The point is you can never test a military, because you are working against an opponent that is consciously trying to work around your system. You can never predict how the attack with occur. Then you can never simulate the attack, even as you might predict it -- you can never launch empty tanks at a realistic target. Instead at best you do tests in empty fields. That's why it will always be in beta, which is not a useful status for a safeguard.
And the US should put sufficient trust in the rest of the world that if the US were to be attacked, alliances like NATO would come to their help.
That is hard right now. There is a lack of trust on both sides. America is the biggest, and people don't trust us to do the right thing. Meanwhile, we Americans collectively (with some dissent) came to a conclusion, found noone willing to agree with us (or at least none of the "important" nations, apparently), and after consideration were unwilling to change our conclusions just because noone else agreed. It's hard to trust that people would come to our aid because something that seems so obvious to so many of us wasn't obvious on the other side of the Atlantic.
Bombing Iraq makes France unhappy? Too bad.
Well, like I said, America is the biggest but we're not trusted to do the right thing with that. We're not going to hamper ourselves just so people will be less scared of us. They can trust us, or they can fear us, but we know ourselves and, for better or for worse, the only force making America do the right thing right now is the American people. "Too bad... get used to it," seems to be pretty much the only possible course of action. I say wait and see; we're not bent on conquest. We know it, and eventually history will bear that out.
the US stands and falls with its economy, and the US ultimately can't employ its military force without destroying that.
Non sequiter. Where did you come up with that?
Without it, the US will just keep making bad decisions until it's too late.
Most Americans do not think these have been bad decisions. It may be totally obvious that they're bad to Europeans, but only history is the judge of that.
I tried to stick to generalities here; I'm well aware people all over the place disagree.:)
You know how the main island had all these combinations to get to the books to take you off to the other worlds? Each world was protected by some sort of key or access method that you could only get to by manipulating some device that would accept some sort of numeric, symbolic, or other combination.
Eventually, my brother and I found out that you could use the central tower in the game to give you all the combinations. However, we found that out after getting to the last of the other worlds. We bruteforced every single one of those combinations! Really! We took turns and tried fifty combinations each at a go until we got into each one. Terribly mindnumbing, but it's made a great story to tell other Myst players.
Imagine what would happen if Torvalds and Stallman committed to this. Versions of the Linux kernel from 1990 would be available under public domain terms in a year, and versions of emacs and gcc would already be available. It'd be interesting if all the anti-copyleft people who call the GPL "viral" would be sufficiently anti-GPL enough to fork a 14 year old version.
And of course, color-coding letters would be handy, especially when typing in those Microsoft product keys...
I actually had a good friend, complete geek, with synesthesia who could do this. For years he said numbers were colors. Give him a long sequence of characters, and he could rattle it off, days later. He used it for Microsoft keys on multiple occasions.
I would think this might add a little bit more credibility to the people who think life originated in somewhere other than Earth.
I've never understood the whole point of that theory. Life on earth is too complex to have arisen by itself... so it came from space? But where did the life in space come from?
I guess I just don't like the theory because it doesn't explain anything or provide any real answers.:)
Yes, but most distributions are going to use GNU bash. In fact, most distributions are going to use bash for sh.
Everything in a Linux distribution is replaceable. You can replace the kernel itself with the NetBSD kernel or HURD. (Won't work yet, but both projects are slowly getting there.) So since the Linux kernel is an optional and replaceable component, is it then not worth of being part of the name of the OS?
Certain things are just standard, man. Sure, you can build a busybox distribution or whatever. But the fact remains that in every single mainline distribution, GNU utilities still outnumber everything else in lines of code.
Gentoo Linux is a distro. LFS is a "Make your own distro" HOWTO.
Suppose there were no Gentoo, and you wanted to make your own distro with the design goals of Gentoo. You'd install some other distro like RedHat or Debian (or perhaps even a completely different OS; anyone ever bootstrap Linux from FreeDOS?) and slowly compile your own packages. You might choose to use rpm, dpkg, your own, or no packaging system. You'd have a bit of dependency hell while trying to figure out what order to compile everything in (and make sure that you didn't wind up with library dependencies on the original distro). Finally, you'd want to repeat the process from within your new distro; after all, you want it to be self-hosting rather than having to install RedHat each time you build a new version.
Mastering LFS trains you to do all this. Does everyone need to know how to do this? No. Do we really need any new distros? Probably not. But people who have said, "Yes we do" have often brought us much better systems (like your beloved Gentoo). Plus, I found learning this material to be intensely interesting and right up my alley.
Even if you don't agree that GNU is a 'majority OS stakeholder' in terms of lines of code
Since when are mathematical truths open to agreement or disagreement? I played with wc one day, and the base GNU utilities in Linux From Scratch (not including emacs or anything non-GNU) far exceeded everything else, including the Linux kernel and the X Window System. GNU definitely provided the most lines of code in a "regular" Linux distribution.
Well, taking into account who I'm talking to, I'll bet you can't script that API with Perl.
(Okay, taking into account who I'm talking to, I'm sure you could mod your Tivo box to let you install Perl, or build a module around the API.)
But you still can't export your video to a DVD or VCD or something and take it to your friend's house. And a program guide is moot for me: I use tv.yahoo.com to figure out if this week's episode is a repeat or not, and if it's not that's all I want to hear about it.
I want to rip shows and burn them to permanent storage on VCDs or DVDs or something. I want to wait till the end of the season, then take a Saturday to play disk swap and make a complete season set of all my favorite shows. I might even want to make excerpts or bring the digital movie files to other locations or loan to friends.
Of course, at the moment, I don't think "roll-your-own" meets my needs, either. Not reliable enough, and nowhere near turnkey enough for me. I love programming but I want to rely on a tested and true solution for all this rather than fixing all the bugs myself and debugging my hardware.
So, I'll wait, and leech off of other people's efforts when the time comes.
My grandfather had one of those kinetic watches, but he moved around so little it never stayed charged. He used to swing it from side to side in front of himself while watching TV.
I could swear I remember a crossover of this with Superman, where Supes is caught in a sealed chamber at the Metropolis world fair with kryptonite or red solar radiation sapping his powers, and the kids rescue him by making a call with their analog modem. Am I dreaming?
The second track is to get better at explaining ourselves and at persuading people that they should support our positions. Especially, we need to do a better job of finding folks out there who are our natural allies, and convincing them to join us on these issues, even if we disagree about some other issues.
I am a conservative, a libertarian, and a laissez-faire capitalist. I believe in minimizing government control. As such, the DMCA is clearly something I must stand against on principled as well as practical grounds. I am your natural ally.
Sure, we disagree on some things. But is it worth it to let those stand between us when it comes to opposing the DMCA? Is it worth it to drive off people like me by alienating them on slashdot? I really do believe the principle of least government control is what you want... and you will find that in conservatism and libertarianism. And even if we never agree on that principle, we agree on many, many of the specific issues (intellectual property laws, DMCA, internet regulation, free speech)
Court conservatives. Make them see that draconian laws like this just build up big government. Court libertarians. Make them see that intellectual property laws abuse state power to impose an artificial and damaging scarcity. Minds are changing, one at a time.
Slashdot Mirror
The point is you can never test a military, because you are working against an opponent that is consciously trying to work around your system. You can never predict how the attack with occur. Then you can never simulate the attack, even as you might predict it -- you can never launch empty tanks at a realistic target. Instead at best you do tests in empty fields. That's why it will always be in beta, which is not a useful status for a safeguard.
Fire cold missles at an abandoned spot in the midwest, or over the ocean. Test the system.
this when arms races have universally shown themselves to be precursors to major warfare throughout the history of mankind.
You mean like the U.S./Soviet arms race?
And the US should put sufficient trust in the rest of the world that if the US were to be attacked, alliances like NATO would come to their help.
That is hard right now. There is a lack of trust on both sides. America is the biggest, and people don't trust us to do the right thing. Meanwhile, we Americans collectively (with some dissent) came to a conclusion, found noone willing to agree with us (or at least none of the "important" nations, apparently), and after consideration were unwilling to change our conclusions just because noone else agreed. It's hard to trust that people would come to our aid because something that seems so obvious to so many of us wasn't obvious on the other side of the Atlantic.
Bombing Iraq makes France unhappy? Too bad.
Well, like I said, America is the biggest but we're not trusted to do the right thing with that. We're not going to hamper ourselves just so people will be less scared of us. They can trust us, or they can fear us, but we know ourselves and, for better or for worse, the only force making America do the right thing right now is the American people. "Too bad ... get used to it," seems to be pretty much the only possible course of action. I say wait and see; we're not bent on conquest. We know it, and eventually history will bear that out.
the US stands and falls with its economy, and the US ultimately can't employ its military force without destroying that.
Non sequiter. Where did you come up with that?
Without it, the US will just keep making bad decisions until it's too late.
Most Americans do not think these have been bad decisions. It may be totally obvious that they're bad to Europeans, but only history is the judge of that.
I tried to stick to generalities here; I'm well aware people all over the place disagree. :)
You know how the main island had all these combinations to get to the books to take you off to the other worlds? Each world was protected by some sort of key or access method that you could only get to by manipulating some device that would accept some sort of numeric, symbolic, or other combination.
Eventually, my brother and I found out that you could use the central tower in the game to give you all the combinations. However, we found that out after getting to the last of the other worlds. We bruteforced every single one of those combinations! Really! We took turns and tried fifty combinations each at a go until we got into each one. Terribly mindnumbing, but it's made a great story to tell other Myst players.
Imagine what would happen if Torvalds and Stallman committed to this. Versions of the Linux kernel from 1990 would be available under public domain terms in a year, and versions of emacs and gcc would already be available. It'd be interesting if all the anti-copyleft people who call the GPL "viral" would be sufficiently anti-GPL enough to fork a 14 year old version.
Send the UN inspectors!
You know full well that's not the way to handle the problem! :)
Oh, and for that matter, if he's running DOS 3.3 on a ][+, the operating system can't take advantage of the system clock, assuming there is one.
If he's running DOS 3.3, he can't run Appleworks. He'd need ProDOS for that.
And of course, color-coding letters would be handy, especially when typing in those Microsoft product keys...
I actually had a good friend, complete geek, with synesthesia who could do this. For years he said numbers were colors. Give him a long sequence of characters, and he could rattle it off, days later. He used it for Microsoft keys on multiple occasions.
I would think this might add a little bit more credibility to the people who think life originated in somewhere other than Earth.
I've never understood the whole point of that theory. Life on earth is too complex to have arisen by itself ... so it came from space? But where did the life in space come from?
I guess I just don't like the theory because it doesn't explain anything or provide any real answers. :)
Yes, but most distributions are going to use GNU bash. In fact, most distributions are going to use bash for sh.
Everything in a Linux distribution is replaceable. You can replace the kernel itself with the NetBSD kernel or HURD. (Won't work yet, but both projects are slowly getting there.) So since the Linux kernel is an optional and replaceable component, is it then not worth of being part of the name of the OS?
Certain things are just standard, man. Sure, you can build a busybox distribution or whatever. But the fact remains that in every single mainline distribution, GNU utilities still outnumber everything else in lines of code.
then I have to ask if the authors of these tools are even scratching their own itch?
I have to ask if you've been close enough to them to know exactly where their itches are. Ewww...
Gentoo Linux is a distro. LFS is a "Make your own distro" HOWTO.
Suppose there were no Gentoo, and you wanted to make your own distro with the design goals of Gentoo. You'd install some other distro like RedHat or Debian (or perhaps even a completely different OS; anyone ever bootstrap Linux from FreeDOS?) and slowly compile your own packages. You might choose to use rpm, dpkg, your own, or no packaging system. You'd have a bit of dependency hell while trying to figure out what order to compile everything in (and make sure that you didn't wind up with library dependencies on the original distro). Finally, you'd want to repeat the process from within your new distro; after all, you want it to be self-hosting rather than having to install RedHat each time you build a new version.
Mastering LFS trains you to do all this. Does everyone need to know how to do this? No. Do we really need any new distros? Probably not. But people who have said, "Yes we do" have often brought us much better systems (like your beloved Gentoo). Plus, I found learning this material to be intensely interesting and right up my alley.
You use Linux without a shell?
Even if you don't agree that GNU is a 'majority OS stakeholder' in terms of lines of code
Since when are mathematical truths open to agreement or disagreement? I played with wc one day, and the base GNU utilities in Linux From Scratch (not including emacs or anything non-GNU) far exceeded everything else, including the Linux kernel and the X Window System. GNU definitely provided the most lines of code in a "regular" Linux distribution.
It's like comparing AVI or Quicktime to MP3.
I've looked at all three extensively, and I'm convinced Quicktime is a much better format than MP3. I just wish my car MP3 player could handle it.
They used to. The point was, I hadn't been there in awhile.
Personally my 2600 still sees use, and I regret not being around whenever the library got rid of their games, if they ever did.
The library has DVDs?!? Last time I was there all they had were VHS tapes and Atari 2600 games!
Well, taking into account who I'm talking to, I'll bet you can't script that API with Perl.
(Okay, taking into account who I'm talking to, I'm sure you could mod your Tivo box to let you install Perl, or build a module around the API.)
But you still can't export your video to a DVD or VCD or something and take it to your friend's house. And a program guide is moot for me: I use tv.yahoo.com to figure out if this week's episode is a repeat or not, and if it's not that's all I want to hear about it.
I want to rip shows and burn them to permanent storage on VCDs or DVDs or something. I want to wait till the end of the season, then take a Saturday to play disk swap and make a complete season set of all my favorite shows. I might even want to make excerpts or bring the digital movie files to other locations or loan to friends.
Of course, at the moment, I don't think "roll-your-own" meets my needs, either. Not reliable enough, and nowhere near turnkey enough for me. I love programming but I want to rely on a tested and true solution for all this rather than fixing all the bugs myself and debugging my hardware.
So, I'll wait, and leech off of other people's efforts when the time comes.
My grandfather had one of those kinetic watches, but he moved around so little it never stayed charged. He used to swing it from side to side in front of himself while watching TV.
Now, he's old. The rest of us have no excuse. ;)
I could swear I remember a crossover of this with Superman, where Supes is caught in a sealed chamber at the Metropolis world fair with kryptonite or red solar radiation sapping his powers, and the kids rescue him by making a call with their analog modem. Am I dreaming?
The second track is to get better at explaining ourselves and at persuading people that they should support our positions. Especially, we need to do a better job of finding folks out there who are our natural allies, and convincing them to join us on these issues, even if we disagree about some other issues.
I am a conservative, a libertarian, and a laissez-faire capitalist. I believe in minimizing government control. As such, the DMCA is clearly something I must stand against on principled as well as practical grounds. I am your natural ally.
Sure, we disagree on some things. But is it worth it to let those stand between us when it comes to opposing the DMCA? Is it worth it to drive off people like me by alienating them on slashdot? I really do believe the principle of least government control is what you want ... and you will find that in conservatism and libertarianism. And even if we never agree on that principle, we agree on many, many of the specific issues (intellectual property laws, DMCA, internet regulation, free speech)
Court conservatives. Make them see that draconian laws like this just build up big government. Court libertarians. Make them see that intellectual property laws abuse state power to impose an artificial and damaging scarcity. Minds are changing, one at a time.
I don't believe that's the right solution, but I'd be willing to pay for it.
At least until the public wakes up. ;)