At my company, the first thing we did when we migrated to XP (from 98) was set every user's permission to limited.
Works great, until you run into something like Palm software, which won't cooperate with permissions. I've tried several methods to make it possible to sync a Palm Pilot with Outlook, and none work, if the user doesn't have administrator privileges on the computer. Apparently, some of the Palm conduits try to write to directories that aren't available to mere users, and I haven't been able to track all of them down.
And it's the executives that have the Palms, so not letting them work isn't a viable option...
Then, wonder of wonders, it disengaged when he... stepped on the brake!
Ass-u-me-ing that the car ignored the input of the brake pedal at the start of this incident, it isn't all that difficult to believe it would have ignored the input of the on/off toggle.
Heck, it is not unheard of for embedded processors to "stop", leaving its outputs in whatever state they were when the lockup occured, i.e., the processor turns on the "increase throttle" output for the pass, then locks; when it later receives an interrupt that restarts it, it might not check its outputs... leaving them at full throttle. OTHER processors would be reading the engine at full throttle, and prevent bad things from being done to the car (shift to neutral, etc), while the cruise control thinks it's at idle, so it has no need to adjust the throttle.
Personally, I don't get along with too much automation in cars... Which is why I only buy manual transmission vehicles for myself. No one has "clutch by wire" in production yet!
Actually, a couple of Japanese manufactures have computer-controled manual transmissions, where the computer operates a clutch and levers, rather than a torque converter and valves.
Kodak's behavior was a bit like walking into a biker bar and loudly proclaiming that "Only pussies and cowards ride Harleys". They knew they were entering a legal minefield.
Yeah, you'd be surprised how many lawyers own Harleys these days! B-)
why didn't he turn off the power to the cruise control system?
In my Jeep, the button to instruct the cruise control to enter the "off" state is on the steering wheel. It merely sends a logic signal to the computer... it does not power the computer down, because that computer does other things, like manage the engine.
The only way to power the computer off is to pull its fuse. Unfortunately, while the doors and hood are closed, there are no accessible fuses. I believe the engine control module's fuse is under the hood... Kind of inaccessible while moving.
I remember watching a PBS show on global warming and its effects a couple of years ago, which tracked climate changes over the eons. They used data from ice cores, sea bed cores, tree rings, etc., and corelated the results with known phenomena about the solar system, such as the "wobble" of Earth's axis relative to the sun, the eccentricity of its orbit, long-term solar cycles, and dozens of other factors.
When the cycles of these factors were graphed, and the temperature/rainfall/atmospheric gasses data gleaned from the core samples was superimposed upon it, it was very evident that when Earth wobbled one way, temps got colder, and warmer when it wobbled the other way. When the orbit moved a bit futher off-center, summer/winter extremes got wider. When the sun was quiet, Earth was cooler than when the sun was more energetic. And, when cycles overlapped the "wrong way", things got either very hot, or very cold...
The graph showed that nearly all of these long-term factors had "recently" (past few centuries) passed through their average position, and were now trending towards the WARM side of the equation. And the modern historical record confirmed that temperatures have been rising.
Now, most of these factors are well beyond the control of man. But the conclusion of the show's producers was that we (man) must change our ways on greenhouse gas emissions, in the hope that we can slow what the previous 45 minutes had shown as a repeating, natural progression conditions on this planet, which predates our existance. Excuse me? Someone must have carried a decimal point incorrectly....
488 tracking cookies is no where near what we've found on systems. Running Ad-Aware on one home system found over 600 cookies, and 500 other spyware-related files, including two separate "download unknown updated files at every boot" ad programs. It was so infested, it had to be wiped clean and restored from the system CDs, because none of the tools we found code successfully remove all the self-replicating stuff.
An office system we worked on after that one, however, holds our record - 1500 ad/spy files, hundreds of cookies, plus hundreds of registry entries... just over 2400 "critical problems" detected by SpyBot. Removing these things freed up half a gigabyte of disk space!
I have only seen the first disk, which looked good, but someone I know who has watched all three Star Wars disks from the bittorrent says they've been modified - two people apparently inserted text of their names into a number of scenes in episodes 5 and 6. There were other discrepencies, too.
The person in question has original original Betamax tapes of all three movies, given to him by an uncle who worked on the production. So he has some basis for comparison...
Hint: Chads were the diversion, erroneously disenfranchised blacks were the election theft.
Strange that the districts that had the problems which you seem to blame on "disenfranchised blacks" were under the direct electorial control of local Democratic administrations. While you blame Katherine Harris, if there was anyone trying to keep blacks from voting in Palm Beach and the other hand-picked areas of disputed counts, it wouldn't have been Republicans doing it.
Not to mention that every one of the privately-sponsored, post-election recounts done by various news organizations showed that Bush had more votes than Gore. Or that Gore's people petitioned to have the absentee ballots of military personnel excluded, disenfranchising them.
The recounts requested by Gore in selected districts, rather than state-wide, exceeded that which was permitted under Florida law. The Florida Supreme Court should have stopped them, but didn't - they chose to ignore the law. The U.S. Supreme Court was asked to step in, and they did.
What I find amusing is how Democrats tell Republicans to "get over" the fact that Clinton committed purjury while in office, but cannot bring themselves to "get over" the fact that Al Gore couldn't find enough defective ballots with his name on them to win Florida. Hell, if he'd have carried his home state, Florida wouldn't have mattered!
In our case, the support call was free - each server product installation includes a certain number of support calls. For Small Business Server 200, that number is ONE. But, they do charge a pretty large amount for additional calls, and I think it was US$250.
The customer was willing to pay the $250, in any case. It turned out that I had found the correct solution to the problem (force a rebuild dispite the dire warnings from the rebuild utilities about loss of data), but I was reluctant to do it on the chance that there was another procedure that wouldn't result in data loss. The tech also tried all of the no-loss methods before indulging in the "big hammer".
Unless you're a Super-Gold-Mega-Partner, my experience suggests: forget it.
Disagree. I'm firmly in the "hate Microsoft" camp, but my recent experiences with Microsoft Tech Support are VERY GOOD. We had an Exchange Server decide to munch its database, and the MS tech had it up and running via remote support in half an hour.
Now, the system itself continues to munch its database periodically, so I'm still not happy with Microsoft's products, but their tech support is far better than most people give them credit for.
As others have said, the article refers to servers SHIPPED with Linux. In our case, we don't bother with pre-installs, because most use a different distribution than we have standardized upon, and I've never seen one that has the "right collection" of packages we need. It's easier for us to order a dozen identical machines, do one install, and image the hard drive to the others... changing the IPs along the way.
Sender ID adds checking of the header FROM field to SPF. SPF just checks the domains mentioned in the SMTP protocol exchange (HELO/EHLO, MAIL FROM), while Sender/Caller ID check the optional FROM header found in the DATA portion.
... is whether or not any of the projects are going to implement the unemcumbered SPF portion of Sender ID, or if they're throwing that out with Microsoft's enhancements.
You can implement handling the setup of the DNS TXT records without touching anything Microsoft claims ownership of. You can implement the checking of the HELO/EHLO and MAIL FROM via SPF with no patent concerns. Will Apache, Debian, et al dismiss this, simply because the most popular implementations of SPF also support checking the header FROM field, which is supposedly Microsoft's idea?
The changes to DNS involve adding a TXT record to the domain which lists the hosts authorized to forward mail for the domain. Nothing proprietary there, and anyone with control over their DNS can do it.
Of course, if you have a DNS provider who won't let you make such changes, you probably need a different DNS provider!
They're not just hoarding it in jars waiting for a Wal Mart to show up.
Correct - they're spending their money. My point is that the current situation is that they're spending more of it than they need to, keeping them that much poorer.
When just getting the food and clothing you NEED to have costs you 10-20% more than it has to, that's just one more economic burden keeping people in bad neighborhoods. By having access to discount merchants without spending what you save in transportation, "getting by" can become "getting ahead".
Not to mention that the average discount store (not just WalMart) employs more people that most of those M&P stores, making for more jobs in the area, which means not all the money leaves the neighborhood. Where do you think the M&P owners spend their money? Outside the area, buying the goods they bring in to sell!
Follow the money - none of these neighborhoods are closed systems, so it doesn't matter who the retailer is, most of the money spent in a given store leaves the neighborhood. That outflow of money causes an inflow of goods. In an ideal environment, every area would have goods "sources" as well as "sinks", and the people working for the local sources are being paid by money brought in by sending goods to non-local retailers, which they spend at their local retailers.
In ST:DS9, Nog refered to it as the "river of commerce", I believe. WalMart is one of the river's navigators. So are KMart, Bob's Liquor, and Joe and Jane Doe, Consumer-at-large.
Look, I understand your apparent prejudice against WalMart. You seem to believe them to be responsible for many evils in the economic world. They might be guilty of them, too; I don't really know. Personally, I won't shop at a Kohls store, because I don't like what one of the founding family's brood is doing to our economy from his Senate seat in Washington, but I have no problem with them building stores where ever they damn well please, or the fact that my mother loves their "15% Senior discount on Wednesday" specials. I rarely shop at WalMart, primarily because I have found other vendors that sell for the same price or less, on average, and what I'd save on the other things is rarely worth the gas to drive the two blocks more to get them there.
But, I have that choice. Preventing WalMart from building in a poor neighborhood keeps those poor people from having that choice.
Did I mention that there have been 8 or 9 Mom&Pop food stores to open in our little town over the past 3 years, doing well, despite having to compete with 3 Super KMarts, 3 WalMarts, 3 Jewel/Oscos, 2 Dominicks, and a half-dozen other regional chains within 10 miles? All are specialty stores, offering things for local ethnic groups (primarily Hispanic) that aren't served by the larger stores. Running a M&P store is quite possible in the shadow of WalMart, the same way any entrepreneurial venture works - find a need, and fulfill it. One such grocery just opened a month ago, long after it was announced that a Super WalMart would be built less than 1/2 mile away. The difference is that they're specializing in foods and goods from Mexico and Central America, and are located less than 100 yards from the largest concentration of Hispanic immigrants in the area. (It's quite likely many of their customers will be employees of that WalMart, since it's going to employ hundreds of people)
What, do you think that people in the ghettos are growing their own food and making their own clothing or something?
Not at all. But, they aren't able to shop within their neighborhoods for the range of goods suburbanites take for granted, and the prices they pay are usually substantially higher for what they can get. There are exceptions, of course. There are local stores in the inner city. To listen to some of the Chicago ministers and other proclaimed "advocates of the poor", they're primarily liquor and tobacco stores, though. And there are a number of "unlicensed" stores to be found around the area.
But the jist of my story is that it is expensive to be poor in the inner city. And many attempts to relieve that are fought by those who claim to have the "best interests" of the poor in mind while doing it, when it's more their personal agendas that control their actions.
It boils down to opportunity. The ones who made it out of the hood had it... and the ones still living in the streets didn't.
I never said anything about opportunity throughout this discussion - I was commenting on the fact that there are many in control of the race debate today that are purpetuating the myth the blacks are too stupid to get into many jobs without government help.
Moving on to opportunity, yes, that's a problem, too. And the problem comes from many sources. For example, Walmart recently applied for permits to build two stores in Chicago, including one in a predominately black neighborhood. They did NOT get the permits for that store, because of the work of black leaders... who didn't want the "low paying" Walmart jobs, while their constituents currently have NO JOBS. The real problem is that the Walmart jobs wouldn't be union jobs, and, to the leaders fighting the store, promoting unions is far more important than letting someone offer a black a job!
Note that there aren't many "mom and pop" stores for the Walmart "cut throat pricing" to force out of these neighborhoods... Prior to Walmart's entry to the area, these same black leaders were complaining that no one wanted to build stores there, because of the poor economics...
And then there is the bank that wanted to build a branch in a black neighborhood was crucified in the media because they wanted to impose sensible security measures in a high-crime neighborhood, because the security was "insulting" to the people who live there... Isn't it MORE insulting that some of the people living there are preying upon the others to the extent that the security would be needed? These same people currently have to COMMUTE to a real bank, or suffer with confiscatory fees at the armored currency exchanges that will operate in their neighborhood.
And what about the people "still in the streets", that are calling the ones who got out "Uncle Tom" and accusing them of "acting white"? Those that got out faced the exact same obstacles as those that haven't yet. They went to the same schools; they faced the same job opportunities (or lack thereof). What's preventing any of those still stuck on the streets from doing the same, other than their lack of belief that it can be done?
You were brought up in a household who, by your race, has an average income of 40,577, compared to 25,050 for your average african american household (1997) (go ahead, start a college fund on an income like that! And don't resort to the "special case" line of argument). Odds are 23% for each of your parents having attended college, compared to 11% for each african american parent. I could go on - want me to?
Statistically, then, I was "virtually black" by your standards, because my family did not achieve anywhere near your claimed income for white families for YEARS after I was pushed out of the nest. Neither of my parents attended school beyond the 10th grade. My family consists of 9 kids, 4 of which were born prior to my mother's marraige to my legal, but not biological, father... 2 of those were adopted away before I was born (I just met the oldest of my sisters just 24 hours ago, in fact).
Expectations, however, are a key to success. You can not succeed if you don't expect to. In other words, if you think you will fail, you already have. And too many of today's blacks expect to fail... not because they're stupid, but because they've been told to expect it.
Even in the days of rampant, legal discrimination, being white wasn't a guarantee of success. It might have gotten you in a door that was closed to a black person, but it wasn't going to keep you in that job then, and it still doesn't, today. But, if you don't even bother to try the door...
As long as public schools are funded by local property taxes, poor ppl will be screwed.
Partially true. But there are schools in poor neighborhoods that do an extraordinary job of teaching children for less money than the government spends on the same job... They're just not public schools. The schools with the highest per-pupil spending are also amongst the lowest-performing schools, because money is often seen as a fix for bad teaching.
One proposal that is purpetually fought by liberals is the idea of school vouchers. Instead of simply tossing $8,000 or more per pupil per year at the public schools, a portion of that money would be given to the parents, in the form of a voucher, to be applied against any school they chose to send their kids to. If they chose to put their kids in PS122, then the public school gets the voucher money back, as well as the rest of the per-pupil money.
If, on the other hand, they send their kids to Bob's Kiddie College, BKC gets the voucher money... but BKC is still free to charge the parents additional funds, if their tuition is normally $10,000 per year. And the balance of the per-pupil money not included in the voucher remains with the public schools, improving their per-pupil cash flow.
It would seem to be a win-win situation; parents in poor neighboorhoods have access to better schools, if they chose to use them, and public schools have greater incentive to clean up their acts to keep the parents from taking their kids elsewhere. But, that last item is the kicker... The public schools don't want to clean up their acts enough to get back the money they think is "rightfully" theirs.
So, they fight vouchers at every turn, especially the teachers unions. They make claims that vouchers violation the separation of church and state (state shouldn't support religion), because it would allow parents to select religious school options for their kids, even though it really just removes a state-imposed economic barrier to parental choice.
And poor families continue to get the short end of the education stick. To add insult to injury, though, they also tend to vote for the people most against improving their situation...
The problem with trying to rectify yesterday's discriminatory practices with new ones is that, where does it end? For how long do we have to discriminate against whites to "properly" atone for the slavery of 140 years ago, or the economic discrimination of the hundred years that followed? 10 years? 50? 100? Forever? I see nothing in your quotes of Dr. King that suggest perpetual discrimination.
In 1863 the Negro was told that he was free as a result of the Emancipation Proclamation. But he was not given any land to make that freedom meaningful.
In 1976, I was told I was free as a result of reaching 18 years of age. All I was given was instructions that I needed to go out and join the job market... even though I'm white, I was given no property, and no special birthright. While I did not suffer under slavery (some of today's kids might think the tight discipline of my youth was slavery, but it was not), the "meaningfulness" of my freedom was entirely tied to what I was willing to make of it, just as the "meaningfulness" of the 1863 slave's freedom was.
Today, it is illegal to discriminate against anyone in hiring, based upon a variety of criteria, unless they're a white male under the age of 50. Most of these people never owned a slave, and were never in a position to have denied someone else a job because of the color of their skin. And the unfairness of that makes it damn hard for them to accept the idea that someone will less education or less skills has priority over them... or that anyone from these "privileged" groups who didn't need the special programs to succeed really did make it on their own.
Walter E. Williams once related that, when faced with a choice of doctors where he only knew the age and race of the doctors, how he would make his choice. If they were both in their late 50s, and one was black, he'd take the black doctor, because he knew that this man had worked hard to get where he was.
But, if they were in their 30s, he'd go with the white doctor, because he would have no way of knowing if the black doctor had gotten through on his skills, or the need for the university to fulfill its quotas.
This is not the desired result of affirmative action, but it is the common one. It only gets worse when people use the argument that removing race-based quotas hurts blacks, purpetuating the myth that blacks aren't smart enough to succeed on their own.
Tacking onto my own comment, if you have an interest in the difference between "liberal" and "conservative" thought, locate a copy of Thomas Sowell's "A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles". It covers the historical origins of both ends of the political spectrum.
I also highly recommend Dr. Sowell's "The Vision of the Anointed". Amazon's running a special on the pair for $28.77.
Let's refine the question - Why do blacks born in America, on average, find less success than first-generation black immigrants?
Could it be that our education system is programming native-born blacks for failure? That is the opinion of many notable successful black entrepreneurs and authors. Check out the writings of Thomas Sowell and Walter E. Williams, both brilliant economists, and both happy they got their educations before our system was "improved" for blacks in the 60s and 70s.
For nearly 40 years, we have told blacks and other minorities that, because their ancestors were slaves, and their parents were discriminated against under the law, they not only have an excuse for not succeeding, they are expected to not succeed, and only the aid and comfort of the government (and the white liberals who have controlled the purse strings) can fix things for them. This is an incredibly racist thing to say - but, these same white liberals have also modified the language so that it is now racist to suggest that any color humans are just as good as any other other color humans, because this is the basis for removing all race-based preference systems.
Administering these race-based preference systems is a lucrative business, which feeds upon emotion to keep thousands of guilt-ridden people employed. If we truly moved to Dr. King's vision of a color-blind society, these powerful people would be out of work... Who would listen to Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, for example, if they weren't screaming discrimination at every turn?
Many things that are attributed to current discrimination by these people are not really - for example, there are fewer minorities and women in top-level management because they haven't been at it as long. When top management requires 20 years of experience, it takes a while for an increased presence of minorities in the lower eschelons to move their way up the latter, unless they're pushed upward, beyond their current merit, to satisfy the appearance of discrimination. And such fast-tracked individuals may lack skills that time would have given them, so they feel pressured to do what they can't do, and the detractors amongst their peers see it as "proof" of the premise that minorities "aren't good enough".
The solution? Let's put an end to teaching blacks and other minorities that we expect less from them, just because they're not white. Let's stop giving people crap jobs to fill quotas to keep the race merchants from shaking your company down for "donations".
Now they are going to link to random sites as well?
Obviously, you haven't been examining spam messages. Putting dozens of random, unclickable links in spam has been going on for more than half a year. It's used to break up words, as in:
Buy Vi<a href=bob.com></a>agra by <a href=reallinkhere.biz>clicking here</a>!
With nothing between the anchor and its close for "bob.com", there's nothing to click on, so a user doesn't go to the "wrong" website... but a spam checker has to weed through all the links to find which ones are valid, and, therefore, which ISPs to complain to.
I have a few that had more than 40 links in them, only a couple of which were to the real spam site.
Having a fast connection is currently of no use. The current best rate I've seen for A New Hope is 5kB/s (currently less than 1kB/s), with an expected download time of 691 hours.
Just goes to show the weakness of BitTorrent - if a file isn't highly active, the "torrent" isn't even a trickle!
Some retailers DO update systems prior to shipment.
Recently, one of my clients bought an system from CDW.COM. I arrived to set it up, expecting to have to download 20-40MB of updates, like I do with Dell PCs. To my surprise, ALL CURRENT UPDATES were already installed, including one that had been issued by Microsoft just two days before the system was shipped.
Slashdot Mirror
Works great, until you run into something like Palm software, which won't cooperate with permissions. I've tried several methods to make it possible to sync a Palm Pilot with Outlook, and none work, if the user doesn't have administrator privileges on the computer. Apparently, some of the Palm conduits try to write to directories that aren't available to mere users, and I haven't been able to track all of them down.
And it's the executives that have the Palms, so not letting them work isn't a viable option...
Ass-u-me-ing that the car ignored the input of the brake pedal at the start of this incident, it isn't all that difficult to believe it would have ignored the input of the on/off toggle.
Heck, it is not unheard of for embedded processors to "stop", leaving its outputs in whatever state they were when the lockup occured, i.e., the processor turns on the "increase throttle" output for the pass, then locks; when it later receives an interrupt that restarts it, it might not check its outputs... leaving them at full throttle. OTHER processors would be reading the engine at full throttle, and prevent bad things from being done to the car (shift to neutral, etc), while the cruise control thinks it's at idle, so it has no need to adjust the throttle.
Personally, I don't get along with too much automation in cars... Which is why I only buy manual transmission vehicles for myself. No one has "clutch by wire" in production yet!
Actually, a couple of Japanese manufactures have computer-controled manual transmissions, where the computer operates a clutch and levers, rather than a torque converter and valves.
Yeah, you'd be surprised how many lawyers own Harleys these days! B-)
In my Jeep, the button to instruct the cruise control to enter the "off" state is on the steering wheel. It merely sends a logic signal to the computer... it does not power the computer down, because that computer does other things, like manage the engine.
The only way to power the computer off is to pull its fuse. Unfortunately, while the doors and hood are closed, there are no accessible fuses. I believe the engine control module's fuse is under the hood... Kind of inaccessible while moving.
I remember watching a PBS show on global warming and its effects a couple of years ago, which tracked climate changes over the eons. They used data from ice cores, sea bed cores, tree rings, etc., and corelated the results with known phenomena about the solar system, such as the "wobble" of Earth's axis relative to the sun, the eccentricity of its orbit, long-term solar cycles, and dozens of other factors.
When the cycles of these factors were graphed, and the temperature/rainfall/atmospheric gasses data gleaned from the core samples was superimposed upon it, it was very evident that when Earth wobbled one way, temps got colder, and warmer when it wobbled the other way. When the orbit moved a bit futher off-center, summer/winter extremes got wider. When the sun was quiet, Earth was cooler than when the sun was more energetic. And, when cycles overlapped the "wrong way", things got either very hot, or very cold...
The graph showed that nearly all of these long-term factors had "recently" (past few centuries) passed through their average position, and were now trending towards the WARM side of the equation. And the modern historical record confirmed that temperatures have been rising.
Now, most of these factors are well beyond the control of man. But the conclusion of the show's producers was that we (man) must change our ways on greenhouse gas emissions, in the hope that we can slow what the previous 45 minutes had shown as a repeating, natural progression conditions on this planet, which predates our existance. Excuse me? Someone must have carried a decimal point incorrectly....
An office system we worked on after that one, however, holds our record - 1500 ad/spy files, hundreds of cookies, plus hundreds of registry entries... just over 2400 "critical problems" detected by SpyBot. Removing these things freed up half a gigabyte of disk space!
The person in question has original original Betamax tapes of all three movies, given to him by an uncle who worked on the production. So he has some basis for comparison...
Strange that the districts that had the problems which you seem to blame on "disenfranchised blacks" were under the direct electorial control of local Democratic administrations. While you blame Katherine Harris, if there was anyone trying to keep blacks from voting in Palm Beach and the other hand-picked areas of disputed counts, it wouldn't have been Republicans doing it.
Not to mention that every one of the privately-sponsored, post-election recounts done by various news organizations showed that Bush had more votes than Gore. Or that Gore's people petitioned to have the absentee ballots of military personnel excluded, disenfranchising them.
The recounts requested by Gore in selected districts, rather than state-wide, exceeded that which was permitted under Florida law. The Florida Supreme Court should have stopped them, but didn't - they chose to ignore the law. The U.S. Supreme Court was asked to step in, and they did.
What I find amusing is how Democrats tell Republicans to "get over" the fact that Clinton committed purjury while in office, but cannot bring themselves to "get over" the fact that Al Gore couldn't find enough defective ballots with his name on them to win Florida. Hell, if he'd have carried his home state, Florida wouldn't have mattered!
The customer was willing to pay the $250, in any case. It turned out that I had found the correct solution to the problem (force a rebuild dispite the dire warnings from the rebuild utilities about loss of data), but I was reluctant to do it on the chance that there was another procedure that wouldn't result in data loss. The tech also tried all of the no-loss methods before indulging in the "big hammer".
Disagree. I'm firmly in the "hate Microsoft" camp, but my recent experiences with Microsoft Tech Support are VERY GOOD. We had an Exchange Server decide to munch its database, and the MS tech had it up and running via remote support in half an hour.
Now, the system itself continues to munch its database periodically, so I'm still not happy with Microsoft's products, but their tech support is far better than most people give them credit for.
As others have said, the article refers to servers SHIPPED with Linux. In our case, we don't bother with pre-installs, because most use a different distribution than we have standardized upon, and I've never seen one that has the "right collection" of packages we need. It's easier for us to order a dozen identical machines, do one install, and image the hard drive to the others... changing the IPs along the way.
Sender ID adds checking of the header FROM field to SPF. SPF just checks the domains mentioned in the SMTP protocol exchange (HELO/EHLO, MAIL FROM), while Sender/Caller ID check the optional FROM header found in the DATA portion.
You can implement handling the setup of the DNS TXT records without touching anything Microsoft claims ownership of. You can implement the checking of the HELO/EHLO and MAIL FROM via SPF with no patent concerns. Will Apache, Debian, et al dismiss this, simply because the most popular implementations of SPF also support checking the header FROM field, which is supposedly Microsoft's idea?
Of course, if you have a DNS provider who won't let you make such changes, you probably need a different DNS provider!
Correct - they're spending their money. My point is that the current situation is that they're spending more of it than they need to, keeping them that much poorer.
When just getting the food and clothing you NEED to have costs you 10-20% more than it has to, that's just one more economic burden keeping people in bad neighborhoods. By having access to discount merchants without spending what you save in transportation, "getting by" can become "getting ahead".
Not to mention that the average discount store (not just WalMart) employs more people that most of those M&P stores, making for more jobs in the area, which means not all the money leaves the neighborhood. Where do you think the M&P owners spend their money? Outside the area, buying the goods they bring in to sell!
Follow the money - none of these neighborhoods are closed systems, so it doesn't matter who the retailer is, most of the money spent in a given store leaves the neighborhood. That outflow of money causes an inflow of goods. In an ideal environment, every area would have goods "sources" as well as "sinks", and the people working for the local sources are being paid by money brought in by sending goods to non-local retailers, which they spend at their local retailers.
In ST:DS9, Nog refered to it as the "river of commerce", I believe. WalMart is one of the river's navigators. So are KMart, Bob's Liquor, and Joe and Jane Doe, Consumer-at-large.
Look, I understand your apparent prejudice against WalMart. You seem to believe them to be responsible for many evils in the economic world. They might be guilty of them, too; I don't really know. Personally, I won't shop at a Kohls store, because I don't like what one of the founding family's brood is doing to our economy from his Senate seat in Washington, but I have no problem with them building stores where ever they damn well please, or the fact that my mother loves their "15% Senior discount on Wednesday" specials. I rarely shop at WalMart, primarily because I have found other vendors that sell for the same price or less, on average, and what I'd save on the other things is rarely worth the gas to drive the two blocks more to get them there.
But, I have that choice. Preventing WalMart from building in a poor neighborhood keeps those poor people from having that choice.
Did I mention that there have been 8 or 9 Mom&Pop food stores to open in our little town over the past 3 years, doing well, despite having to compete with 3 Super KMarts, 3 WalMarts, 3 Jewel/Oscos, 2 Dominicks, and a half-dozen other regional chains within 10 miles? All are specialty stores, offering things for local ethnic groups (primarily Hispanic) that aren't served by the larger stores. Running a M&P store is quite possible in the shadow of WalMart, the same way any entrepreneurial venture works - find a need, and fulfill it. One such grocery just opened a month ago, long after it was announced that a Super WalMart would be built less than 1/2 mile away. The difference is that they're specializing in foods and goods from Mexico and Central America, and are located less than 100 yards from the largest concentration of Hispanic immigrants in the area. (It's quite likely many of their customers will be employees of that WalMart, since it's going to employ hundreds of people)
Not at all. But, they aren't able to shop within their neighborhoods for the range of goods suburbanites take for granted, and the prices they pay are usually substantially higher for what they can get. There are exceptions, of course. There are local stores in the inner city. To listen to some of the Chicago ministers and other proclaimed "advocates of the poor", they're primarily liquor and tobacco stores, though. And there are a number of "unlicensed" stores to be found around the area.
But the jist of my story is that it is expensive to be poor in the inner city. And many attempts to relieve that are fought by those who claim to have the "best interests" of the poor in mind while doing it, when it's more their personal agendas that control their actions.
I never said anything about opportunity throughout this discussion - I was commenting on the fact that there are many in control of the race debate today that are purpetuating the myth the blacks are too stupid to get into many jobs without government help.
Moving on to opportunity, yes, that's a problem, too. And the problem comes from many sources. For example, Walmart recently applied for permits to build two stores in Chicago, including one in a predominately black neighborhood. They did NOT get the permits for that store, because of the work of black leaders... who didn't want the "low paying" Walmart jobs, while their constituents currently have NO JOBS. The real problem is that the Walmart jobs wouldn't be union jobs, and, to the leaders fighting the store, promoting unions is far more important than letting someone offer a black a job!
Note that there aren't many "mom and pop" stores for the Walmart "cut throat pricing" to force out of these neighborhoods... Prior to Walmart's entry to the area, these same black leaders were complaining that no one wanted to build stores there, because of the poor economics...
And then there is the bank that wanted to build a branch in a black neighborhood was crucified in the media because they wanted to impose sensible security measures in a high-crime neighborhood, because the security was "insulting" to the people who live there... Isn't it MORE insulting that some of the people living there are preying upon the others to the extent that the security would be needed? These same people currently have to COMMUTE to a real bank, or suffer with confiscatory fees at the armored currency exchanges that will operate in their neighborhood.
And what about the people "still in the streets", that are calling the ones who got out "Uncle Tom" and accusing them of "acting white"? Those that got out faced the exact same obstacles as those that haven't yet. They went to the same schools; they faced the same job opportunities (or lack thereof). What's preventing any of those still stuck on the streets from doing the same, other than their lack of belief that it can be done?
Statistically, then, I was "virtually black" by your standards, because my family did not achieve anywhere near your claimed income for white families for YEARS after I was pushed out of the nest. Neither of my parents attended school beyond the 10th grade. My family consists of 9 kids, 4 of which were born prior to my mother's marraige to my legal, but not biological, father... 2 of those were adopted away before I was born (I just met the oldest of my sisters just 24 hours ago, in fact).
Expectations, however, are a key to success. You can not succeed if you don't expect to. In other words, if you think you will fail, you already have. And too many of today's blacks expect to fail... not because they're stupid, but because they've been told to expect it.
Even in the days of rampant, legal discrimination, being white wasn't a guarantee of success. It might have gotten you in a door that was closed to a black person, but it wasn't going to keep you in that job then, and it still doesn't, today. But, if you don't even bother to try the door...
Partially true. But there are schools in poor neighborhoods that do an extraordinary job of teaching children for less money than the government spends on the same job... They're just not public schools. The schools with the highest per-pupil spending are also amongst the lowest-performing schools, because money is often seen as a fix for bad teaching.
One proposal that is purpetually fought by liberals is the idea of school vouchers. Instead of simply tossing $8,000 or more per pupil per year at the public schools, a portion of that money would be given to the parents, in the form of a voucher, to be applied against any school they chose to send their kids to. If they chose to put their kids in PS122, then the public school gets the voucher money back, as well as the rest of the per-pupil money.
If, on the other hand, they send their kids to Bob's Kiddie College, BKC gets the voucher money... but BKC is still free to charge the parents additional funds, if their tuition is normally $10,000 per year. And the balance of the per-pupil money not included in the voucher remains with the public schools, improving their per-pupil cash flow.
It would seem to be a win-win situation; parents in poor neighboorhoods have access to better schools, if they chose to use them, and public schools have greater incentive to clean up their acts to keep the parents from taking their kids elsewhere. But, that last item is the kicker... The public schools don't want to clean up their acts enough to get back the money they think is "rightfully" theirs.
So, they fight vouchers at every turn, especially the teachers unions. They make claims that vouchers violation the separation of church and state (state shouldn't support religion), because it would allow parents to select religious school options for their kids, even though it really just removes a state-imposed economic barrier to parental choice.
And poor families continue to get the short end of the education stick. To add insult to injury, though, they also tend to vote for the people most against improving their situation...
In 1863 the Negro was told that he was free as a result of the Emancipation Proclamation. But he was not given any land to make that freedom meaningful.
In 1976, I was told I was free as a result of reaching 18 years of age. All I was given was instructions that I needed to go out and join the job market... even though I'm white, I was given no property, and no special birthright. While I did not suffer under slavery (some of today's kids might think the tight discipline of my youth was slavery, but it was not), the "meaningfulness" of my freedom was entirely tied to what I was willing to make of it, just as the "meaningfulness" of the 1863 slave's freedom was. Today, it is illegal to discriminate against anyone in hiring, based upon a variety of criteria, unless they're a white male under the age of 50. Most of these people never owned a slave, and were never in a position to have denied someone else a job because of the color of their skin. And the unfairness of that makes it damn hard for them to accept the idea that someone will less education or less skills has priority over them... or that anyone from these "privileged" groups who didn't need the special programs to succeed really did make it on their own.
Walter E. Williams once related that, when faced with a choice of doctors where he only knew the age and race of the doctors, how he would make his choice. If they were both in their late 50s, and one was black, he'd take the black doctor, because he knew that this man had worked hard to get where he was.
But, if they were in their 30s, he'd go with the white doctor, because he would have no way of knowing if the black doctor had gotten through on his skills, or the need for the university to fulfill its quotas.
This is not the desired result of affirmative action, but it is the common one. It only gets worse when people use the argument that removing race-based quotas hurts blacks, purpetuating the myth that blacks aren't smart enough to succeed on their own.
I also highly recommend Dr. Sowell's "The Vision of the Anointed". Amazon's running a special on the pair for $28.77.
Could it be that our education system is programming native-born blacks for failure? That is the opinion of many notable successful black entrepreneurs and authors. Check out the writings of Thomas Sowell and Walter E. Williams, both brilliant economists, and both happy they got their educations before our system was "improved" for blacks in the 60s and 70s.
For nearly 40 years, we have told blacks and other minorities that, because their ancestors were slaves, and their parents were discriminated against under the law, they not only have an excuse for not succeeding, they are expected to not succeed, and only the aid and comfort of the government (and the white liberals who have controlled the purse strings) can fix things for them. This is an incredibly racist thing to say - but, these same white liberals have also modified the language so that it is now racist to suggest that any color humans are just as good as any other other color humans, because this is the basis for removing all race-based preference systems.
Administering these race-based preference systems is a lucrative business, which feeds upon emotion to keep thousands of guilt-ridden people employed. If we truly moved to Dr. King's vision of a color-blind society, these powerful people would be out of work... Who would listen to Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, for example, if they weren't screaming discrimination at every turn?
Many things that are attributed to current discrimination by these people are not really - for example, there are fewer minorities and women in top-level management because they haven't been at it as long. When top management requires 20 years of experience, it takes a while for an increased presence of minorities in the lower eschelons to move their way up the latter, unless they're pushed upward, beyond their current merit, to satisfy the appearance of discrimination. And such fast-tracked individuals may lack skills that time would have given them, so they feel pressured to do what they can't do, and the detractors amongst their peers see it as "proof" of the premise that minorities "aren't good enough".
The solution? Let's put an end to teaching blacks and other minorities that we expect less from them, just because they're not white. Let's stop giving people crap jobs to fill quotas to keep the race merchants from shaking your company down for "donations".
Obviously, you haven't been examining spam messages. Putting dozens of random, unclickable links in spam has been going on for more than half a year. It's used to break up words, as in:
With nothing between the anchor and its close for "bob.com", there's nothing to click on, so a user doesn't go to the "wrong" website... but a spam checker has to weed through all the links to find which ones are valid, and, therefore, which ISPs to complain to.
I have a few that had more than 40 links in them, only a couple of which were to the real spam site.
Just goes to show the weakness of BitTorrent - if a file isn't highly active, the "torrent" isn't even a trickle!
Recently, one of my clients bought an system from CDW.COM. I arrived to set it up, expecting to have to download 20-40MB of updates, like I do with Dell PCs. To my surprise, ALL CURRENT UPDATES were already installed, including one that had been issued by Microsoft just two days before the system was shipped.