I never said or implied that cops were a bad thing. Your examples of seeing me pick my nose and speeding don't really hold water, since I both a) conceded that police are necessary and b) some surveillance is also necessary.
I have always hated arguments that go along the lines of "the founding fathers would have supported this were they to be able to look ahead into the future and see what a mess we would have made." However, the right to privacy is essential to freedom of speech and expression. If someone is watching me in a "Big Brother" type setup, then expressing certain ideas will get me flagged. Hence, I no longer feel comfortable expressing myself in public.
Let me break up surveillance into two categories, active and passive. Passive is cool--just filming things to go back and use as evidence. Then there's active surveillance--a huge beaurocracy watching people. That's not cool.
The First Amendment protects all speech and expression except for "fighting words." There is a lot many don't feel comfortable talking about on a cell phone or in public because of active (not passive) surveillance. Hence, their first amendment right has been violated.
I jumped the gun with my flame, but that doesn't mean I don't have a point.
Everytime I see a remark like this I realize why the U.S. is lagging further and further behind other countries in the three R's.
Everytime I see a remark like that I have to make sure and remind myself that all foreigners aren't elitist self-important conceited assholes, only a vocal minority that gathers on slashdot.
Addressing your point, I believe you misunderstood what I was saying, probably because I was unclear. The right to anonymity is what I was after. I believe we should have the right to go anywhere we please (besides private property) in complete anonymity (except while behind the wheel).
Things that threaten this include: credit card companies selling information to government agencies (or anyone else for that matter), total information awareness, etc. Surveillance alone isn't bad; surveillance combined with supercomputers and huge staffs keeping tabs on people is another matter. You get the idea, I hope.
As soon as you step on someone else's property, you have no right to be unmonitored. What you do in the privacy of your own home is your business, but it's unreasonable to expect that privacy in public.
Whoa there, buddy. The public is my property. It's yours, too. And the issue isn't just privacy. The issue is the sort of dormant police state that laws like the PATRIOT Act and the Homeland Security Act have created. The right to privacy in public is essential to our freedom. If the anti-terrorism laws give Big Brother the right to secret arrests, secret trials, etc., then if we lose the right to be anonymous in public (essentially what the right to privacy is for). Theoretically the government then has the power to track us down, arrest us, detain us, give us a secret trial where we cannot face our accuser, and finally be executed.
It doesn't matter if they actually do this or not--what matters is if they have the power, both legal and physical, to do so. Since they have written this power into law, they have essentially broken the constitution.
Just because they're not throwing you in jail at the subway station today doesn't mean that the right to anonymity in public isn't important. Who knows who's going to be running this place in a few years.
That region has been a mess since before America even existed, thanks to the violent and archaic philosophies of fundamental Islam.
I agree with your post, except for thta statement. Before 1776, the world of Islam was generally more advanced and progressive (and I mean that without the liberal conotation) than its Christian counterpart.
I am also sick of this "I dislike US foreign policy, so anything that happens to us is our fault." If the "terrorists" had demands in mind when they attacked us, and we begin investigating the causes and adjusting them, then we are really just meeting their demands. A lot of liberals don't understand that if we set the precedent that attacking us will get you what you want, we are opening ourselves up for more "demands."
Of course, these terrorists had no demands. Hence, they aren't terrorists. They're guerrilla warriors. And it was more than just nineteen. Remember, Norad protocol demands that fighter jets race to any plane that has turned off its transponder. No such actions took place. The Pentagon is in the most heavily guarded airspace in the country, surrounded by three airbases monitoring that airspace around the clock. I guarantee you people at Norad saw that there were planes that had turned off their transponders, and there were people at the airbases surrounding the Pentagon that saw an unidentified target on radar approaching.
Really, at some point people have to stop and say "hey! I don't even care how they got on board the plane. How the hell did they get so many guys on the inside?" That's a question the Bush administration has completely ignored, and lucky for them we haven't really asked.
Actually, abortion is a good example about how an issue gets jammed into the big government paradigm and makes a big mess.
If states or even local communities could decide for themselves, then there wouldn't be such a problem. People must realize taking a case to the federal court will have ramifications at the federal level.
San Fransiscans want abortion to be legal? Citizens of Tyler, Texas don't? Why can't they both have their way?
Sgt.: "I smell...pleasure...too good to be just sex...I mean listen, she's all I hear. He must have his mouthful...ok call the SWAT team, they're having more fun than I can ever hope for."
Seriously, though, I think you're on to something. The answer from both sides of the political spectrum is always Big Government. What we need is the opposite. I bet Ted Kennedy and George Bush play golf and reenact pagan and Satanic rituals together on weekends. As we squabble over petty issues like abortion, Washington extends its filthy corrupt arms into every community, forcing local and state governments to obey (think of why every state has a drinking age of 21).
I pledge alleigance, to the flag, of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.
My ass. I hate this country sometimes. Then again it used to be one hell of a place. Really in a league of its own. The founding fathers thought they had a system immune to corruption. They were right, until mind control came along.
Sodomy is any sexual act (think orgasm) that cannot yield pregnancy. Oral sex is sodomy, but sodomy isn't oral sex. The parent was wrong, but the idea that sodomy is only anal sex is also wrong.
What about allowing non-destructive editing? Just have a program that puts black boxes on genitals and gore and mutes and/or adds its own sounds during explatives?
The original DVD content is not altered, and you could foreseeably choose your own level of censorship.
I personally think that we are going to be stuck with all the cruft and slowness of X11 for a very long time.
I disagree. Once everyone has stopped coding for platforms, and embraced cross-platform high-level languages, changing platforms will seldom require more than a recompile and a few code changes.
It's not about being easy to support. Windows can be quite hard to "support." It's about having your ass covered, so if your website or intranet goes down, you have someone to sue for all the thousands of dollars per second you lose.
We all know *NIX is easy to administer and troubleshoot. That's not the problem.
Consider a company that contracts out support and/or deployment. They'll be more or less liable for downtime.
My dad used to work in China for British Petroleum near Hong Kong. In high school I'd spend summers there, and when I did I just ssh'ed to my box here in the US and fire up links whenever I hit a blocked site.
If we had decent broadband I might have tried tunneling an x session over the Pacific Ocean, but I bet it'd require too much bandwidth.
Great post, and I'm not offended (it's not a shameless plug).
However, I personally find that plenty of other distributions fill the same needs. In my case, I've started using a lightweight distro called CRUX, which installs as binary packages, but has a ports utility with which you can easily streamline building from source. When you're done building, you have a tar.gz binary package that you can use over and over:)
Any distribution that's not built around a huge binary packaging system like CRUX or Gentoo is good for this. Though if I were using Mandrake or Redhat, I'd just build ardour in/opt/ardour (that's what/opt is for).
I think ardour will get as good as you need for most ameteur and a lot of professional use. Remember that famous albums like Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska and the Beatle's Sgt. Pepper were recorded on old four-tracks.
Ardour will be great if you do a lot of your eq/compression/fx before you hit the soundcard. It will not be as good as Cakewalk or other apps if you want to use it as an all-in-one mixer/fx/kitchen sink.
How about hardware wave synthesis MIDI(for cards that support it, obviously)? I've actually heard it's possible, but it's certainly not enabled out of the box.
How about any of the 3D audio features on the card?
How about Dolby Digital out?
Please correct me if I am wrong, but to my knowledge, the only feature beyond what an old SB-16 can do that ALSA supports is hardware mixing.
For MIDI, all you need is a decent wave table and timidity. This can get much higher quality than the often small, crunched wave tables of older crappy cards. This isn't a problem for great production cards like RME or Terratec, however.
3D audio is good for an 31337 gaming eXPerience, but not really useful for production use.
Again, when you're mixing your own digital tracks and want to hear what it sounds like, most generally feed their sound card's output to real monitors that sound full and clean. I don't even see this as a really important feature for home use anyways (the grandparent was talking about pro audio, however).
1) Installation was a snap. It autodetected my SBLive! Value as well as my ATI Radeon 9000 and installed the drivers automagically. I even got a nice boot screen! However, my modem wasn't detected automatically.
)2) The new KDE desktop looks great. I can't believe the font rendering is so great! However, I tried to install app foo, and the rpm required lib bar, and I had to install bar from a previous distribution, and it seemed to overwrite stuff!
Conclusion? A very nice desktop distro, but it's just not quite "ready" yet. It needs to work out a few kinks before it can beat Windows.
End review, and begin huge flamewars in comments section (along with 300 "You haven't upgraded to gentoo yet? For shame! Kde is as easy as 'emerge kde'" posts).
I know this review is different, but have you seen OS News lately? Kudos to Eugenia for her hard and unpaid work, but man the discussions and reviews (not hers, but the guest reviewers) have gotten really formulaic.
Slashdot Mirror
I have always hated arguments that go along the lines of "the founding fathers would have supported this were they to be able to look ahead into the future and see what a mess we would have made." However, the right to privacy is essential to freedom of speech and expression. If someone is watching me in a "Big Brother" type setup, then expressing certain ideas will get me flagged. Hence, I no longer feel comfortable expressing myself in public.
Let me break up surveillance into two categories, active and passive. Passive is cool--just filming things to go back and use as evidence. Then there's active surveillance--a huge beaurocracy watching people. That's not cool.
The First Amendment protects all speech and expression except for "fighting words." There is a lot many don't feel comfortable talking about on a cell phone or in public because of active (not passive) surveillance. Hence, their first amendment right has been violated.
I jumped the gun with my flame, but that doesn't mean I don't have a point.
Everytime I see a remark like that I have to make sure and remind myself that all foreigners aren't elitist self-important conceited assholes, only a vocal minority that gathers on slashdot.
Addressing your point, I believe you misunderstood what I was saying, probably because I was unclear. The right to anonymity is what I was after. I believe we should have the right to go anywhere we please (besides private property) in complete anonymity (except while behind the wheel).
Things that threaten this include: credit card companies selling information to government agencies (or anyone else for that matter), total information awareness, etc. Surveillance alone isn't bad; surveillance combined with supercomputers and huge staffs keeping tabs on people is another matter. You get the idea, I hope.
Whoa there, buddy. The public is my property. It's yours, too. And the issue isn't just privacy. The issue is the sort of dormant police state that laws like the PATRIOT Act and the Homeland Security Act have created. The right to privacy in public is essential to our freedom. If the anti-terrorism laws give Big Brother the right to secret arrests, secret trials, etc., then if we lose the right to be anonymous in public (essentially what the right to privacy is for). Theoretically the government then has the power to track us down, arrest us, detain us, give us a secret trial where we cannot face our accuser, and finally be executed.
It doesn't matter if they actually do this or not--what matters is if they have the power, both legal and physical, to do so. Since they have written this power into law, they have essentially broken the constitution.
Just because they're not throwing you in jail at the subway station today doesn't mean that the right to anonymity in public isn't important. Who knows who's going to be running this place in a few years.
I agree with your post, except for thta statement. Before 1776, the world of Islam was generally more advanced and progressive (and I mean that without the liberal conotation) than its Christian counterpart.
I am also sick of this "I dislike US foreign policy, so anything that happens to us is our fault." If the "terrorists" had demands in mind when they attacked us, and we begin investigating the causes and adjusting them, then we are really just meeting their demands. A lot of liberals don't understand that if we set the precedent that attacking us will get you what you want, we are opening ourselves up for more "demands."
Of course, these terrorists had no demands. Hence, they aren't terrorists. They're guerrilla warriors. And it was more than just nineteen. Remember, Norad protocol demands that fighter jets race to any plane that has turned off its transponder. No such actions took place. The Pentagon is in the most heavily guarded airspace in the country, surrounded by three airbases monitoring that airspace around the clock. I guarantee you people at Norad saw that there were planes that had turned off their transponders, and there were people at the airbases surrounding the Pentagon that saw an unidentified target on radar approaching.
Really, at some point people have to stop and say "hey! I don't even care how they got on board the plane. How the hell did they get so many guys on the inside?" That's a question the Bush administration has completely ignored, and lucky for them we haven't really asked.
Way to go, Wesley Willis.
If states or even local communities could decide for themselves, then there wouldn't be such a problem. People must realize taking a case to the federal court will have ramifications at the federal level.
San Fransiscans want abortion to be legal? Citizens of Tyler, Texas don't? Why can't they both have their way?
Seriously, though, I think you're on to something. The answer from both sides of the political spectrum is always Big Government. What we need is the opposite. I bet Ted Kennedy and George Bush play golf and reenact pagan and Satanic rituals together on weekends. As we squabble over petty issues like abortion, Washington extends its filthy corrupt arms into every community, forcing local and state governments to obey (think of why every state has a drinking age of 21).
I pledge alleigance, to the flag, of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.
My ass. I hate this country sometimes. Then again it used to be one hell of a place. Really in a league of its own. The founding fathers thought they had a system immune to corruption. They were right, until mind control came along.
Sodomy is any sexual act (think orgasm) that cannot yield pregnancy. Oral sex is sodomy, but sodomy isn't oral sex. The parent was wrong, but the idea that sodomy is only anal sex is also wrong.
The original DVD content is not altered, and you could foreseeably choose your own level of censorship.
Yeah, but then I can buy the product and distribute it for free. There's no way around that one.
10 PRINT "ENTER A CHOICE:"
20 PRINT "1) GROW"
30 PRINT "2) DIVIDE"
PRINT "3) DIE"
40 INPUT A
In my opinion, a tabbed-browsing enabled browswer should just open those in a new tab.
How's that for a nice spin? :)
I disagree. Once everyone has stopped coding for platforms, and embraced cross-platform high-level languages, changing platforms will seldom require more than a recompile and a few code changes.
We all know *NIX is easy to administer and troubleshoot. That's not the problem.
Consider a company that contracts out support and/or deployment. They'll be more or less liable for downtime.
Duke. Nukem. Forever.
If we had decent broadband I might have tried tunneling an x session over the Pacific Ocean, but I bet it'd require too much bandwidth.
-1 Troll, +5 Informative.
However, I personally find that plenty of other distributions fill the same needs. In my case, I've started using a lightweight distro called CRUX, which installs as binary packages, but has a ports utility with which you can easily streamline building from source. When you're done building, you have a tar.gz binary package that you can use over and over :)
Any distribution that's not built around a huge binary packaging system like CRUX or Gentoo is good for this. Though if I were using Mandrake or Redhat, I'd just build ardour in /opt/ardour (that's what /opt is for).
I think ardour will get as good as you need for most ameteur and a lot of professional use. Remember that famous albums like Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska and the Beatle's Sgt. Pepper were recorded on old four-tracks.
Ardour will be great if you do a lot of your eq/compression/fx before you hit the soundcard. It will not be as good as Cakewalk or other apps if you want to use it as an all-in-one mixer/fx/kitchen sink.
How about hardware wave synthesis MIDI(for cards that support it, obviously)? I've actually heard it's possible, but it's certainly not enabled out of the box.
How about any of the 3D audio features on the card?
How about Dolby Digital out?
Please correct me if I am wrong, but to my knowledge, the only feature beyond what an old SB-16 can do that ALSA supports is hardware mixing.
For MIDI, all you need is a decent wave table and timidity. This can get much higher quality than the often small, crunched wave tables of older crappy cards. This isn't a problem for great production cards like RME or Terratec, however.
3D audio is good for an 31337 gaming eXPerience, but not really useful for production use.
Again, when you're mixing your own digital tracks and want to hear what it sounds like, most generally feed their sound card's output to real monitors that sound full and clean. I don't even see this as a really important feature for home use anyways (the grandparent was talking about pro audio, however).
You're kidding right? You're posting to slashdot claiming that some game is the mother of all timesinks? Hah!
Yes I know...the reviewers don't, see?
Not sixty-fourth power, to the power of six four.
Those guys take longer to make a sequel than George Lucas (is the script even started for episode 3?)
So when's Duke Nukem Forever gonna come out anyways?
1) Installation was a snap. It autodetected my SBLive! Value as well as my ATI Radeon 9000 and installed the drivers automagically. I even got a nice boot screen! However, my modem wasn't detected automatically.
)2) The new KDE desktop looks great. I can't believe the font rendering is so great! However, I tried to install app foo, and the rpm required lib bar, and I had to install bar from a previous distribution, and it seemed to overwrite stuff!
Conclusion? A very nice desktop distro, but it's just not quite "ready" yet. It needs to work out a few kinks before it can beat Windows.
End review, and begin huge flamewars in comments section (along with 300 "You haven't upgraded to gentoo yet? For shame! Kde is as easy as 'emerge kde'" posts).
I know this review is different, but have you seen OS News lately? Kudos to Eugenia for her hard and unpaid work, but man the discussions and reviews (not hers, but the guest reviewers) have gotten really formulaic.