It's more stable, and less buggy. any bugs or instability is at least predictable, unhidden, and fairly easily correctable.
"the work I need to do" doesn't revolve around "productivity" tools. I'm a technical person, and my tasks resolve around getting things done specifically with computers. having native tools such as bash, perl, and the standard unix utilities (as opposed to something like cygwin) is a necessity for such tasks.
things 'just work'. That doesn't mean that things work out of the box, necessarily. It means they work in a predictable manner. I don't consider stupid quirks (for example) such as losing my entire profile because the profile server is down as predictable.
I prefer a componentized, modular operating system design.
I like the academic nature of open source, where scratching an itch is much easier, as I can pull stuff from multiple projects.
I think it's rediculous to pay such copious amounts of money for base functionality of my hardware (ie, the OS).
the flexibility: nothing in the windows world rivals the obscene functionality and flexibility of ssh, bash, pipes, or any other number of UNIX-y things. maybe longhorn will be different, but... it still won't be unix.
the empowerment: unlike the corporate software environment, users have just as much ability to understand how a software package as the person that wrote it (reasonably speaking). this empowers users, allowing administrators to be more than simple "technicians", and to have actual creative and technical control over the machines they administer.
the users/culture: this ties in with "empowerment" - the users are clueful overall. It makes getting help for technical problems easier. there is a wonderful community which can only be coroded by the mainstreaming of linux: the Average User Quality Quotient will degrade the more hype and the easier linux is to migrate to 100%.
Can you back that up with at least a little itemizeation? Because I know for sure that I could get a full wireless ISP for a given area + 40 systems for well under $1 million (largely dependent on the area, but yeah, within reason). If people can start up wireless ISPs for a pitance, I see no reason why it would take this much money unless someone's milking the poor SOBs.
What are you going to do to try and block the material which the proprietors will find offensive? Porn, and what else have you. This is important, as you can bet your bottom dollar on the fact that once someone gets caught surfing porn, they're going to want you to 'fix the problem'. You know as well as I do that this isn't reasonably possible.
(That is, unless the proprietor is the one surfing porn...)
Actually, there are quite a few people that claim we're evolving forward into higher life forms. Most of them call themselves "evolutionists" or more coloquially, "scientists".
Yes, but what about the 'mass burial pit' they found at the bottom of what was then a nearby river? The remains there indicated radiation as well, and it's postulated that the people ran from the city to cool their skin.
In my mind, MS has always been akin to the Japanese market in terms of "innovation". They don't make anything conceptually new, but they sure as hell improve on (in some way or another) other people's ideas and make them profitable. One of those improvements (at least if you're not sitting on the Linux bench) is a very integrated operating environment. If there's one thing MS has done, that is it: integration. OS X doesn't seem to have gotten that far along in terms of integration yet, even, and KDE only has recently.
I made this comment elsewhere on this thread, but: google about for the Minoan island Thera. It shows strong evidence that points towards the advanced trade civilization of Atlantis.
There very well might have been an ancient civilization that wiped itself out with nukes.
There's a lot of writing within one of the Indian (Hindu?) holy books that tells of gods flying in air ships, firing thunder and other such terrifying weapons at each other. Sorry, I can't find anything in my bookmarks, or recall anything specific. However, there is evidence that there were nukes back then in india: a city was found irradiated and destroyed from 8,000 years ago.
Quite fascinating, as it totally destroys our conceptions of the past. If you ask me, we're quite pompous to assume that we're evolving to be more intelligent as time goes forward, just because we don't see evidence of the ancients being as advanced as we are (ie, silicon-based electronics and other machinery). That means little - they could have been more advanced spiritually, temporally, with medicine, or any other number of things. There is evidence that ancients accomplished many great, amazing scientific and engineering feats, most of which we have little if no explanation for (the Pyrimids, some artifacts found in China, many various ruins, Stonehenge, etc.)
In 50 years, where are they going to find someone that knows how to use those tools? In 50 years, anyone with any sort of link to such technologies is likely going to be as dead and rotting for at least a couple years - or droolin creamed spinach in a retirement home.
Computer science and programming might be skillsets, but there's only so much that a skillset will do for you. An auto mechanic from the 1950's would shit himself if he had to deal with the horror that is modern autos due to the fact that there are so many electronics.
Think back: just 20 years ago, computers were about as powerful as your average modern-day pocket calculator or watch. Just 20 years ago. Things have gotten both many times more complex (hardware and software design) and much more simplistic (user interfaces) in that time. In 50 years, might programming not be not much more than a click-and-drag process? I have no doubt that it will be significantly more simplistic, to say the least. And I doubt there will be as many programmers, either, let alone ones with any significant hardware experience. Nowadays it's much more than impractical to consider soddering something onto your motherboard. 20 years ago, it was expected. I personally think we'll see the same kind of complexity evolution in the next 50.
There are "a lot of supposed sites for Atlantis. I would have to say this is one of the least faith inspiring "finding" I've seen.
Mythology being quite entertaining to me, I've read of most of the supposed sites. There is an island called Thera, located off the coast of Crete. It seems to me that if anything found so far is the fabled Atlantis, this is it. Archological digs show that they had both hot and cold running water, as well as a very advanced trade. Prior to the erruption, there was a circular cove around the island. There are significant enough similarities between Plato's Atlantis and Thera for there to be a very convincing arguement for this site. The disaster of the volcanic erruption would fit the timeframe of the other legends surrounding the survivors of Atlantis - for instance, the Spanish conquistadors that slayed the white-skinned men on the northwestern coast of Africa that claimed to be from such a society (I think? my memory is sketchy.)
I suspect people aren't making conclusive claims about Thera being Atlantis yet because there simply aren't enough interesting historical mysteries to get funding for. Atlantis is a pearl in almost everyone's eyes, thus people keep searching - finding various other interesting things - in the name of searching for Atlantis.
After all, once you've found all the easter eggs that they said there were, you're not going to want to keep looking, as it's not likely you'll find anything - or so you think.
Thus, why it would make sense for a SF-oriented geek to pick a password like, "S0sa_hI7", for instance.:)
It successfully combats both social engineering by excentricity, and a quick dictionary crack. Granted, it's still 'l33tspeak', but knowing which characters were l33ted will not be something terribly easy to guess.
Until there is something that is as scaleable and as practical as a password that works better on the security front, I think we'll be using passwords.
Cracking passwords requires access to the system's password file.
If someone has gotten that far into your system, you're already fucked. Your security measures have failed.
No, the more important thing is that someone never gets into the system in the first place. Thus, this password scheme would work, as the word of the day is guessable - such passwords are not guessable unless you know the person well, and know their password naming scheme (everyone has one) - and even then it would take some time.
I encourage people to use mixed l33tspeak/alphanumeric mnemonics with a special character or two, at the least. Random is better, as it's more immune to the "get to know a person and their excentricity" methodology attack. I'd suspect that excentric/odd folks are vulnerable to such social engineering, as they're more likely to have a pattern of behavior that is predictable (I know a person or two like this).
Same thing for me, to a large degree. I know all my passwords by heart, and I no longer think about the key combination. There's been a time or two when I've had to do remote phone admin, and I couldn't recall the passwords for the life of me until I closed my eyes and air-typed them out.
Really, I don't see how this memory process is any different than remembering something like, "Right click on desktop, go to Properties. Click on the Display tab. Go to "Advanced"...." or such. Or for that matter, memorizing directions to a meeting place you've never been to before, and being able to recall the directions to get there. It doesn't seem too secure to me.
It would seem that the batteries in these rovers have lasted much longer than was originally expected - in a matter of maginitude.
Does anyone know what the science might be behind the battery longetivity? To me, the science of that is equally, if not more, interesting than what might be on the planet itself.
Government investment in open source development will accelerate innovation. However, increased investment should be in true open source, open source without any stipulations, other than attribution and copyright notification, not hybrid source.
"Hybrid source code" is a phrase coined by former Tocqueville Chairman Gregory Fossedal. The term refers to any product with a license that attempts to mix free and proprietary source code at the same time.
If you can deal with working full time plus full-time college, sure, go for it unless you've got a rational, family-oriented employer.
Otherwise, forget it. Family is more important than work, and if you can't give your child time, you shouldn't have one.
On the other hand: having a child is awesome. I love my son to death. You will find yourself making time for them (possibly by not sleeping). It might lead to burnout, but the child will energize your spirits at the same time.
My mother spends the lion's share of her day reading journals and other such information on the topic of living a healthy, natural life, and bodily cleansing. There's a lot of information out there on it.
Still, this should be a very big concern for anyone that's heavily into computers and has young children.
It might take some odd 100+ cans of soda with saccarine to get cancer, but:
- What about the flavor enhancers, dyes, preservatives, and other such synthetic 'foods' which we eat daily? - What about the horemones, pesticides, and animal drugs which we eat whenever we consume meat? - What about the pesticides we eat whenever we consume even non-processed fruits? - What about the polution from combusted petrolium? - What about the mercury that is now all-too-present in nearly all fish? - What about the chlorine and other toxins added to our drinking water? - What about the large amounts of radiation that now bombard us from the sun, due to canopy depletion? - What about the miriad of toxins in your average household cleaner, paint, or other such off-the-shelf can? - What about the millions of pounds of other air or water-born chemicals which are put out by industry every year? - There are many, many, many more...
Face it. There are a lot of factor's in today's modern world which lead to getting cancer. It's why there is such a high instnace of cancer in the world today.
I'd think that in 20 years, cancer incidence will be a lot higher - almost to epedemic proportions. Then maybe the medical industry will stop irradiating people to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars, and stop sitting on the various actual cures which have been experimented with.
Until then, we'll just have to try and eat healthily, exercise, and try and avoid contact with the nastier elements.
This makes no economic sense for anyone except for the people selling software.
Software is the cheapest thing to produce in terms of what needs to go into it physically besides R&D. People have to pay whatever (artificially set) price the company sets, as without software, hardware is just a large paper weight.
Hardware, on the other hand, is the more expensive side of the equation: there's only so much profit margin available, as people are only willing to pay a certian amount.
I can see people like him and BG saying "hardware will be free" because that's what they want to see - then there will be more money available for software licenses. This is completely impractical until the massive investment required simply to fabricate hardware is negligible - in other words, it's unlikely to happen anytime within the next 10 years.
If anything, market trends are going the other way entirely. I'm not sure why Sun would be that concerned - they've traditionally had some incredible hardware - but MS has everything to lose in a commodity market.
Sun best stick to their recently-stated purpose of having an Apple-like setup, where they sell the hardware and the OS sales. The OS in use is insignificant, really, IMO - they just need something that works well on their hardware. That might be their OS, and it might be Linux.
Yes, believe it or not, at one point your average user was at least marginally tech savvy.
That point in time was somewhere around 1985, and possibly on upwards to the early to mid 1990's. Not so, since Windows became synonymous with PC, and the Internet began to define personal computing.
Best suggestion: don't be a victim by living in fear. If you feel afraid, you will look it, and thus you will be vulnerable to attack.
I'd suggest getting a handgun for protection, but: it'd be stupid to pull a gun for something so incredibly un-threatening to your life. Yes, I'd recommend getting a gun as an additional accessory, but I would not suggest it be gotten for such "protection" purposes.
Instead, I'd recommend doing the following as a preemptive protection: 1) don't carry so much shit around. Do you really need a laptop and a PDA all the time? Truely, unplug the ipod sometime and pay attention to the world aorund you, for fuck's sake. 2) seriously, ditch the ipod. You're creating a hazzard for those around you by not paying full attention to your environment, and the ipod alone is the largest incentive for someone to mug you, as it's got a tremendous resale value and is easy to "lose" in the market - as opposed to a laptop, which has a lot of identifying information that crooks aren't likely to know all about. on the other hand, switching to a black earbud might have been enough, provided the ipod is thoroughly concealed. after all, undercover cops, detectives, and any other number of law enforcement agents tend to have black earbuds in at any given time, so that should scare them off. 3) (I'm saying this, thinking that the ipod only has a mono headphone, as opposed to two for stereo - if it's stereo, it's not likely to work as well. if that's the case, get a mono earbud, as then you'll be a little bit more alert and aware of your environment, which will help you not be unaware and walk into a bad situation) 4) Don't carry the laptop around in a laptop bag. Don't. Don't. Don't. This really should be quite obvious - keep the laptop in a padded backpack. There are backpacks now made specifically for this purpose. Backpacks are also a lot easier to tote around than those awkward laptop bags. 5) Work out. Eat healthy. If you're a fat slob, you're more likely to be mugged because you're more likely to be a a sluggish ball of lard, unable to fight back: ie, a victim. Get in shape and have some self respect. 5) wear baggy clothes to make yourself look more bulky than you are if you're a skinny beanpole geek
But basically: don't make yourself look like a victim. Having an ipod is a pretty good sign that you'd be a good, docile victim.
for those saying that a brit should've been picked for the screen writer: bullshit.
genius is indiscriminate, and british cultural humour is not only "gotten" by brits, as the last 20-some years of Monty Pyton fandom in the US has demonstrated. Nor are brits the only ones that can create such humour.
Furthermore, kirkpatrick said he didn't even make all that many changes, just organized it so it would fit the film format (ie, so that the action wouldn't be crouded at one end of the film, with the other 3/4ths of it boring as fuck).
I don't know about anyone else thought about Chicken Run, but I thought it was very similar in style to Wallace and Grommit. Are not the writers/makers of W&G british? (I personally thought Chicken Run was more fun and humorous overall, but what do I know. I'm a stupid American, right? bigots.)
Huh. I've never seen that happen. Only thing I've seen happen when the system runs out of memory (in this case RAM + swap) was a hard freeze that sysreq didn't fix.
I believe the same was the case -swap, though I could be mistaken.
Slashdot Mirror
free as in freedom
It's more stable, and less buggy. any bugs or instability is at least predictable, unhidden, and fairly easily correctable.
"the work I need to do" doesn't revolve around "productivity" tools. I'm a technical person, and my tasks resolve around getting things done specifically with computers. having native tools such as bash, perl, and the standard unix utilities (as opposed to something like cygwin) is a necessity for such tasks.
things 'just work'. That doesn't mean that things work out of the box, necessarily. It means they work in a predictable manner. I don't consider stupid quirks (for example) such as losing my entire profile because the profile server is down as predictable.
I prefer a componentized, modular operating system design.
I like the academic nature of open source, where scratching an itch is much easier, as I can pull stuff from multiple projects.
I think it's rediculous to pay such copious amounts of money for base functionality of my hardware (ie, the OS).
the flexibility: nothing in the windows world rivals the obscene functionality and flexibility of ssh, bash, pipes, or any other number of UNIX-y things. maybe longhorn will be different, but... it still won't be unix.
the empowerment: unlike the corporate software environment, users have just as much ability to understand how a software package as the person that wrote it (reasonably speaking). this empowers users, allowing administrators to be more than simple "technicians", and to have actual creative and technical control over the machines they administer.
the users/culture: this ties in with "empowerment" - the users are clueful overall. It makes getting help for technical problems easier. there is a wonderful community which can only be coroded by the mainstreaming of linux: the Average User Quality Quotient will degrade the more hype and the easier linux is to migrate to 100%.
Sir, your sig is the funniest thing I've seen in a long time on slashdot. :P
Can you back that up with at least a little itemizeation? Because I know for sure that I could get a full wireless ISP for a given area + 40 systems for well under $1 million (largely dependent on the area, but yeah, within reason). If people can start up wireless ISPs for a pitance, I see no reason why it would take this much money unless someone's milking the poor SOBs.
This is, as you stated, a Christian coffee house.
What are you going to do to try and block the material which the proprietors will find offensive? Porn, and what else have you. This is important, as you can bet your bottom dollar on the fact that once someone gets caught surfing porn, they're going to want you to 'fix the problem'. You know as well as I do that this isn't reasonably possible.
(That is, unless the proprietor is the one surfing porn...)
Har har.
Actually, there are quite a few people that claim we're evolving forward into higher life forms. Most of them call themselves "evolutionists" or more coloquially, "scientists".
Yes, but what about the 'mass burial pit' they found at the bottom of what was then a nearby river? The remains there indicated radiation as well, and it's postulated that the people ran from the city to cool their skin.
In my mind, MS has always been akin to the Japanese market in terms of "innovation". They don't make anything conceptually new, but they sure as hell improve on (in some way or another) other people's ideas and make them profitable. One of those improvements (at least if you're not sitting on the Linux bench) is a very integrated operating environment. If there's one thing MS has done, that is it: integration. OS X doesn't seem to have gotten that far along in terms of integration yet, even, and KDE only has recently.
I made this comment elsewhere on this thread, but: google about for the Minoan island Thera. It shows strong evidence that points towards the advanced trade civilization of Atlantis.
There very well might have been an ancient civilization that wiped itself out with nukes.
There's a lot of writing within one of the Indian (Hindu?) holy books that tells of gods flying in air ships, firing thunder and other such terrifying weapons at each other. Sorry, I can't find anything in my bookmarks, or recall anything specific. However, there is evidence that there were nukes back then in india: a city was found irradiated and destroyed from 8,000 years ago.
Quite fascinating, as it totally destroys our conceptions of the past. If you ask me, we're quite pompous to assume that we're evolving to be more intelligent as time goes forward, just because we don't see evidence of the ancients being as advanced as we are (ie, silicon-based electronics and other machinery). That means little - they could have been more advanced spiritually, temporally, with medicine, or any other number of things. There is evidence that ancients accomplished many great, amazing scientific and engineering feats, most of which we have little if no explanation for (the Pyrimids, some artifacts found in China, many various ruins, Stonehenge, etc.)
In 50 years, where are they going to find someone that knows how to use those tools? In 50 years, anyone with any sort of link to such technologies is likely going to be as dead and rotting for at least a couple years - or droolin creamed spinach in a retirement home.
Computer science and programming might be skillsets, but there's only so much that a skillset will do for you. An auto mechanic from the 1950's would shit himself if he had to deal with the horror that is modern autos due to the fact that there are so many electronics.
Think back: just 20 years ago, computers were about as powerful as your average modern-day pocket calculator or watch. Just 20 years ago. Things have gotten both many times more complex (hardware and software design) and much more simplistic (user interfaces) in that time. In 50 years, might programming not be not much more than a click-and-drag process? I have no doubt that it will be significantly more simplistic, to say the least. And I doubt there will be as many programmers, either, let alone ones with any significant hardware experience. Nowadays it's much more than impractical to consider soddering something onto your motherboard. 20 years ago, it was expected. I personally think we'll see the same kind of complexity evolution in the next 50.
There are "a lot of supposed sites for Atlantis. I would have to say this is one of the least faith inspiring "finding" I've seen.
Mythology being quite entertaining to me, I've read of most of the supposed sites. There is an island called Thera, located off the coast of Crete. It seems to me that if anything found so far is the fabled Atlantis, this is it. Archological digs show that they had both hot and cold running water, as well as a very advanced trade. Prior to the erruption, there was a circular cove around the island. There are significant enough similarities between Plato's Atlantis and Thera for there to be a very convincing arguement for this site. The disaster of the volcanic erruption would fit the timeframe of the other legends surrounding the survivors of Atlantis - for instance, the Spanish conquistadors that slayed the white-skinned men on the northwestern coast of Africa that claimed to be from such a society (I think? my memory is sketchy.)
I suspect people aren't making conclusive claims about Thera being Atlantis yet because there simply aren't enough interesting historical mysteries to get funding for. Atlantis is a pearl in almost everyone's eyes, thus people keep searching - finding various other interesting things - in the name of searching for Atlantis.
After all, once you've found all the easter eggs that they said there were, you're not going to want to keep looking, as it's not likely you'll find anything - or so you think.
Thus, why it would make sense for a SF-oriented geek to pick a password like, "S0sa_hI7", for instance. :)
It successfully combats both social engineering by excentricity, and a quick dictionary crack. Granted, it's still 'l33tspeak', but knowing which characters were l33ted will not be something terribly easy to guess.
Until there is something that is as scaleable and as practical as a password that works better on the security front, I think we'll be using passwords.
Cracking passwords requires access to the system's password file.
If someone has gotten that far into your system, you're already fucked. Your security measures have failed.
No, the more important thing is that someone never gets into the system in the first place. Thus, this password scheme would work, as the word of the day is guessable - such passwords are not guessable unless you know the person well, and know their password naming scheme (everyone has one) - and even then it would take some time.
I encourage people to use mixed l33tspeak/alphanumeric mnemonics with a special character or two, at the least. Random is better, as it's more immune to the "get to know a person and their excentricity" methodology attack. I'd suspect that excentric/odd folks are vulnerable to such social engineering, as they're more likely to have a pattern of behavior that is predictable (I know a person or two like this).
Same thing for me, to a large degree. I know all my passwords by heart, and I no longer think about the key combination. There's been a time or two when I've had to do remote phone admin, and I couldn't recall the passwords for the life of me until I closed my eyes and air-typed them out.
Really, I don't see how this memory process is any different than remembering something like, "Right click on desktop, go to Properties. Click on the Display tab. Go to "Advanced"...." or such. Or for that matter, memorizing directions to a meeting place you've never been to before, and being able to recall the directions to get there. It doesn't seem too secure to me.
It would seem that the batteries in these rovers have lasted much longer than was originally expected - in a matter of maginitude.
Does anyone know what the science might be behind the battery longetivity? To me, the science of that is equally, if not more, interesting than what might be on the planet itself.
Government investment in open source development will accelerate innovation. However, increased investment should be in true open source, open source without any stipulations, other than attribution and copyright notification, not hybrid source.
"Hybrid source code" is a phrase coined by former Tocqueville Chairman Gregory Fossedal. The term refers to any product with a license that attempts to mix free and proprietary source code at the same time.
Gee, I wonder where he gets his information. Obviously this is a verifiable source of unbiased journalistic excellence!
If you can deal with working full time plus full-time college, sure, go for it unless you've got a rational, family-oriented employer.
Otherwise, forget it. Family is more important than work, and if you can't give your child time, you shouldn't have one.
On the other hand: having a child is awesome. I love my son to death. You will find yourself making time for them (possibly by not sleeping). It might lead to burnout, but the child will energize your spirits at the same time.
It is apparently possible to cleanse the body of such toxins.
My mother spends the lion's share of her day reading journals and other such information on the topic of living a healthy, natural life, and bodily cleansing. There's a lot of information out there on it.
Still, this should be a very big concern for anyone that's heavily into computers and has young children.
It might take some odd 100+ cans of soda with saccarine to get cancer, but:
- What about the flavor enhancers, dyes, preservatives, and other such synthetic 'foods' which we eat daily?
- What about the horemones, pesticides, and animal drugs which we eat whenever we consume meat?
- What about the pesticides we eat whenever we consume even non-processed fruits?
- What about the polution from combusted petrolium?
- What about the mercury that is now all-too-present in nearly all fish?
- What about the chlorine and other toxins added to our drinking water?
- What about the large amounts of radiation that now bombard us from the sun, due to canopy depletion?
- What about the miriad of toxins in your average household cleaner, paint, or other such off-the-shelf can?
- What about the millions of pounds of other air or water-born chemicals which are put out by industry every year?
- There are many, many, many more...
Face it. There are a lot of factor's in today's modern world which lead to getting cancer. It's why there is such a high instnace of cancer in the world today.
I'd think that in 20 years, cancer incidence will be a lot higher - almost to epedemic proportions. Then maybe the medical industry will stop irradiating people to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars, and stop sitting on the various actual cures which have been experimented with.
Until then, we'll just have to try and eat healthily, exercise, and try and avoid contact with the nastier elements.
Does this require an obligatory slashdot kudos of:
"Anime is dying!"
"In Soviet Russia, anime fragments YOU!"
Or something else?
* Caimlas misses the old trolls (OOG)
This makes no economic sense for anyone except for the people selling software.
Software is the cheapest thing to produce in terms of what needs to go into it physically besides R&D. People have to pay whatever (artificially set) price the company sets, as without software, hardware is just a large paper weight.
Hardware, on the other hand, is the more expensive side of the equation: there's only so much profit margin available, as people are only willing to pay a certian amount.
I can see people like him and BG saying "hardware will be free" because that's what they want to see - then there will be more money available for software licenses. This is completely impractical until the massive investment required simply to fabricate hardware is negligible - in other words, it's unlikely to happen anytime within the next 10 years.
If anything, market trends are going the other way entirely. I'm not sure why Sun would be that concerned - they've traditionally had some incredible hardware - but MS has everything to lose in a commodity market.
Sun best stick to their recently-stated purpose of having an Apple-like setup, where they sell the hardware and the OS sales. The OS in use is insignificant, really, IMO - they just need something that works well on their hardware. That might be their OS, and it might be Linux.
Yes, believe it or not, at one point your average user was at least marginally tech savvy.
That point in time was somewhere around 1985, and possibly on upwards to the early to mid 1990's. Not so, since Windows became synonymous with PC, and the Internet began to define personal computing.
Best suggestion: don't be a victim by living in fear. If you feel afraid, you will look it, and thus you will be vulnerable to attack.
I'd suggest getting a handgun for protection, but: it'd be stupid to pull a gun for something so incredibly un-threatening to your life. Yes, I'd recommend getting a gun as an additional accessory, but I would not suggest it be gotten for such "protection" purposes.
Instead, I'd recommend doing the following as a preemptive protection:
1) don't carry so much shit around. Do you really need a laptop and a PDA all the time? Truely, unplug the ipod sometime and pay attention to the world aorund you, for fuck's sake.
2) seriously, ditch the ipod. You're creating a hazzard for those around you by not paying full attention to your environment, and the ipod alone is the largest incentive for someone to mug you, as it's got a tremendous resale value and is easy to "lose" in the market - as opposed to a laptop, which has a lot of identifying information that crooks aren't likely to know all about. on the other hand, switching to a black earbud might have been enough, provided the ipod is thoroughly concealed. after all, undercover cops, detectives, and any other number of law enforcement agents tend to have black earbuds in at any given time, so that should scare them off.
3) (I'm saying this, thinking that the ipod only has a mono headphone, as opposed to two for stereo - if it's stereo, it's not likely to work as well. if that's the case, get a mono earbud, as then you'll be a little bit more alert and aware of your environment, which will help you not be unaware and walk into a bad situation)
4) Don't carry the laptop around in a laptop bag. Don't. Don't. Don't. This really should be quite obvious - keep the laptop in a padded backpack. There are backpacks now made specifically for this purpose. Backpacks are also a lot easier to tote around than those awkward laptop bags.
5) Work out. Eat healthy. If you're a fat slob, you're more likely to be mugged because you're more likely to be a a sluggish ball of lard, unable to fight back: ie, a victim. Get in shape and have some self respect.
5) wear baggy clothes to make yourself look more bulky than you are if you're a skinny beanpole geek
But basically: don't make yourself look like a victim. Having an ipod is a pretty good sign that you'd be a good, docile victim.
for those saying that a brit should've been picked for the screen writer: bullshit.
genius is indiscriminate, and british cultural humour is not only "gotten" by brits, as the last 20-some years of Monty Pyton fandom in the US has demonstrated. Nor are brits the only ones that can create such humour.
Furthermore, kirkpatrick said he didn't even make all that many changes, just organized it so it would fit the film format (ie, so that the action wouldn't be crouded at one end of the film, with the other 3/4ths of it boring as fuck).
I don't know about anyone else thought about Chicken Run, but I thought it was very similar in style to Wallace and Grommit. Are not the writers/makers of W&G british? (I personally thought Chicken Run was more fun and humorous overall, but what do I know. I'm a stupid American, right? bigots.)
Huh. I've never seen that happen. Only thing I've seen happen when the system runs out of memory (in this case RAM + swap) was a hard freeze that sysreq didn't fix.
I believe the same was the case -swap, though I could be mistaken.