Open source is given away freely, and if you believe in that freedom, you also believe in others having the freedom to choose differently. I am myself in favour of open source and would definitely be willing to give my software to the community, but there can be many valid reasons why one would have to produce closed source. Eg. if you do a project for a customer who doesn't want the source for his program to be published.
We shouldn't be religious about this - religion, by and large, has always been and always will be harmful.
It seems to me that when a country constantly seems to have leaders and politicians whose policies and general outlook are far removed from the people they are governing on behalf of, there is something fundamentally wrong with the system. Compare to other democratic countries - in Europe the politicians are by and large believed to hold views that most people agree with and they are fairly respected; in the US, it seems, politicians represent either business interests or extreme religious organisations, and they are expected to be corrupt and dishonest. Why is that? Something is definitely wrong.
It occurs to me that basing something on being anti something else simply makes it into a version of the thing it tries to be the opposite of. So, and anti-evolution museum is defined by being against evolution; it is nothing in itself and it exists more or less at the mercy of what it hates.
If one was simply a believer in the Bible as fundamentally and literally true, then perhaps one would think about the theory of evolution and find that it has much going for it, but that somethings are dubious and can't be true if the Bible is to be taken as literally true. On the other hand, if one's starting point is that evolution is against the Bible and therefore must be wrong, then every time evolution theory changes (as it does constantly), one has to adjust one's viewpoint. Just imagine what would happen if one day evolution theory discovered that there is, after all, a God behind it all. Science doesn't a priory exclude that possibility, it just doesn't assume God's existence.
You are as bad as the scaremongers in Washington, my friend. What you are saying is that you want ironcurtain and segregation rather than dialog and diplomacy, basically.
The simply truth of the matter is that since Bush got to power, America has been building up it weapons and level of aggression with any excuse it could find, and the other large players feel threatened; arguably with good reason: America has been on a conquering-spree in the Middle East. Now, nobody outside the government may have any proof that would hold up in court, that says America intends to overrun the entire world and build an empire, but it is very easy to get that impression, and neither China, Russia or any other nation that doesn't see itself as a vassal state of the US can be blamed for taking that impression into account.
So what if the American government says 'We are not going to threaten Russia, honest, guv'? Is this present government one that any sane man would just trust on its word? And apart from that - even the most honest and wellmeaning person can only make promises for him- or herself. Nobody knows that all future American governments will respect those promises.
No, the only way forward if we want world peace is to build trust, respect and cooperation - even with the ones that are now our enemies. So, yes, it is time to end the rabid nonsense - of the neo-conservatives and the self-righteous idiots. We face far bigger problems now than the question of whether Islam or Christianity is better; or whether Communism or Capitalism-run-amok is the right way. If we can't find it in ourselves to reach across our differences and cooperate in honesty, we may well end up in a situation where petty squabbles over ideology or religion are utterly irrelevant.
Phishing and other scams are easy to avoid if one simply use the brain to think with:
- Banks don't send out security warnings by email with a handy link in so you can 'confirm your details'. - Banks never ask for all of your security details even when you are logging on to their actual site - they ask for part of them only. - And of course, you should get a teeny bit suspicious when you receive tens of 'security warnings' or similar from banks in a day, especially when you don't have account there.
The top priority for anybody browsing the internet who has even a marginally normal outlook on life is to avoid adverts. After all, when you are on the internet you tend to know what you want; or I do, at least. If you want to buy something, you search for it - you don't tend to buy spontaneously, just because you an advert. I know people in advertising will hate me for saying this, but intrusive or obstructive advertising doesn't really work. It may work on tv, in newpapers and on posters, but it doesn't work on the internet - because it creates animosity.
Why assume a petty motivation on the part of environmentalists?
This is natural - people go 'This is what I would do'; so petty people assume that everybody else is as petty as themselves. 'A thief thinks all people steal'...
This reminds me of the worst examples of absurd and exaggerated punishment in the world - like maiming and crippling a person for petty crime, which was common in several societies during the middle ages. But perhaps it is not surprising that this kind of deranged mentality is rife in this day and age, where religious extremism and unadulterated, capitalist greed are allowed to rule with few restrictions, and where common people are considered beneat contempt by those in power.
America deperately needs to get rid of these cancers and return the power to the people.
I suppose we all knew it would happen sooner or later, that Microsoft would try this on. But let us step back a little and think about it.
FOSS is widely used, not just by Linux enthusiasts; some very big corporations and the governments of several large nations are using this stuff. They are not going to hang their heads, mumble 'sorry' and pay up, if Microsoft actually try to litigate. On top of that I think it could well give very bad publicity for Microsoft, which I don't think even they could afford; they are not stupid (or I don't think they are), they don't want a lot of publicity that paints them as a monster out of control and their opponents as some sort of hero.
SW patents are not internationally recognised, and I suspect that if there are too many of this kind of thing, many countries will think again before they implement laws that allow SW patents.
What will happen if they actually try to sue somebody? It depends, of course - if they try to go after important enough parts of Linux, like the kernel, I think we will see companies like IBM and Oracle team up against Microsoft; they have invested too much in it to just give it all away. Apart from that, I find it hard to imagine that a company like IBM haven't thought about exactly this question a long time ago. They didn't grow big by blundering headlessly through the world.
No, my best guess is that this is yet another case of FUD. But what exactly do they hope to achieve? I think they have realised what a lot of us already guessed a long time ago: they can't beat Linux of FOSS, so they have to see how they can make money from it. I wouldn't be at all surprised to see them migrate more and more stuff to Linux. We already know what kind of player they will be in the world of Linux: a bully that will use any means to be the biggest if not the only player around.
If one is to believe what can easily be found all over the internet, the 'Church' of Scientology is simply a criminal organisation hiding behind a 'religious' facade. If you read about L. Ron Hubbard here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L_Ron_Hubbard, and compare it to what you can learn from this book http://www.cassiopaea.org/cass/sanity_1.PdF written by Hervey Cleckley http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hervey_Cleckley, I think you will reach the same conclusion as I: Hubbard was a fairly classical psychopath who founded Scientology as a scam, to put it simply.
Calling them a church or cult is probably being too kind.
I have been having the same sort of thoughts, after >25 years in this line of work. I think the first thing to work out is what do you really want to do in your future? I don't think I will ever want to fully retire, but I can see that I will soon no longer be attractive for most employers, so I will have to find something else. These have been my considerations:
- I like: to use my hands, construct things, solve problems. Growing things, like in gardening etc (I'm an esxpert orchid grower). Playing music. - I'm good at: Programming. Managing systems. Solving problems. Teaching. I am very good with children and animals.
At my age the expected thing is to go into management, so I am now systems manager - I like the challenges involved; so I could stay with the company for a while and learn as much about managing as possible. I could possibly go higher in the organisation, but I could also start my own business in a few years' time. If I do, this is a couple of things I will do:
- set up telephone numbers in the areas I want to be reachable from, probably with Skype. Customers don't want to call somebody overseas; but I would like to live in China where prices are much lower. This way I could still charge prices typical or a little lower than what is normal for the US or Europe, but my expenses would be low.
- become an expert in something that is easy to deliver electronically. I'd go for web applications, I think. Some sort of international trade might be a good option.
If you don't want to move abroad, you could still settle in an area that is beautiful, but a bit remote, where house prices are low, but where you can still have a fast new connection; then ply your trade from there. If you're a good amateur musician and have had some success, you could record your own music and sell that (though I personally wouldn't bet on the financial success). I think the most important point is that whatever you do, it must be something that you can enjoy doing a lot, because it will be hard work; either because you don't have much success and have to work long hours to make ends meet, or because you have a lot of success and have to work long hours to meet demands - there's such a thing as getting mugged by success.
Perhaps this one is too nerdy for/. - no forget that I said that.
You can do really interesting things as root; in a place I worked one of my colleagues wouldn't admit that he had done the following on one of our biggest and most important UNIXes: He had logged on as root and opened up/etc/passwd in vi, then immediatelty realized that this was not where he wanted to be. Now, normally one qould use ':q' to exit a file without saving, but he was in the habit of using ':x', which is a convenient way of saving and exiting at the same time. Unfortunately he forgot the ':', which makes it a command to delete whichever character you are standing on. When nothing seemed to happen, he automatically did it again, this time getting it right. Then he logged out.
Now, what is normally the very first line in/etc/passwd? I'll give you a hint: it begins with root:x:0:0 - so this guy had deleted the 'r' in root, saved the file and exited. And since nobody else was logged in as root, we were stuffed - one couldn't log on as root, since he was not in/etc/passwd, and logging on as oot didn't work either because he was still called root in/etc/security/passwd (this was on AIX - it corresponds to/etc/shadow). And using 'su -' from an ordinary user didn't work, since this command actually looks for the username 'root'. Unfortunately it turned out that booting in single user mode meant that you had only very minimal access to the disks, and getting the others online is not easy when you know too little about AIX and have a very complicated arrangement of disks and volumegroups. In the end we had to reinstall. This of course had to have the traditional, serious consequences: the guy was.... promoted.
This is an illustration of what is the main problem in EU: the lack of actual commitment to the union. The member states are paranoid about giving up sovereignty, so they've put so many checks and bureaucracy in place, that it is impossible to actually perform serious work in cooperation. Mind you, the exact same inertia is probably one of the main reasons we have had so few wars since the Second World War.
But the combination of colossal bureaucracy, lack of commitment from the memberstates and the misguided idea that these projects should be commissioned out to private companies are what creates failure after failure in EU, and more often than not, in the member states as well. People often point to some large public IT project that has gone terribly wrong and say 'Look, this is why the state should never undertake that kind of big projects' - but that is actually not true. The problem in those projects is not because it is a state project, but because it is being run by idiots who know too little about the matter in hand. You don't actually have to look very far to find hugely successful public projects. One of my favourites is the great pyramids in Egypt; but you don't have to go that far back in history - just think of the way Great Britain mobilised against Germany during the war. That was a huge, public project, and it was very successful - because everybody realised how important it was to commit fully on all levels, get the best people to work on it and not commission it out to private companies, whose main interest is to channel as much money as possible into their own pockets for as little actual work as they can get away with.
Right, this is how it works, according to me: If I leave my house one day without locking the front door and somebody comes in, sits in my sofa, uses my things etc - is he right to do so? Is it my fault for not locking the door, or should everybody in society know that this is no allowed? Or if I drop my wallet somewhere and somebody picks it up - does he have a right to spend the money just because I didn't take better care of it?
I think most people would say that of course it doesn't depend on whether the front door was locked or I whether I was cereful enough with my money. The insurance company might say that it was my own fault if I suffered a loss, but a crime is a crime; stealing and trespassing in people's home is not allowed even if it is easy.
Same thing with the rules of an educational institution; if the rules are made public, you are supposed to know them and follow them, even if it is SO easy to circumvent them. And if you do break the rules, then it is reasonable to implement whatever the standard punishment is.
True, China has no interest in harming the American economy, so they won't. But on the other hand, America is massively dependent on the rest of the world being willing to lend them money. If the international community were ever to turn away from using USD, America would take a very serious hit, no doubt about it. And if China were to suddenly dump every US bond they owned, it would hurt America very deeply.
Don't you think this should inspire the American government to stop alienating the other nations of the world?
Members are told to click a button to report any 'misconduct' by other users. MySpace's definition of 'misconduct' includes actions such as 'endangering national security, leaking state secrets, subverting the government, undermining national unity, spreading rumors or disturbing the social order' -- according to the site's terms and conditions. In China these are all crimes which carry a hefty prison sentence.
And of course, "endangering national secureity,..." is not a crime in, say, America? I find it hard to imagine that these things are not crimes in every country. The fact that this is enshrined in law in China means that you have no excuse for not knowing that you can get punished for it. Isn't that better than the vague and woolly 'suspicion of terror' which can send you to jail in both the US and UK without ever seeing a court, without knowing what you are accused of, with no time limit and no right to a lawyer?
You find comparing China of today with Nazi Germany 'relatively benign'? I find it hard to believe that you honestly think it is; after all, has there ever been a regime worse than the Nazi one? Pol Pot's was on par, USSR under Stalin was not far behind, but China does not come near, not by a mile. The Nazis systematically slaughtered a whole segment of the population; China, to compare, not only recognizes the rights of their ~50 minorities, but actually in some cases gives them greater rights than the Han Chinese - eg. many minorities are excempt from the rule of one child per family.
So why do you call the Chinese government 'repressive' and 'indoctrinating' - as opposed to the American, I suppose? Isn't it simply because you have been brought up with a diet of narrowminded 'communist-hate'? I put it in quotes because as far as I can see, what you hate isn't really communism, but some terror-image that has been constructed by certain people in power; the McCarthies, the enlightened people at Fox News and others of the same kind. They are more or less the same that also perpetuate the hysteria against cannabis, abortion rights or gays; how can anybody take them serious? To me it seems that America is just as repressive in its own way, or perhaps even more, and you, my friend, are a living example of American indoctrination.
Oh. come on. Every Olympic game is used by the host nation as an opportunity to show off; why the hell would any country want to spend the tens to hundreds of billions of dollars on what is basically a slightly lame entertainment project?
Apart from that, I think it is petty and stupid to keep criticizing China without any real insight into to country and its culture. Yes, there are things that are not right in China, and it is right to point that out, but that is not what is going on at Slashdot. Instead of insightful commentary and opinion, all you get is an automatic yapping of whatever people happen to have picked up from Fox News - or possibly the Simpsons, which is only slightly better.
The population of any country have certain expectations to their leaders - they want them to deal with what they perceive as problems, and in China the vast majority of people feel that the internet is a filthy mess and that the government should do something to clean it up, so their children are not led astray by unhealthy, foreign influences. Chinese parents are afraid of the internet and computer games; they want their children to do well in the future, not waste time. This is perhaps an alien concept to a westerner, but in China this is almost fundamental - 'Work hard, study well' is a phrase you hear all the time, and I bet if you know any Chinese students, you'll know that most of them work harder than anybody else.
Don't just assume per automatic that people in other countries want the same as you - to an American 'freedom' may be a sacred ideal, but to Chinese and to many others it is more important to fit in and be successful. Who can say who is 'right'? Or, to turn it around, don't you believe in the right of others to choose what they want, even if it is completely different from what you would have chosen?
The situation here is a lot more complex than what the media coverage suggests.
First of all, torture is always wrong and should never be ignored. This is the case whether the perpetrator is China, Russia or USA. Torture is 100% wrong and can only be condemned. The ones who commit that kind of atrocities are hardly worthy of the label 'human'.
Having said that, though, if you want to do business in a country, you have to follow the law of that country. The only other option is not to conduct business in a country where you feel the law is unethical, and perhaps that is what Yahoo, Google, Microsoft,... should do. However - it is very easy for the armchair warriors and -philosophers on/. to make wise about what an international business should do, after all it is not your money, is it? It's easy to have ideals ten miles high when they are never likely to be tested.
Apart from that - do you actually, positively know that the information you have is solid fact? It has always been difficult to get valid information about China - 30 years ago it was because the country was secretive and very hostile to the outside world, but now it is more because elements mostly in American media and intelligence have an agenda to distort the information. When it comes to news items about China, especially in the States, you have to check and double check it, unfortunately.
Finally, when the howling crowds on/. go on about China or other pet peeves, they seem to think that the only valid view of the world is the one Americans have been brought up with. Is it really so hard to accept that people in another country can and will have another outlook? Americans carp on about 'democracy' and 'freedom' and seem to believe that those are the most important things in life, and perhaps that is what an American genuinely believes. In other parts of the world they see it differently, they really do. This is not to say that freedom isn't important to most people, but how about such a thing as having something to eat at least several times a week? Or having a roof over your head? I wonder whether you guys would be quite as smug if you had known real hardship.
Now, go on, mod me through the floor, it won't change the truth of what I've said.
It may or may not be a good idea to label foods from cloned animals; but if so, isn't there more reason to label transgenic foods? I may be wrong, but I under the impression that food from genetically modified plants and animals is not labeled in the States, and there is more reason to be worried about those, IMO.
These kinds of things (referring to the shootings at VT) happen in a free society. And that's that unless we all want to live in a police state.
Ye gods, what an idiotic thing to say. No these things happen in a society where 1. Guns are more or less freely available and 2. Nobody, least of all the state, cares about the ones that are weak. Because whatever else one can say about this incident, it would most likely not have happened if it wasn't so incredibly easy to get a gun; and if society actually took care of the ones that were in danger of going out on a tangent. Most people who commit this kind of actions are desperate (as opposed to eg. psychopaths, who tend to kill with cold premeditation) - they may be psychically ill, they may have lost everything. If society took care of these people, they would most likely not get as far out as this.
Compare to most European countries - we have next to no murders compared to the US, because guns are not easily available and society at least tries to take care of the weak
Further research has shown that if you remove a person's brain entirely, his blood pressure drops to zero!! This is clearly conclusive evidence that the main cause of blood pressure is the brain.
It is deeply sad and disheartening how easy it is to shrug off the human suffering caused by this kind of mentality with words like 'collateral damage' and 'In the real world the only law is to win'.
No, in the real world cooperation wins the day - a caring and supportive society will always be stronger in the long run than the anarchy of 'the strongest takes what he wants'. Try and read Dr. Hare's http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Hare_(psycholo gist) books about psychopathy - the mentality that pervades American business and politics seems to correspond very well with the definition of the psychopath. Is this what we want: An America that is the 'psychopath' of the world?
Slashdot Mirror
Don't be silly.
Open source is given away freely, and if you believe in that freedom, you also believe in others having the freedom to choose differently. I am myself in favour of open source and would definitely be willing to give my software to the community, but there can be many valid reasons why one would have to produce closed source. Eg. if you do a project for a customer who doesn't want the source for his program to be published.
We shouldn't be religious about this - religion, by and large, has always been and always will be harmful.
It seems to me that when a country constantly seems to have leaders and politicians whose policies and general outlook are far removed from the people they are governing on behalf of, there is something fundamentally wrong with the system. Compare to other democratic countries - in Europe the politicians are by and large believed to hold views that most people agree with and they are fairly respected; in the US, it seems, politicians represent either business interests or extreme religious organisations, and they are expected to be corrupt and dishonest. Why is that? Something is definitely wrong.
It occurs to me that basing something on being anti something else simply makes it into a version of the thing it tries to be the opposite of. So, and anti-evolution museum is defined by being against evolution; it is nothing in itself and it exists more or less at the mercy of what it hates.
If one was simply a believer in the Bible as fundamentally and literally true, then perhaps one would think about the theory of evolution and find that it has much going for it, but that somethings are dubious and can't be true if the Bible is to be taken as literally true. On the other hand, if one's starting point is that evolution is against the Bible and therefore must be wrong, then every time evolution theory changes (as it does constantly), one has to adjust one's viewpoint. Just imagine what would happen if one day evolution theory discovered that there is, after all, a God behind it all. Science doesn't a priory exclude that possibility, it just doesn't assume God's existence.
with no physical connection between the power source and the light bulb
Even radiowaves or laser constitute a physical connection, strictly speaking
I wonder where they get the ideas from?
You are as bad as the scaremongers in Washington, my friend. What you are saying is that you want ironcurtain and segregation rather than dialog and diplomacy, basically.
The simply truth of the matter is that since Bush got to power, America has been building up it weapons and level of aggression with any excuse it could find, and the other large players feel threatened; arguably with good reason: America has been on a conquering-spree in the Middle East. Now, nobody outside the government may have any proof that would hold up in court, that says America intends to overrun the entire world and build an empire, but it is very easy to get that impression, and neither China, Russia or any other nation that doesn't see itself as a vassal state of the US can be blamed for taking that impression into account.
So what if the American government says 'We are not going to threaten Russia, honest, guv'? Is this present government one that any sane man would just trust on its word? And apart from that - even the most honest and wellmeaning person can only make promises for him- or herself. Nobody knows that all future American governments will respect those promises.
No, the only way forward if we want world peace is to build trust, respect and cooperation - even with the ones that are now our enemies. So, yes, it is time to end the rabid nonsense - of the neo-conservatives and the self-righteous idiots. We face far bigger problems now than the question of whether Islam or Christianity is better; or whether Communism or Capitalism-run-amok is the right way. If we can't find it in ourselves to reach across our differences and cooperate in honesty, we may well end up in a situation where petty squabbles over ideology or religion are utterly irrelevant.
Phishing and other scams are easy to avoid if one simply use the brain to think with:
- Banks don't send out security warnings by email with a handy link in so you can 'confirm your details'.
- Banks never ask for all of your security details even when you are logging on to their actual site - they ask for part of them only.
- And of course, you should get a teeny bit suspicious when you receive tens of 'security warnings' or similar from banks in a day, especially when you don't have account there.
The top priority for anybody browsing the internet who has even a marginally normal outlook on life is to avoid adverts. After all, when you are on the internet you tend to know what you want; or I do, at least. If you want to buy something, you search for it - you don't tend to buy spontaneously, just because you an advert. I know people in advertising will hate me for saying this, but intrusive or obstructive advertising doesn't really work. It may work on tv, in newpapers and on posters, but it doesn't work on the internet - because it creates animosity.
You are right, of course.
Why assume a petty motivation on the part of environmentalists?
This is natural - people go 'This is what I would do'; so petty people assume that everybody else is as petty as themselves. 'A thief thinks all people steal'...
This reminds me of the worst examples of absurd and exaggerated punishment in the world - like maiming and crippling a person for petty crime, which was common in several societies during the middle ages. But perhaps it is not surprising that this kind of deranged mentality is rife in this day and age, where religious extremism and unadulterated, capitalist greed are allowed to rule with few restrictions, and where common people are considered beneat contempt by those in power.
America deperately needs to get rid of these cancers and return the power to the people.
I suppose we all knew it would happen sooner or later, that Microsoft would try this on. But let us step back a little and think about it.
FOSS is widely used, not just by Linux enthusiasts; some very big corporations and the governments of several large nations are using this stuff. They are not going to hang their heads, mumble 'sorry' and pay up, if Microsoft actually try to litigate. On top of that I think it could well give very bad publicity for Microsoft, which I don't think even they could afford; they are not stupid (or I don't think they are), they don't want a lot of publicity that paints them as a monster out of control and their opponents as some sort of hero.
SW patents are not internationally recognised, and I suspect that if there are too many of this kind of thing, many countries will think again before they implement laws that allow SW patents.
What will happen if they actually try to sue somebody? It depends, of course - if they try to go after important enough parts of Linux, like the kernel, I think we will see companies like IBM and Oracle team up against Microsoft; they have invested too much in it to just give it all away. Apart from that, I find it hard to imagine that a company like IBM haven't thought about exactly this question a long time ago. They didn't grow big by blundering headlessly through the world.
No, my best guess is that this is yet another case of FUD. But what exactly do they hope to achieve? I think they have realised what a lot of us already guessed a long time ago: they can't beat Linux of FOSS, so they have to see how they can make money from it. I wouldn't be at all surprised to see them migrate more and more stuff to Linux. We already know what kind of player they will be in the world of Linux: a bully that will use any means to be the biggest if not the only player around.
If one is to believe what can easily be found all over the internet, the 'Church' of Scientology is simply a criminal organisation hiding behind a 'religious' facade. If you read about L. Ron Hubbard here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L_Ron_Hubbard, and compare it to what you can learn from this book http://www.cassiopaea.org/cass/sanity_1.PdF written by Hervey Cleckley http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hervey_Cleckley, I think you will reach the same conclusion as I: Hubbard was a fairly classical psychopath who founded Scientology as a scam, to put it simply.
Calling them a church or cult is probably being too kind.
I have been having the same sort of thoughts, after >25 years in this line of work. I think the first thing to work out is what do you really want to do in your future? I don't think I will ever want to fully retire, but I can see that I will soon no longer be attractive for most employers, so I will have to find something else. These have been my considerations:
- I like: to use my hands, construct things, solve problems. Growing things, like in gardening etc (I'm an esxpert orchid grower). Playing music.
- I'm good at: Programming. Managing systems. Solving problems. Teaching. I am very good with children and animals.
At my age the expected thing is to go into management, so I am now systems manager - I like the challenges involved; so I could stay with the company for a while and learn as much about managing as possible. I could possibly go higher in the organisation, but I could also start my own business in a few years' time. If I do, this is a couple of things I will do:
- set up telephone numbers in the areas I want to be reachable from, probably with Skype. Customers don't want to call somebody overseas; but I would like to live in China where prices are much lower. This way I could still charge prices typical or a little lower than what is normal for the US or Europe, but my expenses would be low.
- become an expert in something that is easy to deliver electronically. I'd go for web applications, I think. Some sort of international trade might be a good option.
If you don't want to move abroad, you could still settle in an area that is beautiful, but a bit remote, where house prices are low, but where you can still have a fast new connection; then ply your trade from there. If you're a good amateur musician and have had some success, you could record your own music and sell that (though I personally wouldn't bet on the financial success). I think the most important point is that whatever you do, it must be something that you can enjoy doing a lot, because it will be hard work; either because you don't have much success and have to work long hours to make ends meet, or because you have a lot of success and have to work long hours to meet demands - there's such a thing as getting mugged by success.
Perhaps this one is too nerdy for /. - no forget that I said that.
/etc/passwd in vi, then immediatelty realized that this was not where he wanted to be. Now, normally one qould use ':q' to exit a file without saving, but he was in the habit of using ':x', which is a convenient way of saving and exiting at the same time. Unfortunately he forgot the ':', which makes it a command to delete whichever character you are standing on. When nothing seemed to happen, he automatically did it again, this time getting it right. Then he logged out.
/etc/passwd? I'll give you a hint: it begins with root:x:0:0 - so this guy had deleted the 'r' in root, saved the file and exited. And since nobody else was logged in as root, we were stuffed - one couldn't log on as root, since he was not in /etc/passwd, and logging on as oot didn't work either because he was still called root in /etc/security/passwd (this was on AIX - it corresponds to /etc/shadow). And using 'su -' from an ordinary user didn't work, since this command actually looks for the username 'root'. Unfortunately it turned out that booting in single user mode meant that you had only very minimal access to the disks, and getting the others online is not easy when you know too little about AIX and have a very complicated arrangement of disks and volumegroups. In the end we had to reinstall. This of course had to have the traditional, serious consequences: the guy was .... promoted.
You can do really interesting things as root; in a place I worked one of my colleagues wouldn't admit that he had done the following on one of our biggest and most important UNIXes: He had logged on as root and opened up
Now, what is normally the very first line in
This is an illustration of what is the main problem in EU: the lack of actual commitment to the union. The member states are paranoid about giving up sovereignty, so they've put so many checks and bureaucracy in place, that it is impossible to actually perform serious work in cooperation. Mind you, the exact same inertia is probably one of the main reasons we have had so few wars since the Second World War.
But the combination of colossal bureaucracy, lack of commitment from the memberstates and the misguided idea that these projects should be commissioned out to private companies are what creates failure after failure in EU, and more often than not, in the member states as well. People often point to some large public IT project that has gone terribly wrong and say 'Look, this is why the state should never undertake that kind of big projects' - but that is actually not true. The problem in those projects is not because it is a state project, but because it is being run by idiots who know too little about the matter in hand. You don't actually have to look very far to find hugely successful public projects. One of my favourites is the great pyramids in Egypt; but you don't have to go that far back in history - just think of the way Great Britain mobilised against Germany during the war. That was a huge, public project, and it was very successful - because everybody realised how important it was to commit fully on all levels, get the best people to work on it and not commission it out to private companies, whose main interest is to channel as much money as possible into their own pockets for as little actual work as they can get away with.
Right, this is how it works, according to me: If I leave my house one day without locking the front door and somebody comes in, sits in my sofa, uses my things etc - is he right to do so? Is it my fault for not locking the door, or should everybody in society know that this is no allowed? Or if I drop my wallet somewhere and somebody picks it up - does he have a right to spend the money just because I didn't take better care of it?
I think most people would say that of course it doesn't depend on whether the front door was locked or I whether I was cereful enough with my money. The insurance company might say that it was my own fault if I suffered a loss, but a crime is a crime; stealing and trespassing in people's home is not allowed even if it is easy.
Same thing with the rules of an educational institution; if the rules are made public, you are supposed to know them and follow them, even if it is SO easy to circumvent them. And if you do break the rules, then it is reasonable to implement whatever the standard punishment is.
True, China has no interest in harming the American economy, so they won't. But on the other hand, America is massively dependent on the rest of the world being willing to lend them money. If the international community were ever to turn away from using USD, America would take a very serious hit, no doubt about it. And if China were to suddenly dump every US bond they owned, it would hurt America very deeply.
Don't you think this should inspire the American government to stop alienating the other nations of the world?
How do you cope with sexual desire among healthy young men and women during a mission years long?
You mean you don't know?
Members are told to click a button to report any 'misconduct' by other users. MySpace's definition of 'misconduct' includes actions such as 'endangering national security, leaking state secrets, subverting the government, undermining national unity, spreading rumors or disturbing the social order' -- according to the site's terms and conditions. In China these are all crimes which carry a hefty prison sentence.
..." is not a crime in, say, America? I find it hard to imagine that these things are not crimes in every country. The fact that this is enshrined in law in China means that you have no excuse for not knowing that you can get punished for it. Isn't that better than the vague and woolly 'suspicion of terror' which can send you to jail in both the US and UK without ever seeing a court, without knowing what you are accused of, with no time limit and no right to a lawyer?
And of course, "endangering national secureity,
You find comparing China of today with Nazi Germany 'relatively benign'? I find it hard to believe that you honestly think it is; after all, has there ever been a regime worse than the Nazi one? Pol Pot's was on par, USSR under Stalin was not far behind, but China does not come near, not by a mile. The Nazis systematically slaughtered a whole segment of the population; China, to compare, not only recognizes the rights of their ~50 minorities, but actually in some cases gives them greater rights than the Han Chinese - eg. many minorities are excempt from the rule of one child per family.
So why do you call the Chinese government 'repressive' and 'indoctrinating' - as opposed to the American, I suppose? Isn't it simply because you have been brought up with a diet of narrowminded 'communist-hate'? I put it in quotes because as far as I can see, what you hate isn't really communism, but some terror-image that has been constructed by certain people in power; the McCarthies, the enlightened people at Fox News and others of the same kind. They are more or less the same that also perpetuate the hysteria against cannabis, abortion rights or gays; how can anybody take them serious? To me it seems that America is just as repressive in its own way, or perhaps even more, and you, my friend, are a living example of American indoctrination.
Oh. come on. Every Olympic game is used by the host nation as an opportunity to show off; why the hell would any country want to spend the tens to hundreds of billions of dollars on what is basically a slightly lame entertainment project?
Apart from that, I think it is petty and stupid to keep criticizing China without any real insight into to country and its culture. Yes, there are things that are not right in China, and it is right to point that out, but that is not what is going on at Slashdot. Instead of insightful commentary and opinion, all you get is an automatic yapping of whatever people happen to have picked up from Fox News - or possibly the Simpsons, which is only slightly better.
The population of any country have certain expectations to their leaders - they want them to deal with what they perceive as problems, and in China the vast majority of people feel that the internet is a filthy mess and that the government should do something to clean it up, so their children are not led astray by unhealthy, foreign influences. Chinese parents are afraid of the internet and computer games; they want their children to do well in the future, not waste time. This is perhaps an alien concept to a westerner, but in China this is almost fundamental - 'Work hard, study well' is a phrase you hear all the time, and I bet if you know any Chinese students, you'll know that most of them work harder than anybody else.
Don't just assume per automatic that people in other countries want the same as you - to an American 'freedom' may be a sacred ideal, but to Chinese and to many others it is more important to fit in and be successful. Who can say who is 'right'? Or, to turn it around, don't you believe in the right of others to choose what they want, even if it is completely different from what you would have chosen?
The situation here is a lot more complex than what the media coverage suggests.
... should do. However - it is very easy for the armchair warriors and -philosophers on /. to make wise about what an international business should do, after all it is not your money, is it? It's easy to have ideals ten miles high when they are never likely to be tested.
/. go on about China or other pet peeves, they seem to think that the only valid view of the world is the one Americans have been brought up with. Is it really so hard to accept that people in another country can and will have another outlook? Americans carp on about 'democracy' and 'freedom' and seem to believe that those are the most important things in life, and perhaps that is what an American genuinely believes. In other parts of the world they see it differently, they really do. This is not to say that freedom isn't important to most people, but how about such a thing as having something to eat at least several times a week? Or having a roof over your head? I wonder whether you guys would be quite as smug if you had known real hardship.
First of all, torture is always wrong and should never be ignored. This is the case whether the perpetrator is China, Russia or USA. Torture is 100% wrong and can only be condemned. The ones who commit that kind of atrocities are hardly worthy of the label 'human'.
Having said that, though, if you want to do business in a country, you have to follow the law of that country. The only other option is not to conduct business in a country where you feel the law is unethical, and perhaps that is what Yahoo, Google, Microsoft,
Apart from that - do you actually, positively know that the information you have is solid fact? It has always been difficult to get valid information about China - 30 years ago it was because the country was secretive and very hostile to the outside world, but now it is more because elements mostly in American media and intelligence have an agenda to distort the information. When it comes to news items about China, especially in the States, you have to check and double check it, unfortunately.
Finally, when the howling crowds on
Now, go on, mod me through the floor, it won't change the truth of what I've said.
It may or may not be a good idea to label foods from cloned animals; but if so, isn't there more reason to label transgenic foods? I may be wrong, but I under the impression that food from genetically modified plants and animals is not labeled in the States, and there is more reason to be worried about those, IMO.
These kinds of things (referring to the shootings at VT) happen in a free society. And that's that unless we all want to live in a police state.
Ye gods, what an idiotic thing to say. No these things happen in a society where 1. Guns are more or less freely available and 2. Nobody, least of all the state, cares about the ones that are weak. Because whatever else one can say about this incident, it would most likely not have happened if it wasn't so incredibly easy to get a gun; and if society actually took care of the ones that were in danger of going out on a tangent. Most people who commit this kind of actions are desperate (as opposed to eg. psychopaths, who tend to kill with cold premeditation) - they may be psychically ill, they may have lost everything. If society took care of these people, they would most likely not get as far out as this.
Compare to most European countries - we have next to no murders compared to the US, because guns are not easily available and society at least tries to take care of the weak
Further research has shown that if you remove a person's brain entirely, his blood pressure drops to zero!! This is clearly conclusive evidence that the main cause of blood pressure is the brain.
It is deeply sad and disheartening how easy it is to shrug off the human suffering caused by this kind of mentality with words like 'collateral damage' and 'In the real world the only law is to win'.
o gist) books about psychopathy - the mentality that pervades American business and politics seems to correspond very well with the definition of the psychopath. Is this what we want: An America that is the 'psychopath' of the world?
No, in the real world cooperation wins the day - a caring and supportive society will always be stronger in the long run than the anarchy of 'the strongest takes what he wants'. Try and read Dr. Hare's http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Hare_(psychol