Yeah, it's like the stealth approach from your Six, then bracketing you. *Target* demographic, indeed. They rarely know what hit 'em yet feel pretty sore afterward...
Put the backup drive in a safety deposit box. That more or less eliminates the basic home dangers (fire, theft, etc) which leaving it at a friends house does not.
Ditto here in all respects but perhaps to a greater degree.
I don't and won't promote drug use, whether it be weed, alcohol, or (especially and for good reasons) meth, but I find it personally hilarious in a disgustingly sad way that too many people find excuses for general idiocy and write laws accordingly.
Speaking from two decades of personal experience, what really hurts most people is being unprepared for the experiences they will encounter. Meanwhile our education system is going to hell...
What a soft, gentle feely country we're becoming...maybe we need controls on DiHydrogen Monoxide, it seems to be fucking up way too many people in this country who overindulge on it.:)
Sigh.
Wouldn't government ads saying "Idiocy/Ignorance Kills" be the totality of irony? lol
The only cop I've ever met who personally terrified me (and I'm not the type who is scared easily) was in his 50s... and he wasn't even after me, I had nothing to do with his quest at the time.
He was after a couple of *teenage runaways* in a building I lived in some years back.
What terrified me was meeting him on the stairwell, and looking in his eyes as we passed. The absolute single-minded *fury* I saw in those eyes terrified me - I've seen that look in the eyes of some vietnam vets talking about combat situations they faced - and I know what it means.
At the time I thought he was after a murderer or rapist or someone who had truly committed an awful crime - and I could agree with his fury, there - but only a few minutes later I learned that he was looking for a pair of basically innocent 14 yo teenage runaways.
To say that disturbed me would truly be putting it mildly...
I agree with most everything you said (and it was well said!) - but:
There are only three kinds of cops: morons, assholes, and both.
Get in a cop's way one of these days and see how much respect you have after he takes you down several pegs. Try complaining at an airport check-in - that'll do it.
Not *all* cops are that way. I've met many who are more concerned with enforcing the law while also respecting ordinary civilians. I also personally know a couple of TSA supervisors who are truly trying to do the best job they can while *simultaneously* respecting the lives and freedom of the "civvies" they have to control.
If you really want to slam someone in this case, slam the politicos who give the cops the rules they have to operate under which cause a lot of really moral, decent people to not want to take up (or keep) the career; which is the main reason why there are altogether too many assholes in enforcement of many kinds.
I've lived in hellholes where the cops were nearly all assholes, because they *had* to be to be able to do the really important part of the job, ie enforcing the laws that make sense; and were under incredible pressure to do so (forcing the best ones to quit or transfer/move.)
I've also lived (and live now) in a place where the cops are mostly fundamentally decent because they aren't subject to the same pressures that the cops in the hellholes are.
I'll close this by saying that while I basically distrust most LEOs, I've also met those who I respect, few in some places, many in others. It's no more a black&white field than any other is. I'm not a youngling nor an innocent by any means, either:) and therefore I understand where you are coming from, even if I do think you are wrong about some things.
Most of your arguments are self-centered bullshit - your last one in particular - (unemployed, are we? Then contribute in another way) but I'll bite:
Most single parent families cannot afford any kind of computer so the most vulnerable in society will not gain any benefit from your largess but only the rich. Then there are the street people.
That's why many people, myself included, volunteer our time to help people get their systems fixed. Sure, we might be taking money from - who? all the competent shops in every city I've ever lived in are buried so far up their asses in work that they are turning people away. I'm helping out a local shop for that same reason, and doing it volunteer - and you know what? They don't have a problem with it! You have a problem with that? Well, fuck you. I'll do what I damned please, and if it includes giving away my time either fixing systems, writing software, or anything I choose to do, it's none of your damned business.
Oh, and if the "street people" are so poor that they can't afford a computer in the first place, then WHERE THE HELL DO OSS DEVS TAKE MONEY AWAY FROM THEM??!!
Yeah,there are plenty of other ways to volunteer to help people - but EVERY SINGLE ONE YOU LISTED COULD BE ARGUED AGAINST IN THE SAME WAY YOU DID, and in addition, one does what one's talents give.
I don't think you understand the meaning of the word altruism. You certainly don't understand how all the parts of society intertwine to make each other work (as evinced by your "street people" comment)
/rant
Oh, and BTW, I've lived most of my life "poor" - at least under the bullshit earnings definition of it - so I'm not one of those "rich" that you espouse about - on the contrary, in my experience it's the 'poor' who give a lot of their time out - the rich just mostly donate money to organizations that may or may not know how to distribute it where it's most needed.
Sorry for the rant, mod me down, whatever, but I am so SICK of hearing similar crap from kids who aren't willing to knuckle down and work their tails off that I'm ready to puke. Waaah.
Speaking as someone who has more than ten years experience in the trades (electrician, plumber, carpenter, and more); and who has done, like most of my colleagues, thousands of hours of volunteer work, all I can say is that despite any qualifications you might have, you fail the human being test, and are also a Damned Fool.
Fuck You, greedy prick. If the only thing that you have to do is to troll with idiot comments like the one you produced here, then all I have to say to you is Get A Life and start contributing. Otherwise other people might decide not to help you out when you need it.
Well put, zogger. There are entirely too many assholes out there who seem to think that the entire system was put in place for their own benefit, and don't understand the basic premise of survival: sharing what you know with others comes back much amplified. The artifices of the system that keeps those sorts in place historically never lasts, either - not that that would mean anything to those shortsighted morons. Not that I weep when they get blindsided by it.
Although historians are uncertain of the origin of the comment, the sentence "Who shot first?" is found interspersed among many of the data fragments found.
It's speculated that the entity referred to by "frist ps0t!" may have been involved.
DSL, while great (and I always have a copy handy) won't do USB boot as far as I am aware. The floppy boot disk doesn't have USB drivers on it - only HD and CDrom (which work fantastic if just have the image on a drive somewhere).
Now it'd be neat if someone would write a floppy that had USB drivers and could boot the DSL image (50mb and very usable) off of a memory stick. I can't see any reason why it couldn't be done , tho it might take two floppies, one for the (stripped down) kernel, one for the root system load - or maybe only one? Anyone care to tackle that question? I've never attempted a USB boot floppy system myself.
Indeed. I picked up a junk laptop from someone local here - in a town of 10k people - for $20; and while the screen was shot and it wouldn't boot, the hard drive was good (a 8GB Fuji) - and the important thing was that I asked questions about how it died (was dropped) and insisted on looking at it in person first. (also got two sticks of working 64mb mem out of it)
A poster above mentioned Ebay, and he's right - you don't know what you are getting. From my experiences I figure it's about 50/50 in getting a HD that will have some lifetime left on it (and there's the weird ones, like a 6GB IBM laptop drive I have that has noisy bearing but has lasted almost two years now - for $25+shp) but in general you are getting pulls that were past their considered lifetime and have problems they don't or won't mention.
In most cities however, I think it's better to ask around or put an ad in the local webmart that you will consider buying throwaways if you can look at them first. It's amazing what some people throw away because they don't want to pay the repair costs. Just make sure you know what you are looking at (and listening to:)
My cats used to love to do lay on top of my monitors also, but I found a solution.
You know what expanded metal mesh is, right? (The kind of stuff they use to stabilize stucco and plaster and underneath stone tile flooring); get yourself a section about the size of the back of the monitor, and tape it to the top of the monitor.
Cats *hate* that stuff, it's apparently very uncomfortable to walk on or lay on. Cured them of lying on top of the monitors pretty quickly:) (I can't blame them, it can lacerate your hands also)
I don't know, I can imagine quite a bit:) Lord, what a clusterfuck this all sounds like.
What I do know, after fixing many hundreds of Win 9x systems for people, is that I decided I was going pure Linux and not looking back. I've found it relaxing. I spend almost no time in maintenance after initial setup and pretty much zero time worrying about system security.
Dumb, dumb. Microsoft is really going to take it on the chin this year, methinks. Which in the long run will be a good thing, perhaps; but in the meantime a lot of people are getting screwed (like my folks; every week I get another phone call...)
Not to mention the weird stuff I encounter at work, where we now run XP Pro on all our systems. FE, we have one box, identical to the others, where the network card driver pukes on a random daily basis. Easy enough to fix - go to the hardware manager and re-enable the card - but WTF?! So far nobody either at Corporate or MS has been able to fix it - and it's not hardware, either. What a PITA.
(also three times now in the last two weeks getting a call from corporate telling us to reboot all our boxes because they could no longer VNC into them. Rebooting fixes it. Ah, Oh Lauded Stability of XP. *snort* Other than kernel upgrades my home boxes never get rebooted. Never; and they work a lot harder than the work boxes do. Windows. Bah.;) )
Can (or do) those other applications embedding the IE engine use the zone controls and otherwise follow any of the security settings for IE itself?
God, I'd hope so, otherwise that could be a right nasty mess (and would explain some of the weirdness I used to encounter back when I used/troubleshot Windows:)
Yup. Five 9's for me here. (One minor issue with a *very few* websites that are using some kind of weird background music files can smash Mozilla, but I've only seen that three times in 6 months).
I started using Mozilla ~0.9x, and even back then it was tremendously more stable then IE was on the same box; and under Linux it's even more so. (Hard to measure windows stability when using it hard results in nearly daily reboots:)
When I installed a new kernel last week Mozilla had been continuously open for more than 70 days - since the last kernel upgrade. Now *that's* stability.
Let'em try. The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, after all.
That might just be repeating the Australian experience....and I for one would find it completely and hilariously ironic:) - not that I'll live that long.
That's really meaningless, because Mars has no magnetic field that makes a difference there, unlike Earth; and the atmosphere is far too thin to provide any radiation shielding that will make a difference for human beings. We'll be doing the same thing on Mars as we would do on Luna - building underground.
A perfect stopping point for a triangle trade with the incredibly mineral rich asteroid belt (Mars raw materials and people can get to the asteroid belt with very little energy; asteroid belt materials get sent to Earth; Earth sends small, high tech components that Mars can't build to Mars).
The major cost of those components is getting them off Earth in the first place. Once you are in LEO you are halfway to anywhere in the solar system. Mars could and possibly will become a good waystation, but that's a long, long way in the future. You are looking entirely too far ahead without considering what we have to do to get there. Laudable, but not realistic.
Major terraforming prospects
That's just a plain ridiculous comparison. Luna can't be terraformed. Mars can, but the effort would still take centuries, at least. It's a nice idea, but exploring the solar system will involve learning how to live within self-contained and self-sufficient environments; and the best place to test them is Luna (because it's the easiest point to launch a rescue mission to.)
As to H-3, on the timescales you are talking about, it's likely that it won't be useless when we finally get there. At least we can hope:)
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, it's like the stealth approach from your Six, then bracketing you. *Target* demographic, indeed. They rarely know what hit 'em yet feel pretty sore afterward...
SB
Put the backup drive in a safety deposit box. That more or less eliminates the basic home dangers (fire, theft, etc) which leaving it at a friends house does not.
SB
But mod parent up!
SB
Ditto here in all respects but perhaps to a greater degree.
I don't and won't promote drug use, whether it be weed, alcohol, or (especially and for good reasons) meth, but I find it personally hilarious in a disgustingly sad way that too many people find excuses for general idiocy and write laws accordingly.
Speaking from two decades of personal experience, what really hurts most people is being unprepared for the experiences they will encounter. Meanwhile our education system is going to hell...
What a soft, gentle feely country we're becoming...maybe we need controls on DiHydrogen Monoxide, it seems to be fucking up way too many people in this country who overindulge on it.
Sigh.
Wouldn't government ads saying "Idiocy/Ignorance Kills" be the totality of irony? lol
Cheers!
SB
Heh...somewhat.
The only cop I've ever met who personally terrified me (and I'm not the type who is scared easily) was in his 50s... and he wasn't even after me, I had nothing to do with his quest at the time.
He was after a couple of *teenage runaways* in a building I lived in some years back.
What terrified me was meeting him on the stairwell, and looking in his eyes as we passed. The absolute single-minded *fury* I saw in those eyes terrified me - I've seen that look in the eyes of some vietnam vets talking about combat situations they faced - and I know what it means.
At the time I thought he was after a murderer or rapist or someone who had truly committed an awful crime - and I could agree with his fury, there - but only a few minutes later I learned that he was looking for a pair of basically innocent 14 yo teenage runaways.
To say that disturbed me would truly be putting it mildly...
Cheers, zogger
SB
I agree with most everything you said (and it was well said!) - but:
There are only three kinds of cops: morons, assholes, and both.
Get in a cop's way one of these days and see how much respect you have after he takes you down several pegs. Try complaining at an airport check-in - that'll do it.
Not *all* cops are that way. I've met many who are more concerned with enforcing the law while also respecting ordinary civilians. I also personally know a couple of TSA supervisors who are truly trying to do the best job they can while *simultaneously* respecting the lives and freedom of the "civvies" they have to control.
If you really want to slam someone in this case, slam the politicos who give the cops the rules they have to operate under which cause a lot of really moral, decent people to not want to take up (or keep) the career; which is the main reason why there are altogether too many assholes in enforcement of many kinds.
I've lived in hellholes where the cops were nearly all assholes, because they *had* to be to be able to do the really important part of the job, ie enforcing the laws that make sense; and were under incredible pressure to do so (forcing the best ones to quit or transfer/move.)
I've also lived (and live now) in a place where the cops are mostly fundamentally decent because they aren't subject to the same pressures that the cops in the hellholes are.
I'll close this by saying that while I basically distrust most LEOs, I've also met those who I respect, few in some places, many in others. It's no more a black&white field than any other is. I'm not a youngling nor an innocent by any means, either
Cheers, friend
SB
Most single parent families cannot afford any kind of computer so the most vulnerable in society will not gain any benefit from your largess but only the rich. Then there are the street people.
That's why many people, myself included, volunteer our time to help people get their systems fixed. Sure, we might be taking money from - who? all the competent shops in every city I've ever lived in are buried so far up their asses in work that they are turning people away. I'm helping out a local shop for that same reason, and doing it volunteer - and you know what? They don't have a problem with it! You have a problem with that? Well, fuck you. I'll do what I damned please, and if it includes giving away my time either fixing systems, writing software, or anything I choose to do, it's none of your damned business.
Oh, and if the "street people" are so poor that they can't afford a computer in the first place, then WHERE THE HELL DO OSS DEVS TAKE MONEY AWAY FROM THEM??!!
Yeah,there are plenty of other ways to volunteer to help people - but EVERY SINGLE ONE YOU LISTED COULD BE ARGUED AGAINST IN THE SAME WAY YOU DID, and in addition, one does what one's talents give.
I don't think you understand the meaning of the word altruism. You certainly don't understand how all the parts of society intertwine to make each other work (as evinced by your "street people" comment)
Oh, and BTW, I've lived most of my life "poor" - at least under the bullshit earnings definition of it - so I'm not one of those "rich" that you espouse about - on the contrary, in my experience it's the 'poor' who give a lot of their time out - the rich just mostly donate money to organizations that may or may not know how to distribute it where it's most needed.
Sorry for the rant, mod me down, whatever, but I am so SICK of hearing similar crap from kids who aren't willing to knuckle down and work their tails off that I'm ready to puke. Waaah.
SB
Speaking as someone who has more than ten years experience in the trades (electrician, plumber, carpenter, and more); and who has done, like most of my colleagues, thousands of hours of volunteer work, all I can say is that despite any qualifications you might have, you fail the human being test, and are also a Damned Fool.
Fuck You, greedy prick. If the only thing that you have to do is to troll with idiot comments like the one you produced here, then all I have to say to you is Get A Life and start contributing. Otherwise other people might decide not to help you out when you need it.
Moron.
SB
Ditto here.
I imagine that a lot of volunteer Firefighter organizations (and others*) would have something to say about that.
To the GP poster: that was truly well said. Kudos!
What is it with Gates, anyway? He can't be that desperate; I seriously wonder what his motivations are nowadays.
Perhaps he's suffering from vendor lock-in
* One could make quite a list...
SB
If wookies had lawyers, we'd all be in deep shit
SB
Read "Desert Solitaire", also by Abbey - if you can find a copy. Not to malign Abbey's fiction novels, but his nonfic was even better.
Hopefully, you already know that
Agreed 180% wrt to television.
Cheers,
SB
Slashdot is a satire of the news media.
:)
;-D
That truth has to be experienced to be appreciated, however; which, of course, invalidates the entire experiment concept in the first place
Not that most people in the serious world give an ants' feelies about slashdot.
Cheers!
SB
Well put, zogger. There are entirely too many assholes out there who seem to think that the entire system was put in place for their own benefit, and don't understand the basic premise of survival: sharing what you know with others comes back much amplified. The artifices of the system that keeps those sorts in place historically never lasts, either - not that that would mean anything to those shortsighted morons. Not that I weep when they get blindsided by it.
SB, madder 'n hell
Although historians are uncertain of the origin of the comment, the sentence "Who shot first?" is found interspersed among many of the data fragments found.
It's speculated that the entity referred to by "frist ps0t!" may have been involved.
SB
DSL, while great (and I always have a copy handy) won't do USB boot as far as I am aware. The floppy boot disk doesn't have USB drivers on it - only HD and CDrom (which work fantastic if just have the image on a drive somewhere).
Now it'd be neat if someone would write a floppy that had USB drivers and could boot the DSL image (50mb and very usable) off of a memory stick. I can't see any reason why it couldn't be done , tho it might take two floppies, one for the (stripped down) kernel, one for the root system load - or maybe only one? Anyone care to tackle that question? I've never attempted a USB boot floppy system myself.
SB
Indeed. I picked up a junk laptop from someone local here - in a town of 10k people - for $20; and while the screen was shot and it wouldn't boot, the hard drive was good (a 8GB Fuji) - and the important thing was that I asked questions about how it died (was dropped) and insisted on looking at it in person first. (also got two sticks of working 64mb mem out of it)
:)
A poster above mentioned Ebay, and he's right - you don't know what you are getting. From my experiences I figure it's about 50/50 in getting a HD that will have some lifetime left on it (and there's the weird ones, like a 6GB IBM laptop drive I have that has noisy bearing but has lasted almost two years now - for $25+shp) but in general you are getting pulls that were past their considered lifetime and have problems they don't or won't mention.
In most cities however, I think it's better to ask around or put an ad in the local webmart that you will consider buying throwaways if you can look at them first. It's amazing what some people throw away because they don't want to pay the repair costs. Just make sure you know what you are looking at (and listening to
SB
My cats used to love to do lay on top of my monitors also, but I found a solution.
You know what expanded metal mesh is, right? (The kind of stuff they use to stabilize stucco and plaster and underneath stone tile flooring); get yourself a section about the size of the back of the monitor, and tape it to the top of the monitor.
Cats *hate* that stuff, it's apparently very uncomfortable to walk on or lay on. Cured them of lying on top of the monitors pretty quickly
Cheers,
SB
A truly Priceless Kodak Moment
SB
I don't know, I can imagine quite a bit :) Lord, what a clusterfuck this all sounds like.
;) )
What I do know, after fixing many hundreds of Win 9x systems for people, is that I decided I was going pure Linux and not looking back. I've found it relaxing. I spend almost no time in maintenance after initial setup and pretty much zero time worrying about system security.
Dumb, dumb. Microsoft is really going to take it on the chin this year, methinks. Which in the long run will be a good thing, perhaps; but in the meantime a lot of people are getting screwed (like my folks; every week I get another phone call...)
Not to mention the weird stuff I encounter at work, where we now run XP Pro on all our systems. FE, we have one box, identical to the others, where the network card driver pukes on a random daily basis. Easy enough to fix - go to the hardware manager and re-enable the card - but WTF?! So far nobody either at Corporate or MS has been able to fix it - and it's not hardware, either. What a PITA.
(also three times now in the last two weeks getting a call from corporate telling us to reboot all our boxes because they could no longer VNC into them. Rebooting fixes it. Ah, Oh Lauded Stability of XP. *snort* Other than kernel upgrades my home boxes never get rebooted. Never; and they work a lot harder than the work boxes do. Windows. Bah.
Cheers,
SB
Don't know for sure, but I'd bet that stucco or plaster which is supported by expanded metal mesh would play merry hell with this system :)
(There are still an awful lot of homes, particularly older and cheaper ones, with that style of construction)
SB
Can (or do) those other applications embedding the IE engine use the zone controls and otherwise follow any of the security settings for IE itself?
God, I'd hope so, otherwise that could be a right nasty mess (and would explain some of the weirdness I used to encounter back when I used/troubleshot Windows
SB
IOW I'll believe it when I see it. *snort*
SB
Yup. Five 9's for me here. (One minor issue with a *very few* websites that are using some kind of weird background music files can smash Mozilla, but I've only seen that three times in 6 months).
I started using Mozilla ~0.9x, and even back then it was tremendously more stable then IE was on the same box; and under Linux it's even more so. (Hard to measure windows stability when using it hard results in nearly daily reboots
When I installed a new kernel last week Mozilla had been continuously open for more than 70 days - since the last kernel upgrade. Now *that's* stability.
SB
Heh.
Let'em try. The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, after all.
That might just be repeating the Australian experience....and I for one would find it completely and hilariously ironic
Good funny!
SB
Partial natural radiation shielding
:)
That's really meaningless, because Mars has no magnetic field that makes a difference there, unlike Earth; and the atmosphere is far too thin to provide any radiation shielding that will make a difference for human beings. We'll be doing the same thing on Mars as we would do on Luna - building underground.
A perfect stopping point for a triangle trade with the incredibly mineral rich asteroid belt (Mars raw materials and people can get to the asteroid belt with very little energy; asteroid belt materials get sent to Earth; Earth sends small, high tech components that Mars can't build to Mars).
The major cost of those components is getting them off Earth in the first place. Once you are in LEO you are halfway to anywhere in the solar system. Mars could and possibly will become a good waystation, but that's a long, long way in the future. You are looking entirely too far ahead without considering what we have to do to get there. Laudable, but not realistic.
Major terraforming prospects
That's just a plain ridiculous comparison. Luna can't be terraformed. Mars can, but the effort would still take centuries, at least. It's a nice idea, but exploring the solar system will involve learning how to live within self-contained and self-sufficient environments; and the best place to test them is Luna (because it's the easiest point to launch a rescue mission to.)
As to H-3, on the timescales you are talking about, it's likely that it won't be useless when we finally get there. At least we can hope
SB