewhat ridiculous. The threat to good oder in the keep-the-fags-silent camp is that the good-old-real-men will just be forced to act against their cohort and we cannot live without those bad actors.
Disclaimer: I am one o them fags, I was denied entry to the service in the early eighties. They wanted me bad for some classified work, but I knew I wouldn't be able to get/hold the clearance if I lied in the intake. Nice choice that. When I fessed up, they sent me to a shrink. He asked me three questions totaling about 10 words. I gave him three answers totaling 15 words. He wrote like _three_ _pages_ of notes, and I was out. This transaction failed every test of common sense.
Then in the original DADT hearings even some senior general guy with a gay kid was all saying how he would fear for his son's safety, were he allowed to serve, because his well disciplined cadre couldn't be trusted to not turn on the boy. Yes, he knew he could not _trust_ his existing _straight_ contingent.
The gay people are not the threat to cohesion and good order, its the homophones that are the threat.
Might as well say "the men under my command are perfect soldiers as long as you don't give them any orders, or ask them to confront anything more hostile than the P.X." The argument against open service has always been stupid.
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It's a bunch of people who have to accept and send documents to a bunch of backward places like the United States. No other office would be more hounded and pressed by the idiots sending everything from wordstar to Microsoft .docx files.
Given the amount of effort Microsoft makes to make sure that they can use other formats but nobody else can use theirs fully, it is no wonder that the one place where the German government rubs up against the rest of the world the most often would have the most problems avoiding Microsoft contamination.
This is not an indictment of Linux at all, it is further proof that Microsoft secret innards should be considered harmful to all comers.
Interoperability of _Microsoft_ products with all others is _extremely_ low. And training anybody, let alone a bunch of diplomats, exactly how to hop through all the hoops to access a readable version of a .docx file sent from abroad is a non-trivial task.
It is easy to blame the fix (Linux and Open Office et al) for the woes of the common but broken (secret Microsoft document standards) that flood you when you use the fix. And really, while I use Open Office almost exclusively for my own work, it _isn't_ exactly the best piece of software I have ever seen. It is just as quirky and annoying as virtually every other word processor I have ever used. [To date, WordPerfect has been the best word processor I have ever used, but it is dead and there is no pining for the past.]
And scanner support in Linux is not as sane (pun!) as you would hope. This is not a "Linux flaw", its a scanner vendor flaw, as even the good "hp printer drivers" don't include any kind of decent "hp scanner facility" under Linux. And my outstanding Cannon mf9170c at home has no Linux drivers at all so it took non-trivial effort to discover that cups 1.4+ and the generic PCL6 support drivers was the magic combination that _still_ borks up if I put it in the (unnecessary, but you know a diplomat is going to use it) "high quality mode". So the people to blame for bad "Linux printer and scanner driver support" is the manufacturers of the printers and scanners.
In fact the whole "looking for drivers" issue is a red herring. I have spent hundreds of professional man hours looking for Windows drivers for hardware in my lifetime and I am not alone. Every vendor always puts their drivers in odd and bizarre places. And since everybody is non-root on a linux box by default they can't just pull off the normal "cram in everything I can find till something works" techniques people use to get stuff to work under Windows.
In all computing, changing the interface of an implementation is the hardest part. And in international document exchange, that interface is going to be the foreign office of a major government. I am disappointed sure, but they gave it a good run and I would expect this office to fail on the first go.
Changing OS is like quitting smoking. Some failures and restarts are to be expected. But when they start coughing up blood again they'll try quitting again.
As stated in the lead, this is a comedic ploy used my many comedians. Inter-cutting video to mislead into a comic result is done all the time. (Watch Fox "News" entertainment some time.)
The only "rape" here is that some kid's parents didn't get paid and so they complained.
Oh, and the guy is getting raped by the system.
Someone go better arrest the Tosh.0 staff and the daily show etc... oh wait, those kids were properly prostituted to TV by their parents so it's okay.
"Children", "Drugs" and "Terror" are the root passwords to the U.S. Constitution.
instead of windows.
Someday "windows" will be synonymous with "waste" and "evil"... Just saying... Not to troll or anything...
Friends don't let friends open .doc files... .doc files aren't windows, but they have been touched by it...
is this a troll yet... or just a truth...?
In the information age, the modem is mightier than the cable franchise?
Honestly we need to start "backing up the Internet" by restoring the dial-up BBS infrastructure with some hard coper wire.
Also everybody should have references to some safe international DNS roots etc.
I am kind of stunned actually that the pirates havn't gone to sending their wares over the net strongly encrypted and using modem+BBS drop boxen for the key distribution just to ensure the stronger wire tapping law coverage. But thieves are never smart, its part of believing in theft.
Whatever we all come up with to back up and replace the Internet, we must carefully name it something else and ensure we don't use words like "digital" (computers are not actually "digital" [base 10] they are TTL discrete [base 2] technology) so that we can get a fresh go at all the laws that constrain those words. 8-)
I used to live near DC. A presidential motorcade involves snarling the city to a freaking stop sometimes for hours. People stuck in their cars. Motorcycle cops blocking intersections. Fleet of cars. Random circuitous routes. I think direct point-to-point transport in Marine 1 is probably a _huge_ carbon footprint win.
Now how about moving the President in a commercial jet? His security staff and regular staff, and the news outlets that invariably pursue would use up a non-trivial number of the seats (like all of them). If any were left over, would you want to go through the screening to join that flight? And they would have to strip-search the planes for bombs. And don't get me started international flight delays when, say, most or all of the terminals for whichever airports he passed through would be traumatized. I'm pretty sure that Airforce 1 isn't much of a waste in carbon or money or time once you look at the whole picture.
Course he could drive cross country in that motorcade. Yea, that would be interesting. With armed military escort vehicles and disruptions of every city and township passed through or worse, stopped within.
If we lived in a world where the President could hop into a Ford Festia and just drive off safe in his person, then sure the Presidential aircraft would be wasteful.
We don't live in that world.
Funny. Obama has been in office two years, and most of the things hes stuck funding are legacy items that are required to be funded by law. Another big chunk was the bailout, which wasn't exactly optional being a last-moment action of Bush the Lesser et al. and a direct feature of the G.W. leadership in gutting all forms of financial regulation.
Then there was the whole Republican Filibuster Rampage for two years to prevent any meaningful action by the government to undo the G.W. era "tax cuts" ensuring that the whole Republican Borrow and Spend *ahem* fiscal responsibility *ahem* was the only way to keep the government open and functioning.
I also must mention the war in Iraq, which had _nothing_ to do with anything regarding terrorism or valid international policy. Bush, having made a horrific financial boondoggle out of our entire economy under the waving banner of terrorism, where Iraq had _nothing_ to do with international terrorism, we rational analysts can not fairly lay that ongoing cost at Obama's feet. Sure we want out of Iraq, but we do have a moral responsibility to clean up as much of the spilled milk as possible before we go. Plus see the RFR mentioned above for exacerbating contributions to these issues.
Yes, your approbation of Obama, who meanwhile has met something like 84% of his election promises in the first two years of office and largely repaired our international reputation, is a tad misplaced. Perhaps even "convenient self deception" is involved here when you point at the last two years and bemoan the inability of the current administration to undo eight years of legislative, fiscal, and social damage done by the previous administration.
By getting the rich to buy enough to bring the price down. Thats how.
At one point the Ammana Radar Range cost thousands of dollars, now a microwave oven can be had for $150. Same for DVD players and Gawd knows how many other things.
The rest of your post is equally poor in reasoning and understanding.
Emissions reduction, and conversion of the fleet to non-petrol is the point. It isn't about saving you money in the short term. Since we have arguably passed peak oil, and since we will need that oil for plastics and medicine, it is _vital_ that we stop burning it for transportation.
My Prius, for example, is tuned for emissions. That means that the gas mileage is "very good" by default, but there are times when the total system could be better for mileage but instead of laboring the engine it revs the enginge and "saves the extra". That conversion from mechanical to electrical to chemical potential, and its eventual reconverstion from chemical potential to electrical and then to kinetic energy is lossy. Very lossy. But it is "better than" belching up partially burned hydrocarbons from a laboring engine.
Efficiency isn't about your wallet. Neither is greater good. Its about your lungs, and your ability to get medicine and clean water in for the rest of your life.
Besides...
My gas costs more than 3.40 a gallon today.
Everybody knows that the Republican Borrow and Spend technique is the only fiscally responsible choice. Paying down debt is un-American. Only a deadbeat pays principle. And how dare he tax rich people on parity with the poor! The poor exist to make the lives of the rich better! Damn him for creating more jobs in two years than Bush the Lesser created in four, maybe eight. And meeting 84% of his election promises in two years? That's a some sort of Kenyan Konspiracy!
Where are they going to _park_ 1 million cars in, at, or near the white house?
Based on nothing but the odd legal theories being projected against Hotz, I would bet that there is no technical difference between 3.55 and 3.56 and all the actual diffs are in the license agreement.
You know, this is an SCO-esque attempt by SCE (a Japaneese corporation) to conflate its rights to have SCEA (and American LLC) sue you if they don't like you for any purpose, and to have you double-agree that you agree to whatever agreements they want to say you did. (Check groklaw, this one about whatever agreements they say you are bound by bit is in there for real.)
The possibility that this firmware update rewrites the TPM is somewhat unlikely.
You cannot meaningfully use the MAC addresses in a JumpStart kind of situation as you don't know at jump-start creation which adapter will be which in the MAC address sort order, particularly when you are using insert cards.
I use udev, but then I edit the persistent rules it generates to rename my interfaces "intX" and "extX" (internal and external interfaces) for making firewall rules and so on.
The problem is that there is no real "right answer" for naming devices berfore you identify them explicitly.
Oddly enough, once you are part of "a system" (q.v. a network or server farm) the problem can be magically moot. IPV6 will solve most of your internal/external network topology questions once you have established your anchor machines (routers). Explicit naming of media (Volume Labels, LVM names, metadevice names) will solve the media topology issues. etc.
The only "impossible" topology is dynamic USB as the standard doesn't provide any means for tagging, say, which of which serial adapters are connected to what devices. They get ttyUSB(X) names in probed-then-plugged order and there are several semi-universal chips used to connect a large number of devices (touch screens, GPS, raw serial adapters, etc) that all report just the serial chip's vendor and part id's.
All of the solutions that involve implicit tagging by arbitrary value (MAC) or bus topology (PCI bus ID, USB bus ID, SCSI bus LUN, etc) will have just as many drawbacks as arbitrary naming, but they won't seem to have those drawbacks until after they get instituted as policy and _then_ they bite you.
Bad information, especially when it is only occasionally bad, is always worse than no information.
Has been relevant only since the discovery of oil. Saudi Arabia has passed peak oil, and so has passed peak relevancy. When they can no longer afford the pyramid scheme that is their economy, their state will collapse back on itself instantly.
Remember that the House of Saud has been promising it's people that Trickle Down Economics will pay off for the little guy for like 50 years. Just another year or two and everybody in the country will be rich etc. We know how exactly what trickles down in that scheme.
Right now the extremists can afford to look abroad and say our presence in their lives is the root of their problems. In thirty years or so we will stop having any presence in their lives. Between now and then, they will continue to try to make us go away, and we will have to play along with their various national agendas. But we are their Jews as much as the actual Jews are their Jews. We are someone to blame for how the dream of oil has not made daily life better. We also back Israel because it is the only actually stable state in the region. We will need some sort of foot-hold from which to deal with that mess when the oil runs out. For a brief period of time there will be a lot of arms and a lot of angry people. Those two will cancel each other out left to their own.
The only reason the west supports the House of Saud is because they can keep the country together and functioning well enough to keep the oil flowing. The reason the individual members of the House of Saud invest outside their own country so heavily is because some of them are not so dumb.
But really, once the sand and oil cocktail is just sand again, and now that we no longer really have to worry about the mid-east waterways for the well-being of Europe, the whole area is a write-off. Nobody needs that sand.
Were the House of Saud actually smart in the general sense they would have modernized their country and they would already be establishing solar and bio-fuel infrastructure. Even if the technology _sucks_ relatively, they own a huge expanse of unoccupied dry land under cloudless sky at or near the equator. Sure-as-shootin someone will solve the solar-to-storage problem sooner or later. Then Saud could be selling us its sunlight energy.
But they'll collapse first, into a nice and irrelevant pile of sand and dust.
Just human fetal stem cells suspended in an aqueous solution of war-orphan's tears and finely shredded mortgage backed securities.
Most GPL violations are solved with a quick appology and direct remediation of the violation. Typically the violation is the failure to disclose source and such disclosure then happens. Damaged or headers are not uncommon, and in case of individual stupidity (not every guy checking stuff into version control is a jet-fuel genius) or honest mistake (not every guy checking stuff into version control is fully versed in copyright law), then reasonable people just go "eh, dude, that needs to be fixed" and then someone else replies "ok, cool, I'll fix that".
So the change of license was wrong, and needs to be fixed. Neither license is particularly incompatible with the other. Reasonable people, finding an issue _this_ minor are expected to act reasonably.
Of course Orace is involved so that's expecting rather a lot.
For the most part, if the actual complaint was this mis-licensing, between typical and reasonable GPL entities, then there would have been a check-in with the corrected headers.
So no matter what the other facts may be, the damage threshold is nascent to non-existent, and the "reasonable behavior" test has not been met by Oracle.
This whole thing is Oracle FUD to damage Android for no apparent reason than the fact that Oracle doest that kind of thing.
I have worked in shops using Microsoft code bases where the shop has paid for a massive fix, only to have the next release of windows restore the error and then Microsoft charged us (admittedly less) for the new windows with the old fix.
And it _was_ a fix.
Go ahead and wander through the microsoft knowledge base and look for all the fixes that aren't available to the general public.
It's not that no possible developer of proprietary code can pleas a customer. Its that if ANY developer of PROPRIETARY CODE decides NOT TO PLEASE YOU then you are farked.
See it's not that hard to see the distinction between "having a choice" and "not having a choice". It this case the choice to fix things the vendor doesn't care to.
Any small number of "that's not how I run _my_ business" anecdotes don't change the measurable fact that, the proven fact, that if I bought your product, whatever it may be, I wouldn't be able to do anything to it that you didn't _let_ me do, including fixing on-the-spot a critical flaw that brings my operation to a halt while you are off on vacation or whatever.
As for your "stunned silence", you really don't understand language do you? you cannot enunciate silence without putting the lie to your "silence".
Plus you must be new to slashdot if you think this isn't _exactly_ the forum for making war-related digressions in the name of metaphor. (I am 35.4 MILLION user id numbers senior to you here, so I think I know how this forum works, thank you very much...8-)
Yes, having found a problem, and then found a solution you have to maintain or share that solution. The horrors!
I non-open code you have the choice of paying potentially millions of dollars to get a fix from the vendor, and having paid that sum, you receive one fix once, with no promise that your fix will become part of the product line's subsequent release. So when that subsequent release is made and it _doesn't_ have your fix, you get to pay all that money _again_ even though they already know the problem and solution. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.
With open source you don't have to "fork" just to retain the patch and reapply it, usually with virtually no effort since, if someone is working on the code you patched, they likely used your fix, something like your fix, or didn't touch the lines you patched in any meaningful way.
I have had a kernel patch to "smarten up" termios for years. I submitted it and it was rejected for reasons like "we are about to change that code anyway" and "someone might have written code that _uses_ the fact that you can end up blocking on a one-byte read, waiting for one byte to be received, despite the fact that there is more than one byte in the buffer".
With every subsequent release of the kernel I just apply the patch and move on. I didn't "fork the kernel" etc. Nothing ever so daunting.
It is an obvious truth that exploring an option and making use of an opportunity is _always_ more effort and "clear expense" then just throwing up ones hands and living with no choice in the matter.
The costs of surrender are always hidden, prorated, long term. [Ask the French, their defense against Germany was sabatoged, as it always was, by Belgium's habit of buckling like a belt when threatened no matter how much the promised to do their part as a key point in the defense of europe. Nobody blames Belgium for being the useless twits they always are, but to this day France takes a load of shit for their surrender once their entire north flank went for strudel.]
Agree with Microsoft? I suggest you read up on "Plays4Sure"... and every single "microsoft preferred partner" in history.
Its okay to say Pigfarker here, we are on the cable internet...
with business concerns in mind but without concern to the citizenry!
Regulatory Capture of the FCC is kind of a given at this point.
The Worshipers of the Grand Free Market (except where the tariffs and controls prevent others from competing with the Grand Free Established and Entrenched) are full force and full on in genesis of this decay.
Sure the FCC makes stupid token actions in terms of the indecency of seeing aging female nipple or any male appendage over the airwaves to keep the proles feeling "protected" from the evils of the flesh (and coincidentally bolstering the closed and captured pay-per-view and [ahem] "premium-package providers" in the cash), but beyond that token public good with its fully coincidental cash windfall to the cable companies, it should surprise nobody that the FCC demonstrates purient action in favor of its corporate owners.
No need for a conspiracy theory here. Money talks, unfunded speech doesn't even get a "protest zone" for the President of the United States.
Especially when that causes the key to get stuck in the lock, or even break off... I only go to good key cutters if I want keys made without errors.
System Subverters worry about system subversion obsessively, just as nobody is as paranoid about being stolen from as a thief.
When I find myself working for a person who is repeatedly asking how "we" are going to make sure that (some guy) doesn't have too much power I immediately ask two questions: (1) Does (some guy) already have too much power that he is apparently ready to misuse [kinda common] so obviously that he has already implicitly threatened the good function of the office; and (2) is the person asking the question engaged in personal entrenchment and bad dealing to a degree that they are expressing the worry that others are able to do to them what they are already doing to others [far more common that item 1].
Both conditions are toxic. The question itself is a warning sign of bad things to come.
A good system admin will have _already_ established some kind of key escrow and should already be training his replacement by the end of day one on the job. That's because a good system administrator knows that he doesn't want to be called at all hours of the day and night for pointless tasks, nor does he want to be so indefensible that he will never be able to advance out of his current position.
There are plenty of acceptable system admins out there who don't have these personal policies, and that isn't that bad.
But when your boss doesn't trust, that is usually a sign that your boss is not worthy of trust himself. This isn't always the case, but it is the safest bet to make.
Besides, "disempowring" users or admins _never_ really works. It just leads to multiplied consequences. Set up a mail retention policy that discards mail after ninety days? You'll find people saved their mail all over the place by dragging it out of the mail system. Lock down your USB ports and you will get things emailed will-he nill-he and find burnt CDs everywhere. Try to lock out your administrators and they will spread undocumented hacks all through your system. All this just so these people can meet the minimum requirements of their jobs.
"The more you tighten your grip, the more systems will slip through your fingers" -- This is a truth, not just a Star Wars quote.
_hardware_ manufactures who think they want to be in the _software_ maintenance market.
The difference between calling an API to render color fast, and knowing that cramming a 0x721 into a register at 0x3392 to render color fast isn't particularly a hemorrhaging of 'intellectual property'.
Granted, it does let us know where the API is "cheating".
So while the example of one byte in one register is reductio ad absurdem, and the process is more about laying out memory buffers and such, who cares. Sure the manufactures may be worried about nock-off hardware, but that hardware almost certainly be nock-off quality. Think of all the SoundBlaster knock offs that have ever been made. Compare that to Creative's bottom line. Those third party cards, which are _still_ on the market made SoundBlaster a universal name. Creative has been reclined upon those laurels for years now.
It is horrifically stupid on the part of the hardware manufacturers to be palying so close to the vest. They should _want_ everybody scrambling to be compatible with _their_ hardware interface, making them the leader that the market has to chase.
First big name out of the gate with a fully open graphics hardware platform would own the segment anew for years.
But "companies" have no smarts and that "isn't the way (that) business is done" so here we languish on in a half-realized market.
(As for the "getting drivers" thing I have spent hundreds of hours of my professional and personal career "getting drivers" for windows machines. Only the "you'll damn well eat what we serve you" hardware platforms like Apple can remove the quest for drivers. And woe betide you if you want to use old gear from those guys. So the whole plaintive "waah, I had to look for drivers" complaint rings a little false.)
(The subject is the point)
Technical Notes:
A union of people for the good of the people is the definition of socialism. The USA was formed as a socialist nation. As in We the People ... establish justice ... domestic tranquility ... common defense ... general welfare ... ourselves and our posterity...
A union of people for the good of the Nation/State is "National Socialism" and is what we fought against in world war II. If you have ever said "my country, right or wrong" you were being un-american as you were (at the risk of Goodwining myself) practicing National Socialism.
A union of the people for the good of the bureaucracy is Soviet Socialism, which is what "the cold war" was about.
Fascism is a belief or _worship_ of the state as divine power of right. It typically requires uniformity of behavior in some areas the state has deemed universally desirable, and an individual conformity in the details by individual. It is National Socialism raised to a near religion. It is "father knows best".
So anybody who complains about Socialist Policies or Polities in U.S. actions or positions failed "U.S. Constitution 101".
Sadly none of our political options available in this country are in line with the countries inherently socialist ideals. The Socialist parties are either National Socialist, or Fascist. The libertarians are psudo-anarchists and anti-socialists with no understanding of the economies of scale that make their life possible [stupid-idealist to-the-right]. Both the Republicans and Democrats are Corporatist and Paternalist (e.g. National Socialist to Proto-Fascists ["government knows best"] underpinning ["money talks" popularism]). Communists claim to believe in no government at all (in theory) which would work just great if there were no humans involved.
Now if we could get _all_ the closet republicans out of the Democratic party, and then remove "person-hood" from corporations, and then prevent "popular elections" and substitute in "topical elections" (such as requiring people to vote for a platform, with no personal knowledge of who would then take the office, only knowledge that that person wrote and holds to particular positions), or some other pie-in-sky transaction like that...
_Then_ we can have government of, by, and for the people.
Basically we need a president that has no power to "front for us" and a body governmental that is perhaps appointed at random (drafted, as in via the draft, from the roles of educational graduation), paid at shite wages, and given orders by topical ballot (not by "polling" but by initiative). Basically the entire legislative branch should be a paramilitary organization that cannot be joined by choice, only by draft.
At that point you start getting _close_ to what is needed. But in essence anybody who wants public office should be banned from public office.
When we describe a social system that has collapsed into meaningless clique reenforcement we say that it has just become a "popularity contest."
The cleche of that derision makes it no less true. Our political system, with its popular media basis and its easy sound-bytes, is the very definition of a popularity contest.
Unfortunately good leaders are rarely popular _before_ they lead. Many good leaders become popular as they retire because they were "tough but fair" etc. Our cart is before our horse here.
Our disneyesque imagineers manufacture the sock-puppet most likely to attract files, and make sure there is enough excrement around to keep the flies feeding and buzzing. The the guy covered with the most fly-specks gets the job.
So Fox News was inevitable, and "democracy is the means, by which we ensure, we are governed _no_ _better_ than we deserve" (attribution lost).
In my fantasy world we would appoint people almost at random and then decide between death, sanction, retirement, cash bonus, or another term when their term is up. By definition nobody who _wants_ the job of leadership should be allowed to have it.
#3 The idea that the military is better off retaining the idiots who cannot process the implicit order "don't kill, assault, or sabotage your comrades in arms just because you don't like them" is somewhat ridiculous. The threat to good oder in the keep-the-fags-silent camp is that the good-old-real-men will just be forced to act against their cohort and we cannot live without those bad actors.
Disclaimer: I am one o them fags, I was denied entry to the service in the early eighties. They wanted me bad for some classified work, but I knew I wouldn't be able to get/hold the clearance if I lied in the intake. Nice choice that. When I fessed up, they sent me to a shrink. He asked me three questions totaling about 10 words. I gave him three answers totaling 15 words. He wrote like _three_ _pages_ of notes, and I was out. This transaction failed every test of common sense.
Then in the original DADT hearings even some senior general guy with a gay kid was all saying how he would fear for his son's safety, were he allowed to serve, because his well disciplined cadre couldn't be trusted to not turn on the boy. Yes, he knew he could not _trust_ his existing _straight_ contingent.
The gay people are not the threat to cohesion and good order, its the homophones that are the threat.
Might as well say "the men under my command are perfect soldiers as long as you don't give them any orders, or ask them to confront anything more hostile than the P.X." The argument against open service has always been stupid.