Re:I think it is a good idea not to update quickly
on
Debian 3.0r6 Released
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· Score: 1
Believe me, if you are responsible for you corporate Oracle database, file server and mail server "stable" sounds very good and "unstable" sounds like a ticket to the unemployment office. For important server stability is it and honestly, what has changed since 2002 that will make your Oracle database better? Nothing.
Everyone pans Debian stable for being so old but in the real world it isn't at all. Windows Server 2003 is not all that much newer and it is just now starting to be a presence in server rooms. I see a lot of Windows 2000 and AIX 4.3 servers both of which are much older than Debian 3.0. Sys admins live for things that are stable and hate upgrading their systems.
You are making the point for open source whether you intended to or not. Buying software won't necessarily get you good support, buying contracted support will, usually, get you a far better level of assistance when you need it. The thing is you can get that same contract support, in many cases from the same companies, for open source solutions. The bonus of an open source solution is that you aren't tied to the contractor after the contract ends. If their support is pissing you off or you find someone who will provide you with better support and/or at a better price you can jump contractors. You can't do that with a closed solution.
then the US, who is not party to the trade, and supposedly believes in free trade has a law whereby they can apply sanctions to my company
Interesting that the government of Cuba is running Windows though isn't it? Isn't access to technology and other tools to modernize their society *exactly* what the sanctions are meant to prevent? So how is a US corporation able to provide the Cuban government with those tools?
This is what the trade emabargo is about:
1. Florida is always a very close state in terms of Democrat/Republican split and it has a lot of electoral votes.
2. Florida has a large Cuban population who are mostly anti-Castro and strongly favor sanctions against Cuba.
3. No president will dare break the sanctions because Florida is a make or break state in every election and breaking the sanctions will, everyone believes, effectively give the state away.
The US will punish non American businesses for trading with Cuba to show that it is being tough on Cuba. US companies do plenty of trade with Cuba and everyone knows it. They do it through their non US subsidiaries who never seem to get noticed by the US. The sanctions are about perception nothing else.
I'll give you a great use for Knoppix. My father in-law was going to throw out his old laptop because the hard drive crashed and he wanted to buy a new one. Yes, he could have have just bought a new hard drive but that isn't the way he thinks...
Anyway, instead of throwing it out he let me take it. I popped in Knoppix and had instantly useful laptop for around the house. The only money I have put into it was a used 802.11g card from eBay. Knoppix is certainly not the speediest running off of a CD drive but it does the trick.
Another thing it works great for is people who are learning Unix and want to practice/poke around but no interest in installing Linux on their systems. For example, the place where I work supports the major Unix variations (Solaris, AIX, HP-UX) but we have a lot of support and tech people who know next to nothing about Unix. The company has lately been pushing these people to get up to speed and many are taking courses and trying to learn more. Thing is, they don't care about Unix that much and they won't be installing Linux on their home PC but they do want to practice what they have learned. Knoppix is perfect for them.
Fine, scientific consensus has been wrong many times over. We all understand that. So, because scientists have been wrong before they are wrong all of the time? Everytime scientists agree on something the opposite is the truth? I agree that just because scientists agree on something doesn't mean that they are right, but they often are.
Global warming and the effect of CO2 on the environment were not idea made up by hippies and environmentalists to get everyone out of their cars. The notion of global warming came from astronomers studying Venus. Isn't it strange, they thought, that a planet so much like ours is so inhospitable? Sure, it is closer to the sun so you would expect it to be hotter but not THAT much hotter. So, why is it so hot? A lot of study eventually revealed that Venus' atmosphere is filled with CO2. Nice thing about CO2 is that it traps heat from the sun's radiation into the atmosphere instead of escaping the atmosphere as it normally would.
Interesting they thought. Then someone said 'hey, aren't we pumping a lot of CO2 into our atmosphere?' and global warming was born. You can argue how deep the effect of our pollution is. You can argue how much of our current, apparent, warming would occur naturally. You can argue about how much C02 the world's forests are recycling. You can't argue that CO2 in the atmosphere traps in heat that would otherwise escape. We see it on Venus and it can be easily proven in labratory tests. You can't argue that the human population is dumping tons of C02 into the atmosphere. Arguing that it simply isn't happening is silly and ignorant.
Scientists have been wrong before, that is for sure. They aren't wrong here. Maybe wrong about the extent or degree of it, we can't know that, but global warming is happening so deal with it. Denying it now is like all of the people 30 years ago who believed the tobacco companies when they said the smoking doesn't cause cancer. Eventually everyone came to understand the bitter truth only it was too late for some.
I still don't even understand the need or rush to electronic machines at all. Really, what do you get out of them? Sure it saves some election official a few hours of counting but is it worth it? I don't think so.
Forget touch screens and electronic voting. In Canadian Federal elections, two barely-paid representatives of each party, known as "scrutineers," are present all day at the voting place. If there are more political parties, there are more scrutineers. To vote, you write an "X" with a pencil in a one centimeter circle beside the candidate's name, fold the ballot up and stuff it into a box. Later, the scrutineers AND ANY VOTER WHO WANTS TO WATCH all sit at a table for about half an hour and count every ballot, keeping a tally for each candidate. If the counts agree at the end of the process, the results are phoned-in and everyone goes home. If they don't, you do it again. Fairness is achieved by balanced self-interest, not by technology. The population of Canada is about the same as California, so the elections are of comparable scale. In the last Canadian Federal election the entire vote was counted in four hours. Why does it take us 30 days or more?
The system is magic in it's simplicity and transparency. Someone from each party gets to physically count the votes, any voter who wants to watch is able to. Open, transparent, accurate, cheap and efficient. Sometimes technology isn't the answer.
Well, that is not entirely true. There was significant intelligence within US agencies that completly disagreed with the notion that there was a threat from Iraq. What seems to have happened is that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and co. were only interested in intelligence that supported their view. Views that supported going to war were trumped up and view that did not support the war were simply not listened to.
The best known example to date is the assertion that Iraq was trying to buy uranium from Niger. The White House was warned months before Bush used the story to help justify the invasion of Iraq that the story was dubious. So the question becomes, did GWB get that information and ignore it, did he not get not get the information or did he understand that the story was dubious and say it anyway? In other words, did he simply ignore information he didn't like, were his staff keeping vital information from him or did he lie? Take your pick, no one solution is worse than another IMO.
If he ignored the info because it did not jive with his world view then he is an imcompetent president because he can't process vital information in a reasonable manner.
If his staff were keeping vital information from him and telling him to say things they knew weren't true then you have to wonder who is really running things. Why wouldn't Bush take the heads of those people? Woudn't you expect a president who was so completly misled on a vital matter to publicly humiliate those advisors and distance himself from them?
If he understood and lied then there isn't anything else to say, is there?
Whether he lied or not will probably be debated forever, much like the question of Reagan selling arms to Iran. What is clear though is that the Bush administration has been embroiled in a collosal mess of group think that supported evidence that supported their views and quashed evidence that they did not support their views. To me it does not matter if he lied or he simply believed what he wanted to believe and discarded any evidence that did not support his POV. Either is equally egregious and frightening. Do you want a president who lies to you or who ignores important evidence because he does not want to agree with it?
I am supporting some applications the break the bank for bad code. No word of a lie, I have to try and debug C functions that are 13,000 - 15,000 lines long. For a single function! The best part is that in a 15,000 line function there might be five or six comments.
No trying to keep a line of code to within 80 characters so it is readable either. Nope, single lines reach well into the hundreds of characters wide. Of course this is necessary because you are going 12 levels of indentation. if within an if within an else within a case within an else within an if within a case within an if within a while.
Debugging is a real treat. Let's see, I know that the problem is that eventually nVar1 evaluates to 4 but it should be 8. Hmm. Let's see nVar1 is possibly changed 400 times from when it was set to 8 depending on maybe thousands of possible things that could have happened.
There are some fun tricks in there too. The original coder seemed to have a lot of problems with hung sockets that were keeping the port locked even after the socket was supposed to be done. So, how about this obvious solution: write a routine that checks the port and if it appears to be locked just increment the default port and listen on that port instead. Of course eventually that port gets locked too so increment again and listen on yet another port. All you have to do is write all clients to also check and if a connection fails just start incrementally trying to attach to a port until you get one. Magic.
So mind numbing. The worst is that everyone at the company thinks that the guy who wrote the code is some sort of genius (You mean other servers don't start listening on different ports when their default port is locked up?!?). Idiots.
In case you needed another reason to never do business with SCO they have given you yet another. Apparently SCO has well and truly abandoned any thought of ever being in the business of selling operating systems again. Anyone who is considering buying anything from SCO are now warned, once you buy you can't change platforms later under the threat of legal action. You would be a complete fool to do business with SCO.
It's like when I am playing with my kids and I hide my eyes for a second and then fling my hands away and yell 'surprise'. They are genuinely surprised EVERY time, even if I do it 100 times in a row. I guess it is that kind of surprise.
I wonder if you could claim refugee status for this. "I face persecution and imprisonment in my country for sharing music, a perfectly legal action in Canada." I bet you could.
That would be a lark, our refugee board filled with nerds clinging desperately to their 100 GB hard drives.
Having worked in a place that many Macs I can safely say that Apple are not well regarded for their support. My conclusion was that Apple must truly hate their customers. Support sucks, hardware is expensive and often hard to get, the machines are a pain the ass to get into...
"Don't use the machine, just admire the design elegance" That is their attitude. Even though they use BSD they really think the opposite of open source. Who wants to buy into that?
The penguin is an awesome mascot for this reason alone... Kids love it. It is so much more engaging than that weird flying window thing or that obnoxious steel blue X. My oldest (2.5 yrs) used to simply call the computer 'the penguin' ("play with the penguin?"). The best way to gain mindshare is to teach the young ones and linux has the mascot to do it.
My kid (2 yrs.) has only ever seen computers running Linux. I have a Windows partition but don't use it for much so I have no games or anything fun for her on it. Since all of the fun things are in Linux she already believes that Linux is much more fun and interesting that windows.
She knows enough now that when she wants to play on the computer she asks to "see the penguin and the dragon?!?" since I have a desktop for her with pictures of Tux and Kondi. As an interesting aside penguins are far more interesting to kids than a non-descript flying window thing.
The Debain Jr. package(s) are great for kids, a bit over my girls head but she really likes watching me play TuxRacer and she has fun with gcompris and TuxPaint by herself. We also play TuxTyping and I let her call out the letters as they come down. She is learning quickly although I am not specifically trying to teach her computers or god help me become a programmer. I use KDE and have created an account for her, modified the menus, settings and desktop so that nothing could really happen with that account. No problems with Flash websites.
I went back to university to get a CS degree. In CS I had a number of projects that I worked on in Linux. After I graduated I had a lot of Linux experience and found an employer who was in desperate need of anyone who knew anything about Unix. Those were better times though, companies were growing like crazy and needed to find people who could do the work.
At that time it was relatively easy to get a job as a junior admin with little experience. Now I am in the position of hiring admins and I see a lot of resumes from people who have many years of experience and that is generally preferable to someone with little or no experience. Having said that, I also know that 10 years of experience does not necessarily make you a good administrator and having no work experience does not automatically disqualify you from a position.
Certifications are generally good because they demonstrate at least a minimal level of competence. If you have some great but don't get caught up in getting certs, there are other ways to demonstrate competence. Send the people some examples of your work, I always ask people to bring in something that they wrote such as a shell script, something in perl, python or whatever. A degree in CS is going to be a requirement in most places, otherwise you just have to show them something to prove your ability.
I bet M$ didn't see that one coming. They will certainly not be happy about the news that their entire new strategy could be violating McAffee's patents.
This should be fun.
The real concern here is that the US legal system is largely based on precedence which guarantees that this will have effects far beyond this actual situation. I am not especially for or against having CCTVs in public places but, like all issues regarding technology and the police, we need very strict guidelines about its uses. Without a concensus about what is legitimate and illegitmate use of this technology we can quickly find CCTVs in a lot more places and used more invasively than anyone intended.
Drug testing in the workplace is a good example of how this happpens. At first it was the train companies who wanted to start testing their engineers because train crashes were occuring far too often and the engineers were often found to be drunk or on drugs when the trains crashed. Who was going to argue the reasonableness of that? These guys are moving toxic chemicals, dangerous freight and people. There was a clear danger here and reasonable minded people everywhere agreed that this was clearly a situation where drug testing was fair. All argument was squashed in the name of public safety.
What few people considered was that just about everyone can, in some way, pose a danger to others through their own negligence. I don't think any of the reasonable minded people believed that in the end just about everyone applying for any job in the US would have to take a drug test but here we are. Police can, should and will use technology. We as a society need to be mindful of its implications, remember that precedence has reach far beyond small reasonably framed arguments and ask tough questions.
Fair enough argument, I agree with the principle but not the example. Spraying pesticides on a field has a similar effect on the wildlife population and in some ways is probably worse. Some pesticides kill pretty much everything they touch not just the offending pests. Farms by their very nature make dramatic changes to the natural ecosystem.
I do agree however that we don't know what long term effects GMOs will have on the environment. My suspicion is that we will see strange consequences that no one expected. For example if companies develop strains of corn that require less water then farmers who irrigate their fields will need less water which will increase the water levels on the water ways. Maybe the increased water levels mean more flooding in spring runoffs and then more dikes and water control systems or maybe increased water levels lead to a sharp increase in the mosquito population and an aggresive spraying plan by the government and so on.
Of course corn that is naturally resistant to pests could also mean less pesticides in our foods and long term reduced cancer rates. I have no idea what will come of all of this but I bet we are in for a few surprises.
Thank god we are finally starting to talk about bloat. Linux has changed from being nice and compact to being amazingly bloated in a surprisingly short time. Right now/usr/share alone is taking up a whopping 350MB on this box. WTF is in there?
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Believe me, if you are responsible for you corporate Oracle database, file server and mail server "stable" sounds very good and "unstable" sounds like a ticket to the unemployment office. For important server stability is it and honestly, what has changed since 2002 that will make your Oracle database better? Nothing.
Everyone pans Debian stable for being so old but in the real world it isn't at all. Windows Server 2003 is not all that much newer and it is just now starting to be a presence in server rooms. I see a lot of Windows 2000 and AIX 4.3 servers both of which are much older than Debian 3.0. Sys admins live for things that are stable and hate upgrading their systems.
You are making the point for open source whether you intended to or not. Buying software won't necessarily get you good support, buying contracted support will, usually, get you a far better level of assistance when you need it. The thing is you can get that same contract support, in many cases from the same companies, for open source solutions. The bonus of an open source solution is that you aren't tied to the contractor after the contract ends. If their support is pissing you off or you find someone who will provide you with better support and/or at a better price you can jump contractors. You can't do that with a closed solution.
Interesting that the government of Cuba is running Windows though isn't it? Isn't access to technology and other tools to modernize their society *exactly* what the sanctions are meant to prevent? So how is a US corporation able to provide the Cuban government with those tools?
This is what the trade emabargo is about:
1. Florida is always a very close state in terms of Democrat/Republican split and it has a lot of electoral votes.
2. Florida has a large Cuban population who are mostly anti-Castro and strongly favor sanctions against Cuba.
3. No president will dare break the sanctions because Florida is a make or break state in every election and breaking the sanctions will, everyone believes, effectively give the state away.
The US will punish non American businesses for trading with Cuba to show that it is being tough on Cuba. US companies do plenty of trade with Cuba and everyone knows it. They do it through their non US subsidiaries who never seem to get noticed by the US. The sanctions are about perception nothing else.
what to do with the grill I received as a present. I don't want to insult my in-laws by getting rid of it but I'm not going to use it either...
Looks like I have my answer. They'll never know, I can honestly say that we use the grill all the time.
I'll give you a great use for Knoppix. My father in-law was going to throw out his old laptop because the hard drive crashed and he wanted to buy a new one. Yes, he could have have just bought a new hard drive but that isn't the way he thinks...
Anyway, instead of throwing it out he let me take it. I popped in Knoppix and had instantly useful laptop for around the house. The only money I have put into it was a used 802.11g card from eBay. Knoppix is certainly not the speediest running off of a CD drive but it does the trick.
Another thing it works great for is people who are learning Unix and want to practice/poke around but no interest in installing Linux on their systems. For example, the place where I work supports the major Unix variations (Solaris, AIX, HP-UX) but we have a lot of support and tech people who know next to nothing about Unix. The company has lately been pushing these people to get up to speed and many are taking courses and trying to learn more. Thing is, they don't care about Unix that much and they won't be installing Linux on their home PC but they do want to practice what they have learned. Knoppix is perfect for them.
Fine, scientific consensus has been wrong many times over. We all understand that. So, because scientists have been wrong before they are wrong all of the time? Everytime scientists agree on something the opposite is the truth? I agree that just because scientists agree on something doesn't mean that they are right, but they often are.
Global warming and the effect of CO2 on the environment were not idea made up by hippies and environmentalists to get everyone out of their cars. The notion of global warming came from astronomers studying Venus. Isn't it strange, they thought, that a planet so much like ours is so inhospitable? Sure, it is closer to the sun so you would expect it to be hotter but not THAT much hotter. So, why is it so hot? A lot of study eventually revealed that Venus' atmosphere is filled with CO2. Nice thing about CO2 is that it traps heat from the sun's radiation into the atmosphere instead of escaping the atmosphere as it normally would.
Interesting they thought. Then someone said 'hey, aren't we pumping a lot of CO2 into our atmosphere?' and global warming was born. You can argue how deep the effect of our pollution is. You can argue how much of our current, apparent, warming would occur naturally. You can argue about how much C02 the world's forests are recycling. You can't argue that CO2 in the atmosphere traps in heat that would otherwise escape. We see it on Venus and it can be easily proven in labratory tests. You can't argue that the human population is dumping tons of C02 into the atmosphere. Arguing that it simply isn't happening is silly and ignorant.
Scientists have been wrong before, that is for sure. They aren't wrong here. Maybe wrong about the extent or degree of it, we can't know that, but global warming is happening so deal with it. Denying it now is like all of the people 30 years ago who believed the tobacco companies when they said the smoking doesn't cause cancer. Eventually everyone came to understand the bitter truth only it was too late for some.
Check out this article http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20031211
Most notably:
The system is magic in it's simplicity and transparency. Someone from each party gets to physically count the votes, any voter who wants to watch is able to. Open, transparent, accurate, cheap and efficient. Sometimes technology isn't the answer.
Well, that is not entirely true. There was significant intelligence within US agencies that completly disagreed with the notion that there was a threat from Iraq. What seems to have happened is that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and co. were only interested in intelligence that supported their view. Views that supported going to war were trumped up and view that did not support the war were simply not listened to.
The best known example to date is the assertion that Iraq was trying to buy uranium from Niger. The White House was warned months before Bush used the story to help justify the invasion of Iraq that the story was dubious. So the question becomes, did GWB get that information and ignore it, did he not get not get the information or did he understand that the story was dubious and say it anyway? In other words, did he simply ignore information he didn't like, were his staff keeping vital information from him or did he lie? Take your pick, no one solution is worse than another IMO.
If he ignored the info because it did not jive with his world view then he is an imcompetent president because he can't process vital information in a reasonable manner.
If his staff were keeping vital information from him and telling him to say things they knew weren't true then you have to wonder who is really running things. Why wouldn't Bush take the heads of those people? Woudn't you expect a president who was so completly misled on a vital matter to publicly humiliate those advisors and distance himself from them?
If he understood and lied then there isn't anything else to say, is there?
Whether he lied or not will probably be debated forever, much like the question of Reagan selling arms to Iran. What is clear though is that the Bush administration has been embroiled in a collosal mess of group think that supported evidence that supported their views and quashed evidence that they did not support their views. To me it does not matter if he lied or he simply believed what he wanted to believe and discarded any evidence that did not support his POV. Either is equally egregious and frightening. Do you want a president who lies to you or who ignores important evidence because he does not want to agree with it?
I am supporting some applications the break the bank for bad code. No word of a lie, I have to try and debug C functions that are 13,000 - 15,000 lines long. For a single function! The best part is that in a 15,000 line function there might be five or six comments.
No trying to keep a line of code to within 80 characters so it is readable either. Nope, single lines reach well into the hundreds of characters wide. Of course this is necessary because you are going 12 levels of indentation. if within an if within an else within a case within an else within an if within a case within an if within a while.
Debugging is a real treat. Let's see, I know that the problem is that eventually nVar1 evaluates to 4 but it should be 8. Hmm. Let's see nVar1 is possibly changed 400 times from when it was set to 8 depending on maybe thousands of possible things that could have happened.
There are some fun tricks in there too. The original coder seemed to have a lot of problems with hung sockets that were keeping the port locked even after the socket was supposed to be done. So, how about this obvious solution: write a routine that checks the port and if it appears to be locked just increment the default port and listen on that port instead. Of course eventually that port gets locked too so increment again and listen on yet another port. All you have to do is write all clients to also check and if a connection fails just start incrementally trying to attach to a port until you get one. Magic.
So mind numbing. The worst is that everyone at the company thinks that the guy who wrote the code is some sort of genius (You mean other servers don't start listening on different ports when their default port is locked up?!?). Idiots.
In case you needed another reason to never do business with SCO they have given you yet another. Apparently SCO has well and truly abandoned any thought of ever being in the business of selling operating systems again. Anyone who is considering buying anything from SCO are now warned, once you buy you can't change platforms later under the threat of legal action. You would be a complete fool to do business with SCO.
It's like when I am playing with my kids and I hide my eyes for a second and then fling my hands away and yell 'surprise'. They are genuinely surprised EVERY time, even if I do it 100 times in a row. I guess it is that kind of surprise.
I wonder if you could claim refugee status for this. "I face persecution and imprisonment in my country for sharing music, a perfectly legal action in Canada." I bet you could.
That would be a lark, our refugee board filled with nerds clinging desperately to their 100 GB hard drives.
Having worked in a place that many Macs I can safely say that Apple are not well regarded for their support. My conclusion was that Apple must truly hate their customers. Support sucks, hardware is expensive and often hard to get, the machines are a pain the ass to get into...
"Don't use the machine, just admire the design elegance" That is their attitude. Even though they use BSD they really think the opposite of open source. Who wants to buy into that?
The penguin is an awesome mascot for this reason alone... Kids love it. It is so much more engaging than that weird flying window thing or that obnoxious steel blue X. My oldest (2.5 yrs) used to simply call the computer 'the penguin' ("play with the penguin?"). The best way to gain mindshare is to teach the young ones and linux has the mascot to do it.
My kid (2 yrs.) has only ever seen computers running Linux. I have a Windows partition but don't use it for much so I have no games or anything fun for her on it. Since all of the fun things are in Linux she already believes that Linux is much more fun and interesting that windows.
She knows enough now that when she wants to play on the computer she asks to "see the penguin and the dragon?!?" since I have a desktop for her with pictures of Tux and Kondi. As an interesting aside penguins are far more interesting to kids than a non-descript flying window thing.
The Debain Jr. package(s) are great for kids, a bit over my girls head but she really likes watching me play TuxRacer and she has fun with gcompris and TuxPaint by herself. We also play TuxTyping and I let her call out the letters as they come down. She is learning quickly although I am not specifically trying to teach her computers or god help me become a programmer. I use KDE and have created an account for her, modified the menus, settings and desktop so that nothing could really happen with that account. No problems with Flash websites.
You mean the courts have ruled in favor of some individual over a corporation? Wow! Can we request these judges to preside over some DMCA cases?
Computers are secure and not a threat to your privacy.
Databases are protected and access is secure.
Your private information will *not* be divulged or passed on in any manner.
Trust your Big Brother to protect you, your privacy is safe with us.
I went back to university to get a CS degree. In CS I had a number of projects that I worked on in Linux. After I graduated I had a lot of Linux experience and found an employer who was in desperate need of anyone who knew anything about Unix. Those were better times though, companies were growing like crazy and needed to find people who could do the work.
At that time it was relatively easy to get a job as a junior admin with little experience. Now I am in the position of hiring admins and I see a lot of resumes from people who have many years of experience and that is generally preferable to someone with little or no experience. Having said that, I also know that 10 years of experience does not necessarily make you a good administrator and having no work experience does not automatically disqualify you from a position.
Certifications are generally good because they demonstrate at least a minimal level of competence. If you have some great but don't get caught up in getting certs, there are other ways to demonstrate competence. Send the people some examples of your work, I always ask people to bring in something that they wrote such as a shell script, something in perl, python or whatever. A degree in CS is going to be a requirement in most places, otherwise you just have to show them something to prove your ability.
I bet M$ didn't see that one coming. They will certainly not be happy about the news that their entire new strategy could be violating McAffee's patents. This should be fun.
The real concern here is that the US legal system is largely based on precedence which guarantees that this will have effects far beyond this actual situation. I am not especially for or against having CCTVs in public places but, like all issues regarding technology and the police, we need very strict guidelines about its uses. Without a concensus about what is legitimate and illegitmate use of this technology we can quickly find CCTVs in a lot more places and used more invasively than anyone intended.
Drug testing in the workplace is a good example of how this happpens. At first it was the train companies who wanted to start testing their engineers because train crashes were occuring far too often and the engineers were often found to be drunk or on drugs when the trains crashed. Who was going to argue the reasonableness of that? These guys are moving toxic chemicals, dangerous freight and people. There was a clear danger here and reasonable minded people everywhere agreed that this was clearly a situation where drug testing was fair. All argument was squashed in the name of public safety.
What few people considered was that just about everyone can, in some way, pose a danger to others through their own negligence. I don't think any of the reasonable minded people believed that in the end just about everyone applying for any job in the US would have to take a drug test but here we are. Police can, should and will use technology. We as a society need to be mindful of its implications, remember that precedence has reach far beyond small reasonably framed arguments and ask tough questions.
Fair enough argument, I agree with the principle but not the example. Spraying pesticides on a field has a similar effect on the wildlife population and in some ways is probably worse. Some pesticides kill pretty much everything they touch not just the offending pests. Farms by their very nature make dramatic changes to the natural ecosystem.
I do agree however that we don't know what long term effects GMOs will have on the environment. My suspicion is that we will see strange consequences that no one expected. For example if companies develop strains of corn that require less water then farmers who irrigate their fields will need less water which will increase the water levels on the water ways. Maybe the increased water levels mean more flooding in spring runoffs and then more dikes and water control systems or maybe increased water levels lead to a sharp increase in the mosquito population and an aggresive spraying plan by the government and so on.
Of course corn that is naturally resistant to pests could also mean less pesticides in our foods and long term reduced cancer rates. I have no idea what will come of all of this but I bet we are in for a few surprises.
Thank god we are finally starting to talk about bloat. Linux has changed from being nice and compact to being amazingly bloated in a surprisingly short time. Right now /usr/share alone is taking up a whopping 350MB on this box. WTF is in there?