WRT the current case, however, I believe this is not entrapment. If I offer you $50,000 to kill someone and you take the money and attempt to carry out the murder, only to be arrested by police who are waiting at the would-be crime scene because I was an informant, you weren't entrapped. Anyone who accepts money to commit murder already has a reasonable predisposition to do it, IMO. Like you say, it's a case for a jury, but that's a jury I'd like to be on.
You couldn't offer me $50,000 to kill someone, no matter what financial straights I was in. Yes, I know this. I lost a home that I had a great deal of money invested in, and if someone had offered me enough money to make the back payments and pay off the mortgage in exchange for blowing up $TARGET, I would not have done it. I doubt I'll ever be able to buy a house again. Most of our life's savings were in it, and I'll reach retirement age before I have that much cash again. But I wouldn't have killed or stolen for the money to save it. In fact, I would have told him to let me think about it, then I would have called the FBI myself.
You show me a person who says "Yeah, sure" to an offer of blowing up a Synagogue for cash and I'll show you a person with a predisposition to do that anyway.
Prejudice against Muslims? Hardly. You *have* noticed that the people going around doing this are primarily young, primarily Muslim, primarily male, right? And that even among Muslims who don't do things like that, there is a lot of sympathy for those who do, and a lot of baseless hatred of Jews in general and Israel in particular. To suspect young, Muslim males as a group of being likely terrorists is hardly prejudice. If you removed all of the Islamist terror groups around the world, you'd remove almost all the terror groups, period. Sure, there are a few others, like the Tamil Tigers (now either defunct or nearly so), and the Shining Path group, but they are the exceptions to the rule. Nearly all terrorists are trying to advance radical Islam.
Yes, it sucks when truly innocent Muslims have to endure extra scrutiny, but the only way to tell the good from the bad is through scrutiny, and it would be really helpful if the non-radical, non-terrorist-sympathizing Muslims (that is, the global minority of them) would come out and strongly condemn terror, but they're pretty silent on that issue. No surprise, then, when they all get looked at as being more part of the problem than part of the solution. If moderate Muslims want Islam to be respected rather than suspected, they need to stand up and denounce terror and denounce terrorists. Even when those terrorists are state actors.
What's my race and religion? You can call me Irish Catholic. In some parts of the world, that might have gotten me some extra scrutiny once upon a time and I wouldn't call it unfair. People with names like mine and a religion like mine were planting bombs in London, and some here in the US were helping to finance them. If our terrorism problems here were with people of Irish ancestry and Catholic religion, I'd be quite understanding if that got me secondary screening when I fly, and I wouldn't be whining that it's racism or prejudice.
Here's another good example: my wife is from a country that has a lot of people who would like to live in the United States. There's a lot of visa fraud and as much illegal immigration as they can manage. We met when I was living there and already had one kid and another on the way when we decided to move back to the US. Even with those clear bona fides, the process to get her a spouse visa took a very long time. When I secured a good job in the States, we had to live apart for nearly 16 months, and I went a whole year without seeing her or our kids - from the time the second one was born until she got her visa. Getting a green card took another year and change after that, more paperwork, and yet another interview. At least she could do that part in the States.
25 out of 100 random people will accept an offer of C4 from a stranger? I call BS. If you told me 25/100 people were stupid, I'd believe you. But not *that* stupid.
Secondly, he didn't just walk up to them, open his trench coat and say "Pssst, wanna buy some C4 and a Stinger?" They were looking for stuff, so the FBI put forward a supplier.
Finally, if an FBI agent *had* walked up and said "Pssst, wanna buy some C4 and a Stinger?" and they said yes, then got busted, that'd stand up in court. Offering an illegal item for sale is not legal entrapment. Cf. John Delorean's coke bust. Or anybody who gets busted for soliciting prostitution when the prostitute turns out to be a police officer.
OK, then try this, asshole. We invented it. It's ours. You other piss-ant countries want your own Internet? Fine. Go run your own alternate root name servers. See how many people use them. See how well your own populace likes your Internet as opposed to the real one.
Am I a nationalist? Damn right. Nothing wrong with that.
Am I a xenophobe? Not at all. I spent a large portion of my life living abroad, and while I know there are things in the US that are fucked up, I never found anyplace that was less so. In fact, most places are even more screwed up than we are.
Sure, they were dumb. Most criminals are. Most terrorists aren't exactly the sharpest marbles in the sack, either. How dumb do you have to be for someone to convince you that blowing yourself up or flying an airplane into a building is a good idea and will help you achieve your goals?
However, they only failed because the supplier they found was an undercover Fed rather than someone who would supply actual weapons. As for reality, the rocket was real; it was just disarmed. As for the C-4, it's probably possible to supply fake C-4 that behaves just like the real thing except it won't actually explode. It's not surprising that they didn't test the stuff; they had no reason to, believing it to be authentic, and testing C-4 is likely to attract a lot of attention.
The bottom line is, they *are* terrorists. They did have a concrete plan to carry out attacks. They attempted to carry out that plan. They were caught by good undercover police work. To try and say they aren't terrorists because they were arrested before they could blow anything up is like trying to say somebody isn't a drug dealer because he gets arrested after selling to a narc.
Well, no, they couldn't. Plagiarism is taking someone else's original work, either in whole or in part, and purporting that it is your own original work. A small example of this is using an attributed quote in a paper and not identifying it as a quote.
A large example is copying your entire paper from someone else, putting your name on it, and submitting it as yours.
Note that plagiarism with permission is still plagiarism. If your friend gives you his term paper from last year and you turn it in as yours, that's still plagiarism. If you do it without permission, it may also be a copyright violation.
And I see that the law against online gambling did a lot to stop your mother from gambling away yours parents' savings. Since you say "parents" I'll assume that your father is still living. Why did he do nothing to protect that money if your mother is a gambling addict?
Seriously, I'm sorry about your mom and her problems, but for most of us, gambling is not a problem. It's something we do for entertainment. For me, playing poker for a few hours is more fun than going to a movie, and cheaper. For my wife, it's more fun than going to a movie, and it's profitable.
Your argument against gambling is completely specious and driven purely by emotion, not logic. Your argument can be used against practically anything.
"Let's ban alcohol. It's not a problem for most people, but some people mess up their lives with it, so no one should be allowed to have it." "Let's ban drugs. It's not a problem for most people, but some people mess up their lives with them, so no one should be allowed to have it." "Let's ban porn. It's not a problem for most people, but some people mess up their lives with it, so no one should be allowed to have it." "Let's ban prostitution. It's not a problem for most people, but some people mess up their lives with it, so no one should be allowed to have it." "Let's ban cars. It's not a problem for most people, but some people mess up their lives with it, so no one should be allowed to have them." "Let's ban food. It's not a problem for most people, but some people mess up their lives with it, so no one should be allowed to have it." "Let's ban sex. It's not a problem for most people, but some people mess up their lives with it, so no one should be allowed to have it."
That doesn't sound very sensible, does it?
Note that there are some countries that ban a number of those things. Would you really want to live in one of them? Probably not, but on the off chance that your answer is yes, if you convert to Islam, Saudi Arabia or Iran might take you in. You never know.
Actually, yes. Ainu (at least if they are full-blooded) do look different. Ainu are the indigenous population of Japan, before the arrival of the Yamato Japanese (what we (and they) generally think of as "Japanese" today). They also speak a different language, although even in Hokkaido, where most of the remaining Ainu live, the Ainu language is at least threatened if not outright endangered.
Beyond that, there is tremendous variation in the way Japanese look (yes, I get the joke, but still). Some look very Korean, for example. And some Koreans look quite a bit like Japanese. Go talk about that in either country if you want to rev up some extra controversy:) When I lived in Japan, I knew a Korean woman who never carried her gaijin card because she looked very Japanese, dressed Japanese, and spoke native-level Japanese. She was an immigrant, but it would pretty hard to tell, so she could get away with not carrying her card.
Some Japanese are kind of Chinese-looking, too. They definitely don't all look alike. There is also a small Vietnamese community in Japan. More are around Osaka than Tokyo, but all together there are probably only 20-30 thousand, IIRC.
Well, the study didn't actually say they get laid.
For example:
"Seventy-eight per cent of techies that were questioned also claimed that sex toys were part of their love life"
"And a further eight out of ten tech workers said that sex toys played an important part in their sexual relationships "
"Eighty-two per cent of IT workers also claimed to consider their partners sexual needs above there own"
Translation: the ones they interviewed are getting along with inflatables, Fleshlights, and pr0n, or if they are rich enough, maybe a Real Doll. The "partners needs" mentioned are probably the need for new batteries in some of their toys.
Nope, not thinking that. A regular baby monitor is just fine.
Why? I have three kids, and they have always been in the care of a trusted family member. Normally, either myself or my wife. Once in a while, an aunt, uncle, or grandparent.
Bottom line: if you're putting your child(ren) - especially a baby - in the care of someone that you cannot trust to care for your child without a baby monitor, the solution to the problem isn't a baby monitor. The solution to the problem is making sure a trusted person is caring for your child. Normally, that should be you. Yes, that may mean having to adjust work schedules or having only one parent work, but it's a matter of priorities. If your children aren't your top priority, you need to reassess your priorities. And maybe get yourself snipped, while you're at it.
It's not exactly that he's an idiot (OK, maybe he is), but that he's anti-Linux and his mind is made up and he is looking for corner cases to support his argument. Aside from the security stuff, which is obvious BS - Windows is less secure because of design choices made by Microsoft a long time ago and *nix is more secure because of different design choices that were also made a long time ago, and there are good AV apps available for Linux, it's just that hardly anyone thinks they need one - most of what he wrote is true but irrelevant.
Yeah, OO.org loads slowly. Shutdown and startup times have been slow (Ubuntu 9.04 is quite fast. though; the speed difference when I upgraded from 8.10 was really surprising), and he does note that some of these things are being addressed. Yadayadayada.
The number one pointer that he's talking from some orifice other than his mouth is the fact that any major Linux distro today is far more usable than Windows 95 was in its day, and yet nobody - not even the most rabid Mac fanboi - claimed that Windows 95 wasn't ready for the desktop, whatever that's even supposed to mean.
Some people might want to dispute that claim about being more usable than Windows 95, so I'll hit a few major points:
-Does anyone remembering connecting Windows 95 to the Internet? I worked for an ISP in those days, and it was pretty normal for support to have to help people get online back then. Granted, dial-up networking isn't a shining point of light for Linux either, but it's better than it was on Windows 95, and Ethernet networking is dead simple.
-Installing software. Way easier on Linux than it was on Windows 95. Come to think of it, it's still easier on Linux than it is on XP or Vista.
-Stability. Linux has always been more stable than Windows, and remains so today, although Windows has improved a lot and is now actually pretty stable in most cases.
-Less backwards compatibility. Yes, this is a feature. Windows 95 had less than perfect backwards compatibility with older apps, but it should have had even less. Microsoft is really shackled by maintaining backwards compatibility and Windows would be a much better OS if they could break compatibility with all previous versions. They can't/won't for business reasons, and this is an unsolvable weakness of proprietary software. KDE broke compatibility with KDE 3.x, and apart from the wailing and gnashing of teeth over the immaturity of KDE 4.0, it was relatively painless. A year on, with KDE 4.2 out, there isn't much complaining anymore. The number one reason for that is that there was no monetary pain involved in breaking compatibility. Nobody had to go out and replace hundreds, or even thousands, of dollars of KDE apps because they're all free. It only required some effort, and far less effort than would be required on Windows. Anyone updating today from KDE 3.5.x to 4.2.3 would just say "wow!" The pain was only for people who upgraded when 4.0 came out. I hated it, but now there's no way I'd go back to KDE 3.5.x. For Windows users, the monetary cost of breaking compatibility plus the effort involved would be intolerable. They would either not upgrade - ever - or they would jump ship, probably to Linux.
-Appearance. Gnome, KDE, and pretty much everything else look way nicer than Windows 95. Or XP, which doesn't look all that different.
-Dual-boot. Ever try to dual-boot Windows 95 with anything, even another language version of Windows 95? I did, with English and Japanese versions. It wasn't pretty.
-Language support. Using Windows 95 in another language generally meant buying a localized version. For GNOME and KDE, you just switch languages.
-Driver support. On Windows 95, you needed a vendor driver disk for pretty much everything, and in the early days, not everything even had a Windows 95 driver. On Linux, the great majority of hardware works out of the box, no driver needed. In fact, Linux had better out of the box driver support than any Windows version, including Vista. Granted, for that minor
A Macbook Air is way too big to be a subnotebook. You can only try to call it that because notebooks have grown so large. I was working at an ISP in Japan in the late nineties and we actually had a Libretto (don't recall what model, but it was running Win 95-J OSR2, so probably the one referenced in the article). I found it too small to type comfortably on, but some people - even with larger fingers than mine - thought it was OK. I preferred our main "road computer," a Thinkpad 240 which they are probably still using there today. A couple of years ago they replaced its hard drive when it died.
The Thinkpad 240 was about the same size as a Macbook Air, probably smaller (it was a B5 notebook), but thicker. There were Sony Vaios on the market then that were very thin and light and would not look especially out of place on the shelf today. Very thin, very light, had no serial port because they were too thin. We bought the Thinkpad 240 instead of a Vaio b/c it did have a 9-pin serial port and we wanted to be very, very sure that it would talk over the serial port to any of our networking equipment. Nobody wanted to hundreds of kilometers from Tokyo at a remote site and find out that something didn't play well with USB - serial adapters.
Macbook Airs are neat and all, and I suppose you could make an argument that by today's bloated notebook standards the MBA is practically a subnotebook, but it's larger than anything that is properly a subnotebook.
Told such a lie, he's likely to go with the Windows box.
Of course, the truth of the matter is that with a major Linux distro such as Ubuntu, Fedora, SuSE, etc., you basically just pour it in and it works. Ubuntu Jaunty will even auto-configure dual-head. I saw that happen, in person, a couple days ago at work.
Not only will a major distro just work on the great majority of hardware, it will also install itself faster than XP or Vista will do. And it requires no activation or any such BS. And it will configure itself to dual-boot Windows if you want.
Maybe, maybe not. As others have pointed out, going for a purportedly green techonology that might not actually be green may send an "all hands on deck" message, but it may also encourage other promotion of purportedly green techonologies that aren't really green, and that's likely to not be a net gain and might be a net loss. I don't pretend to be qualified to pass judgment on soy-based toner, but you seem to basically be saying that "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" and that's usually not true. The enemy of your enemy is the enemy of your enemy. Very rarely is it, or will it, be your friend.
WRT bring your own bag, however, I'm going to call BS. Why?
Because if I brought my own bags to the supermarket, I'd have to by vinyl garbage bags to put in my kitchen garbage can. I don't know whether they talk longer to decompose than supermarket plastic bags, but considering how thick/heavy they are, they might. At the least, a thicker, larger (than I need), heavier bag takes more energy and more resources to produce, and I'd likely be spending more for them than the cost (included in the price of groceries) of supermarket plastic bags.
Bottom line: bringing my own bag would be a net loss for me and for the environment, and a gain for people making and selling plastic trash bags. I'll keep taking the supermarket bags, thanks.
And before you suggest paper, it has this little problem with moisture tolerance. No thanks. I'm for biodegrable/self-destructing plastic bags, I recycle everything I can, and I do bring my own bags to some places (mostly Costco, because they don't provide bags at all, just whatever cardboard boxes are in the box bin), but large-scale BYOB isn't a solution.
I believe that. My daughter recently spent a few days in the pediatric ICU, and at both the hospital she was taken to by ambulance and later, at the hospital to which she was transferred because they have a PICU, I saw lots of computers running Windows 2000. These hospitals are both top-notch, highly regarded institutions in a major metropolitan area of the United States, but they have some pretty antiquated computer equipment. Wouldn't surprise me if they had NT 4.x machines lurking somewhere, too.
I don't think the threat is so much that people will die on the table as a result of computer downtime, but that they will die, for example in the ER as a result of a huge increase in processing backlog brought on when computers are down and paper forms have to be brought out, combined with some human error introduced by trying to read the scribbly handwriting of others.
Really, now? I've been using Linux since 1998 and was a Linux/FreeBSD/Solaris x86 admin from 1999 - 2003, when I shifted to the email security industry. I have been using Linux as my exclusive home desktop since 1999, and exclusively at work most of the time since 1999 (currently 80% Linux, 20% Mac), and primarily at work all the time since 1999. Even when I worked for Microsoft. I'll hazard a guess, based partly on your/. ID and partly on your comment, that your credentials are something less than this.
I use sudo all the time. A basic point of security is using the least amount of privilege necessary to get the job done. Using sudo and its GUI counterparts is a textbook example of that, and is well-implemented by the various flavors of Ubuntu, and also well-implemented by Apple.
Even Microsoft was smart enough to go that way in Vista. It was poorly implemented and pissed of users, sure, but the basic idea of having it was not wrong.
RPM Vs. Dev, and all, is under the hood stuff that is almost certainly already known by the person asking, since (s)he states previous use of Mandrake. An important difference would be something like msec, the Mandriva Security Center, which has no good equivalent in *buntu AFAIK. I don't know what "optimized for GNOME" is supposed to mean, but Ubuntu comes in the GNOME flavor (default Ubuntu), the KDE flavor (Kubuntu), and the XFCE flavor (Xubuntu) that I know of. LXDE is also in there, but I don't know if there is a seperate version for that or not.
WRT the root account, *buntu does have a root account, The root password is just disabled, so if you want to become root you have to use sudo su, but the root account is there if you want it. I sometimes use it. I haven't bothered to see a root password, but it can be done. Discouraged? Yeah, but so what? It's probably a good idea for many inexperienced users, and even experienced ones. More than a few of us have executed a command as root that we really shouldn't have, then said "Oh, crap!" as we realized it:)
I once worked on a Japanese ODA project in northern Viet Nam, setting up a wireless WAN network with some Cisco IP Phones and a few PCs in a place that didn't have paved roads, didn't have a hospital or clinic (as far as I could tell), and which had never before had a telephone in its high school (which had only a few hundred old books in its library). Not exactly a high tech kind of place. However, before the computers were even warmed up, students had descended on them and installed Yahoo Messenger, file sharing apps, etc., the second we turned our backs.
To maintain some semblance of control, we had to resort to techniques such as putting the keyboard and mouse cables behind the computer and seemingly plugging in, but actually only just resting in the sockets. That kept them fooled for the whole week I was there:)
Good point. My Geocities pages were written in 1996 and 1997 and lead to my becoming a web developer in the late nineties and later, a sysadmin.
Sure, they look crappy now, but like you said, it's where a lot of people learned to write HTML. I liked Geocities a lot and it was a shame to see it basically die/become a piece of crap after Yahoo took over.
It was pretty common knowledge 10 years ago when I was an ISP postmaster. Since 2003, I've been working directly in the email security industry, and yeah, there's no doubt whatsoever that "opt-out" means "Yes, Mr. Spammer, this is a valid email address that you can hit harder."
I can't believe such a dumb question actually got past the/. editors. Sheesh. What's the world coming to?
I forgot to mention in my previous reply that there is really only one element that sees - or would see - a single, unified packaging system as a plus: those who are providing, or want to provide, proprietary software for Linux. If either.rpm or.deb were the only packaging system in use across all major distros, a proprietary vendor could build one statically-linked package and be done with it. Or, they could build several dynamically-linked ones to cover the most popular distros. However, once you start down the path of providing different versions for different distros, it's a very small leap from there to also providing them as a tarball, a.rpm, and a.deb.
In any case, few in the Linux community - whether on the distributor side or the end user side - care about whether things are easy or hard for proprietary software vendors. Proprietary software is a thing that Free software aims to replace, so there's little motivation for anyone to ease its way on Linux. Most especially, there's no motivation to make packaging system decisions based on what's good for proprietary software vendors.
For Free software developers, it doesn't matter much. If they can't/won't/don't/aren't providing packages for different distros, it doesn't matter very much. If the software is even remotely popular, it's like to be packaged by most or all of the leading distros.
Of course, there are exceptions, such as Ubuntu not having a Handbrake package. Of course, it may be that Handbrake just isn't very popular on Linux yet. I first became acquainted with it on the Mac. Through a little searching, I did find a PPA source for Handbrake on Jaunty, but it would be nice to see an official package for this excellent piece of software.
I don't know how old you were on January 1, 2000, but I probably wouldn't be far off is I guessed you weren't old enough to have worked on Y2K stuff, old enough to vote, old enough to drive, or maybe not even old enough to get dressed by yourself for school in the morning. You're certainly far too ignorant of Y2K to be talking about it.
The reason Y2K was pretty much a non-event (I say pretty much because there were some failures, but they were generally of the minor/hahaha variety) is because of all the fixing stuff that went on during 1999. I was a sysadmin at the time, and even though we were pretty sure all our systems were properly patched, my entire department spent the night of December 31, 1999, until the wee hours of the morning, in our office. Pizza, snacks (and once we were sure nothing was going to go wrong, other refreshments) were provided by our CTO. To his credit, he also spent the night at the office. Not because he expected to be needed, but because if he was requiring us to do it, he was going to put in the hours, too. And besides, somebody had to pay for all that stuff:)
I didn't have to install any dependencies to watch the video, I just clicked the link. And yes, I watched it on my Linux desktop. The only thing I had to do was authorize the site in NoScript, but that's only because I installed NoScript and my policy is to deny by default and authorized only when really needed. An "ordinary" would never encounter that situation.
RPM is close? Sure. Need an easier way? Maybe. RPM is pretty good, though. But if you need an easier way, any Debian-based distro already has it. APT takes care of the dependencies automatically.
I disagree, however, that there needs to be one standard packaging system across distros. Even if we had such a thing - which would require.deb and.rpm being reconciled into a single whole, and all other systems basically just dying - you still would be ill-advised to install one distro's package on another because of version and dependency differences.
IIRC urpmi basically makes RPM systems act a lot like APT-based systems and thus, on any RPM or APT system, dependencies should be automatically handled.
If you want to install packages that aren't from your distro, you're on your own, of course. But then, that's not the kind of thing noobs usually do. They use the GUI tool to install whatever they want. In a huge distro like Debian, Ubuntu, SuSE, Fedora, etc., it's highly likely that whatever they want will be there. The user neither knows nor cares what happens under the hood with the packaging system.
As a matter of fact, installing new software on my Linux systems is easier than installing it on my MacBook Pro, and *way* easier than installing it on Windows.
Let's see, things that are uniform across Linux distros:
-The great majority of them use either KDE or GNOME by default
-The great majority use either RPM or or APT for package management
-All, or nearly all, use BASH as the default shell
-Networking
-Compilers and interpreters, except for differences in version (but.Net programmers don't find the same version everywhere they go, either)
-Firewall
Those are just the things that come to mind offhand. Those things are especially uniform among the most popular ones, so if you have experience in Red Hat, you'll be comfortable on any RH-like distro. If you have Debian or Ubuntu experience, you'll be comfortable on any Debian-based distro. Right there, that covers the great majority of the Linux installed base.
And of course, going from Linux to *BSD or vice versa isn't very difficult, either. A lot of Linux skills also translate to proprietary UNIX flavors, or at least make using them a lot easier. Solaris, for example, is much farther away from any Linux distro than any two Linux distros are from each other. BSD even feels more Linuxy, even though Solaris uses Sys V inits like Linux, rather than BSD-style inits.
Your comment about training on things like browsers, email, office apps, looks like it's just a straw man, too. Training on those things won't get you a better job, unless the job you have now is at a fast food restaurant. Not knowing those things will keep you from getting a job that requires you to use a computer, because those are skills that are just expected going in. If you don't have them, someone who does will be hired. That training is also already available cheap/free through many sources.
But as for the broader topic at hand, I can't believe this article even got past the editors. Of course Microsoft would only pay for training on Windows technology. They'd be idiots to pay for training on a competing product. I work for a well-known hardware vendor, and if we were giving away free training to the public, either directly or in vouchers, I rather doubt it would be training conducted using our competitors' products. That would be foolish.
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I stand corrected on the Delorean case.
WRT the current case, however, I believe this is not entrapment. If I offer you $50,000 to kill someone and you take the money and attempt to carry out the murder, only to be arrested by police who are waiting at the would-be crime scene because I was an informant, you weren't entrapped. Anyone who accepts money to commit murder already has a reasonable predisposition to do it, IMO. Like you say, it's a case for a jury, but that's a jury I'd like to be on.
You couldn't offer me $50,000 to kill someone, no matter what financial straights I was in. Yes, I know this. I lost a home that I had a great deal of money invested in, and if someone had offered me enough money to make the back payments and pay off the mortgage in exchange for blowing up $TARGET, I would not have done it. I doubt I'll ever be able to buy a house again. Most of our life's savings were in it, and I'll reach retirement age before I have that much cash again. But I wouldn't have killed or stolen for the money to save it. In fact, I would have told him to let me think about it, then I would have called the FBI myself.
You show me a person who says "Yeah, sure" to an offer of blowing up a Synagogue for cash and I'll show you a person with a predisposition to do that anyway.
Prejudice against Muslims? Hardly. You *have* noticed that the people going around doing this are primarily young, primarily Muslim, primarily male, right? And that even among Muslims who don't do things like that, there is a lot of sympathy for those who do, and a lot of baseless hatred of Jews in general and Israel in particular. To suspect young, Muslim males as a group of being likely terrorists is hardly prejudice. If you removed all of the Islamist terror groups around the world, you'd remove almost all the terror groups, period. Sure, there are a few others, like the Tamil Tigers (now either defunct or nearly so), and the Shining Path group, but they are the exceptions to the rule. Nearly all terrorists are trying to advance radical Islam.
Yes, it sucks when truly innocent Muslims have to endure extra scrutiny, but the only way to tell the good from the bad is through scrutiny, and it would be really helpful if the non-radical, non-terrorist-sympathizing Muslims (that is, the global minority of them) would come out and strongly condemn terror, but they're pretty silent on that issue. No surprise, then, when they all get looked at as being more part of the problem than part of the solution. If moderate Muslims want Islam to be respected rather than suspected, they need to stand up and denounce terror and denounce terrorists. Even when those terrorists are state actors.
What's my race and religion? You can call me Irish Catholic. In some parts of the world, that might have gotten me some extra scrutiny once upon a time and I wouldn't call it unfair. People with names like mine and a religion like mine were planting bombs in London, and some here in the US were helping to finance them. If our terrorism problems here were with people of Irish ancestry and Catholic religion, I'd be quite understanding if that got me secondary screening when I fly, and I wouldn't be whining that it's racism or prejudice.
Here's another good example: my wife is from a country that has a lot of people who would like to live in the United States. There's a lot of visa fraud and as much illegal immigration as they can manage. We met when I was living there and already had one kid and another on the way when we decided to move back to the US. Even with those clear bona fides, the process to get her a spouse visa took a very long time. When I secured a good job in the States, we had to live apart for nearly 16 months, and I went a whole year without seeing her or our kids - from the time the second one was born until she got her visa. Getting a green card took another year and change after that, more paperwork, and yet another interview. At least she could do that part in the States.
Despite all that hassle and the rea
25 out of 100 random people will accept an offer of C4 from a stranger? I call BS. If you told me 25/100 people were stupid, I'd believe you. But not *that* stupid.
Secondly, he didn't just walk up to them, open his trench coat and say "Pssst, wanna buy some C4 and a Stinger?" They were looking for stuff, so the FBI put forward a supplier.
Finally, if an FBI agent *had* walked up and said "Pssst, wanna buy some C4 and a Stinger?" and they said yes, then got busted, that'd stand up in court. Offering an illegal item for sale is not legal entrapment. Cf. John Delorean's coke bust. Or anybody who gets busted for soliciting prostitution when the prostitute turns out to be a police officer.
OK, then try this, asshole. We invented it. It's ours. You other piss-ant countries want your own Internet? Fine. Go run your own alternate root name servers. See how many people use them. See how well your own populace likes your Internet as opposed to the real one.
Am I a nationalist? Damn right. Nothing wrong with that.
Am I a xenophobe? Not at all. I spent a large portion of my life living abroad, and while I know there are things in the US that are fucked up, I never found anyplace that was less so. In fact, most places are even more screwed up than we are.
Sure, they were dumb. Most criminals are. Most terrorists aren't exactly the sharpest marbles in the sack, either. How dumb do you have to be for someone to convince you that blowing yourself up or flying an airplane into a building is a good idea and will help you achieve your goals?
However, they only failed because the supplier they found was an undercover Fed rather than someone who would supply actual weapons. As for reality, the rocket was real; it was just disarmed. As for the C-4, it's probably possible to supply fake C-4 that behaves just like the real thing except it won't actually explode. It's not surprising that they didn't test the stuff; they had no reason to, believing it to be authentic, and testing C-4 is likely to attract a lot of attention.
The bottom line is, they *are* terrorists. They did have a concrete plan to carry out attacks. They attempted to carry out that plan. They were caught by good undercover police work. To try and say they aren't terrorists because they were arrested before they could blow anything up is like trying to say somebody isn't a drug dealer because he gets arrested after selling to a narc.
Well, no, they couldn't. Plagiarism is taking someone else's original work, either in whole or in part, and purporting that it is your own original work. A small example of this is using an attributed quote in a paper and not identifying it as a quote.
A large example is copying your entire paper from someone else, putting your name on it, and submitting it as yours.
Note that plagiarism with permission is still plagiarism. If your friend gives you his term paper from last year and you turn it in as yours, that's still plagiarism. If you do it without permission, it may also be a copyright violation.
And I see that the law against online gambling did a lot to stop your mother from gambling away yours parents' savings. Since you say "parents" I'll assume that your father is still living. Why did he do nothing to protect that money if your mother is a gambling addict?
Seriously, I'm sorry about your mom and her problems, but for most of us, gambling is not a problem. It's something we do for entertainment. For me, playing poker for a few hours is more fun than going to a movie, and cheaper. For my wife, it's more fun than going to a movie, and it's profitable.
Your argument against gambling is completely specious and driven purely by emotion, not logic. Your argument can be used against practically anything.
"Let's ban alcohol. It's not a problem for most people, but some people mess up their lives with it, so no one should be allowed to have it."
"Let's ban drugs. It's not a problem for most people, but some people mess up their lives with them, so no one should be allowed to have it."
"Let's ban porn. It's not a problem for most people, but some people mess up their lives with it, so no one should be allowed to have it."
"Let's ban prostitution. It's not a problem for most people, but some people mess up their lives with it, so no one should be allowed to have it."
"Let's ban cars. It's not a problem for most people, but some people mess up their lives with it, so no one should be allowed to have them."
"Let's ban food. It's not a problem for most people, but some people mess up their lives with it, so no one should be allowed to have it."
"Let's ban sex. It's not a problem for most people, but some people mess up their lives with it, so no one should be allowed to have it."
That doesn't sound very sensible, does it?
Note that there are some countries that ban a number of those things. Would you really want to live in one of them? Probably not, but on the off chance that your answer is yes, if you convert to Islam, Saudi Arabia or Iran might take you in. You never know.
Actually, yes. Ainu (at least if they are full-blooded) do look different. Ainu are the indigenous population of Japan, before the arrival of the Yamato Japanese (what we (and they) generally think of as "Japanese" today). They also speak a different language, although even in Hokkaido, where most of the remaining Ainu live, the Ainu language is at least threatened if not outright endangered.
Beyond that, there is tremendous variation in the way Japanese look (yes, I get the joke, but still). Some look very Korean, for example. And some Koreans look quite a bit like Japanese. Go talk about that in either country if you want to rev up some extra controversy :) When I lived in Japan, I knew a Korean woman who never carried her gaijin card because she looked very Japanese, dressed Japanese, and spoke native-level Japanese. She was an immigrant, but it would pretty hard to tell, so she could get away with not carrying her card.
Some Japanese are kind of Chinese-looking, too. They definitely don't all look alike. There is also a small Vietnamese community in Japan. More are around Osaka than Tokyo, but all together there are probably only 20-30 thousand, IIRC.
Well, the study didn't actually say they get laid.
For example:
"Seventy-eight per cent of techies that were questioned also claimed that sex toys were part of their love life"
"And a further eight out of ten tech workers said that sex toys played an important part in their sexual relationships "
"Eighty-two per cent of IT workers also claimed to consider their partners sexual needs above there own"
Translation: the ones they interviewed are getting along with inflatables, Fleshlights, and pr0n, or if they are rich enough, maybe a Real Doll. The "partners needs" mentioned are probably the need for new batteries in some of their toys.
It never says the actually get laid :)
Nope, not thinking that. A regular baby monitor is just fine.
Why? I have three kids, and they have always been in the care of a trusted family member. Normally, either myself or my wife. Once in a while, an aunt, uncle, or grandparent.
Bottom line: if you're putting your child(ren) - especially a baby - in the care of someone that you cannot trust to care for your child without a baby monitor, the solution to the problem isn't a baby monitor. The solution to the problem is making sure a trusted person is caring for your child. Normally, that should be you. Yes, that may mean having to adjust work schedules or having only one parent work, but it's a matter of priorities. If your children aren't your top priority, you need to reassess your priorities. And maybe get yourself snipped, while you're at it.
It's not exactly that he's an idiot (OK, maybe he is), but that he's anti-Linux and his mind is made up and he is looking for corner cases to support his argument. Aside from the security stuff, which is obvious BS - Windows is less secure because of design choices made by Microsoft a long time ago and *nix is more secure because of different design choices that were also made a long time ago, and there are good AV apps available for Linux, it's just that hardly anyone thinks they need one - most of what he wrote is true but irrelevant.
Yeah, OO.org loads slowly. Shutdown and startup times have been slow (Ubuntu 9.04 is quite fast. though; the speed difference when I upgraded from 8.10 was really surprising), and he does note that some of these things are being addressed. Yadayadayada.
The number one pointer that he's talking from some orifice other than his mouth is the fact that any major Linux distro today is far more usable than Windows 95 was in its day, and yet nobody - not even the most rabid Mac fanboi - claimed that Windows 95 wasn't ready for the desktop, whatever that's even supposed to mean.
Some people might want to dispute that claim about being more usable than Windows 95, so I'll hit a few major points:
-Does anyone remembering connecting Windows 95 to the Internet? I worked for an ISP in those days, and it was pretty normal for support to have to help people get online back then. Granted, dial-up networking isn't a shining point of light for Linux either, but it's better than it was on Windows 95, and Ethernet networking is dead simple.
-Installing software. Way easier on Linux than it was on Windows 95. Come to think of it, it's still easier on Linux than it is on XP or Vista.
-Stability. Linux has always been more stable than Windows, and remains so today, although Windows has improved a lot and is now actually pretty stable in most cases.
-Less backwards compatibility. Yes, this is a feature. Windows 95 had less than perfect backwards compatibility with older apps, but it should have had even less. Microsoft is really shackled by maintaining backwards compatibility and Windows would be a much better OS if they could break compatibility with all previous versions. They can't/won't for business reasons, and this is an unsolvable weakness of proprietary software. KDE broke compatibility with KDE 3.x, and apart from the wailing and gnashing of teeth over the immaturity of KDE 4.0, it was relatively painless. A year on, with KDE 4.2 out, there isn't much complaining anymore. The number one reason for that is that there was no monetary pain involved in breaking compatibility. Nobody had to go out and replace hundreds, or even thousands, of dollars of KDE apps because they're all free. It only required some effort, and far less effort than would be required on Windows. Anyone updating today from KDE 3.5.x to 4.2.3 would just say "wow!" The pain was only for people who upgraded when 4.0 came out. I hated it, but now there's no way I'd go back to KDE 3.5.x. For Windows users, the monetary cost of breaking compatibility plus the effort involved would be intolerable. They would either not upgrade - ever - or they would jump ship, probably to Linux.
-Appearance. Gnome, KDE, and pretty much everything else look way nicer than Windows 95. Or XP, which doesn't look all that different.
-Dual-boot. Ever try to dual-boot Windows 95 with anything, even another language version of Windows 95? I did, with English and Japanese versions. It wasn't pretty.
-Language support. Using Windows 95 in another language generally meant buying a localized version. For GNOME and KDE, you just switch languages.
-Driver support. On Windows 95, you needed a vendor driver disk for pretty much everything, and in the early days, not everything even had a Windows 95 driver. On Linux, the great majority of hardware works out of the box, no driver needed. In fact, Linux had better out of the box driver support than any Windows version, including Vista. Granted, for that minor
A Macbook Air is way too big to be a subnotebook. You can only try to call it that because notebooks have grown so large. I was working at an ISP in Japan in the late nineties and we actually had a Libretto (don't recall what model, but it was running Win 95-J OSR2, so probably the one referenced in the article). I found it too small to type comfortably on, but some people - even with larger fingers than mine - thought it was OK. I preferred our main "road computer," a Thinkpad 240 which they are probably still using there today. A couple of years ago they replaced its hard drive when it died.
The Thinkpad 240 was about the same size as a Macbook Air, probably smaller (it was a B5 notebook), but thicker. There were Sony Vaios on the market then that were very thin and light and would not look especially out of place on the shelf today. Very thin, very light, had no serial port because they were too thin. We bought the Thinkpad 240 instead of a Vaio b/c it did have a 9-pin serial port and we wanted to be very, very sure that it would talk over the serial port to any of our networking equipment. Nobody wanted to hundreds of kilometers from Tokyo at a remote site and find out that something didn't play well with USB - serial adapters.
Macbook Airs are neat and all, and I suppose you could make an argument that by today's bloated notebook standards the MBA is practically a subnotebook, but it's larger than anything that is properly a subnotebook.
Told such a lie, he's likely to go with the Windows box.
Of course, the truth of the matter is that with a major Linux distro such as Ubuntu, Fedora, SuSE, etc., you basically just pour it in and it works. Ubuntu Jaunty will even auto-configure dual-head. I saw that happen, in person, a couple days ago at work.
Not only will a major distro just work on the great majority of hardware, it will also install itself faster than XP or Vista will do. And it requires no activation or any such BS. And it will configure itself to dual-boot Windows if you want.
Now what's Joe gonna do?
Maybe, maybe not. As others have pointed out, going for a purportedly green techonology that might not actually be green may send an "all hands on deck" message, but it may also encourage other promotion of purportedly green techonologies that aren't really green, and that's likely to not be a net gain and might be a net loss. I don't pretend to be qualified to pass judgment on soy-based toner, but you seem to basically be saying that "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" and that's usually not true. The enemy of your enemy is the enemy of your enemy. Very rarely is it, or will it, be your friend.
WRT bring your own bag, however, I'm going to call BS. Why?
Because if I brought my own bags to the supermarket, I'd have to by vinyl garbage bags to put in my kitchen garbage can. I don't know whether they talk longer to decompose than supermarket plastic bags, but considering how thick/heavy they are, they might. At the least, a thicker, larger (than I need), heavier bag takes more energy and more resources to produce, and I'd likely be spending more for them than the cost (included in the price of groceries) of supermarket plastic bags.
Bottom line: bringing my own bag would be a net loss for me and for the environment, and a gain for people making and selling plastic trash bags. I'll keep taking the supermarket bags, thanks.
And before you suggest paper, it has this little problem with moisture tolerance. No thanks. I'm for biodegrable/self-destructing plastic bags, I recycle everything I can, and I do bring my own bags to some places (mostly Costco, because they don't provide bags at all, just whatever cardboard boxes are in the box bin), but large-scale BYOB isn't a solution.
I believe that. My daughter recently spent a few days in the pediatric ICU, and at both the hospital she was taken to by ambulance and later, at the hospital to which she was transferred because they have a PICU, I saw lots of computers running Windows 2000. These hospitals are both top-notch, highly regarded institutions in a major metropolitan area of the United States, but they have some pretty antiquated computer equipment. Wouldn't surprise me if they had NT 4.x machines lurking somewhere, too.
I don't think the threat is so much that people will die on the table as a result of computer downtime, but that they will die, for example in the ER as a result of a huge increase in processing backlog brought on when computers are down and paper forms have to be brought out, combined with some human error introduced by trying to read the scribbly handwriting of others.
Really, now? I've been using Linux since 1998 and was a Linux/FreeBSD/Solaris x86 admin from 1999 - 2003, when I shifted to the email security industry. I have been using Linux as my exclusive home desktop since 1999, and exclusively at work most of the time since 1999 (currently 80% Linux, 20% Mac), and primarily at work all the time since 1999. Even when I worked for Microsoft. I'll hazard a guess, based partly on your /. ID and partly on your comment, that your credentials are something less than this.
I use sudo all the time. A basic point of security is using the least amount of privilege necessary to get the job done. Using sudo and its GUI counterparts is a textbook example of that, and is well-implemented by the various flavors of Ubuntu, and also well-implemented by Apple.
Even Microsoft was smart enough to go that way in Vista. It was poorly implemented and pissed of users, sure, but the basic idea of having it was not wrong.
This doesn't really answer the question.
RPM Vs. Dev, and all, is under the hood stuff that is almost certainly already known by the person asking, since (s)he states previous use of Mandrake. An important difference would be something like msec, the Mandriva Security Center, which has no good equivalent in *buntu AFAIK. I don't know what "optimized for GNOME" is supposed to mean, but Ubuntu comes in the GNOME flavor (default Ubuntu), the KDE flavor (Kubuntu), and the XFCE flavor (Xubuntu) that I know of. LXDE is also in there, but I don't know if there is a seperate version for that or not.
WRT the root account, *buntu does have a root account, The root password is just disabled, so if you want to become root you have to use sudo su, but the root account is there if you want it. I sometimes use it. I haven't bothered to see a root password, but it can be done. Discouraged? Yeah, but so what? It's probably a good idea for many inexperienced users, and even experienced ones. More than a few of us have executed a command as root that we really shouldn't have, then said "Oh, crap!" as we realized it :)
The Ghostbusters warned us about this decades ago, but did we listen?! Noooooooooooooooooo!!!
+1
I once worked on a Japanese ODA project in northern Viet Nam, setting up a wireless WAN network with some Cisco IP Phones and a few PCs in a place that didn't have paved roads, didn't have a hospital or clinic (as far as I could tell), and which had never before had a telephone in its high school (which had only a few hundred old books in its library). Not exactly a high tech kind of place. However, before the computers were even warmed up, students had descended on them and installed Yahoo Messenger, file sharing apps, etc., the second we turned our backs.
To maintain some semblance of control, we had to resort to techniques such as putting the keyboard and mouse cables behind the computer and seemingly plugging in, but actually only just resting in the sockets. That kept them fooled for the whole week I was there :)
Good point. My Geocities pages were written in 1996 and 1997 and lead to my becoming a web developer in the late nineties and later, a sysadmin.
Sure, they look crappy now, but like you said, it's where a lot of people learned to write HTML. I liked Geocities a lot and it was a shame to see it basically die/become a piece of crap after Yahoo took over.
I'm just relieved it didn't give him a *seizure*
It was pretty common knowledge 10 years ago when I was an ISP postmaster. Since 2003, I've been working directly in the email security industry, and yeah, there's no doubt whatsoever that "opt-out" means "Yes, Mr. Spammer, this is a valid email address that you can hit harder."
I can't believe such a dumb question actually got past the /. editors. Sheesh. What's the world coming to?
I forgot to mention in my previous reply that there is really only one element that sees - or would see - a single, unified packaging system as a plus: those who are providing, or want to provide, proprietary software for Linux. If either .rpm or .deb were the only packaging system in use across all major distros, a proprietary vendor could build one statically-linked package and be done with it. Or, they could build several dynamically-linked ones to cover the most popular distros. However, once you start down the path of providing different versions for different distros, it's a very small leap from there to also providing them as a tarball, a .rpm, and a .deb.
In any case, few in the Linux community - whether on the distributor side or the end user side - care about whether things are easy or hard for proprietary software vendors. Proprietary software is a thing that Free software aims to replace, so there's little motivation for anyone to ease its way on Linux. Most especially, there's no motivation to make packaging system decisions based on what's good for proprietary software vendors.
For Free software developers, it doesn't matter much. If they can't/won't/don't/aren't providing packages for different distros, it doesn't matter very much. If the software is even remotely popular, it's like to be packaged by most or all of the leading distros.
Of course, there are exceptions, such as Ubuntu not having a Handbrake package. Of course, it may be that Handbrake just isn't very popular on Linux yet. I first became acquainted with it on the Mac. Through a little searching, I did find a PPA source for Handbrake on Jaunty, but it would be nice to see an official package for this excellent piece of software.
I don't know how old you were on January 1, 2000, but I probably wouldn't be far off is I guessed you weren't old enough to have worked on Y2K stuff, old enough to vote, old enough to drive, or maybe not even old enough to get dressed by yourself for school in the morning. You're certainly far too ignorant of Y2K to be talking about it.
The reason Y2K was pretty much a non-event (I say pretty much because there were some failures, but they were generally of the minor/hahaha variety) is because of all the fixing stuff that went on during 1999. I was a sysadmin at the time, and even though we were pretty sure all our systems were properly patched, my entire department spent the night of December 31, 1999, until the wee hours of the morning, in our office. Pizza, snacks (and once we were sure nothing was going to go wrong, other refreshments) were provided by our CTO. To his credit, he also spent the night at the office. Not because he expected to be needed, but because if he was requiring us to do it, he was going to put in the hours, too. And besides, somebody had to pay for all that stuff :)
I didn't have to install any dependencies to watch the video, I just clicked the link. And yes, I watched it on my Linux desktop. The only thing I had to do was authorize the site in NoScript, but that's only because I installed NoScript and my policy is to deny by default and authorized only when really needed. An "ordinary" would never encounter that situation.
RPM is close? Sure. Need an easier way? Maybe. RPM is pretty good, though. But if you need an easier way, any Debian-based distro already has it. APT takes care of the dependencies automatically.
I disagree, however, that there needs to be one standard packaging system across distros. Even if we had such a thing - which would require .deb and .rpm being reconciled into a single whole, and all other systems basically just dying - you still would be ill-advised to install one distro's package on another because of version and dependency differences.
IIRC urpmi basically makes RPM systems act a lot like APT-based systems and thus, on any RPM or APT system, dependencies should be automatically handled.
If you want to install packages that aren't from your distro, you're on your own, of course. But then, that's not the kind of thing noobs usually do. They use the GUI tool to install whatever they want. In a huge distro like Debian, Ubuntu, SuSE, Fedora, etc., it's highly likely that whatever they want will be there. The user neither knows nor cares what happens under the hood with the packaging system.
As a matter of fact, installing new software on my Linux systems is easier than installing it on my MacBook Pro, and *way* easier than installing it on Windows.
I know I shouldn't feed trolls, but ...
Let's see, things that are uniform across Linux distros:
-The great majority of them use either KDE or GNOME by default
-The great majority use either RPM or or APT for package management
-All, or nearly all, use BASH as the default shell
-Networking
-Compilers and interpreters, except for differences in version (but .Net programmers don't find the same version everywhere they go, either)
-Firewall
Those are just the things that come to mind offhand. Those things are especially uniform among the most popular ones, so if you have experience in Red Hat, you'll be comfortable on any RH-like distro. If you have Debian or Ubuntu experience, you'll be comfortable on any Debian-based distro. Right there, that covers the great majority of the Linux installed base.
And of course, going from Linux to *BSD or vice versa isn't very difficult, either. A lot of Linux skills also translate to proprietary UNIX flavors, or at least make using them a lot easier. Solaris, for example, is much farther away from any Linux distro than any two Linux distros are from each other. BSD even feels more Linuxy, even though Solaris uses Sys V inits like Linux, rather than BSD-style inits.
Your comment about training on things like browsers, email, office apps, looks like it's just a straw man, too. Training on those things won't get you a better job, unless the job you have now is at a fast food restaurant. Not knowing those things will keep you from getting a job that requires you to use a computer, because those are skills that are just expected going in. If you don't have them, someone who does will be hired. That training is also already available cheap/free through many sources.
But as for the broader topic at hand, I can't believe this article even got past the editors. Of course Microsoft would only pay for training on Windows technology. They'd be idiots to pay for training on a competing product. I work for a well-known hardware vendor, and if we were giving away free training to the public, either directly or in vouchers, I rather doubt it would be training conducted using our competitors' products. That would be foolish.