No, my point is that my Visa debit card isn't my primary account, it's a "reserve" if you like, that gets topped up from time to time as required, and never accumulates large reserves of cash/credit to be tapped. The insurance issue is identical to that of a regular credit card [see below], it's just that it can never become overdrawn.
There is always the issue of contesting charges no matter what option you use, but if you conduct online transactions at all, this is about as good as it gets.
Anyone really wanting a bit better privacy could invent a complete "public" personality. A maybe even real name might be OK, but everything connected to that name is invented and has no bearing to any real person.
I've had one of those since 1997. I won't mention his name here, because by now he's almost as real as I am, and I wouldn't want to get him into trouble.:) The drawback with alter-egos is that after a while they take almost as much looking-after as your own identity...
Yeah, I've been in serious debt-hell before too. There's no doubt that cash can be the best way to manage your finances, especially if you're as unreliable as I am.;-) Something I do find useful, though, is the Visa debit-card option that some banks offer. Very useful for on-line purchases, with only a limited capacity for being milked.
Whenever I'm asked for my phone number, I give out the number for the local police station. I figure if anyone wants to scam me and wants to find out why it's not working, they can call somebody who might care.;-)
Yeah, goodluckwiththat and all, but one can dream...
...But privacy temporarily set aside, a good reason NOT to sign up for Facebook is to retain some control over your time
Most people I know who "do" Facebook (including my wife, as it happens) seem to end up having their lives swallowed up by it. I waste enough time here on Slashdot, I don't need to make it worse...;-)
Yes and no. I agree the Big Oil companies, with the willing collusion of most of the world's governments, will do everything they can to stifle this, just as they have with other alternative energy projects over the decades.
But I don't see why it would be such a disaster. There are plenty of perfectly sustainable (though not yet cost-effective) ways of producing H2, e.g. by anaerobic fermentations involving any number of bacterial species such as some of the Clostridium for example.
And burning H2 doesn't produce any greenhouse gases. What could possibly go wrong?;-)
[edit: damn preview, I didn't need to know that slashcode doesn't accept the subscript tag...]
Apple sells image (and good machines mostly, yeah yeah, mod me down, I like my apple machines), part of that image is their CEO, whoever fills Job's shoes eventually will have to make that image theirs. If you think apple doesnt have some people earmarked for this, you're nuts.
Well, I'm not nuts, but my point was that Apple is setting up a fragile situation by investing so much of the "image" in one person, however talented. They need a few other people taking his place on the podium once in a while. Jobs also might need to think a bit about letting go.
Perhaps they also need to think a bit about something a bit more profound than "image".
(Disclaimer: I like the Apple gear that I have - laptop and 2 iPods, but use Linux on my desktop machine) but some of their products have simply not been thought through in their haste to get them on the market. Witness the Macbook Air and the iPhone...
Heh, I was wondering how long it would take for Emacs to be mentioned.;-) Actually, as a matter of curiosity, I wonder if Linus uses this, or if he is a vi man. [Google...] ah, apparently MicroEmacs. Never heard of it, but fair enough...
It's up to the actual traders to verify unsubstantiated statements such as this before taking any action.
This is silly, in any case. If Apple is so dependent on the health of one person, they have bigger problems than the antics of a few journalists.
What are they going to do when Jobs finally does pop his clogs? Sooner or later, that is going to happen, and they need to think about that now rather than later.
The main thing I worry about is that the mere presence of Paranoid Linux installed on your machine will be grounds for prosecuting you in the places where it's most needed.
Perhaps a more useful approach would be a sort of meta-distribution that picks over the configuration settings of whatever distribution you're running, and makes suggestions (or alterations) where requested or required. This would have the advantage of not requiring the maintenance of a complete distribution tree, with all the duplication of effort that entails. It would be relatively straightforward to maintain a database to indicate where a given program is out of date and should be upgraded.
The truly paranoid (that is, mentally ill people) often don't trust themselves.
True, but when you think about it, this wouldn't necessarily be a bad survival trait if everyone were in fact out to get me. Though in practice, it would be much safer to never use a computer at all.
There's a lot to be said for this attitude; people do leave all sorts of incriminating or compromising material sitting around on their computers, and they really can't be pursuaded not to reply to that so-convincing phishing email...
Even for alpha, that's stupid. Something I've come to expect from Linux and its "I've got to be the neatest" mentality.
Even for Anonymous Coward, that was a stupid thing to say. A bug existing in alpha or beta versions does not constitute shoddy software overall. That is, after all, what alpha and beta releases are for. I don't need to catalogue the bugs in Windows that are never even acknowledged, let alone fixed, but production releases of Linux are generally as solid as anyone could wish, and bug reports are open for everyone to see, and do get acted upon.
I find it surprising how long it takes the friggin' BIOS to load Grub on most "modern" computers.
This is one reason why I still prefer to use LILO, even though it no longer appears to be very fashionable. At the risk of sounding curmudgeonly, I fail to see any real advantage to using grub at all, and usually find LILO less trouble.
Sure, I am aware that you can edit boot parameters at will. This, I admit, can be just as well, since every single distro I have tried that uses grub has without fail selected the wrong boot disk in the config file by default, so I invariably have to edit the boot param to get a kernel image loaded.
But what I meant to say before I digressed, is that I would be a lot more content with these boot-races if they would mention how they are getting there. For instance, are we timing from power-on, or end of POST? What services are we loading? If a computer doesn't have to do anything except load a tiny kernel, it won't take long to boot, but it also won't be very useful. Are be booting all the way to X11 or just to a tty? And so on. My boot time is nothing like 5 seconds (probably closer to 10 times that) but I have a feeling my idea of a useful computer might be a bit more comprehensive than in some of these benchmarks.
While I defend anyone's right to arm bears, I fail to see how we managed to get on to this topic, even browsing at -1. It seems far removed from boosting Linux boot speed.
Indeed, the cost of RAM is now such that it makes sense to simply buy enough to make sure that swap is rarely used. But by the same token, where drives if 1TB or more are no longer uncommon, it doesn't hurt to allocate a couple of gigs of swap for special occasions, and find something else to worry about.
If you find your apps leaking to the extent that they swap a lot, simply consider alternative applications, or at least reload them more frequently.
Yes, myself for one. I think it is an excellent idea to be able to leave a "family" of utilities floating there when they are to be called upon repeatedly. But it's a matter of habit and perspective: if you are used to working this way, Photoshop's approach seems unnecessarily clunky. It doesn't mean to say that one or the other is wrong.
Unless your desktop publishing operation goes out to a litho offset printer, I wouldn't worry about it. Most other kinds of printers only take RGB inputs, even if they use CMYK inks.
Indeed. It gets a bit tiring reading these posts bleating that gimp is automatically inferior to PhotoShop because it doesn't do CMYK or because the poster can't cope with the fact that the interface is different. I have a feeling that a lot of them have little idea what CMYK actually does.
The gimp developers don't actually claim the thing is a replacement for PS. It is, however, a good and useful program in its own right, and it does not cost hundreds of dollars for the licence.
As for the interface (sorry, yes, I realise this is a digression) I learned to use the gimp before I ever played with PhotoShop, so I personally find the latter harder to use as a result. That does not mean that one or the other is broken; any powerful tool has an associated learning curve, and the gimp is no exception. Even though I now have a (non-legit) copy of PS on my Mac, I usually find my first preference is towards the gimp for most purposes. But then, I have no pretensions to being a professional graphics artist.
He looked me up and down and said "Who says its hard to use" and turned away.
Interesting. I wouldn't want to attempt to excuse his boorish behaviour, but the attitude sounds characteristic of someone who spends a disproportionate amount of time interacting with machines rather than people. This might also account for a certain tendency for correspondents on this forum to go up in flames and hurl abuse without provocation.
Indeed. I get very tired of all the denizens of the peanut gallery who start frothing at the mouth whenever RMS' name is even mentioned, as if he was some personal enemy to be abhorred and shunned.
In common with the probable majority of these people, I have never actually met the man, but I am capable of recognising that he has contributed more to Free and Open Source software than most us ever will.
It might be worth remembering that the next time Google decides it was only joking the last time they revoked an opressive and obnoxious license agreement. If your data is important to you, simple common-sense should indicate that putting it in someone else's hands is sheer folly. RMS is 100% on the money.
so dumping them for minor things like this is unwise.
In any case, if the tech support crew actually offer some guidance rather than a blanket prohibition, it's possible that they can forestall some of the more flagrantly insecure or unsafe idiocies that some users are apt to come up with.
Contrary to popular belief, not all users are criminals [gasp!] or even idiots [heresy!] and they will more often than not respond well if you take the trouble to explain *why* you don't want them running p2p on corporate machines.
Slashdot Mirror
You seem to be under the impression that the government cares about what is "legal".
Indeed; the main thrust of TFA is the lack of any legal approval or oversight of this project.
No, my point is that my Visa debit card isn't my primary account, it's a "reserve" if you like, that gets topped up from time to time as required, and never accumulates large reserves of cash/credit to be tapped. The insurance issue is identical to that of a regular credit card [see below], it's just that it can never become overdrawn.
There is always the issue of contesting charges no matter what option you use, but if you conduct online transactions at all, this is about as good as it gets.
Anyone really wanting a bit better privacy could invent a complete "public" personality. A maybe even real name might be OK, but everything connected to that name is invented and has no bearing to any real person.
:) The drawback with alter-egos is that after a while they take almost as much looking-after as your own identity...
I've had one of those since 1997. I won't mention his name here, because by now he's almost as real as I am, and I wouldn't want to get him into trouble.
Yeah, I've been in serious debt-hell before too. There's no doubt that cash can be the best way to manage your finances, especially if you're as unreliable as I am. ;-) Something I do find useful, though, is the Visa debit-card option that some banks offer. Very useful for on-line purchases, with only a limited capacity for being milked.
Whenever I'm asked for my phone number, I give out the number for the local police station. I figure if anyone wants to scam me and wants to find out why it's not working, they can call somebody who might care. ;-)
Yeah, goodluckwiththat and all, but one can dream...
...But privacy temporarily set aside, a good reason NOT to sign up for Facebook is to retain some control over your time
;-)
Most people I know who "do" Facebook (including my wife, as it happens) seem to end up having their lives swallowed up by it. I waste enough time here on Slashdot, I don't need to make it worse...
Yes and no. I agree the Big Oil companies, with the willing collusion of most of the world's governments, will do everything they can to stifle this, just as they have with other alternative energy projects over the decades.
;-)
But I don't see why it would be such a disaster. There are plenty of perfectly sustainable (though not yet cost-effective) ways of producing H2, e.g. by anaerobic fermentations involving any number of bacterial species such as some of the Clostridium for example.
And burning H2 doesn't produce any greenhouse gases. What could possibly go wrong?
[edit: damn preview, I didn't need to know that slashcode doesn't accept the subscript tag...]
Apple sells image (and good machines mostly, yeah yeah, mod me down, I like my apple machines), part of that image is their CEO, whoever fills Job's shoes eventually will have to make that image theirs. If you think apple doesnt have some people earmarked for this, you're nuts.
Well, I'm not nuts, but my point was that Apple is setting up a fragile situation by investing so much of the "image" in one person, however talented. They need a few other people taking his place on the podium once in a while. Jobs also might need to think a bit about letting go.
Perhaps they also need to think a bit about something a bit more profound than "image".
(Disclaimer: I like the Apple gear that I have - laptop and 2 iPods, but use Linux on my desktop machine) but some of their products have simply not been thought through in their haste to get them on the market. Witness the Macbook Air and the iPhone...
Heh, I was wondering how long it would take for Emacs to be mentioned. ;-) Actually, as a matter of curiosity, I wonder if Linus uses this, or if he is a vi man. [Google...] ah, apparently MicroEmacs. Never heard of it, but fair enough...
It's up to the actual traders to verify unsubstantiated statements such as this before taking any action.
This is silly, in any case. If Apple is so dependent on the health of one person, they have bigger problems than the antics of a few journalists.
What are they going to do when Jobs finally does pop his clogs? Sooner or later, that is going to happen, and they need to think about that now rather than later.
Just a minor correction here, since there have been four successive posts with this misapprehension:
Blair is no longer prime minister of the United Kingdom.
The main thing I worry about is that the mere presence of Paranoid Linux installed on your machine will be grounds for prosecuting you in the places where it's most needed.
Perhaps a more useful approach would be a sort of meta-distribution that picks over the configuration settings of whatever distribution you're running, and makes suggestions (or alterations) where requested or required. This would have the advantage of not requiring the maintenance of a complete distribution tree, with all the duplication of effort that entails. It would be relatively straightforward to maintain a database to indicate where a given program is out of date and should be upgraded.
The truly paranoid (that is, mentally ill people) often don't trust themselves.
True, but when you think about it, this wouldn't necessarily be a bad survival trait if everyone were in fact out to get me. Though in practice, it would be much safer to never use a computer at all.
There's a lot to be said for this attitude; people do leave all sorts of incriminating or compromising material sitting around on their computers, and they really can't be pursuaded not to reply to that so-convincing phishing email...
Even for alpha, that's stupid. Something I've come to expect from Linux and its "I've got to be the neatest" mentality.
Even for Anonymous Coward, that was a stupid thing to say. A bug existing in alpha or beta versions does not constitute shoddy software overall. That is, after all, what alpha and beta releases are for. I don't need to catalogue the bugs in Windows that are never even acknowledged, let alone fixed, but production releases of Linux are generally as solid as anyone could wish, and bug reports are open for everyone to see, and do get acted upon.
You might have sigs disabled.
Ah. Indeed I do.
I find it surprising how long it takes the friggin' BIOS to load Grub on most "modern" computers.
This is one reason why I still prefer to use LILO, even though it no longer appears to be very fashionable. At the risk of sounding curmudgeonly, I fail to see any real advantage to using grub at all, and usually find LILO less trouble.
Sure, I am aware that you can edit boot parameters at will. This, I admit, can be just as well, since every single distro I have tried that uses grub has without fail selected the wrong boot disk in the config file by default, so I invariably have to edit the boot param to get a kernel image loaded.
But what I meant to say before I digressed, is that I would be a lot more content with these boot-races if they would mention how they are getting there. For instance, are we timing from power-on, or end of POST? What services are we loading? If a computer doesn't have to do anything except load a tiny kernel, it won't take long to boot, but it also won't be very useful. Are be booting all the way to X11 or just to a tty? And so on. My boot time is nothing like 5 seconds (probably closer to 10 times that) but I have a feeling my idea of a useful computer might be a bit more comprehensive than in some of these benchmarks.
While I defend anyone's right to arm bears, I fail to see how we managed to get on to this topic, even browsing at -1. It seems far removed from boosting Linux boot speed.
Quid errata demonstrandum.
;-)
A bit of grammar correction required, but a serendipitously funny take on the phrase...
Or did you actually mean to say "quod erat..."?
Indeed, the cost of RAM is now such that it makes sense to simply buy enough to make sure that swap is rarely used. But by the same token, where drives if 1TB or more are no longer uncommon, it doesn't hurt to allocate a couple of gigs of swap for special occasions, and find something else to worry about.
If you find your apps leaking to the extent that they swap a lot, simply consider alternative applications, or at least reload them more frequently.
Some of us like the separated windows.
Yes, myself for one. I think it is an excellent idea to be able to leave a "family" of utilities floating there when they are to be called upon repeatedly. But it's a matter of habit and perspective: if you are used to working this way, Photoshop's approach seems unnecessarily clunky. It doesn't mean to say that one or the other is wrong.
Unless your desktop publishing operation goes out to a litho offset printer, I wouldn't worry about it. Most other kinds of printers only take RGB inputs, even if they use CMYK inks.
Indeed. It gets a bit tiring reading these posts bleating that gimp is automatically inferior to PhotoShop because it doesn't do CMYK or because the poster can't cope with the fact that the interface is different. I have a feeling that a lot of them have little idea what CMYK actually does.
The gimp developers don't actually claim the thing is a replacement for PS. It is, however, a good and useful program in its own right, and it does not cost hundreds of dollars for the licence.
As for the interface (sorry, yes, I realise this is a digression) I learned to use the gimp before I ever played with PhotoShop, so I personally find the latter harder to use as a result. That does not mean that one or the other is broken; any powerful tool has an associated learning curve, and the gimp is no exception. Even though I now have a (non-legit) copy of PS on my Mac, I usually find my first preference is towards the gimp for most purposes. But then, I have no pretensions to being a professional graphics artist.
He looked me up and down and said "Who says its hard to use" and turned away.
Interesting. I wouldn't want to attempt to excuse his boorish behaviour, but the attitude sounds characteristic of someone who spends a disproportionate amount of time interacting with machines rather than people. This might also account for a certain tendency for correspondents on this forum to go up in flames and hurl abuse without provocation.
And that we can thank our Dear RMS for.
Thanks papa bear.
Indeed. I get very tired of all the denizens of the peanut gallery who start frothing at the mouth whenever RMS' name is even mentioned, as if he was some personal enemy to be abhorred and shunned.
In common with the probable majority of these people, I have never actually met the man, but I am capable of recognising that he has contributed more to Free and Open Source software than most us ever will.
It might be worth remembering that the next time Google decides it was only joking the last time they revoked an opressive and obnoxious license agreement. If your data is important to you, simple common-sense should indicate that putting it in someone else's hands is sheer folly. RMS is 100% on the money.
so dumping them for minor things like this is unwise.
In any case, if the tech support crew actually offer some guidance rather than a blanket prohibition, it's possible that they can forestall some of the more flagrantly insecure or unsafe idiocies that some users are apt to come up with.
Contrary to popular belief, not all users are criminals [gasp!] or even idiots [heresy!] and they will more often than not respond well if you take the trouble to explain *why* you don't want them running p2p on corporate machines.
A female Linux user?!? You can compile and install Gentoo while waiting for that to happen. : p
;-)
My wife is a Linux user.
You insensitive clod