> I'd explain the difference between two kooks in a conspiracy and a militia to you,
No, you actually can't. They aren't different.
When the US bombed the Chinese embassy, they were acting completely in the spotlight. They had to come before the cameras and explain why it had occurred - and can you imagine being the guy who has to say "we read an old map." Talk about a bad day at work.
But when militias, or members of militias, go off and do things they conveniently can say "well we didn't sanction it," because they operate in the shadows. The "Real IRA" bombing last year was done by a splinter group from the Provos. I happen to feel that it truly was a splinter group, and that it wasn't sanctioned or encouraged, but even as a pro-32 counties person I can completely understand Unionists who think that argument is bullshit.
Militias rarely hold open debates, rarely take responsibility, and their control doesn't derive from the people. I've never heard of an election in a militia, nevermind an election open to non-members.
And I again remind you that all too often militias are fronts for right-wing hate groups. Sorry, I just can't bring myself to pity a bunch of ignorant white men complaining that "the niggers, kikes, and spics" (or whatever cute code words they use in their place) are keeping them down. At least the Catholics in the North suffered real persecution before they turned to violence.
when did a militia accidentally bomb a chinese embassy? why never, but let's see what militias have been doing lately:
gee, didn't mr. mcveigh blew up an office in o.k. city a few years ago?
not recent enough? ok, then how about the "real ira's" bombing last summer that killed about 30 people at a busy shopping area in omagh.
and then there are the militias in kosovo, east timor, and a host of other places.
here's a little fact, my tunnel vision friend, militias in the u.s. aren't all that different from militias in the rest of the world. they tend to be home to rather hateful set of right wing people who would just love it if they could make the "evil gov't" get out of the way so they could do what they do best: trash other people's rights. usually "different" people.
is the gov't in the u.s. perfect? absolutely not. but if you fire up the ol' noggin, the militias offer a far worse starting point for fixing problems the the gov't.
as an aside, the evil us gov't is you. i left the u.s. because too many people there seem not to want to accept that responsibility. grow up and get busy.
the world's search engines can't acquire all the web pages out there.
deja.com tries to get all the usenet news posts, and it probably fails.
most people i know have at least one bill or piece of data on file with a misspelled name. i myself have had everything from my social security number to my name entered incorrectly. i've since moved to ireland and i'm not used to all the numbers that id me now - who knows if they're correct.
a friend of mine's dog has a credit card.
there's tons of data being produced. tons. some of it may even be tracked. by the time people have developed computers fast enough to snarf it all, disks big enough to hold it all, and algorithm's smart enough to tie it all together - there will be even more data to deal with, newer ways to package it, and more sources for it.
think about it. let's say there's a tap on an undersea cable. is the line carrying voice, fax, or data? voice - what language, is it a code? fax - what speed, what language, is it coded? data - ip, x.25, other? ip - what protocol, is it encrypted, what formats? let's say it's email - is it plain text, uuencoded, mime (flavor?), binhexed? if it's mime, what's in it? is it a word document - which version, what language, is it in code, is it encrypted? is it some other word processor - writenow, macwrite, wordperfect, wordstar, star office, applixware(sun), pdf, postscript, amiword, the wp that's popular in korea, etc?
then there are encrypted data streams like freeswan, ssh (i do an ssh connection from dublin to boston everyday, and i do a 128bit ssl connection from dublin to bankboston every now and then too), and others.
your privacy is gone. right. it can be taken, but if you declare loss before even trying it most certainly will go away. you want to protect privacy? use secure connections. send a few extra emails each day (and use pgp or gnupg). put up some web pages. lobby for more bandwidth. and if you want, pester your reps (or run for office yourself), to protect your personal data.
70 degrees? i suspect those of us in ireland might appreciate a regionally adjusted benchmark. maybe the first five days that don't rain in the summer months?
>This could be intended to just silence the dumb accusations about SuSE >only ripping off linux.
gee, it didn't seem to work for redhat. they spent over two million dollars on development, release gobs of free software, and for some reason are acused of being the microsoft of linux.
i wish suse luck. i hope all the linux distributors follow companies like suse, redhat, and even va systems and contribute back to the linux community.
gnome is bigger then redhat. i suspect the gnome project will work hard to make, or help make, a variety of window managers gnome compatable. alan cox is working on wmx, the windowmaker people have done their stuff, etc.
i think the gnome desire to be windowmanager inclusive, as opposed to the kde's kwm, is a good plan.
i get the impression that raster is going to be doing things to make enlightenment gnome unfriendly. i think that's unfortunate. i hope i'm wrong, and i hope he works closely with the gnome people (and if the kde people have wm specs, i hope he works with them as well) to deliver a good, integrated wm.
i also hope he, mandrake, and the author of eterm work on one additional goal - smaller memory footprint.
could they be referring to gnu utilities? things like bash are on be systems. and there was a port of gimp available, yes?
if so, it would seem to lend weight to rms's gnu/linux complaint (though i still think it's a silly request).
Re:People, try to keep your eyes wide open...
on
Feature:GPL vs BSD
·
· Score: 1
"The adoption of license should be based on different situation - GPL tends to be more suitable to fun or volunteer projects"
So if redhat spent $2.2 million on development last year, and the coders just did it for fun as volunteers, what exactly did they spend that money on? and va research? and the developers at cygnus that help maintain the compiler that all the *bsd projects use, i suppose they just go into the cygnus offices and then leave each night to beg for food?
and which sells more: redhat linux or the freebsd cd? actually any of the linux distribs vs all of the *bsd's sold.
it's not enough to keep your eyes open. you have to actually reach out and take the clues as they float past...
Re:The software is free, not the people.
on
Feature:GPL vs BSD
·
· Score: 1
with any license the original developer is free to release her code under another license.
with the gpl, every contributor can continue to see the changes made to the code.
with the bsd license, the original author and the other contributors have a good chance of using software written by them, but not modifiable by them.
with the gpl, the phrase "gpl license" contains an extra word.
FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, MicrosoftBSD...
on
Feature:GPL vs BSD
·
· Score: 2
I originally didn't like linux because I first started with BSD based systems (SunOS). But linux eventually won out because of more drivers, some more BSDish userland tools, and the fact that it's a level playing field. The last part is due to the license.
Joe Schmoe and Company X are on equal ground with the GPL. Anyone makes a change, everyone gets to see it. No "Embrace and Extend" for Linux and the GNU utils.
Contrast this with past experience with X and BSD. The Open Group almost took over a decades worth of patches and contributions and restricted their availability. They stopped, but they could do it again. Sun made changes to the BSD base of SunOS - the BSD community didn't get those changes back. BSDI has done the same, though they're pretty good about feeding back patches from what I hear.
The GPL makes people be kind, benevolant dictators. RedHat's recent IPO said they needed to keep the good will of their users/developers - when has any company ever said that in their IPO? The BSD License just assumes people will be good citizens of developerland. Don't get me wrong, I like that assumption more, but experience shows the GPL is needed for the morally challenged.
As for Microsoft BSD, it's quite possible. It's very possible. And they can easily make it incompatible with the other *BSD's and Linux. And if they get their way wrt the US Universal Product Code, they can even stop people from reverse engineering the results. So they'll be able to build off of the ideas free software developers create without having to share those ideas back. And we'll be back to reinventing the wheel all over again.
they state their business plan in their statement to the sec. they state that they need to keep the free s/w community's good will. they say they need to offer their code under the gpl - and include the gpl text in the filing.
if people choose to invest, they accept that plan. seems simple to me.
first he berates people who think redhat will make it's money from support, but then suggests redhat will need to diversify from just box sales. i agree with the last part, but their box sales *do* include support, and what is he suggesting they diversify to? i'm thinking support...
as for the open-source community taking the development efforts of $20 million in gpl'ed code... well gee, let's give that tough problem a long think. have to get back to that one.
what i find *more* interesting is that redhat isn't just going against the conventional wisdom, it's exacting cruel and unusual punishment against the conventional wisdom.
cw: linux companies will just take and not give back. reality: redhat gives back with a 20% r&d budget.
cw: in order to do well companies must protect i.p.. reality: all of redhat's code is gpl'ed.
cw: if a company *did* give back and it's code *was* gpl'ed (yeah, right) the free s/w community would love them. reality: a vocal group (big? small? who knows.) continually speak against them.
cw: product companies must lose gobs of cash first. reality: redhat's lost less then half a million since it's inception.
cw: it won't work. reality: it's growing.
at this point the cw just rings up the aclu and requests legal assistance.
btw, the answer to the tough question: if it doesn't suck, yes.
criminal failure? gee, were you napping during the "due process" section of your civics class?
first, molly ivins made a comment that a nation that spends 25 to 35 billion dollars a year spying on other nations is not really on a moral high ground about spying. methinks you're mistaking "getting up on a soapbox" with "crawling out from under a rock."
second, what does the word echelon mean to you?
and lastly who ever said brilliant physics discoveries were only within the domain of us scientists? for all you know china was spying on you guys to see why your spies were getting from them.
your mr. richardson was right. cooperation, not fear-mongering, is more appropriate in the scientific arena.
what right-wing america will do to find an excuse to bash clinton apparently knows no bounds. hopefully the american electorate - on all sides of the fence - will see past all these mindbogglingly idiotic attempts to throw mud rather then deal with any real issues.
if we were to send microbes to mars that would pretty much destroy any chance of seeing if there was life native to mars. while it would be cool to terraform mars, it would also be cool to study what mars is on its own before we "embrace and extend" it.
I highly suggest others send a note to the Voice. Perhaps the author will engage their brain next time?
Interesting article on Voices From the Hellmouth. The assumptions are quite interesting as well. The most striking one is the idea that geeks (and apparently gays) are all white, middle class males.
Boy, will some of my friends be shocked. All these years and there was a white-boy struggling to get out of their female/black or some other non-white-male selves.
Wonder if they'll suddenly start voting for Newt Gingrich? Scary thought.
Articles like this are yet more confirmation that leaving America was a *great* idea. It's not perfect over here in Ireland, but at least every debate doesn't need kneejerk race reactions.
*Lot's* of kids get abuse in school. I know of numerous people who have taken abuse they should never have to deal with, and school systems continually stick their heads in the sand and ignore it.
In the course of following the events in Littleton (the UK/Irish press carried it with the underlying question of "Will those crazy yanks ever give up their guns?") it never occured to me to think about what race geeks are.
Your article is the only one I've seen that depicts this as a white-only issue. I suspect it has more to do with your own worldview, and inability to see the world from a geek of any background's perspective.
By the way I think what the students in Littleton did was absolutely disgusting and has absolutely no justification. What they did was completely their own responsibility. In an effort to draw some positive action from it however, I think schools should start trying to deal with the cruelty that students inflict upon one another - long before guns or bombs are involved. Abuse of geeks, date rape, hazing, racism, sexism, and a host of other anti-social activities should be actively discouraged and punished. Students should learn from day one that tolerance and respect is an all important value and that without it things like Columbine and certain Village Voice pieces are all too common.
for us citizens it's quite a big difference. i'm currently just an expatriate (i live in ireland). if the economy keeps going well here and i decide to stay (75%) i'll probably become an ex-patriot. why? taxes.
if i decide to live outside of the us for the rest of my life there's no way i'm going to pay taxes to the us which i will have to do if i make over a certain amount of money. and while taxes in the us are low (and trust me, they are really low) there's no way i'm going to pay for services i'm not using.
the pro's for ireland by the way: no s/w patents, no encryption ban, good economy, guinness. the con's: net access is so-so, traffic.
I think we can congratulate 12 years of conservativism (1980-1992) for this little nugget. Yes that is overly simplistic, but it's a serious contributor:
My high school, suffering from shrinking budgets, eventually cut it's higher level classes (just after I left). The tax-cut fever finally swept even recession-proof Long Island (at least undil the cold war ended - oops) and frivolous programs like AP Math were gone!
But even in my class (1989) teachers were noting that less women were in tech courses, and male students weren't filling the gap.
It's a shame really since Dwight Eisenhower had advocated education to a large degree. Republicans didn't always stand for the lowest common denominator.
it's thanks to sco that i used linux. i'd been a long time unix user and had played with the two "toy" os's (freebsd and linux) but was quite happy to stick with sunos 4.1.4 (ah... heaven). then i got a job working with sco boxes.
i'd never seen a unix box crash. well, the sun sparc server the admin in the dental school had stuck in a closet with no ventalation for a weekend... that box crashed... but otherwise i'd never seen a unix box crash.
in my first month at this company, i learned more about fs recovery and fsck behavior then i care to re-remember. sco crashed, and it crashed a lot.
so one weekend a co-worker and myself built a linux box (redhat 4.1) and managed to build a working linux based, sco targeted gcc. he ported the build environment, and i got the yp tools up and running (sco's being braindead).
in a few months we had boxes that stayed up (barring power failures), functioning nis, and better driver support then sco ever managed.
so thanks sco. for those of you using sco for development, look into the cross compiling solution. great stuff!
"can you make money with the oss model?" redhat's distribution is gpl'd, their software is gpl'd, and almost all the software is free software in some manner. they mad alliances with closed source companies, but have slowly been getting away from that except wrt video drivers for x. and even there they team up with video vendors and then lobby them to go open source.
rpm fears. rpm is gpl'd software. anyone can use it. is it better then dpkg? damned if i know, but if rpm is winning out why not look into merging dpkg features into rpm?
"assurances." you want to know their commitment to free software? you want a statement? why? actions speak louder then words, and all their software **AND** documentation is gpl'd.
why does ee belong in/usr/local/bin? are you developing it?
look, i can see ee belonging in/usr/X11/bin, or even a/usr/gnome/bin, but unless you're raster or some other ee hacker, ee does not belong in/usr/local/bin. by your own argument might i add.
a lot of the things from/usr/local/bin (where many sites fold your/usr/contrib/bin) are gnu utilities on vendor unix boxes. quite useful on an aix box i use since i get gnu utils by default since/usr/local/bin is first in my path.
but why would a linux box but them there? gnu utils *are* it's default utils.
as to why redhat has more binaries in/usr/bin then a solaris box? gee, i'm guessing it has more software. just my experience of course.
actually redhat install 2.7.2 by default so that you can recompile the kernel - alan cox has said for years that 2.0.x is to be compiled by gcc, not egcs.
the current kernel still seems to have problems with the egcs compiler (or the other way around). one hopes that those buglets will be squashed.
Slashdot Mirror
this isn't rocket science. go look at bison's info page, see the "conditions" section.
> I'd explain the difference between two kooks in a conspiracy and a militia to you,
No, you actually can't. They aren't different.
When the US bombed the Chinese embassy, they were acting completely in the spotlight. They had to come before the cameras and explain why it had occurred - and can you imagine being the guy who has to say "we read an old map." Talk about a bad day at work.
But when militias, or members of militias, go off and do things they conveniently can say "well we didn't sanction it," because they operate in the shadows. The "Real IRA" bombing last year was done by a splinter group from the Provos. I happen to feel that it truly was a splinter group, and that it wasn't sanctioned or encouraged, but even as a pro-32 counties person I can completely understand Unionists who think that argument is bullshit.
Militias rarely hold open debates, rarely take responsibility, and their control doesn't derive from the people. I've never heard of an election in a militia, nevermind an election open to non-members.
And I again remind you that all too often militias are fronts for right-wing hate groups. Sorry, I just can't bring myself to pity a bunch of ignorant white men complaining that "the niggers, kikes, and spics" (or whatever cute code words they use in their place) are keeping them down. At least the Catholics in the North suffered real persecution before they turned to violence.
listen up mr. u.s. centric boy...
when did a militia accidentally bomb a chinese embassy? why never, but let's see what militias have been doing lately:
gee, didn't mr. mcveigh blew up an office in o.k. city a few years ago?
not recent enough? ok, then how about the "real ira's" bombing last summer that killed about 30 people at a busy shopping area in omagh.
and then there are the militias in kosovo, east timor, and a host of other places.
here's a little fact, my tunnel vision friend, militias in the u.s. aren't all that different from militias in the rest of the world. they tend to be home to rather hateful set of right wing people who would just love it if they could make the "evil gov't" get out of the way so they could do what they do best: trash other people's rights. usually "different" people.
is the gov't in the u.s. perfect? absolutely not. but if you fire up the ol' noggin, the militias offer a far worse starting point for fixing problems the the gov't.
as an aside, the evil us gov't is you. i left the u.s. because too many people there seem not to want to accept that responsibility. grow up and get busy.
the world's search engines can't acquire all the web pages out there.
deja.com tries to get all the usenet news posts, and it probably fails.
most people i know have at least one bill or piece of data on file with a misspelled name. i myself have had everything from my social security number to my name entered incorrectly. i've since moved to ireland and i'm not used to all the numbers that id me now - who knows if they're correct.
a friend of mine's dog has a credit card.
there's tons of data being produced. tons. some of it may even be tracked. by the time people have developed computers fast enough to snarf it all, disks big enough to hold it all, and algorithm's smart enough to tie it all together - there will be even more data to deal with, newer ways to package it, and more sources for it.
think about it. let's say there's a tap on an undersea cable. is the line carrying voice, fax, or data? voice - what language, is it a code? fax - what speed, what language, is it coded? data - ip, x.25, other? ip - what protocol, is it encrypted, what formats? let's say it's email - is it plain text, uuencoded, mime (flavor?), binhexed? if it's mime, what's in it? is it a word document - which version, what language, is it in code, is it encrypted? is it some other word processor - writenow, macwrite, wordperfect, wordstar, star office, applixware(sun), pdf, postscript, amiword, the wp that's popular in korea, etc?
then there are encrypted data streams like freeswan, ssh (i do an ssh connection from dublin to boston everyday, and i do a 128bit ssl connection from dublin to bankboston every now and then too), and others.
your privacy is gone. right. it can be taken, but if you declare loss before even trying it most certainly will go away. you want to protect privacy? use secure connections. send a few extra emails each day (and use pgp or gnupg). put up some web pages. lobby for more bandwidth. and if you want, pester your reps (or run for office yourself), to protect your personal data.
redhat has a track record of knocking non-free software off their cd's if given an alternative.
has anyone considered informing them? or is it just more fun to piss and moan about it here?
70 degrees? i suspect those of us in ireland might appreciate a regionally adjusted benchmark. maybe the first five days that don't rain in the summer months?
what does the sky look like without clouds?
>This could be intended to just silence the dumb accusations about SuSE
>only ripping off linux.
gee, it didn't seem to work for redhat. they spent over two million dollars on development, release gobs of free software, and for some reason are acused of being the microsoft of linux.
i wish suse luck. i hope all the linux distributors follow companies like suse, redhat, and even va systems and contribute back to the linux community.
gnome is bigger then redhat. i suspect the gnome project will work hard to make, or help make, a variety of window managers gnome compatable. alan cox is working on wmx, the windowmaker people have done their stuff, etc.
i think the gnome desire to be windowmanager inclusive, as opposed to the kde's kwm, is a good plan.
i get the impression that raster is going to be doing things to make enlightenment gnome unfriendly. i think that's unfortunate. i hope i'm wrong, and i hope he works closely with the gnome people (and if the kde people have wm specs, i hope he works with them as well) to deliver a good, integrated wm.
i also hope he, mandrake, and the author of eterm work on one additional goal - smaller memory footprint.
could they be referring to gnu utilities? things like bash are on be systems. and there was a port of gimp available, yes?
if so, it would seem to lend weight to rms's gnu/linux complaint (though i still think it's a silly request).
"The adoption of license should be based on different situation - GPL tends to be more suitable to fun or volunteer projects"
So if redhat spent $2.2 million on development last year, and the coders just did it for fun as volunteers, what exactly did they spend that money on? and va research? and the developers at cygnus that help maintain the compiler that all the *bsd projects use, i suppose they just go into the cygnus offices and then leave each night to beg for food?
and which sells more: redhat linux or the freebsd cd? actually any of the linux distribs vs all of the *bsd's sold.
it's not enough to keep your eyes open. you have to actually reach out and take the clues as they float past...
with any license the original developer is free to release her code under another license.
with the gpl, every contributor can continue to see the changes made to the code.
with the bsd license, the original author and the other contributors have a good chance of using software written by them, but not modifiable by them.
with the gpl, the phrase "gpl license" contains an extra word.
I originally didn't like linux because I first started with BSD based systems (SunOS). But linux eventually won out because of more drivers, some more BSDish userland tools, and the fact that it's a level playing field. The last part is due to the license.
Joe Schmoe and Company X are on equal ground with the GPL. Anyone makes a change, everyone gets to see it. No "Embrace and Extend" for Linux and the GNU utils.
Contrast this with past experience with X and BSD. The Open Group almost took over a decades worth of patches and contributions and restricted their availability. They stopped, but they could do it again. Sun made changes to the BSD base of SunOS - the BSD community didn't get those changes back. BSDI has done the same, though they're pretty good about feeding back patches from what I hear.
The GPL makes people be kind, benevolant dictators. RedHat's recent IPO said they needed to keep the good will of their users/developers - when has any company ever said that in their IPO? The BSD License just assumes people will be good citizens of developerland. Don't get me wrong, I like that assumption more, but experience shows the GPL is needed for the morally challenged.
As for Microsoft BSD, it's quite possible. It's very possible. And they can easily make it incompatible with the other *BSD's and Linux. And if they get their way wrt the US Universal Product Code, they can even stop people from reverse engineering the results. So they'll be able to build off of the ideas free software developers create without having to share those ideas back. And we'll be back to reinventing the wheel all over again.
you also need to get lilo to yammer on the serial port. see the lilo docs for more info.
they state their business plan in their statement to the sec. they state that they need to keep the free s/w community's good will. they say they need to offer their code under the gpl - and include the gpl text in the filing.
if people choose to invest, they accept that plan. seems simple to me.
he makes some odd comments.
first he berates people who think redhat will make it's money from support, but then suggests redhat will need to diversify from just box sales. i agree with the last part, but their box sales *do* include support, and what is he suggesting they diversify to? i'm thinking support...
as for the open-source community taking the development efforts of $20 million in gpl'ed code... well gee, let's give that tough problem a long think. have to get back to that one.
what i find *more* interesting is that redhat isn't just going against the conventional wisdom, it's exacting cruel and unusual punishment against the conventional wisdom.
cw: linux companies will just take and not give back.
reality: redhat gives back with a 20% r&d budget.
cw: in order to do well companies must protect i.p..
reality: all of redhat's code is gpl'ed.
cw: if a company *did* give back and it's code *was* gpl'ed (yeah, right) the free s/w community would love them.
reality: a vocal group (big? small? who knows.) continually speak against them.
cw: product companies must lose gobs of cash first.
reality: redhat's lost less then half a million since it's inception.
cw: it won't work.
reality: it's growing.
at this point the cw just rings up the aclu and requests legal assistance.
btw, the answer to the tough question: if it doesn't suck, yes.
criminal failure? gee, were you napping during the "due process" section of your civics class?
first, molly ivins made a comment that a nation that spends 25 to 35 billion dollars a year spying on other nations is not really on a moral high ground about spying. methinks you're mistaking "getting up on a soapbox" with "crawling out from under a rock."
second, what does the word echelon mean to you?
and lastly who ever said brilliant physics discoveries were only within the domain of us scientists? for all you know china was spying on you guys to see why your spies were getting from them.
your mr. richardson was right. cooperation, not fear-mongering, is more appropriate in the scientific arena.
what right-wing america will do to find an excuse to bash clinton apparently knows no bounds. hopefully the american electorate - on all sides of the fence - will see past all these mindbogglingly idiotic attempts to throw mud rather then deal with any real issues.
if we were to send microbes to mars that would pretty much destroy any chance of seeing if there was life native to mars. while it would be cool to terraform mars, it would also be cool to study what mars is on its own before we "embrace and extend" it.
If that was really his letter to the net it was rather sad. Bitterness is pretty lame.
Hope he has a nice drive, but I hope at the end he decides to be a bit less vindictive to the people he works with.
I highly suggest others send a note to the Voice. Perhaps the author will engage their brain next time?
Interesting article on Voices From the Hellmouth. The assumptions are quite interesting as well. The most striking one is the idea that geeks (and apparently gays) are all white, middle class males.
Boy, will some of my friends be shocked. All these years and there was a white-boy struggling to get out of their female/black or some other non-white-male selves.
Wonder if they'll suddenly start voting for Newt Gingrich? Scary thought.
Articles like this are yet more confirmation that leaving America was a *great* idea. It's not perfect over here in Ireland, but at least every debate doesn't need kneejerk race reactions.
*Lot's* of kids get abuse in school. I know of numerous people who have taken abuse they should never have to deal with, and school systems continually stick their heads in the sand and ignore it.
In the course of following the events in Littleton (the UK/Irish press carried it with the underlying question of "Will those crazy yanks ever give up their guns?") it never occured to me to think about what race geeks are.
Your article is the only one I've seen that depicts this as a white-only issue. I suspect it has more to do with your own worldview, and inability to see the world from a geek of any background's perspective.
By the way I think what the students in Littleton did was absolutely disgusting and has absolutely no justification. What they did was completely their own responsibility. In an effort to draw some positive action from it however, I think schools should start trying to deal with the cruelty that students inflict upon one another - long before guns or bombs are involved. Abuse of geeks, date rape, hazing, racism, sexism, and a host of other anti-social activities should be actively discouraged and punished. Students should learn from day one that tolerance and respect is an all important value and that without it things like Columbine and certain Village Voice pieces are all too common.
for us citizens it's quite a big difference. i'm currently just an expatriate (i live in ireland). if the economy keeps going well here and i decide to stay (75%) i'll probably become an ex-patriot. why? taxes.
if i decide to live outside of the us for the rest of my life there's no way i'm going to pay taxes to the us which i will have to do if i make over a certain amount of money. and while taxes in the us are low (and trust me, they are really low) there's no way i'm going to pay for services i'm not using.
the pro's for ireland by the way: no s/w patents, no encryption ban, good economy, guinness. the con's: net access is so-so, traffic.
I think we can congratulate 12 years of conservativism (1980-1992) for this little nugget. Yes that is overly simplistic, but it's a serious contributor:
My high school, suffering from shrinking budgets, eventually cut it's higher level classes (just after I left). The tax-cut fever finally swept even recession-proof Long Island (at least undil the cold war ended - oops) and frivolous programs like AP Math were gone!
But even in my class (1989) teachers were noting that less women were in tech courses, and male students weren't filling the gap.
It's a shame really since Dwight Eisenhower had advocated education to a large degree. Republicans didn't always stand for the lowest common denominator.
it's thanks to sco that i used linux. i'd been a long time unix user and had played with the two "toy" os's (freebsd and linux) but was quite happy to stick with sunos 4.1.4 (ah... heaven). then i got a job working with sco boxes.
i'd never seen a unix box crash. well, the sun sparc server the admin in the dental school had stuck in a closet with no ventalation for a weekend... that box crashed... but otherwise i'd never seen a unix box crash.
in my first month at this company, i learned more about fs recovery and fsck behavior then i care to re-remember. sco crashed, and it crashed a lot.
so one weekend a co-worker and myself built a linux box (redhat 4.1) and managed to build a working linux based, sco targeted gcc. he ported the build environment, and i got the yp tools up and running (sco's being braindead).
in a few months we had boxes that stayed up (barring power failures), functioning nis, and better driver support then sco ever managed.
so thanks sco. for those of you using sco for development, look into the cross compiling solution. great stuff!
a few thoughts frank...
"can you make money with the oss model?" redhat's distribution is gpl'd, their software is gpl'd, and almost all the software is free software in some manner. they mad alliances with closed source companies, but have slowly been getting away from that except wrt video drivers for x. and even there they team up with video vendors and then lobby them to go open source.
rpm fears. rpm is gpl'd software. anyone can use it. is it better then dpkg? damned if i know, but if rpm is winning out why not look into merging dpkg features into rpm?
"assurances." you want to know their commitment to free software? you want a statement? why? actions speak louder then words, and all their software **AND** documentation is gpl'd.
why does ee belong in /usr/local/bin? are you developing it?
/usr/X11/bin, or even a /usr/gnome/bin, but unless you're raster or some other ee hacker, ee does not belong in /usr/local/bin. by your own argument might i add.
/usr/local/bin (where many sites fold your /usr/contrib/bin) are gnu utilities on vendor unix boxes. quite useful on an aix box i use since i get gnu utils by default since /usr/local/bin is first in my path.
/usr/bin then a solaris box? gee, i'm guessing it has more software. just my experience of course.
look, i can see ee belonging in
a lot of the things from
but why would a linux box but them there? gnu utils *are* it's default utils.
as to why redhat has more binaries in
actually redhat install 2.7.2 by default so that you can recompile the kernel - alan cox has said for years that 2.0.x is to be compiled by gcc, not egcs.
the current kernel still seems to have problems with the egcs compiler (or the other way around). one hopes that those buglets will be squashed.