I don't believe that the testing archive has ever been broken (in its 2? year history?), possibly but once. Before packages are part of testing, they stay in the unstable branch for a variable amount of time and are not moved to testing until a package has no so-called "release-critical" bugs. Thus, testing packages usually fit very well with the rest of the system, and there are not really any problems. In terms of stability, testing is in many ways comparable to the released versionso f many other distributions. Testing is perfect for normal people who want to use something reliable that's not embarassingly old. The only problem with testing is security updates: it doesn't have any. This is a concern for many people, but not as much of one for the home user.
You may be thinking of the unstable branch as "frequently being upgraded and broken". This is sometimes the case. Sometimes, packages are uploaded to unstable that significantly break the system. Clearly, this is undesirable for the "normal person". Although, I should mention that if you do not upgrade an otherwise stable snapshot of the unstable distribution, then there really aren't any problems.
Testing is very nearly comparable in stability to the stable branch, and is equal to or exceeds the stability of many other distributions. That is not really the problem with using testing.
The problem with testing is that the Debian Security Team does not specifically provide security updates for it. Thus, if a package in testing has a security issue, the fix for that security issue will not be in testing until the normal, automatic, procedure for transferring packages from unstable to testing takes place. This means that a security bug in testing will be fixed 2 days after the fix is released for stable (and put into unstable), at the very least. In some cases, it may take weeks.
So, while the stability of testing shouldn't be a real concern for most businesses, its security is. Thus, a business must be more active in order to maintain the security of a system running testing.
You're incorrect. The point is that the tabulation method does not reflect the preferences of the voters. The ostensible end of IRV is to more accurately represent the will of the people by allowing preferences to be more specifically indicated. The example tries to illustrate that, when a voter indicates his true preference on the ballot, he is actually disfavoring the party he prefers. This is similar to the idea of Nader votes in the 2000 election making it so that Gore did not win (as Nader votes would take away from Gore votes, as Nader supporters would very likely prefer Gore to Bush). This is the problem that these alternative voting systems are supposed to remedy, but with IRV, strategic voting (on the ballot, indicating not your true preference but the vote that is most likely to get your preferred candidate in office).
In the example, the voter (who's preference is Libertarian, Republican, Democrat) will actually get a result he likes more if he indicates his vote as Rep., Lib., Dem. instead of Lib., Rep., Dem. In other words, when he falsifies his true preference, voting Rep. above Lib. even though he prefers the Lib. candidate, he gets a more favorable result than if he had indicated his true preference. That is the problem of IRV. By ranking the Lib. above the Rep. (merely shuffling the order within the set of "the least two popular candidates"), the voter actually lowers the chances of both. Condorcet voting, on the other hand, accurately reflects voter preferences. IRV is good for allowing voters to indicate preference, increasing the prominence of third parties, but when a third party actually has a chance of winning, IRV greatly skews the vote, and the result is the same problem with the two-way single preference voting.
The point is if the federal government pays for it, everyone in the country, even if they're in the most rural area, pay a fraction that I or they should not have to pay.
Even if I could ask to have my vote registered by hand, it doesn't change the fact that others will still vote using the machinery, forcing the election to use Diebold machinery, and forcing me to deal with a government by such means.
As for Biology, humans haven't really created life, with at least any sensible conception of the word "created".
Some of the points try to relate absurd things, how would the implementation of a realistic plan to refinance the national debt have any predictable effect on cubism?
Clearly, a lot of people don't believe that gun ownership only belongs in the "wild west", and gun ownership has been a right in the US and in other countries since long before the wild west. Even assuming that extreme gun control is legal under the Constitution, and assuming that gun control laws will reduce crime in urban areas, etc., the United States has vast rural regions where wild animals are a real threat, where your closest neighbor is a mile away, and it will take the police at least 20 minutes to get to your house. Frankly, I don't see how you might not think a gun would be appropriate in such a situation, even if only because the low population density in many regions in the United States is actually quite similar to the way things were in the wild west. Gun ownership was appropriate in the wild west because it was wild and law enforcement authorities were not very powerful. The same is true if you're living in North Dakota. Other people are very far away, there are wild animals, and law enforcement is weak, or at least, delayed (which is the same thing when you're dead). With gun control, as a criminal, I would be able to get guns fairly easily (and the US doesn't even have a small border of water like the UK), and then due to the gun control laws, I can go to any house in a rural area, and know that even if there is a person in the house, it will be at least 15-30 minutes before anyone (the police) else with equal power to me (a gun) will get there. There are 500,000 police officers in a country of 280 million people and over 9 million square kilometers. They are good at investigating crimes, they are not good at preventing any individual crime. On the other hand, there are 70 million gun owners in this country, and only a few thousand murders by gun per year, many of which are by people who are going to kill each other anyway, such as various criminal elements fighting each other. Canada has more guns per capita than the US and there is much less crime in Canada than the US.
I don't see what's wrong with having a single written Constitution. The United States Constitution is so minimal as to be extremely flexible. Gun ownership is a specified right that was clearly thought important by the people who founded this country. If that right is to be changed, it is done so with the numerically significant and regionally diverse support required of a Constitutional amendment. If the UK "constitution" is so flexible that it reflects the current world better than the U.S. Constitution (which is absurd because the U.S. Constitution is so very basic that it is an appropriate Constitution for a government in almost any era at all), that would mean that the basis of the UK government is more vulnerable to various fads of government and such that are often later realized to be very bad ideas. No, I suspect your constitution isn't as flexible as you think. If it were, it wouldn't be any sort of constitution, it would be on par with any other law at all, and afforded no special protection under the law.
In most cases, you don't need to know the names of any modules in order to install. You do need to know the module name of your NIC if you do a network install.
To be fair, the only time most people ever need to even insert any hardware modules for the install is to install a single network card driver. The modules for the rest of a person's hardware are generally loaded by the kernel after installation.
Presumably from his argument, the users that would not be able to install using a difficult installer would be users that don't tend to submit useful bug reports, whereas technically adept individuals would be much more likely to submit bug reports and, more importantly, would be more likely to submit useful bug reports.
What? The version of vim in stable is 6.1.018; the latest stable version is 6.2. Oh no! Not a package from Apr 2002. They didn't even have cell phones back in those days!!!!
I recommend you download root.bin and rescue.bin, and the driver-?.bin files from the stable release: ftp://ftp.debian.org/debian/dists/stable/main/disk s-/current/images-1.44
Where is your architecture (one of arm, hppa, i386, ia64, m68k, mips, mipsel, powerpc, s390, sparc). If you have any sort of new hardware you can download instead from: ftp://ftp.debian.org/debian/dists/stable/main/disk s-/current/images-1.44/bf2.4
Use the rawrite tool from: ftp://ftp.debian.org/debian/tools/rawrite2.zip
This will write the images to floppy disks (disk images from that link are for 1.44MB disks).
If you can't get jigdo to work, you can download ISO image of the stable, testing, or unstable releases from: http://www.debian.org/CD/http-ftp/
If you install the stable release, which is the most reliable method, you will need to upgrade to the unstable branch (you can also upgrade to the testing branch). To do this, you need to change the specified location for downloading software packages and then update the package list and packages. First, change instances of "stable" in the file/etc/apt/sources.list to either "testing" or "unstable". You can also use many of the packaging frontends, dselect, aptitude, etc., to do this and subsequent things. Then, the safest method is to type "dselect update" and then run dselect or some of the other frontends. There are guides on the Debian website and elsewhere. This will upgrade all the packages on the system to the "testing" or "unstable" branch, respectively, and the system will be as though it were one of those releases. This method of upgrading is the same method used to upgrade between releases.
It's more like they cite international rulings as other instances where noted judicial bodies reach the same conclusion, as in: "Look, we legally reached our decision, and other bodies, which mostly have the same heritage of liberty, representative government, and, important with regard to sodomy, the same heritage of human morality, agree with us." The international rulings aren't so much used as precedent but as consistent with the conclusions of the Court, which are reached through reasoning based on the constitution, U.S. judicial decisions, historical papers of the Founders, etc. I see no problem with a hat tip to international decision on matters of human morality.
Well, first of all, electronic voting is still going to take place at the polling place. The person still has to go to the random location, but instead of making an X they press a button.
You seem to be talking about Internet voting, which has significant other problems, in addition to the horrible problems with simple electronic voting at the polling place. Anyway, if someone can't be hassled to drive to a location within their town, at similar distance to the supermarkets, gas stations, movie rental stores, restaurants, etc. that millions of people go to every day, then they probably haven't taken the time to look into the candidates. Indeed, properly looking into the issues and the candidates takes far more time than the minutes it takes to go the polling place and vote. Uninformed participation is not democratic, it is dangerous. If you propose to make the system so easy, why not allow 11 year olds to participate in voting? That would make the system more democratic, and the level of knowledge about the candidates is probably similar between an 11 year old and the people who haven't looked into the issue because they can't take the hassle of participating in the political system.
No, it is somewhat different. If you require people to vote, you will get a certain number of people who will simply vote "randomly", although in fact they are not voting randomly, there will be some bias based on the candidate's name, position on the ballot, or simply because they happened to see that candidate publicized more. This is quite dangerous. Similarly, requiring people to go to the polls undoubtedly induces voting by people who would otherwise not vote. If someone doesn't have the motivation to go to the polling place unless on pain of legal penalty, they probably haven't had the motivation to look into the candidates or the issues to any significant degree. A lot of the people don't vote in the United States because of this lack of interest. Uninformed participation is not democratic, it's dangerous and increases the chances for demagogues, and the prominence of unimportant issues like the candidate's hairstyle or tone of voice.
Aha, I suppose if I had read your whole post, I would have noticed that it looks like simple flamebait, but I will answer it anyway.
Debian does not have to be installed and configured "entirely by hand". Almost all user/desktop packages "just work" without any configuration, and those that do require configuration ask questions of the user through a configuration interface. Obviously, server applications often require more configuration, but that is true of any distribution. You may consider Debian less user-friendly than other distributions, but it is very usable without much work.
How is Debian "experimental"? and why is it, or any of the other dozens of general purpose distributions insufficient for use by an "ordinary user" or a "solo professional"? The principle difference between Debian and Red Hat is that the Debian project itself does not provide support contracts, especially wanted by corporations. Yet, there are companies, such as Progeny, that are dedicated to crafting solutions based upon and providing support contracts for Debian and many other distributions.
The cause of the crime is the cause of the crime, it has nothing to do with the weapon used. If you actually can remove guns from the person who is committing the crime (unlikely given the failure of other prohibitions; the ready access to the machine tools necessary to make weapons throughout the country; huge long, almost open, border with canada; and that police, hunters, etc. are also sources of weapons, something like 1 out of 9 murdered police officers are killed with their own gun, etc.), it doesn't change the fact that a person motivated to commit the particular crime will still do so. You may argue that the criminal will do so less lethally, etc. or that the overall societal benefit justifies it, but it doesn't mean that guns actually cause crime or that the gun actually causes the crime. To cause means to effect or produce, the gun cannot cause crime: it has no means to do so. Instead, guns are a means themselves, just like knives and box cutters; the gun is more the cause of the crime than the bullet or inertia is. If guns are the cause of crime involving guns, then anything at all could be made illegal and magically become the cause of a crime. The use of a gun in a felony or as a murder may cause there to be a "gun crime" charge, but that does not mean that guns are the cause of crime any more than candy corn is the cause of the crime of candy corn possession.
Airplanes is an easy one I think. You do not want anyone in an airplane with a gun unless they have a high level of training. It's not a good thing when you shoot a hole in the side of a plane at 30,000 feet, and it changes your "gun" from a personal weapon into one that has the potential to kill hundreds of people. However, there are Sky Marshals, with guns, that fly undercover on airplanes. High school and airports are different: that's probably just silly American politics. Many high schools do have police officers, with guns, on duty, and airports also have police officers and such, as well as though National Guardsman? they may be still around.
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I don't believe that the testing archive has ever been broken (in its 2? year history?), possibly but once. Before packages are part of testing, they stay in the unstable branch for a variable amount of time and are not moved to testing until a package has no so-called "release-critical" bugs. Thus, testing packages usually fit very well with the rest of the system, and there are not really any problems. In terms of stability, testing is in many ways comparable to the released versionso f many other distributions. Testing is perfect for normal people who want to use something reliable that's not embarassingly old. The only problem with testing is security updates: it doesn't have any. This is a concern for many people, but not as much of one for the home user.
You may be thinking of the unstable branch as "frequently being upgraded and broken". This is sometimes the case. Sometimes, packages are uploaded to unstable that significantly break the system. Clearly, this is undesirable for the "normal person". Although, I should mention that if you do not upgrade an otherwise stable snapshot of the unstable distribution, then there really aren't any problems.
Woody does have binary images of the 2.4 kernel. 2.4 simply isn't the default.
Testing is very nearly comparable in stability to the stable branch, and is equal to or exceeds the stability of many other distributions. That is not really the problem with using testing.
The problem with testing is that the Debian Security Team does not specifically provide security updates for it. Thus, if a package in testing has a security issue, the fix for that security issue will not be in testing until the normal, automatic, procedure for transferring packages from unstable to testing takes place. This means that a security bug in testing will be fixed 2 days after the fix is released for stable (and put into unstable), at the very least. In some cases, it may take weeks.
So, while the stability of testing shouldn't be a real concern for most businesses, its security is. Thus, a business must be more active in order to maintain the security of a system running testing.
IRV is for voting. A flawed voting system like IRV should not be used as it can dangerously skew results.
You're incorrect. The point is that the tabulation method does not reflect the preferences of the voters. The ostensible end of IRV is to more accurately represent the will of the people by allowing preferences to be more specifically indicated. The example tries to illustrate that, when a voter indicates his true preference on the ballot, he is actually disfavoring the party he prefers. This is similar to the idea of Nader votes in the 2000 election making it so that Gore did not win (as Nader votes would take away from Gore votes, as Nader supporters would very likely prefer Gore to Bush). This is the problem that these alternative voting systems are supposed to remedy, but with IRV, strategic voting (on the ballot, indicating not your true preference but the vote that is most likely to get your preferred candidate in office).
In the example, the voter (who's preference is Libertarian, Republican, Democrat) will actually get a result he likes more if he indicates his vote as Rep., Lib., Dem. instead of Lib., Rep., Dem. In other words, when he falsifies his true preference, voting Rep. above Lib. even though he prefers the Lib. candidate, he gets a more favorable result than if he had indicated his true preference. That is the problem of IRV. By ranking the Lib. above the Rep. (merely shuffling the order within the set of "the least two popular candidates"), the voter actually lowers the chances of both. Condorcet voting, on the other hand, accurately reflects voter preferences. IRV is good for allowing voters to indicate preference, increasing the prominence of third parties, but when a third party actually has a chance of winning, IRV greatly skews the vote, and the result is the same problem with the two-way single preference voting.
The point is if the federal government pays for it, everyone in the country, even if they're in the most rural area, pay a fraction that I or they should not have to pay.
Of course, it is easy to use apt-get to discover security updates.
Even if I could ask to have my vote registered by hand, it doesn't change the fact that others will still vote using the machinery, forcing the election to use Diebold machinery, and forcing me to deal with a government by such means.
As for Biology, humans haven't really created life, with at least any sensible conception of the word "created".
Some of the points try to relate absurd things, how would the implementation of a realistic plan to refinance the national debt have any predictable effect on cubism?
Clearly, a lot of people don't believe that gun ownership only belongs in the "wild west", and gun ownership has been a right in the US and in other countries since long before the wild west. Even assuming that extreme gun control is legal under the Constitution, and assuming that gun control laws will reduce crime in urban areas, etc., the United States has vast rural regions where wild animals are a real threat, where your closest neighbor is a mile away, and it will take the police at least 20 minutes to get to your house. Frankly, I don't see how you might not think a gun would be appropriate in such a situation, even if only because the low population density in many regions in the United States is actually quite similar to the way things were in the wild west. Gun ownership was appropriate in the wild west because it was wild and law enforcement authorities were not very powerful. The same is true if you're living in North Dakota. Other people are very far away, there are wild animals, and law enforcement is weak, or at least, delayed (which is the same thing when you're dead). With gun control, as a criminal, I would be able to get guns fairly easily (and the US doesn't even have a small border of water like the UK), and then due to the gun control laws, I can go to any house in a rural area, and know that even if there is a person in the house, it will be at least 15-30 minutes before anyone (the police) else with equal power to me (a gun) will get there. There are 500,000 police officers in a country of 280 million people and over 9 million square kilometers. They are good at investigating crimes, they are not good at preventing any individual crime. On the other hand, there are 70 million gun owners in this country, and only a few thousand murders by gun per year, many of which are by people who are going to kill each other anyway, such as various criminal elements fighting each other. Canada has more guns per capita than the US and there is much less crime in Canada than the US.
I don't see what's wrong with having a single written Constitution. The United States Constitution is so minimal as to be extremely flexible. Gun ownership is a specified right that was clearly thought important by the people who founded this country. If that right is to be changed, it is done so with the numerically significant and regionally diverse support required of a Constitutional amendment. If the UK "constitution" is so flexible that it reflects the current world better than the U.S. Constitution (which is absurd because the U.S. Constitution is so very basic that it is an appropriate Constitution for a government in almost any era at all), that would mean that the basis of the UK government is more vulnerable to various fads of government and such that are often later realized to be very bad ideas. No, I suspect your constitution isn't as flexible as you think. If it were, it wouldn't be any sort of constitution, it would be on par with any other law at all, and afforded no special protection under the law.
In most cases, you don't need to know the names of any modules in order to install. You do need to know the module name of your NIC if you do a network install.
To be fair, the only time most people ever need to even insert any hardware modules for the install is to install a single network card driver. The modules for the rest of a person's hardware are generally loaded by the kernel after installation.
Presumably from his argument, the users that would not be able to install using a difficult installer would be users that don't tend to submit useful bug reports, whereas technically adept individuals would be much more likely to submit bug reports and, more importantly, would be more likely to submit useful bug reports.
What? The version of vim in stable is 6.1.018; the latest stable version is 6.2. Oh no! Not a package from Apr 2002. They didn't even have cell phones back in those days!!!!
I recommend you download root.bin and rescue.bin, and the driver-?.bin files from the stable release: ftp://ftp.debian.org/debian/dists/stable/main/disk s- /current/images-1.44
k s- /current/images-1.44/bf2.4
/etc/apt/sources.list to either "testing" or "unstable". You can also use many of the packaging frontends, dselect, aptitude, etc., to do this and subsequent things. Then, the safest method is to type "dselect update" and then run dselect or some of the other frontends. There are guides on the Debian website and elsewhere. This will upgrade all the packages on the system to the "testing" or "unstable" branch, respectively, and the system will be as though it were one of those releases. This method of upgrading is the same method used to upgrade between releases.
Where is your architecture (one of arm, hppa, i386, ia64, m68k, mips, mipsel, powerpc, s390, sparc). If you have any sort of new hardware you can download instead from: ftp://ftp.debian.org/debian/dists/stable/main/dis
Use the rawrite tool from: ftp://ftp.debian.org/debian/tools/rawrite2.zip
This will write the images to floppy disks (disk images from that link are for 1.44MB disks).
If you can't get jigdo to work, you can download ISO image of the stable, testing, or unstable releases from: http://www.debian.org/CD/http-ftp/
If you install the stable release, which is the most reliable method, you will need to upgrade to the unstable branch (you can also upgrade to the testing branch). To do this, you need to change the specified location for downloading software packages and then update the package list and packages. First, change instances of "stable" in the file
What's wrong with the testing version? How has it disappeared? Everyone else can use it...
It's more like they cite international rulings as other instances where noted judicial bodies reach the same conclusion, as in: "Look, we legally reached our decision, and other bodies, which mostly have the same heritage of liberty, representative government, and, important with regard to sodomy, the same heritage of human morality, agree with us." The international rulings aren't so much used as precedent but as consistent with the conclusions of the Court, which are reached through reasoning based on the constitution, U.S. judicial decisions, historical papers of the Founders, etc. I see no problem with a hat tip to international decision on matters of human morality.
So work for a year or two and save a little money. Even $1,000 can be extremely profitable in the right places.
The militia is all able-bodied males between the ages of 17 and 45, with a few additional sets of people included.
Well, first of all, electronic voting is still going to take place at the polling place. The person still has to go to the random location, but instead of making an X they press a button.
You seem to be talking about Internet voting, which has significant other problems, in addition to the horrible problems with simple electronic voting at the polling place. Anyway, if someone can't be hassled to drive to a location within their town, at similar distance to the supermarkets, gas stations, movie rental stores, restaurants, etc. that millions of people go to every day, then they probably haven't taken the time to look into the candidates. Indeed, properly looking into the issues and the candidates takes far more time than the minutes it takes to go the polling place and vote. Uninformed participation is not democratic, it is dangerous. If you propose to make the system so easy, why not allow 11 year olds to participate in voting? That would make the system more democratic, and the level of knowledge about the candidates is probably similar between an 11 year old and the people who haven't looked into the issue because they can't take the hassle of participating in the political system.
No, it is somewhat different. If you require people to vote, you will get a certain number of people who will simply vote "randomly", although in fact they are not voting randomly, there will be some bias based on the candidate's name, position on the ballot, or simply because they happened to see that candidate publicized more. This is quite dangerous. Similarly, requiring people to go to the polls undoubtedly induces voting by people who would otherwise not vote. If someone doesn't have the motivation to go to the polling place unless on pain of legal penalty, they probably haven't had the motivation to look into the candidates or the issues to any significant degree. A lot of the people don't vote in the United States because of this lack of interest. Uninformed participation is not democratic, it's dangerous and increases the chances for demagogues, and the prominence of unimportant issues like the candidate's hairstyle or tone of voice.
Aha, I suppose if I had read your whole post, I would have noticed that it looks like simple flamebait, but I will answer it anyway.
Debian does not have to be installed and configured "entirely by hand". Almost all user/desktop packages "just work" without any configuration, and those that do require configuration ask questions of the user through a configuration interface. Obviously, server applications often require more configuration, but that is true of any distribution. You may consider Debian less user-friendly than other distributions, but it is very usable without much work.
How is Debian "experimental"? and why is it, or any of the other dozens of general purpose distributions insufficient for use by an "ordinary user" or a "solo professional"? The principle difference between Debian and Red Hat is that the Debian project itself does not provide support contracts, especially wanted by corporations. Yet, there are companies, such as Progeny, that are dedicated to crafting solutions based upon and providing support contracts for Debian and many other distributions.
The cause of the crime is the cause of the crime, it has nothing to do with the weapon used. If you actually can remove guns from the person who is committing the crime (unlikely given the failure of other prohibitions; the ready access to the machine tools necessary to make weapons throughout the country; huge long, almost open, border with canada; and that police, hunters, etc. are also sources of weapons, something like 1 out of 9 murdered police officers are killed with their own gun, etc.), it doesn't change the fact that a person motivated to commit the particular crime will still do so. You may argue that the criminal will do so less lethally, etc. or that the overall societal benefit justifies it, but it doesn't mean that guns actually cause crime or that the gun actually causes the crime. To cause means to effect or produce, the gun cannot cause crime: it has no means to do so. Instead, guns are a means themselves, just like knives and box cutters; the gun is more the cause of the crime than the bullet or inertia is. If guns are the cause of crime involving guns, then anything at all could be made illegal and magically become the cause of a crime. The use of a gun in a felony or as a murder may cause there to be a "gun crime" charge, but that does not mean that guns are the cause of crime any more than candy corn is the cause of the crime of candy corn possession.
Airplanes is an easy one I think. You do not want anyone in an airplane with a gun unless they have a high level of training. It's not a good thing when you shoot a hole in the side of a plane at 30,000 feet, and it changes your "gun" from a personal weapon into one that has the potential to kill hundreds of people. However, there are Sky Marshals, with guns, that fly undercover on airplanes. High school and airports are different: that's probably just silly American politics. Many high schools do have police officers, with guns, on duty, and airports also have police officers and such, as well as though National Guardsman? they may be still around.