I agree with all of that WRT people who use computers and have at least some clue. However, most people with computers today are more like my wife. She's what I call "Willfully computer-stupid." She doesn' want to read a manual (for anything, not just computers) and finds even the most ridiculously obvious (to me) stuff to be hard. Googling the solution to a computer problem has never crossed her mind. She's the only person in my family who doesn't use Linux (even our 4 year old and 5 year old kids use Linux). And yet, for all that, some of her friends *ask her* for computer advice, because they're so computer-stupid they make her look like tech support. Your solutions only work for people like us. They don't work for people like my wife and her friends.
I don't know what the ultimate answer is, but I know it's not asking technical questions to ignorant people when software is installed.
These are good points (yes, the Supreme Court (SCOTUS) is the highest court in the US), but whether or not they lose depends on who is on the court. If the court is mostly made up of strict constructionist judges (thumbail summary: if the Constitution doesn't say the government can do it, the government can't do it), or activist judges (thumbnail summary: the Constitution is a living document and it means whatever the fuck we want it to mean). If it's a constructionist court, the "controllers" are likely to fail. If it's an activist court ("read leftist/liberal) they are likely to succeed.
Democrats tend to appoint activist judges. Republicans tend to appoint constructionist judges. On this one point, Republicans are superior to Democrats. Otherwise, they both suck.
Yeah, he's being sarcastic, and yeah, those interrogations were BS. I have two young kids, and like any parent, I can tell you that questioning, young kids will generally say whatever they think you want to hear or will keep them out of trouble. Discerning who really hit whom requires parent intuition + eys-in-the-back-of-the-head.
But, I work in email security and have a disgusting front-row seat to just how common child pornography really is, and it's pretty disheartening. Every time I run across the stuff, I wish I could execute the perp and rescue the kid. Unfortunately, I can only report it to the FBI.
Since you're already at +5 I'll give a reply instead of one of my mod points. I pretty much agree with your post, but OTOH I work for an email security company. In my perspective from the catbird's seat on a multi-terabyte corpus of ham and spam, I can say that child pornography is a lot less rare than you think. Yes, it is a small minority of non-legit (spam or illegal) Internet traffic, but if I did a 30-day search of our corpus, I doubt there'd be a day when there wasn't some child porn spam in it. The people who produce it may be more underground/harder to catch (or not), but there's a ton of it out there and it's spamvertised every day. As a dad, I would be quite happy to personally execute the perps responsible. None of this lethal injection BS. I'd do it up close and personal, with a.40 S&W through the teeth.
That said, I agree that specific legislation like this may not be warranted. It passed unanimously only because on one would dare be caught voting against it.
Don't look now, but no, *normal* guys don't have passive sexual urges toward 13 year olds. Nice try at normalizing yourself, perv. Before you meet my daughters, you'll meet my 12-gauge.
Ditto. I have a two kids (a four year old and a five year old). They're currently allowed to play games at Nick Jr and Cartoon Network, plus locally installed games. They like Tuxpaint, Gcompris, and Ktuberling, are using Kubuntu,and seem to "get" computers more than my wife does. However, KDE is a less than ideal UI for a four year old (I like, it and use it myself, but my kids are a very different audience). I think it would be cool to run the Sugar UI on top of $DISTRO. In developed countries (at least; probably other places, too), that may do more to create a generation of Free Software/Linux kids than OLPC itself.
-If you write a GNOME app, it will probably work on any distro that ships GNOME. If you write a KDE app, it will probably run on any distro that ships KDE. Since most major distros ship both, we're already pretty close to being able to write an app and have it run on any distro. It's been that way for a long time. It's close enough that a convergence of KDE and GNOME would make little or no difference on that point.
-It's not hard to find inconsistency *within* apps for $DESKTOP_ENVIRONMENT. We don't need to worry that much about the fact that GNOME apps act differently than KDE apps; I use a Mac at work, and my biggest desire from both GNOME and KDE is that they achieve the level of consistency and quality in their UIs that Apple has achieved.
-Whether or not you have to futz around with settings is irrelevant to UI convergence. Any given distro has a default DE that it ships with, whether that be GNOME, KDE, or something else. You can futz around with settings if you want to, or not if you don't. That would be true no matter how many desktops there were. I futz around with settings on Mac and Windows a lot, too, and those platforms do have only one DE. To the extent that I futz with settings more on Linux, that's just a reflection of the fact that Linux DEs have more things that I *can* change, so I can get more of exactly what I want. This is a good thing.
-On Mac, if you don't like the DE, you have one choice (don't use a Mac). Ditto for Windows. On Linux, if you don't like one, you can try another and another until you're satisfied. A single DE for Linux would take away that choice and bring Linux closer to the level of Mac and Windows WRT DE choice. That would be a huge step down.
Diversity of UI is one of the great strengths of the Linux and BSD-based operating systems. Screwing that up would be a huge mistake. I'm a KDE user, and so far, I don't like KDE 4 at all. So much so that I plan to become an ex-KDE user. I don't like GNOME, either, so if there were only those two choices, or only one choice, I'd be screwed. If my only choices were KDE 4 and GNOME, I'd chuck it and go all Mac. Candidates for my next DE are Enlightenment (used to use it in the 90s) and XFCE. Choice is good.
The 3rd would be a stretch because no one is actually being quartered in a private home. The 4th also might not apply because gaining unauthorized access and use is neither a search nor an outright seizure (or they both might; a court would have to decide that, and it might make it all the way to SCOTUS). However, there are plenty of both state and federal laws regarding breaking into computers, and I doubt (or at least hope not) that any of them contain a clause that says "breaking into and hijacking computers is illegal, unless you're government or military."
That said, if they needed a botnet in time of war, all they'd have to do is ask. I could provide at least 2, and probably 4 or 5, computers for the express purpose of participation in a botnet to attack our enemies' networking infrastructure. I'm too old to join the army and fight; giving them some bandwidth and CPU cycles, I can do. I'm sure it wouldn't be that hard to get volunteers for such a project.
Thank you. I was just about to comment that people were hanged for things less heinous than this following the war crimes trials at the end of WW II. If Mengele were alive and practicing today, there are many who would not bat an eye at his experiments, so long as he avoided selecting his experimental subjects on the basis of their race, ethnicity, religion, or gender.
If we want to remove the Mengele reference (because some will falsely accuse us of playing the Nazi card, even though Mengele's being a Nazi isn't the point; atrocities then and atrocities now are the point), read Frankenstein. The Dr. Frankenstein of the novel is not really any different than the ones doing monstrous experiments like the one described in TFA: he has what he considers to be good motivations, but the bottom line is that he's doing a monstrous thing because he can, and that's all the justification he needs. And of course, "For the greater good" has always been used to justify all manner of atrocities.
Sadly, bioethics seems to have joined business ethics on the scrap heap of oxymorons.
Actually, there is no difference between "sentence enhancement" and "hate speech" laws. What both are really doing is trying to make certain kinds of thought illegal. Consider:
Hate speech law: we're going to arrest you and punish you for saying you hate $GROUP_YOU_DISLIKE and others should hate them to
Hate crime law: we're going to arrest you and punish you for assaulting John Doe. Because John Doe is a member of $GROUP_YOU_DISLIKE and you had previously expressed hatred of that group and encouraged others to also hate that group, we're going to punish you more harshly.
Both of these are punishment for what a person thinks. In the case of the hate crime law, what should matter is the crime that was committed. For example, if a person commits murder, his motivation for the murder shouldn't matter. It could be because he had a personal grudge with the victim. It could be because the victim was a member of a group (ethnic, religions, political, gender, whatever) that he held in contempt. It could be jealousy. It could be because someone paid him to do it. Maybe he didn't like the color of the victim's tie, or maybe he was just pissed off and wanted to kill someone, or maybe he was a nutjob like the guys at Columbine. Doesn't matter. The perp's motivation for committing murder should be legally irrelevant, just as it is morally irrelevant. There is only one fact that matters in murder case: a murder was committed. The victim is just as dead whether he was murdered for the contents of his wallet, his political affiliation, or the color of his skin.
All hate crime/hate speech laws are morally flawed (as the saying goes, the road to hell is paved with good intentions), a bad idea for society, and at least in some countries (the United States for instance), probably unconstitutional. And if they aren't found in contravention of the letter of the US Constitution, they are certainly against the spirit of it.
If we outlaw speech or motivation, which is what these laws do, the fundamental harm done to society by allowing unpopular - even loathsome - thought or speech to be censored vastly exceeds whatever good we may do by imprisoning those who advocate hate. And for the record, I do not believe that imprisoning someone for hate speech (or otherwise muzzling him) could achieve much of anything. You can't stop ideas with a jail. Or even a bullet, if people like them enough. Gandhi, Mandela, and King are pretty good proofs.
As for Steyn, what he said was neither hateful nor evil. It was just the truth, but it's an unpopular truth. When we start judging the permissibility of what someone says based on its popularity, we as as society are completely screwed.
Bzzzt. Try again. Cell phones are more distracting than most in-car distractions because they not only distract via the linguistic channel as described in TFA, but they they require more concentration because they lack the context of an in-person conversation. I will not talk on a cell-phone while driving, at all, because it's even more distracting than my four year old and five year old having a fight in the back seat. If somebody calls me while I'm driving, I'll let it go to my voice mail. When I come to a light, I'll see who it was and if it's somebody I want to call back right now. If it is, I'll pull in somewhere and call them. It's the only responsible way to handle it.
And don't even get me started on people who *dial* while they're driving. Cognitively, that's far worse than answering a call and talking on the phone.
You may recall that a study some months back found that drivers using a cell phone while driving - even with a hands-free set (which didn't help at all), were as impaired as drunk drivers. People aren't allowed to drink while they drive, or even have an opened alcoholic beverage container in their cars. I see no reason allow cell phone use while driving, either. Don't get me wrong, I love my cell phone. I value it more than my land line and wouldn't even have a land line if I didn't do so much international calling (free to many European countries with my VOIP provider and a steal at $25.95 a month), but years of looking at evidence (both on the road, in my personal experience, and through studies) have completely changed my mind about cell phone use while driving. I used to do it all the time; now I don't do it at all and sometimes even turn my phone off when getting in the car, and I support legislation banning cell phone use by drivers, period.
I spent a year and a half working at Microsoft as the result of an acquisition, and I think I can answer that. Microsoft wants to be not just Google, but also because they just don't know when to say "enough." They don't know where to stop and be content with having a bunch of widely used stuff, being the market leader, and being at the center of a healthy infrastructure that grows up around those products. Rather, Microsoft's corporate culture dictates that *everthing* has to be Microsoft-branded. If they don't/can't/don't want to make it, they'll acquire a company that does. That's how I wound up there. Using Non-Microsoft products at work is really discouraged and I rarely saw anyone doing it. I even had to stop using a Linux machine and actually use the POS Toshiba Tecra M4 with XP Tablet Edition they issued me. Of course, that machine would have been a POS running Linux, too, I'm pretty sure.
Add to that the constant propaganda stream telling everyone how great MSFT and its products are (if you've never been to a cafeteria on the Redmond campus, the amount of propaganda there is a real eye-opener), and you can see how Microsoft is the way it is. The Microsoft Research campus in Mountain View is more low-key, but it's still a fairly branded place.
This all goes back to the personalities of the people who founded the company and built its corporate culture. I'd call the culture generally negative. It's somewhat pathological, very closed-minded to technologies it didn't invent or buy, truly believes (or claims to believe; I go with the latter) that Microsoft products are better than any others in the marketplace, and that Microsoft is destined to always rule. It's like a sort of corporate Manifest Destiny.
That doesn't mean a culture like that can't be successful in the marketplace - obviously, it has - but I believe it runs into sustainability/scalability issues and MSFT reached that point already a while ago. Vista was a product of that, I believe, and it is a failure. Sure, Vista has made and will make money because MSFT is able to ship it pre-installed on most new Windows PCs now and in the future on all of them after XP is finally killed off, but we can still define it as a failure. Vista is a product that few people would buy if they had a choice. Most of those on XP plan to remain on it for as long as XP is supported and maybe even after that (look how long Win 98 hung around) and many of those buying new PCs would choose XP over Vista if they could. Vista shipped as a pretty much unwanted OS. That's a failure, even if it's a failure they still make money off of. It's an abject mindshare failure, and when MSFT has a mindshare failure of the magnitude of Vista, it's in trouble. Even if it's still making boatloads of money, it's in trouble.
Ballmer's fault. In part, but he's not the only one that makes that culture. Should they dump him? I hope not. A MSFT in trouble is a MSFT that's good for the rest of the industry.
Using JFS or XFS on Linux will probably do you better, if your main issue is just the file size/file system size thing. If you want the other features that ZFS brings to the table that neither JFS nor XFS do and you want or need them right now and need them to accept all the areas on which OpenSolaris is still well behind the Linux (and *BSD) curve, then it might be worth it. FWIW, my BSD-using friends tell me that ZFS is already in FreeBSD now (experimental, IIRC), so keeping an eye on FreeBSD WRT ZFS looks like a really good bet for those who need ZFS.
I want ZFS but don't need ZFS, and my prediction is that ZFS will be in Linux and available with the installer of most or all major distros before OpenSolaris has caught up to Linux in things like hardware support.
That said, when OpenSolaris has caught up to Linux, I may well find myself running it. To this day, the up-time record of any box I ever adminned is still held by a Solaris machine, at over 1100 days (it was only a hardware failure that took it down). This record was achieved on a box with a global IP address, outside of any firewall; it was part of the infrastructure at an ISP where I worked, and best of all, it was done on a whitebox Solarix x86 machine that we'd built ourselves, back in the days when you had to go shopping with a copy of the Solarix x86 HCL in your hand if you wanted it to work. That kind of stability is really impressive.
Why, yes, as a matter of fact it does. However, neither of those are part of Linux, either. Linux is a kernel. It's not X, or any environment built on top of X. It's not userland, which is GNU (although I seem to recall a distro some year ago that was attempting to marry Linux to a BSD userland for political reasons (read, "Some people were sick of hearing GNU/Linux), but AFAIK that effort is dead; someone please correct me if I'm wrong).
There's nothing to stop you from running KDE or Gnome or any other desktop environment or window manager usually found on Linux (or *BSD) on top of the proprietary UNIX of your choice, if that's what floats your boat. There's nothing that says you *must* run CDE on a UNIX system (and CDE isn't part of UNIX any more than KDE is part of Linux). You might have to compile it yourself if no one has ready-made binaries for the UNIX you're using, but it can be done on most or all UNIXes, past or present.
And 7.6 was the worst. Not just the worst MacOS, but a good candidate for worst OS ever. It was so unstable that I found myself actually preferring Windows 95. Ugh! The horror!
OTOH, I work for a business unit of a very large and well-known Silicon Valley company. Within my department (engineering), almost everyone uses a Mac. The few who don't are mostly using FreeBSD or Linux, with a very small handful using Windows. Company-wide across our parent company, there are 4,000 - 6,000 Mac other Mac users (6K would be 10% of the work force) despite the fact that Mac is not an officially supported platform (and one reason why I don't have a precise count). Some of those Mac users bought the Mac with their own money rather than use Windows or Linux, after they couldn't get approval for the capital expenditure to buy a MacBook Pro.
Leasing is an issue, or would be if it were being done. Right now, AFAIK all Macs are outright purchases. However, different OS versions aren't really an issue. In my business unit (where Macs are officially supported by IT), we have a mix of Tiger and Leopard. Probably more Tiger than Leopard. In the entire company, where Macs do not have general IT support, there is a similar mix of Tiger and Leopard. it doesn't seem to be causing any problems, so my overall take on this is that there is no really compelling need for everyone to be on the same version of OS X. In some environments (maybe yours) that may not be the case, but for most business, a mix of Tiger and Leopard should not be a problem. By the time the successor to Leopard comes out, Tiger machines will most likely all be retired, so the mix will generally be limited to no more than two major versions of OS X. This is probably a lot easier to handle than the mix many Windows IT shops see now, with a mix of XP and Vista, or saw in the past with Win2K and XP, or a version from the Win9x family + a version (or 2) from the NT family.
If Apple is no where near enterprise-ready, that would come as a shock to the ~ten percent of our total work force that is using Mac in the enterprise right now (total work force = about 60K). Some people say that about Linux and FreeBSD too, but a good slice of our total work force (probably smaller than Mac, but numbered in the thousands) are using those in the enterprise as well. Heck, those of us who are using them would be prepared to make the argument that when one considers reliability, usability, and security, Windows is the least enterprise-ready OS of the lot.
I was quite surprised and pleased to see that reference in the summary. My parents had that album (probably still do, in a box or cupboard somewhere). Some of the first records I ever played were their Herb Alpert records, along with The Beatles' "A Hard Day's Night" album.
You're far too kind. Those aren't distortions, they're outright lies, and no good the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation does can erase the low opinion I have of Bill Gates for things like this. He's a liar, plain and simple. The year and a half I spent at Microsoft after they acquired my former employer was interesting, to say the least, but it felt really good/clean/liberating to quit and divest myself of all Microsoft stock and options.
Thankyouthankyouthankyou! I was reading the summary of TFA and the quotes and thinking back to my years in the mainframe business, working at a bank. I didn't have to directly touch ATMs, thankfully, but those who supported them had one brand among our several vendors that they loathed above all others because of chronic reliability problems in all of them (hardware, mostly; this was in the pre-Windows era or it could have been software, too ). Guess which one it was?
That said, and I hate to say anything in defense of the Artist Formerly Known as Diebold, but of course you'd spend more to build an ATM than you would to build a voting machine. An ATM is a larger, more complex device, communicating over a WAN with a central computer system, and with lots of moving parts that have to accurately dispense money, accept deposit envelopes, maybe record video, be difficult to break into while unattended, etc. A voting machine probably *sells* for less than it costs to make an ATM.
That said, to more fully appreciate how much ATMs sold in the US suck, one needs to visit Japan. Japanese ATMs are not only smaller and faster than US ones, but are far more functional. The majority of them talk (not listen), and some support both English and Japanese speech, while more others have E/J bilingual text. When you make a deposit, you don't have to use an envelope. You put cash in the bills receptacle and coins in the coin hopper, and the ATM counts it for you right there (quickly!) and credits your account. In 8 years I never saw one make a counting error. You can also do wire transfer from pretty much any ATM in Japan to any other domestic bank account. You key in the amount,the recipient's name, bank, and account number (on a touch screen, usually), and you're done. The ATM may also offer to print a card for you encoded with the recipient's info, so that if it's someone you make payments to often, you just have to slip the card in the ATM after your ATM card, enter your PIN and the amount to send, and you're done. I don't know if that's such a good idea from a security standpoint, but it's sure convenient.
And again, they do all this in a smaller machine than US ATMs. And they were doing all this 6 years ago when I left Japan. Who knows what more advanced features they might by now? And if that's not enough, if you see a Japanese ATM out of service, it's probably just out of money. I never saw one that appeared to be actually broken. They must fail sometimes, but it's rare.
Another way,then, of looking at the spokeshole's statements is "You guys spend that much money building an ATM and that's the best you can do?!?!"
My prescription co-pay is $5, and my wife's annual gyno exam is 100% covered. I guess it just depends on what health insurance you've got. Hospitalization is covered, too.
When I was hospitalized in a country with a single-payer system, I had to share a big room with five other patients, all of whom were far sicker than I, and endure the absolute worst food I've ever had in my life. If the hospital hadn't had a convenience store in the basement where I could stock up on junk food I might not have survived the ordeal:P
It was expensive, too. My share of the premium (it was mostly employer-paid) was almost as my share here for myself, my wife, and our kids. I'm sure you can tell by now that the country I'm talking about wasn't Australia, but how much do you pay for coverage there?
That doesn't mean a single-payer system can't be done right, but like many things, it's far easier to screw it up than to get it right. And when governments screw things up, they tend not to correct them at all, or to do so very slowly and reluctantly. CF the US Social Security System. It's unsustainable, probably ought to be scrapped entirely (they can keep what I've paid in over the last 30 years and give me nothing, ever, if they'll just let me out!). For at least a couple of decades, the government has known that Social Security has been staring insolvency in the face, yet has done nothing, and it's getting nearer and nearer to the point of no return.
Thus, if we are going to entertain the idea of a single-payer system, we need to look very carefully at how everyone has done it, figuring out who has screwed it up, who has done it right, and take only the approaches that have worked, keeping in mind the consideration of whether or not they would work *here*. I've seen no evidence that any politician backing a single-payer system has done that sort of homework, so they all need to be viewed with the greatest skepticism. I believe it would be easier to fix our current system - which is basically sound but has some issues that need to be fixed - than to scrap it, potentially bankrupting a number of US insurance companies and putting many thousands of people out of work - than to create a huge new unresponsive (what other kind is there?) government bureaucracy. It hasn't been very long since the last time the government did that, and I have no reason to suspect a national health insurance system would be any better run than the Department of Homeland Security.
I don't think banning genetic-testing based discrimination is incompatible with private health insurance. The problem is that the health insurance is trying (pretty sucessfully,it seems) to distort the notion of insurance. The basic idea of insurance is that it's a shared risk pool; we all pay $AMOUNT for health insurance, and it spreads the risk over the size of the pool. Insurers know to quite a few decimal places how many individuals/million will suffer from any given condition and use that to determine pricing.(I know that's a simplified model and a very large employer can demand better pricing, but it's the basic idea.)
The problem is that the insurance companies are trying to game that system but figuring out *who* those individuals are who are more likely to get $CONDITION and either charge them more or refuse to insure them at all, while still charging the rest of us the same amount as if those at risk individuals were still in the pool and paying the same as the rest of us. THAT is the ripoff that needs to be stopped.
Unfortunately, having lived in single-payer insurance countries and compared the level of care to that which I get here in the U.S., I can't say that single-payer is the answer. I'm quite certain it's not. That makes this all a much more difficult problem,because I don't really know that the answer is, and I don't think the politicians know, either. One solution is to mandate that no risk testing of any kind is allowed, that no one may be refused insurance, not even for a pre-existing condition, and that all members of the pool (which may be no more narrowly defined than "all the employees of a given company that we insure") pay the say rate/person, regardless of conditions, medical history, or anything.
Would that work? Maybe. It's a lot like a single-payer system, but it keeps the government out of the process. That is good. If you think HMOs are bad, just wait until you try dealing with bureaucrats who control your insurance. An HMO has minimal incentive to do what you want. A bureaucracy has none whatsoever. Would we all pay more for insurance? Maybe. OTOH,if legislation also mandated that everyone be covered, even if some or all of the price of that coverage came from tax rolls to assist the poor, the expanded size of the risk pool would help to keep costs down.
For all Kubuntu fans, the fine print is that the Kubuntu team very unfortunately decided to drop LTS status for Kubuntu 8.04. This really disappoints me, because KDE 4 is not really usable yet (OK, it sucks) and I was really looking forward to 3 years of LTS for the KDE 3.5 series, because KDE 4 looks like it may need that long to get as good as 3.5.x, if it ever does. This has me starting to look around for my next desktop environment. Xubuntu is the frontrunner at this point.
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I agree with all of that WRT people who use computers and have at least some clue. However, most people with computers today are more like my wife. She's what I call "Willfully computer-stupid." She doesn' want to read a manual (for anything, not just computers) and finds even the most ridiculously obvious (to me) stuff to be hard. Googling the solution to a computer problem has never crossed her mind. She's the only person in my family who doesn't use Linux (even our 4 year old and 5 year old kids use Linux). And yet, for all that, some of her friends *ask her* for computer advice, because they're so computer-stupid they make her look like tech support. Your solutions only work for people like us. They don't work for people like my wife and her friends.
I don't know what the ultimate answer is, but I know it's not asking technical questions to ignorant people when software is installed.
These are good points (yes, the Supreme Court (SCOTUS) is the highest court in the US), but whether or not they lose depends on who is on the court. If the court is mostly made up of strict constructionist judges (thumbail summary: if the Constitution doesn't say the government can do it, the government can't do it), or activist judges (thumbnail summary: the Constitution is a living document and it means whatever the fuck we want it to mean). If it's a constructionist court, the "controllers" are likely to fail. If it's an activist court ("read leftist/liberal) they are likely to succeed.
Democrats tend to appoint activist judges. Republicans tend to appoint constructionist judges. On this one point, Republicans are superior to Democrats. Otherwise, they both suck.
Yeah, he's being sarcastic, and yeah, those interrogations were BS. I have two young kids, and like any parent, I can tell you that questioning, young kids will generally say whatever they think you want to hear or will keep them out of trouble. Discerning who really hit whom requires parent intuition + eys-in-the-back-of-the-head.
But, I work in email security and have a disgusting front-row seat to just how common child pornography really is, and it's pretty disheartening. Every time I run across the stuff, I wish I could execute the perp and rescue the kid. Unfortunately, I can only report it to the FBI.
Since you're already at +5 I'll give a reply instead of one of my mod points. I pretty much agree with your post, but OTOH I work for an email security company. In my perspective from the catbird's seat on a multi-terabyte corpus of ham and spam, I can say that child pornography is a lot less rare than you think. Yes, it is a small minority of non-legit (spam or illegal) Internet traffic, but if I did a 30-day search of our corpus, I doubt there'd be a day when there wasn't some child porn spam in it. The people who produce it may be more underground/harder to catch (or not), but there's a ton of it out there and it's spamvertised every day. As a dad, I would be quite happy to personally execute the perps responsible. None of this lethal injection BS. I'd do it up close and personal, with a .40 S&W through the teeth.
That said, I agree that specific legislation like this may not be warranted. It passed unanimously only because on one would dare be caught voting against it.
Don't look now, but no, *normal* guys don't have passive sexual urges toward 13 year olds. Nice try at normalizing yourself, perv. Before you meet my daughters, you'll meet my 12-gauge.
Ditto. I have a two kids (a four year old and a five year old). They're currently allowed to play games at Nick Jr and Cartoon Network, plus locally installed games. They like Tuxpaint, Gcompris, and Ktuberling, are using Kubuntu,and seem to "get" computers more than my wife does. However, KDE is a less than ideal UI for a four year old (I like, it and use it myself, but my kids are a very different audience). I think it would be cool to run the Sugar UI on top of $DISTRO. In developed countries (at least; probably other places, too), that may do more to create a generation of Free Software/Linux kids than OLPC itself.
-If you write a GNOME app, it will probably work on any distro that ships GNOME. If you write a KDE app, it will probably run on any distro that ships KDE. Since most major distros ship both, we're already pretty close to being able to write an app and have it run on any distro. It's been that way for a long time. It's close enough that a convergence of KDE and GNOME would make little or no difference on that point.
-It's not hard to find inconsistency *within* apps for $DESKTOP_ENVIRONMENT. We don't need to worry that much about the fact that GNOME apps act differently than KDE apps; I use a Mac at work, and my biggest desire from both GNOME and KDE is that they achieve the level of consistency and quality in their UIs that Apple has achieved.
-Whether or not you have to futz around with settings is irrelevant to UI convergence. Any given distro has a default DE that it ships with, whether that be GNOME, KDE, or something else. You can futz around with settings if you want to, or not if you don't. That would be true no matter how many desktops there were. I futz around with settings on Mac and Windows a lot, too, and those platforms do have only one DE. To the extent that I futz with settings more on Linux, that's just a reflection of the fact that Linux DEs have more things that I *can* change, so I can get more of exactly what I want. This is a good thing.
-On Mac, if you don't like the DE, you have one choice (don't use a Mac). Ditto for Windows. On Linux, if you don't like one, you can try another and another until you're satisfied. A single DE for Linux would take away that choice and bring Linux closer to the level of Mac and Windows WRT DE choice. That would be a huge step down.
Diversity of UI is one of the great strengths of the Linux and BSD-based operating systems. Screwing that up would be a huge mistake. I'm a KDE user, and so far, I don't like KDE 4 at all. So much so that I plan to become an ex-KDE user. I don't like GNOME, either, so if there were only those two choices, or only one choice, I'd be screwed. If my only choices were KDE 4 and GNOME, I'd chuck it and go all Mac. Candidates for my next DE are Enlightenment (used to use it in the 90s) and XFCE. Choice is good.
The 3rd would be a stretch because no one is actually being quartered in a private home. The 4th also might not apply because gaining unauthorized access and use is neither a search nor an outright seizure (or they both might; a court would have to decide that, and it might make it all the way to SCOTUS). However, there are plenty of both state and federal laws regarding breaking into computers, and I doubt (or at least hope not) that any of them contain a clause that says "breaking into and hijacking computers is illegal, unless you're government or military."
That said, if they needed a botnet in time of war, all they'd have to do is ask. I could provide at least 2, and probably 4 or 5, computers for the express purpose of participation in a botnet to attack our enemies' networking infrastructure. I'm too old to join the army and fight; giving them some bandwidth and CPU cycles, I can do. I'm sure it wouldn't be that hard to get volunteers for such a project.
Thank you. I was just about to comment that people were hanged for things less heinous than this following the war crimes trials at the end of WW II. If Mengele were alive and practicing today, there are many who would not bat an eye at his experiments, so long as he avoided selecting his experimental subjects on the basis of their race, ethnicity, religion, or gender.
If we want to remove the Mengele reference (because some will falsely accuse us of playing the Nazi card, even though Mengele's being a Nazi isn't the point; atrocities then and atrocities now are the point), read Frankenstein. The Dr. Frankenstein of the novel is not really any different than the ones doing monstrous experiments like the one described in TFA: he has what he considers to be good motivations, but the bottom line is that he's doing a monstrous thing because he can, and that's all the justification he needs. And of course, "For the greater good" has always been used to justify all manner of atrocities.
Sadly, bioethics seems to have joined business ethics on the scrap heap of oxymorons.
Actually, there is no difference between "sentence enhancement" and "hate speech" laws. What both are really doing is trying to make certain kinds of thought illegal. Consider:
Hate speech law: we're going to arrest you and punish you for saying you hate $GROUP_YOU_DISLIKE and others should hate them to
Hate crime law: we're going to arrest you and punish you for assaulting John Doe. Because John Doe is a member of $GROUP_YOU_DISLIKE and you had previously expressed hatred of that group and encouraged others to also hate that group, we're going to punish you more harshly.
Both of these are punishment for what a person thinks. In the case of the hate crime law, what should matter is the crime that was committed. For example, if a person commits murder, his motivation for the murder shouldn't matter. It could be because he had a personal grudge with the victim. It could be because the victim was a member of a group (ethnic, religions, political, gender, whatever) that he held in contempt. It could be jealousy. It could be because someone paid him to do it. Maybe he didn't like the color of the victim's tie, or maybe he was just pissed off and wanted to kill someone, or maybe he was a nutjob like the guys at Columbine. Doesn't matter. The perp's motivation for committing murder should be legally irrelevant, just as it is morally irrelevant. There is only one fact that matters in murder case: a murder was committed. The victim is just as dead whether he was murdered for the contents of his wallet, his political affiliation, or the color of his skin.
All hate crime/hate speech laws are morally flawed (as the saying goes, the road to hell is paved with good intentions), a bad idea for society, and at least in some countries (the United States for instance), probably unconstitutional. And if they aren't found in contravention of the letter of the US Constitution, they are certainly against the spirit of it.
If we outlaw speech or motivation, which is what these laws do, the fundamental harm done to society by allowing unpopular - even loathsome - thought or speech to be censored vastly exceeds whatever good we may do by imprisoning those who advocate hate. And for the record, I do not believe that imprisoning someone for hate speech (or otherwise muzzling him) could achieve much of anything. You can't stop ideas with a jail. Or even a bullet, if people like them enough. Gandhi, Mandela, and King are pretty good proofs.
As for Steyn, what he said was neither hateful nor evil. It was just the truth, but it's an unpopular truth. When we start judging the permissibility of what someone says based on its popularity, we as as society are completely screwed.
Bzzzt. Try again. Cell phones are more distracting than most in-car distractions because they not only distract via the linguistic channel as described in TFA, but they they require more concentration because they lack the context of an in-person conversation. I will not talk on a cell-phone while driving, at all, because it's even more distracting than my four year old and five year old having a fight in the back seat. If somebody calls me while I'm driving, I'll let it go to my voice mail. When I come to a light, I'll see who it was and if it's somebody I want to call back right now. If it is, I'll pull in somewhere and call them. It's the only responsible way to handle it.
And don't even get me started on people who *dial* while they're driving. Cognitively, that's far worse than answering a call and talking on the phone.
You may recall that a study some months back found that drivers using a cell phone while driving - even with a hands-free set (which didn't help at all), were as impaired as drunk drivers. People aren't allowed to drink while they drive, or even have an opened alcoholic beverage container in their cars. I see no reason allow cell phone use while driving, either. Don't get me wrong, I love my cell phone. I value it more than my land line and wouldn't even have a land line if I didn't do so much international calling (free to many European countries with my VOIP provider and a steal at $25.95 a month), but years of looking at evidence (both on the road, in my personal experience, and through studies) have completely changed my mind about cell phone use while driving. I used to do it all the time; now I don't do it at all and sometimes even turn my phone off when getting in the car, and I support legislation banning cell phone use by drivers, period.
You wish. The only box we ever had compromised was running - ironically enough - OpenBSD.
I spent a year and a half working at Microsoft as the result of an acquisition, and I think I can answer that. Microsoft wants to be not just Google, but also because they just don't know when to say "enough." They don't know where to stop and be content with having a bunch of widely used stuff, being the market leader, and being at the center of a healthy infrastructure that grows up around those products. Rather, Microsoft's corporate culture dictates that *everthing* has to be Microsoft-branded. If they don't/can't/don't want to make it, they'll acquire a company that does. That's how I wound up there. Using Non-Microsoft products at work is really discouraged and I rarely saw anyone doing it. I even had to stop using a Linux machine and actually use the POS Toshiba Tecra M4 with XP Tablet Edition they issued me. Of course, that machine would have been a POS running Linux, too, I'm pretty sure.
Add to that the constant propaganda stream telling everyone how great MSFT and its products are (if you've never been to a cafeteria on the Redmond campus, the amount of propaganda there is a real eye-opener), and you can see how Microsoft is the way it is. The Microsoft Research campus in Mountain View is more low-key, but it's still a fairly branded place.
This all goes back to the personalities of the people who founded the company and built its corporate culture. I'd call the culture generally negative. It's somewhat pathological, very closed-minded to technologies it didn't invent or buy, truly believes (or claims to believe; I go with the latter) that Microsoft products are better than any others in the marketplace, and that Microsoft is destined to always rule. It's like a sort of corporate Manifest Destiny.
That doesn't mean a culture like that can't be successful in the marketplace - obviously, it has - but I believe it runs into sustainability/scalability issues and MSFT reached that point already a while ago. Vista was a product of that, I believe, and it is a failure. Sure, Vista has made and will make money because MSFT is able to ship it pre-installed on most new Windows PCs now and in the future on all of them after XP is finally killed off, but we can still define it as a failure. Vista is a product that few people would buy if they had a choice. Most of those on XP plan to remain on it for as long as XP is supported and maybe even after that (look how long Win 98 hung around) and many of those buying new PCs would choose XP over Vista if they could. Vista shipped as a pretty much unwanted OS. That's a failure, even if it's a failure they still make money off of. It's an abject mindshare failure, and when MSFT has a mindshare failure of the magnitude of Vista, it's in trouble. Even if it's still making boatloads of money, it's in trouble.
Ballmer's fault. In part, but he's not the only one that makes that culture. Should they dump him? I hope not. A MSFT in trouble is a MSFT that's good for the rest of the industry.
Using JFS or XFS on Linux will probably do you better, if your main issue is just the file size/file system size thing. If you want the other features that ZFS brings to the table that neither JFS nor XFS do and you want or need them right now and need them to accept all the areas on which OpenSolaris is still well behind the Linux (and *BSD) curve, then it might be worth it. FWIW, my BSD-using friends tell me that ZFS is already in FreeBSD now (experimental, IIRC), so keeping an eye on FreeBSD WRT ZFS looks like a really good bet for those who need ZFS.
I want ZFS but don't need ZFS, and my prediction is that ZFS will be in Linux and available with the installer of most or all major distros before OpenSolaris has caught up to Linux in things like hardware support.
That said, when OpenSolaris has caught up to Linux, I may well find myself running it. To this day, the up-time record of any box I ever adminned is still held by a Solaris machine, at over 1100 days (it was only a hardware failure that took it down). This record was achieved on a box with a global IP address, outside of any firewall; it was part of the infrastructure at an ISP where I worked, and best of all, it was done on a whitebox Solarix x86 machine that we'd built ourselves, back in the days when you had to go shopping with a copy of the Solarix x86 HCL in your hand if you wanted it to work. That kind of stability is really impressive.
Why, yes, as a matter of fact it does. However, neither of those are part of Linux, either. Linux is a kernel. It's not X, or any environment built on top of X. It's not userland, which is GNU (although I seem to recall a distro some year ago that was attempting to marry Linux to a BSD userland for political reasons (read, "Some people were sick of hearing GNU/Linux), but AFAIK that effort is dead; someone please correct me if I'm wrong).
There's nothing to stop you from running KDE or Gnome or any other desktop environment or window manager usually found on Linux (or *BSD) on top of the proprietary UNIX of your choice, if that's what floats your boat. There's nothing that says you *must* run CDE on a UNIX system (and CDE isn't part of UNIX any more than KDE is part of Linux). You might have to compile it yourself if no one has ready-made binaries for the UNIX you're using, but it can be done on most or all UNIXes, past or present.
"School girl motor?" Are you sure Bedini didn't just have a thing for Japanese Pr0n?
That's mostly true, but there's an exception to everything. You should see my MBP and my HP Photosmart 7350 not talk to each other :p
And 7.6 was the worst. Not just the worst MacOS, but a good candidate for worst OS ever. It was so unstable that I found myself actually preferring Windows 95. Ugh! The horror!
OTOH, I work for a business unit of a very large and well-known Silicon Valley company. Within my department (engineering), almost everyone uses a Mac. The few who don't are mostly using FreeBSD or Linux, with a very small handful using Windows. Company-wide across our parent company, there are 4,000 - 6,000 Mac other Mac users (6K would be 10% of the work force) despite the fact that Mac is not an officially supported platform (and one reason why I don't have a precise count). Some of those Mac users bought the Mac with their own money rather than use Windows or Linux, after they couldn't get approval for the capital expenditure to buy a MacBook Pro.
Leasing is an issue, or would be if it were being done. Right now, AFAIK all Macs are outright purchases. However, different OS versions aren't really an issue. In my business unit (where Macs are officially supported by IT), we have a mix of Tiger and Leopard. Probably more Tiger than Leopard. In the entire company, where Macs do not have general IT support, there is a similar mix of Tiger and Leopard. it doesn't seem to be causing any problems, so my overall take on this is that there is no really compelling need for everyone to be on the same version of OS X. In some environments (maybe yours) that may not be the case, but for most business, a mix of Tiger and Leopard should not be a problem. By the time the successor to Leopard comes out, Tiger machines will most likely all be retired, so the mix will generally be limited to no more than two major versions of OS X. This is probably a lot easier to handle than the mix many Windows IT shops see now, with a mix of XP and Vista, or saw in the past with Win2K and XP, or a version from the Win9x family + a version (or 2) from the NT family.
If Apple is no where near enterprise-ready, that would come as a shock to the ~ten percent of our total work force that is using Mac in the enterprise right now (total work force = about 60K). Some people say that about Linux and FreeBSD too, but a good slice of our total work force (probably smaller than Mac, but numbered in the thousands) are using those in the enterprise as well. Heck, those of us who are using them would be prepared to make the argument that when one considers reliability, usability, and security, Windows is the least enterprise-ready OS of the lot.
I was quite surprised and pleased to see that reference in the summary. My parents had that album (probably still do, in a box or cupboard somewhere). Some of the first records I ever played were their Herb Alpert records, along with The Beatles' "A Hard Day's Night" album.
You're far too kind. Those aren't distortions, they're outright lies, and no good the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation does can erase the low opinion I have of Bill Gates for things like this. He's a liar, plain and simple. The year and a half I spent at Microsoft after they acquired my former employer was interesting, to say the least, but it felt really good/clean/liberating to quit and divest myself of all Microsoft stock and options.
Thankyouthankyouthankyou! I was reading the summary of TFA and the quotes and thinking back to my years in the mainframe business, working at a bank. I didn't have to directly touch ATMs, thankfully, but those who supported them had one brand among our several vendors that they loathed above all others because of chronic reliability problems in all of them (hardware, mostly; this was in the pre-Windows era or it could have been software, too ). Guess which one it was?
That said, and I hate to say anything in defense of the Artist Formerly Known as Diebold, but of course you'd spend more to build an ATM than you would to build a voting machine. An ATM is a larger, more complex device, communicating over a WAN with a central computer system, and with lots of moving parts that have to accurately dispense money, accept deposit envelopes, maybe record video, be difficult to break into while unattended, etc. A voting machine probably *sells* for less than it costs to make an ATM.
That said, to more fully appreciate how much ATMs sold in the US suck, one needs to visit Japan. Japanese ATMs are not only smaller and faster than US ones, but are far more functional. The majority of them talk (not listen), and some support both English and Japanese speech, while more others have E/J bilingual text. When you make a deposit, you don't have to use an envelope. You put cash in the bills receptacle and coins in the coin hopper, and the ATM counts it for you right there (quickly!) and credits your account. In 8 years I never saw one make a counting error. You can also do wire transfer from pretty much any ATM in Japan to any other domestic bank account. You key in the amount,the recipient's name, bank, and account number (on a touch screen, usually), and you're done. The ATM may also offer to print a card for you encoded with the recipient's info, so that if it's someone you make payments to often, you just have to slip the card in the ATM after your ATM card, enter your PIN and the amount to send, and you're done. I don't know if that's such a good idea from a security standpoint, but it's sure convenient.
And again, they do all this in a smaller machine than US ATMs. And they were doing all this 6 years ago when I left Japan. Who knows what more advanced features they might by now? And if that's not enough, if you see a Japanese ATM out of service, it's probably just out of money. I never saw one that appeared to be actually broken. They must fail sometimes, but it's rare.
Another way,then, of looking at the spokeshole's statements is "You guys spend that much money building an ATM and that's the best you can do?!?!"
My prescription co-pay is $5, and my wife's annual gyno exam is 100% covered. I guess it just depends on what health insurance you've got. Hospitalization is covered, too.
:P
When I was hospitalized in a country with a single-payer system, I had to share a big room with five other patients, all of whom were far sicker than I, and endure the absolute worst food I've ever had in my life. If the hospital hadn't had a convenience store in the basement where I could stock up on junk food I might not have survived the ordeal
It was expensive, too. My share of the premium (it was mostly employer-paid) was almost as my share here for myself, my wife, and our kids. I'm sure you can tell by now that the country I'm talking about wasn't Australia, but how much do you pay for coverage there?
That doesn't mean a single-payer system can't be done right, but like many things, it's far easier to screw it up than to get it right. And when governments screw things up, they tend not to correct them at all, or to do so very slowly and reluctantly. CF the US Social Security System. It's unsustainable, probably ought to be scrapped entirely (they can keep what I've paid in over the last 30 years and give me nothing, ever, if they'll just let me out!). For at least a couple of decades, the government has known that Social Security has been staring insolvency in the face, yet has done nothing, and it's getting nearer and nearer to the point of no return.
Thus, if we are going to entertain the idea of a single-payer system, we need to look very carefully at how everyone has done it, figuring out who has screwed it up, who has done it right, and take only the approaches that have worked, keeping in mind the consideration of whether or not they would work *here*. I've seen no evidence that any politician backing a single-payer system has done that sort of homework, so they all need to be viewed with the greatest skepticism. I believe it would be easier to fix our current system - which is basically sound but has some issues that need to be fixed - than to scrap it, potentially bankrupting a number of US insurance companies and putting many thousands of people out of work - than to create a huge new unresponsive (what other kind is there?) government bureaucracy. It hasn't been very long since the last time the government did that, and I have no reason to suspect a national health insurance system would be any better run than the Department of Homeland Security.
I don't think banning genetic-testing based discrimination is incompatible with private health insurance. The problem is that the health insurance is trying (pretty sucessfully,it seems) to distort the notion of insurance. The basic idea of insurance is that it's a shared risk pool; we all pay $AMOUNT for health insurance, and it spreads the risk over the size of the pool. Insurers know to quite a few decimal places how many individuals/million will suffer from any given condition and use that to determine pricing.(I know that's a simplified model and a very large employer can demand better pricing, but it's the basic idea.)
The problem is that the insurance companies are trying to game that system but figuring out *who* those individuals are who are more likely to get $CONDITION and either charge them more or refuse to insure them at all, while still charging the rest of us the same amount as if those at risk individuals were still in the pool and paying the same as the rest of us. THAT is the ripoff that needs to be stopped.
Unfortunately, having lived in single-payer insurance countries and compared the level of care to that which I get here in the U.S., I can't say that single-payer is the answer. I'm quite certain it's not. That makes this all a much more difficult problem,because I don't really know that the answer is, and I don't think the politicians know, either. One solution is to mandate that no risk testing of any kind is allowed, that no one may be refused insurance, not even for a pre-existing condition, and that all members of the pool (which may be no more narrowly defined than "all the employees of a given company that we insure") pay the say rate/person, regardless of conditions, medical history, or anything.
Would that work? Maybe. It's a lot like a single-payer system, but it keeps the government out of the process. That is good. If you think HMOs are bad, just wait until you try dealing with bureaucrats who control your insurance. An HMO has minimal incentive to do what you want. A bureaucracy has none whatsoever. Would we all pay more for insurance? Maybe. OTOH,if legislation also mandated that everyone be covered, even if some or all of the price of that coverage came from tax rolls to assist the poor, the expanded size of the risk pool would help to keep costs down.
For all Kubuntu fans, the fine print is that the Kubuntu team very unfortunately decided to drop LTS status for Kubuntu 8.04. This really disappoints me, because KDE 4 is not really usable yet (OK, it sucks) and I was really looking forward to 3 years of LTS for the KDE 3.5 series, because KDE 4 looks like it may need that long to get as good as 3.5.x, if it ever does. This has me starting to look around for my next desktop environment. Xubuntu is the frontrunner at this point.