If you can't tell the difference between a broken power supply, motherboard, or ram then you don't know what you're doing.
Really? How can you tell whether it's motherboard or power supply if, say, a box is just completely unresponsive to any attempt to turn it on?
Alternatively, when attempting to boot gets some lights on the motherboard, but nothing else -- apart from a beep code which doesn't actually match any of those given in the Engrish word salad that calls itself a manual -- where would you say the problem lies?
This essay by Thom Hartmann argues that the reason no "right to privacy" language appears in the US Constitution is that in 18th century, the word "privacy" was used almost exclusively in reference to toilet functions:
However, living in the 18th Century, they never would have actually used the word "privacy" out loud or in writing. A search, for example, of all 16,000 of Thomas Jefferson's letters and writings produces not a single use of the word "privacy." Nor does Adams use the word in his writings, so far as I can find.
The reason is simple: "privacy" in 1776 was a code word for toilet functions. A person would say, "I need a moment of privacy" as a way of excusing themselves to go use the "privy" or outhouse. The chamberpots around the house, into which people relieved themselves during the evening and which were emptied in the morning, were referred to as "the privates," a phrase also used to describe genitals. Privacy, in short, was a word that wasn't generally used in political discourse or polite company during an era when women were expected to cover their arms and legs and discussion of bedroom behavior was unthinkable.
It wasn't until 1898 that Thomas Crapper began marketing the flush toilet and discussion of toilet functions became relatively acceptable. Prior to then, saying somebody had a "right to privacy" would have meant "a right to excrete." This was, of course, a right that was taken for granted and thus the Framers felt no need to specify it in the Constitution.
Has anyone else ever heard this before? It seems believable to me, but unfortunately, I haven't been able to find a source online which can verify or counter it. I'm going to get a friend of mine to ask his 18thc. English literature professor to see if she knows; I probably won't have that answer before this thread dies, though.
I had the same thing from NBTel, the company who invented VibeVision (IIRC, they were the first ones to get television down an ADSL link successfully). I did notice occasional artifacts in the video stream when I was doing some heavy downloading, but that was it.
NBTel then got bought by Aliant, a subsidiary of Bell, and the new management pretty much shelved all of the research work NBTel had been doing. That decision alone made me hate Aliant.
First, there are no "Soviet officials" as the Soviet Union ceased to exist more than a decade ago. Second, it does very little to draw attention from the USSR - you know, the guy's name could be Andrej.
Uh, "USSR" stands for Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.;)
(Note: I'm no professional in the field, so if someone with actual credentials and experience comes along later, go with his/her answer.)
I'm not sure anyone's yet certain. Getting a picture which accurately represents what we'd see standing on Mars is more complex than one might think. For one, the visual cortex does some 'image processing' below conscious awareness, such as white balancing; since the color spectra of sunlight would be different on Mars' surface (as opposed to Earth's), that might change how things look. Dust in the air would have an affect, too, depending on the precise properties of the dust. And I think atmospheric pressure can actually alter color in some way; not sure if the air pressure at the landing site is different enough from that at sea level on Earth to make an appreciable difference, though.
There is a color wheel on this rover for use in determining proper color balance, but at first blush I don't think that would necessarily result in an image that shows what a human would see on Mars' surface. I imagine that such rebalancing would get something closer to what the ground on Mars would look like if it were transported en masse to the Earth. I'm not certain on this, though.
Anyone know if they've actually calibrated the photos with the color wheel yet?
The ESA mission -- the Mars Express probe -- works. Beagle 2 was, as the other posts here say, a $30M privately-funded British project which was tacked on to Mars Express under much greater constraints than any other lander yet sent.
Back in a third-year digital systems lab, one of the exercises was to write a basic low-level printer driver in C. The printers we used were, of course, rather old tractor-fed IBM things.
Once we got to the appropriate part of the lab, we loaded the driver I had written and proceeded to run it. After ironing out a few snags, we got it semi-working -- it didn't quite initialize properly, but did seem to be able to print something. So I send it the string "Test". What appeared on the paper?
"Jesu".
I think I spent a good two hours trying to figure this one out.
In the end, after much time spent replacing cables, going through code and running a debugger to watch what the driver was doing, we figured out that the problem was actually in the printer. Somewhere in the interface port hardware in the printer, the lead for the least significant bit of the eight data bits was broken. This was causing the printer to interpret that bit as a logic '1' no matter what was sent through the cable.
The upshot is, any character which had an even ASCII value would be changed to the next character up, while characters with odd ASCII values would remain unchanged. 'e' and 's' both have odd ASCII values; 'T' and 't", however, are even, and thus were changed to 'U' and 'u', respectively. The printer, being so old and decrepit, had a problem printing 'U'; only the right-hand half of the letter was printed, not the left -- thus making it look like a 'J'.
Can someone please explain why after these changes Linux is somehow intrisically better than Windows has the potential to become in terms of security?
You're mixing tenses: comparing how secure Linux is to how secure Windows might become. Of course Windows has the potential to become as secure or more secure than Linux; so does any other OS, though of course the amount of work required will vary. If the Linux hackers, GNU hackers, et al spend time improving their security while Microsoft is improving Windows', there's no reason Linux can't stay ahead.
I've just put it on morpheus as well, although I've limited it to three simultaneous uploads, since my connection only has 640kbit/s upstream bandwidth.
I just looked at the This Hour Has 22 Minutes web site, and apparently on April 1st at 9pm the CBC is airing an entire one-hour Talking To Americans special -- this will include the footage of George W. Bush showing that he doesn't have a clue who the Prime Minister of Canada is. So, if any slashdotters in Canada haven't seen that yet, here's your chance.;)
On that note one of Canada's own news-spoofs asked George W. Bush what he thought of Prime Minister Poutine (The name of a popular meal here involving grease, french fries, grease, cheese, and grease), and George proved he didn't even know the name of Canada's prime minister!
This isn't quite what happened; I saw the actual footage a while back (the show was This Hour Has 22 Minutes, in a segment that Rick Mercer does called Talking to Americans). Basically, George W. was about to make a speech or something, and Rick Mercer of This Hour got next to the little runway thing that W. and his staff were walking down. They accosted various staffers as they passed by, telling them that Prime Minister Poutine of Canada had previously said he was not going to take sides in the US election, but that he had since stated that he thought W. was the man to lead the US in the new millennium. The staffers all just pretty much smiled and said "that's great", or something similar. Then W. himself came along, and Mercer told him the same thing. W. stopped for a moment and gave a nice little speech about how Mr. Poutine obviously understood that trade was important.
It was rather funny, hearing him refer to the PM of Canada as Mr. Poutine. Of course, this man is now the leader of the most powerful military in the world. I'm scared..
I'm sorry if I seemed hostile in my initial response, it was a bit of a knee-jerk reaction. You have a valid point, but I think the assumptions upon which you're basing it are somewhat flawed.
To take your example of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, one has to take into account the fact that the time they spent writing and rehearsing isn't the only time they put into it. I doubt it was even half. For the Beatles, their music dominated their lives. In addition to the constant stress of touring and working on their next album, they had to deal with being unable to be noticed in public, lest they be mobbed by fans.
And one can't really say that only the six months between the production of that album and the production of their next was the only time they spent working for that album. Once people find they like a band, they'll often try listening to that band's older works too; thus, all their work from then on also contributed to the sales of that album (though of course to a lesser extent).
My point is that it's hard to say how much time a group spent working on one album. Depending on their popularity, one could say that the members of the Beatles spent several years working constantly, because their success forced them to significantly change their entire lifestyle. I suppose it comes down to what one considers 'work'; is the time spent on a bus or plane between tour stops considered work? They're not really doing anything, but it is time taken out of their lives in order to further their careers.
And to give a more direct answer to your question of whether a band deserves $20,000,000 for one song/album: I don't think there's much that anyone can do that gives them an instant moral right to that kind of money. But, I also doubt that any single musician has ever made $20,000,000 off of one album alone; the profits that the record industry has been posting in the last few years make my brain hurt, but most of that isn't getting near the artists.
And on the other hand, if people are willing to buy so many copies of a CD that the band makes some figure as obscene as $20,000,000, then is it wrong for the band to take that money?
Lastly, thanks for replying. I like dialogue a lot more than just posting.
You musicians out there, do you feel it is your right to be able to live for the rest of your life off of a few hours of work (songwriting/recording)? And don't bullshit me that it's not a few hours of work, because it is. Programming is the same thing. Sure it make take me years to improve my skills, but the chances of me ever getting paid $20,000,000 USD for one song/program are next to zero, while no-talent boy-bands (that's right N-Sync, Backdoor boys, I'm talking about your dumb asses) rake in the dough because the cartels control the distribution of nearly all music. Do you like the fact that your industry is more akin to a lottery than to art?
Wow, I'm not even sure where to start with this.
Okay, let's say you're in a band. First thing you have to do is practice, learn to play well together -- but of course, you only have to do that once. Then you'll spend a few months or more writing and perfecting songs. Then, depending on how much cash you have and whether or not you have label backing, you'll spend quite a while in the studio recording it. We're already way beyond 'a few hours', but it isn't necessarily as time-consuming as a full-time job.
Okay, the CD is recorded and pressed, singles sent out, and so on. It's a hit. The singles are on seemingly infinite loop on radio stations. Now the band sits back and watches the money roll in, content from their 'few hours' of work, right?
Um, no.
All of a sudden, everyone wants to see the band. They're being booked for interviews by TV shows and magazines. And then the tour: several months of flying or driving from point A to point B to point C, doing shows every few nights, sometimes even every night. And in between you're making little station ID recordings for radio stations, making more guest appearances, doing more interviews, or stewing in your hotel room. Once it's all over, you get a few months to try to regain your sanity, and then you do it all over again.
Doesn't really sound like 'a few hours of work' to me.
I'm not trying to justify the kind profits the music industry makes, especially not the labels. Just realize that most bands who try to make a living off of music are working their asses off, whether they're massively popular or not. Go watch "Meeting People is Easy"; it's a movie about Radiohead, basically following their first tour after OK Computer got so popular. I don't call that the easy life people seem to think music stars have.
I really don't think eliminating anonymity is the answer. In Real Life(tm) for example, in order to prevent crime, shops have cameras, security guards, and so on - basically the equivalents of various security tools available for servers on the Internet, such as firewalls, proxy servers, and so on.
Licensing surfers seems, IMHO, tantamount to forcing everyone to have little credit card-like things with their social security number (or whatever). Card readers would be posted on the door of every house, shop, mall, etc. and in order to enter a building, you'd need to insert your card. That way, there would be records of where everyone was and when, so if something got stolen, they (the government, police, storeowner, or whomever) would theoretically know who it was; and, incidentally, there would be reams of information on every single person in the country who ever left their home, detailing where they went and when. So law enforcement would have a very powerful new tool to combat crime, and marketers would be able to target the right people for their bulk mailings - everybody wins!...right?
As I think most people can tell, a system like that would never, ever, ever be brought into existence, at least in a "free" country - it would be held as a massive violation of rights. So why on Earth should such a system exist on the Internet? It's hardly the only way to combat crime.
In the article, the Internet is compared to a highway, where all drivers are licensed, and so on. I have to disagree with this; I think an analogy of people in a massive city might be a little more appropriate, although even that is flawed. But perhaps one of the most glaring flaws in the drivers-on-the-road analogy is the potential for damage: someone in a car can easily kill themselves or others through a lack of skill in handling a car - either by hitting another car, or running into a tree, or whatever. That is why drivers and cars are licensed - if someone tries to drive a car without adequate training, then nine times out of ten they'll get into some sort of accident, and quite possibly seriously hurt. Now, if you put someone in front of a computer with no prior training, they'll just get confused, nothing more. No one gets hurt or killed. On the Internet, the people with potential to cause damage are the ones who know what they're doing (or, in some cases, script kiddies who just think they know what they're doing - but I don't think most of them are capable of serious damage). And I think that the truly dangerous people will figure out how to get around the licensing anyway.
And of course, there's the problem of who you get to oversee the licensing. A government wouldn't really work, since the Internet has no geographical boundaries; W3C wouldn't be able to do it, since IIRC no one is actually *forced* to listen to them. In fact, I wouldn't be amazingly surprised if an attempt at licensing surfers like this just resulted in fracturing the Internet into parts that require licenses, and parts that don't. I personally think that part of the beauty (for lack of a better word) of the Internet is the fact that it's pseudo-anonymous, and unregulated. There isn't really anyone with the power to say what you can or can't do. Naturally, this does get abused, but that hasn't ruined the Internet. It's a place where anyone can say what they want, and have an equal opportunity to be heard, without having to be afraid of anyone coming after them for it; that's something that should always be protected. A licensing and identification scheme would be a large step towards destroying that.
The school thing is simple enough, if not controversial. School uniforms, and no book bags. [...] So, why do I suggest school uniforms? Again, the core of the problem is classism. Like racism, it stems from SURFACE PERCEPTIONS. As you strip those away, you have less resistance to solving the more basic problems inherent in human nature.
While I agree with most of the rest of your post, I can't say I agree entirely with this. I spent grades 1-8 in public schools, with all the cliquishness that is often (and correctly, IMHO) attributed to those environments, especially Jr. High. Once my parents and I were thoroughly disgusted with the public school system - both of my brothers suffered because of it, and I guess that when it started with me they'd had enough - I went to a boarding school, which had uniforms.
Did that school have the social classes and cliques that are found in many public schools? No. But I really don't think this was because of the uniforms. The uniforms may have helped, but what made the greatest difference was the size and the environment. When I graduated, the school was at record size: 200 students in total, grades 6 - 12 inclusive. In a school that small, you generally get to know everyone, at least by sight if not by name. Each year, the school would have a day or two of Sports Camp before classes began in September, and by the end of this the headmaster always made a point to know every student by name, and he succeeded. The school was by no means perfect, but was socially a far better place than the public schools I've gone to, and I think the main reason for that is that before long you get to know almost everyone, whether you try to or not. My graduating class was 50 people in total; there just aren't enough people to support cliques, whether they're in uniforms or not. Even if you do just look at someone and judge them based on your surface perceptions, in a school that small eventually you'll probably run into that person enough that you'll get a truer feel for what they're like.
I really don't think that uniforms in public schools with 1000+ students in three grades will help much. I'm fairly sure that all the school shootings in the states happened in large schools (at least hundreds of students per grade); IIRC, Columbine had something like over 3000 students. Put everyone in uniforms, and they'll eventually find other ways to split off into groups. But put them in schools of, say, less than a hundred students per grade, perhaps with uniforms as well, and I don't think social rifts of that kind would occur. Now, finding enough good teachers to staff that many schools and the money to fund all of them is an entirely different matter..
Um, they do have an MP3 version. The link's right next to the RealAudio link on the page, there's a streaming version and a downloadable version (the downloadable version is at http://mp3-2.thesync.com/geeks12.mp3.
After The World resigned, Kasparov announced a 25-move forced mate after move 62 (read: the world would've lost on or before move 87, no matter what it did). You can see the page here, and it has a bit of commentary with Kasparov's analysis.
Hm. I'm not exactly an encyclopedia for this type of thing, but other people I can think of that you might want to consider might be:
Larry Wall (Perl seems to be the de facto languge for CGI) Alan Cox and/or any of the other more prominent Linux hackers (maybe just put short one-page profiles of some of the more major contributers in the chapter on Torvalds and Linux) the guy who wrote/engineered/whatever C++ (his name escapes me) The CEO of RedHat (can't remember his name either - hey, I'm on a roll!)
I'm sure there are plenty of others, too. Not all of them would need a chapter of their own, but there are many people who are less well known than those you've mentioned, yet who still deserve at least some recognition for what they've done, IMHO at least.
Oh, and please forgive me if I've accidentally used a name in the wrong place, or something of the like; I have an uncanny ability to mess up names, whenever and however possible.:)
My first-ever Linux install was Slackware 3.0, and I didn't have much trouble with it. I'm now running 3.6, and personally I've found it easier to use (in some ways) than RedHat - on a friend's RH 6.0 installation, I tried for about half an hour to get it to even access the Internet through a LAN. The same thing on Slackware took me about five minutes, without prior experience. Now, if only Slackware had some sort of package manager..
--Raereth, who often gets very irritated trying to compile and install source tarballs..
I am indeed running gpm, but I'm rather hesitant to kill it, since I use it quite a bit. Is there any other way to fix this, or perhaps something other than gpm that could let me cut and paste text between consoles?
Oh, and as a side note, is it possible to select text in a console, cut or copy it, and then paste it into X?
Slashdot Mirror
Really? How can you tell whether it's motherboard or power supply if, say, a box is just completely unresponsive to any attempt to turn it on?
Alternatively, when attempting to boot gets some lights on the motherboard, but nothing else -- apart from a beep code which doesn't actually match any of those given in the Engrish word salad that calls itself a manual -- where would you say the problem lies?
To be fairer, they were both in the first Hitchhiker's radio series, which came before the books. ;)
(Though the first radio series contains only the first part of the prehistoric Earth segment; it continued at the beginning of the second series.)
Has anyone else ever heard this before? It seems believable to me, but unfortunately, I haven't been able to find a source online which can verify or counter it. I'm going to get a friend of mine to ask his 18thc. English literature professor to see if she knows; I probably won't have that answer before this thread dies, though.
I had the same thing from NBTel, the company who invented VibeVision (IIRC, they were the first ones to get television down an ADSL link successfully). I did notice occasional artifacts in the video stream when I was doing some heavy downloading, but that was it.
NBTel then got bought by Aliant, a subsidiary of Bell, and the new management pretty much shelved all of the research work NBTel had been doing. That decision alone made me hate Aliant.
Uh, "USSR" stands for Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
(Note: I'm no professional in the field, so if someone with actual credentials and experience comes along later, go with his/her answer.)
I'm not sure anyone's yet certain. Getting a picture which accurately represents what we'd see standing on Mars is more complex than one might think. For one, the visual cortex does some 'image processing' below conscious awareness, such as white balancing; since the color spectra of sunlight would be different on Mars' surface (as opposed to Earth's), that might change how things look. Dust in the air would have an affect, too, depending on the precise properties of the dust. And I think atmospheric pressure can actually alter color in some way; not sure if the air pressure at the landing site is different enough from that at sea level on Earth to make an appreciable difference, though.
There is a color wheel on this rover for use in determining proper color balance, but at first blush I don't think that would necessarily result in an image that shows what a human would see on Mars' surface. I imagine that such rebalancing would get something closer to what the ground on Mars would look like if it were transported en masse to the Earth. I'm not certain on this, though.
Anyone know if they've actually calibrated the photos with the color wheel yet?
The ESA mission -- the Mars Express probe -- works. Beagle 2 was, as the other posts here say, a $30M privately-funded British project which was tacked on to Mars Express under much greater constraints than any other lander yet sent.
Back in a third-year digital systems lab, one of the exercises was to write a basic low-level printer driver in C. The printers we used were, of course, rather old tractor-fed IBM things.
Once we got to the appropriate part of the lab, we loaded the driver I had written and proceeded to run it. After ironing out a few snags, we got it semi-working -- it didn't quite initialize properly, but did seem to be able to print something. So I send it the string "Test". What appeared on the paper?
"Jesu".
I think I spent a good two hours trying to figure this one out.
In the end, after much time spent replacing cables, going through code and running a debugger to watch what the driver was doing, we figured out that the problem was actually in the printer. Somewhere in the interface port hardware in the printer, the lead for the least significant bit of the eight data bits was broken. This was causing the printer to interpret that bit as a logic '1' no matter what was sent through the cable.
The upshot is, any character which had an even ASCII value would be changed to the next character up, while characters with odd ASCII values would remain unchanged. 'e' and 's' both have odd ASCII values; 'T' and 't", however, are even, and thus were changed to 'U' and 'u', respectively. The printer, being so old and decrepit, had a problem printing 'U'; only the right-hand half of the letter was printed, not the left -- thus making it look like a 'J'.
And that's how 'Test' became 'Jesu'.
You're mixing tenses: comparing how secure Linux is to how secure Windows might become. Of course Windows has the potential to become as secure or more secure than Linux; so does any other OS, though of course the amount of work required will vary. If the Linux hackers, GNU hackers, et al spend time improving their security while Microsoft is improving Windows', there's no reason Linux can't stay ahead.
The idea was to actually type in the compiled form of the program.
I probably should've written it as "cat > a.out" or something.
Of course, real men just "cat > foo.c" and don't make mistakes.
And the ubermensch just "cat > foo" followed by "chmod a+x foo".
I've just put it on morpheus as well, although I've limited it to three simultaneous uploads, since my connection only has 640kbit/s upstream bandwidth.
I just looked at the This Hour Has 22 Minutes web site, and apparently on April 1st at 9pm the CBC is airing an entire one-hour Talking To Americans special -- this will include the footage of George W. Bush showing that he doesn't have a clue who the Prime Minister of Canada is. So, if any slashdotters in Canada haven't seen that yet, here's your chance. ;)
It was rather funny, hearing him refer to the PM of Canada as Mr. Poutine. Of course, this man is now the leader of the most powerful military in the world. I'm scared..
I'm sorry if I seemed hostile in my initial response, it was a bit of a knee-jerk reaction. You have a valid point, but I think the assumptions upon which you're basing it are somewhat flawed.
To take your example of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, one has to take into account the fact that the time they spent writing and rehearsing isn't the only time they put into it. I doubt it was even half. For the Beatles, their music dominated their lives. In addition to the constant stress of touring and working on their next album, they had to deal with being unable to be noticed in public, lest they be mobbed by fans.
And one can't really say that only the six months between the production of that album and the production of their next was the only time they spent working for that album. Once people find they like a band, they'll often try listening to that band's older works too; thus, all their work from then on also contributed to the sales of that album (though of course to a lesser extent).
My point is that it's hard to say how much time a group spent working on one album. Depending on their popularity, one could say that the members of the Beatles spent several years working constantly, because their success forced them to significantly change their entire lifestyle. I suppose it comes down to what one considers 'work'; is the time spent on a bus or plane between tour stops considered work? They're not really doing anything, but it is time taken out of their lives in order to further their careers.
And to give a more direct answer to your question of whether a band deserves $20,000,000 for one song/album: I don't think there's much that anyone can do that gives them an instant moral right to that kind of money. But, I also doubt that any single musician has ever made $20,000,000 off of one album alone; the profits that the record industry has been posting in the last few years make my brain hurt, but most of that isn't getting near the artists.
And on the other hand, if people are willing to buy so many copies of a CD that the band makes some figure as obscene as $20,000,000, then is it wrong for the band to take that money?
Lastly, thanks for replying. I like dialogue a lot more than just posting.
Okay, let's say you're in a band. First thing you have to do is practice, learn to play well together -- but of course, you only have to do that once. Then you'll spend a few months or more writing and perfecting songs. Then, depending on how much cash you have and whether or not you have label backing, you'll spend quite a while in the studio recording it. We're already way beyond 'a few hours', but it isn't necessarily as time-consuming as a full-time job.
Okay, the CD is recorded and pressed, singles sent out, and so on. It's a hit. The singles are on seemingly infinite loop on radio stations. Now the band sits back and watches the money roll in, content from their 'few hours' of work, right?
Um, no.
All of a sudden, everyone wants to see the band. They're being booked for interviews by TV shows and magazines. And then the tour: several months of flying or driving from point A to point B to point C, doing shows every few nights, sometimes even every night. And in between you're making little station ID recordings for radio stations, making more guest appearances, doing more interviews, or stewing in your hotel room. Once it's all over, you get a few months to try to regain your sanity, and then you do it all over again.
Doesn't really sound like 'a few hours of work' to me.
I'm not trying to justify the kind profits the music industry makes, especially not the labels. Just realize that most bands who try to make a living off of music are working their asses off, whether they're massively popular or not. Go watch "Meeting People is Easy"; it's a movie about Radiohead, basically following their first tour after OK Computer got so popular. I don't call that the easy life people seem to think music stars have.
Wh4t r34lly 5c4r35 m3 15 th4t 1 c4n r34d 4nd typ3 l1k3 th15 4t 4lm05t n0rm4l 5p33d.
Um, I'm pretty sure Half Life *was* ported, and has been for a while. There are a LOT of Linux-based Counter-Strike servers.
I really don't think eliminating anonymity is the answer. In Real Life(tm) for example, in order to prevent crime, shops have cameras, security guards, and so on - basically the equivalents of various security tools available for servers on the Internet, such as firewalls, proxy servers, and so on.
...right?
Licensing surfers seems, IMHO, tantamount to forcing everyone to have little credit card-like things with their social security number (or whatever). Card readers would be posted on the door of every house, shop, mall, etc. and in order to enter a building, you'd need to insert your card. That way, there would be records of where everyone was and when, so if something got stolen, they (the government, police, storeowner, or whomever) would theoretically know who it was; and, incidentally, there would be reams of information on every single person in the country who ever left their home, detailing where they went and when. So law enforcement would have a very powerful new tool to combat crime, and marketers would be able to target the right people for their bulk mailings - everybody wins!
As I think most people can tell, a system like that would never, ever, ever be brought into existence, at least in a "free" country - it would be held as a massive violation of rights. So why on Earth should such a system exist on the Internet? It's hardly the only way to combat crime.
In the article, the Internet is compared to a highway, where all drivers are licensed, and so on. I have to disagree with this; I think an analogy of people in a massive city might be a little more appropriate, although even that is flawed. But perhaps one of the most glaring flaws in the drivers-on-the-road analogy is the potential for damage: someone in a car can easily kill themselves or others through a lack of skill in handling a car - either by hitting another car, or running into a tree, or whatever. That is why drivers and cars are licensed - if someone tries to drive a car without adequate training, then nine times out of ten they'll get into some sort of accident, and quite possibly seriously hurt. Now, if you put someone in front of a computer with no prior training, they'll just get confused, nothing more. No one gets hurt or killed. On the Internet, the people with potential to cause damage are the ones who know what they're doing (or, in some cases, script kiddies who just think they know what they're doing - but I don't think most of them are capable of serious damage). And I think that the truly dangerous people will figure out how to get around the licensing anyway.
And of course, there's the problem of who you get to oversee the licensing. A government wouldn't really work, since the Internet has no geographical boundaries; W3C wouldn't be able to do it, since IIRC no one is actually *forced* to listen to them. In fact, I wouldn't be amazingly surprised if an attempt at licensing surfers like this just resulted in fracturing the Internet into parts that require licenses, and parts that don't. I personally think that part of the beauty (for lack of a better word) of the Internet is the fact that it's pseudo-anonymous, and unregulated. There isn't really anyone with the power to say what you can or can't do. Naturally, this does get abused, but that hasn't ruined the Internet. It's a place where anyone can say what they want, and have an equal opportunity to be heard, without having to be afraid of anyone coming after them for it; that's something that should always be protected. A licensing and identification scheme would be a large step towards destroying that.
Did that school have the social classes and cliques that are found in many public schools? No. But I really don't think this was because of the uniforms. The uniforms may have helped, but what made the greatest difference was the size and the environment. When I graduated, the school was at record size: 200 students in total, grades 6 - 12 inclusive. In a school that small, you generally get to know everyone, at least by sight if not by name. Each year, the school would have a day or two of Sports Camp before classes began in September, and by the end of this the headmaster always made a point to know every student by name, and he succeeded. The school was by no means perfect, but was socially a far better place than the public schools I've gone to, and I think the main reason for that is that before long you get to know almost everyone, whether you try to or not. My graduating class was 50 people in total; there just aren't enough people to support cliques, whether they're in uniforms or not. Even if you do just look at someone and judge them based on your surface perceptions, in a school that small eventually you'll probably run into that person enough that you'll get a truer feel for what they're like.
I really don't think that uniforms in public schools with 1000+ students in three grades will help much. I'm fairly sure that all the school shootings in the states happened in large schools (at least hundreds of students per grade); IIRC, Columbine had something like over 3000 students. Put everyone in uniforms, and they'll eventually find other ways to split off into groups. But put them in schools of, say, less than a hundred students per grade, perhaps with uniforms as well, and I don't think social rifts of that kind would occur. Now, finding enough good teachers to staff that many schools and the money to fund all of them is an entirely different matter..
--Raereth
Um, they do have an MP3 version. The link's right next to the RealAudio link on the page, there's a streaming version and a downloadable version (the downloadable version is at http://mp3-2.thesync.com/geeks12.mp3.
After The World resigned, Kasparov announced a 25-move forced mate after move 62 (read: the world would've lost on or before move 87, no matter what it did). You can see the page here, and it has a bit of commentary with Kasparov's analysis.
Hm. I'm not exactly an encyclopedia for this type of thing, but other people I can think of that you might want to consider might be:
:)
Larry Wall (Perl seems to be the de facto languge for CGI)
Alan Cox and/or any of the other more prominent Linux hackers (maybe just put short one-page profiles of some of the more major contributers in the chapter on Torvalds and Linux)
the guy who wrote/engineered/whatever C++ (his name escapes me)
The CEO of RedHat (can't remember his name either - hey, I'm on a roll!)
I'm sure there are plenty of others, too. Not all of them would need a chapter of their own, but there are many people who are less well known than those you've mentioned, yet who still deserve at least some recognition for what they've done, IMHO at least.
Oh, and please forgive me if I've accidentally used a name in the wrong place, or something of the like; I have an uncanny ability to mess up names, whenever and however possible.
My first-ever Linux install was Slackware 3.0, and I didn't have much trouble with it. I'm now running 3.6, and personally I've found it easier to use (in some ways) than RedHat - on a friend's RH 6.0 installation, I tried for about half an hour to get it to even access the Internet through a LAN. The same thing on Slackware took me about five minutes, without prior experience. Now, if only Slackware had some sort of package manager..
--Raereth, who often gets very irritated trying to compile and install source tarballs..
I am indeed running gpm, but I'm rather hesitant to kill it, since I use it quite a bit. Is there any other way to fix this, or perhaps something other than gpm that could let me cut and paste text between consoles?
Oh, and as a side note, is it possible to select text in a console, cut or copy it, and then paste it into X?