Their service hasn't exactly been the most reliable, so I've now pointed all my webmail accounts to forward to gmail. When I read this I was first smug, then realized that as soon as I get all uppity, gmail will hose me. Just goes to show that you should always back up to tape; no wait, floppy; hang on, cdrom... dvd? usb extra drive.. paper????
First we allow cloning, then we allow genetic manipulation...
'Are you going to tell me,' said Arthur, 'that I shouldn't have green salad?'
'Well,' said the animal, 'I know many vegetables that are very clear on that point. Which is why it was eventually decided to cut through the whole tangled problem and breed an animal that actually wanted to be eaten and was capable of saying so clearly and distinctly. And here I am.'
Rules for running a nation or war are not the same as a moral code
Accurately recording history is not the same as endorsing immoral behavior
I don't feel this is the right place for a point by point examination, but it presents no arguments not already adequately addressed by Christian apologists in other places.
If my boss makes me choose a color of mm, then I'm sure as heck going to develop a preference real quick, without any need for rationalizing my decision. Boss says I like blue better now? Okay, I like blue better now, just don't stop the paycheck.
Really, Leon Festinger didn't prove cognitive dissonance to me, all he showed is that experience teaches people to appreciate what they are most familiar with. Cognitive dissonance on the other hand, is about having reason to believe that something you already believe is untrue and still trying to find a way to hold to the questionable belief. Certainly I don't think the monkeys were ever given any reason to believe their choice was inferior, so I don't see this or Leon Festinger's experiments as having proved CD, although Leon at least could question his subjects about their beliefs and try to isolate CD.
I'd buy a dozen Windows licenses to run in Xen virtual machines at $5. I'd buy forty licenses if it were (really) open source at $80.
Instead I run Linux. Where is the profit? When I was in college, cs students could buy XP at $10. It was too much for too little then for me, and it still is.
Where is the profit? It is in the masses who need Windows and don't think $300 is too much. It's hard to blame MS for the tunnel vision of the masses.
Sancho: You have some valid points. It isn't that democracy itself is bad, but rather that the people who have the most control of the government, and the laws created by the government, are not for the most part in the control of the people supposedly represented. If you educate 10,000 people about the issue, then get their opinions, I'd be shocked to hear that most of them think the current system of content distribution is fair. If the will of the people, as determined by an educated majority were to actually be followed by the legislative branch and enforced, then The Pirate Bay would have to change their name.
It is by this definition that I call the the body of law bad from TPB's perspective. I'm don't think I have the education to make that call myself. The problem with law and government is that there isn't really much of a good way to do it. I can certainly see problems with our form of government (I do live in the US) but I've really not been able to determine how to fix it. Personally, I'm not willing to pay the penalties so I'm not willing to break the law to make a point. I'm also not willing to give my own money to those I believe are abusing their position, so I do without. I can live with that. I simply don't desire the content at the lower price and higher risk enough to break the law. I'm not making much of a difference, but it is a small one and isn't motivated by selfishness. I choose in this instance first to vote with my wallet. Second though, I'll vote with a ballot, as much as I can given other matters of conscience. I have been fairly consistent in voting for a primary of the two parties here, but if one came out and espoused a desire to see the system changed, providing they weren't otherwise too horribly objectionable, I'd vote for that party. No parties have come out with that position though, because they cannot, they either alienate their financial supporters or they alienate the voters. It's lose/lose for them, so I'm not holding my breath that my ballot will affect this issue any time soon.
TheVelvetFlamebait: That segues nicely into the question of whether allowing people to use your service to break the law in their own country is immoral. If you believe your laws are moral and the laws of another country are immoral, then how is it wrong to assist people in other countries if they choose to break their own laws? I think this is what TPB is actually doing. The real problem is that a huge number of the citizens of the US are willing to break the laws. If they weren't, then there would be no profit for TPB. If you're ticked off because it affects you negatively, well, that's where you get the opportunity to get your country's laws changed to stop allowing TPB to be able to do business with the US. If there is no jurisdiction to directly affect them, then censorship (blocking their IPs) would be sufficient alternative. I think China has done a good bit of research on how to control their citizens' Internet use, so it's not even uncharted territory.
Of course the obvious rebuttal to that is to more rigidly enforce the existing laws, track down the criminals and make them pay. If a significant enough portion of the population of any governed people starts breaking a law though, it is probably time to reconsider that law. Until I thought this through for this very post, I was still a fence sitter, but now I believe the laws are immoral and need to be changed and I do not believe it will happen in the reasonable future due to the reasons that Sancho clearly defined. Essentially I've decided that this is not an issue that is caused by some people doing something they know is wrong, but by a huge number of people who are willing to take significant risks (and I don't know how stupid you'd have to be to not realize that pirating content is a significant risk) because they feel the system is wrong. I don't know if your average pirate would be able to express it clearly without prompting, but starting asking those who do download, "Do you pirate the music because the record c
The Pirate Bay and others like it are fighting a battle where the clashing ideologies are essentially based on who has a right to make how much money. The *AA believe they have the right to profit the most from music and have the system of law to back them up. The opposing group believes that this system of law squelches art and freedom and may well eventually destroy the ability of the artist to have music, movies or other art distributed in a fair manner to the masses.
Since there is a body of law in question, the issue is not so simple as just two groups arguing, the one without the legal backing must by definition break the laws in order to do what they feel is ethically right. It is immoral and unethical to follow a bad law, and they believe the laws concerning copyright are bad ones.
Radiohead and allofmp3.com make convincing arguments that the current system does in fact depress creative and free expression. The issue doesn't affect me directly since I don't purchase and don't download and rarely listen to music and don't watch movies other than the ones on broadcast TV. Still, I watch closely since flouted laws tend to get changed after a lot of squabbling, and maybe someday there will be sufficient art out there that some of it will appeal to me.
Ironically, I will now remember ifpi.com easily, and never would have remembered anything to with pirate bay before. For me, this puts the link in my brain to reflect FSMs association of global warming with lack of pirates.
Now if they loose it, I will probably remember this article and be able to find the article and from there find the site, but isn't that sort of what good domain names are designed to help simplify?
I'm a long time Linux user but at work we have to run Windows Apps and VMWare wouldn't cut it on the hardware we have.
My boss bought a Mac for his house, and the other day asked me if I'd be interested in getting one for work as my regularly scheduled upgrade. It will end up costing the company an extra thousand dollars since we'll have to pay the full price for software that we could have gotten practically free with MS PCs, but we're getting two Macs, one for my use (probably in the developer category, in other words, I'll probably break it a couple times) and one for regular use and we'll be paying for VMWare Fusion, Windows XP and Outlook on top of the already fairly high price of getting the two machines. It adds up to costing more than an extra machine, but we're going to try it. We're getting to try it because Vista has been a pain on the half dozen machines we've put it on and the higher ups are starting to realize something is wrong when most of the major software partners we rely on don't support Vista yet.
So, with Linux still seen as too complex for the masses, we're looking for alternatives and Mac fits the bill. If we can test it sufficiently and get it proven to be usable, the possibility of having Macs in a corporate environment open up. It's far from a done deal, but it is possible where it wasn't just two years ago.
I respectfully disagree with the parent, laffer1; it is not games but corporate adoption that will decide whether Vista is the first step in losing the stranglehold that Windows has had on the OS market. People will become familiar with what they have to use at work and will buy the same thing. Macs are finally becoming competitive in features and pricing and once they are adopted in the corporate world, the home user market can follow. If you ask me, Microsoft got their advertising right by targeting the environment that controls the user experience while Mac has been aiming at the home user when that same user will use whatever they are familiar with from work and school. I wish that I could say Linux is ready, and it would do as well or better for me, but it isn't ready for the average worker. Mac, just maybe, might be.
More to the point, you can't break your own rules and expect to be taken seriously, even more so if you're a standards committee.
Alternatively, bribe/badger/coax enough new and old members in via whatever loopholes you can find in order to get the rules changed. After that, the new rules say you're out if you don't participate in at least 75% of the meetings called for by at least 10% of the membership. All legal and tidy and somehow fitting, use the loopholes to patch the loopholes, heck it's real life recursion.
Lawyering on Slashdot
on
SCO Loses
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Couldn't help but think of an excerpt:
"I know it, 'e knows it, th'gentleman knows it, y'knows it yerself, th'dogs in th' alleys knows it, th'babes in th'woods knows it, th'man in th'moon knows it, th'tooth fairy knows it, th'owl an' the pussycat knows it, th'Queen knows it, th'constables knows it, ever'body knows it."
Alas, my mouth had a mind of its own.
"Can't be proved!" I cried. The next moment, I flinched with dismay.
The whole crowd around the table were hissing me down.
"Prove it?" demanded O'Doul. His face was pale with outrage. "Prove it?"
"What's proof got t'do with it?" demanded Flannery. "What d'ye think this is, y' mangy cur, some kind o' court o' law?"
Flannery tottered to his feet, waving his alepot about. "This is not a court o' law, y'little guttersnipe! This 'ere is th'ancient an' venerable Bar 'o Troughly Justice!"
"Verges on outright lawyering," muttered O'Doul, glaring at me balefully.
Every web page the infected connection tries to go to says: This is a message from [YourISP]. In accordance with Federal regulations, your Internet access has been temporarily suspended. Your connection has been identified as one which has the [Virus flavor of the week]. You can download a removal tool: [link here] or contact us at 800-whatever. If you prefer, you may contact us at the phone number listed on your service bill.
Every email gets bounced/returned with the same message.
It would work without the "In accordance with Federal regulations" but probably not as well as people are a lot more likely to complain about something they voluntarily pay for. It wouldn't be that hard to implement for any size ISP, and they could do anything from active scanning or passive monitoring to only reacting to reports of infected machines.
They sent me a Sunfire last year telling me it had capabilities it didn't. I sent it back. If $21,500 is the price tag, then this would outperform what I was considering at approximately the same price. I doubt these have the capabilities I was looking for, (I want Windows in Xen) but the price isn't going to be it's limiting factor.
By the way, if they're still running it, the Try and Buy program is every bit as good as it sounds. They shipped me a server for the asking, I tested it, and sent it back, all on their dime (except my time.) If I'd talked to salespeople honest enough to say "I don't know" rather than "of course" I wouldn't have had it sent in the first place and might be running one of their servers right now. Maybe next year.
Okay, I have to ask, have you or has anyone you know ever tried to run a Linux distro off of a NTFS system? I'm not sure why you'd want to but I'm curious as heck if it is possible.
When I read he would have given a finger.. it took me a minute to realize he meant "to part with" rather than "to display" and I had to re-evaluate which finger he meant.
Is there actually a metric of why companies are turning to virtualization somewhere? We are doing it for stability of applications to a very small degree, but also for development ease, backup ease and also for a big part to consolidate and use hardware more efficiently. What about you, why are you considering/using/investigating virtualization?
Forget framing your roomie, the people you want to frame are the people who are messing up the curve. A lot of the classes I've taken were graded on a curve, so if the best performing students were having a bad day, my grade improved. (Assuming here that I wasn't the one at the top of the curve.)
So how do you improve your grades? Frame those who have the best grades. Even if they don't need the network access, even if they eventually prove themselves innocent, you can still pretty much be assured that dealing with the ban would cause them to lose focus. Time it so that they were dealing with it right when they'd be studying for the major exams otherwise.
No, this isn't a tatic limited to network access, but framing someone on a computer is much easier than many of the other possibilities. This rule just makes it easier and more beneficial, also probably safer, than other ways of distracting other students for improvement in your own grades.
Disclaimer: No, I've never done this, I'm simply pointing out the danger that I think was overlooked by school officials when they thought up this rule.
This is exactly the right approach to dealing with nuisances. When someone behaves in a childish manner, the best way to change their behavior is to make them understand that their actions can cause them more grief than they are willing to accept. It isn't about the damage they do, it is about the nuisance they cause. That said, there seems to be some bad analogies being used here.
This isn't like a kid slashing tires, this is like a kid who convinced you to slash your own tires. Even if he hands you his pocket knife, even if he tells you it will make your car faster, if you slash your own tires then the kid causing the nuisance only shares the blame with you.
The distinction here is that the "virus" writers didn't actually damage anyone's machines directly, they just convinced people to do something stupid (downloading and installing software from an unknown source is stupid.) I have told people that Alt+F4 would fix their problems before, always as a joke, but if they were stupid enough to believe me then they should consider it a cheap education.
Still nags this lingering guilt, maybe I need to read BOFH again.
how many more such companies will ever sign a contract with Sony again
Wow! Excellent point. Maybe NO company will ever want to put undisclosed root-kits in software for bigger companies (like Sony) because they'll fear litigation. Maybe Sony will never be able to get that kind of software from an outside company again!
Oh, wait, you didn't mean that you thought putting the fear of litigation into companies selling evil software was a bad thing did you?
I'm posting this from a Mandriva install that shares a drive with a Gentoo install and used to be where I had an OpenBSD install. The other disk has CentOS on it and probably will have OpenSUSE shortly. I try new distros and new releases of old distros on a regular basis. I'll probably try Ubuntu again in a couple months.
Mandrake tried to do what Ubuntu does, but it tried to do it years and years before Ubuntu existed. It did a decent job of starting on the path toward a newbie friendly desktop Linux distribution. Unfortunately, it has had times where the entire system was unstable, where the hardware either didn't work as expected or didn't work at all. I don't recommend Mandriva because I don't trust it to stay as stable as it appears to be in it's current incarnation and also because I know that people have an easier time finding other users with similar questions and issues if they use Ubuntu.
I think that Ubuntu sits where it does in terms of popularity because it came on the scene at the right time with the right goal, make it easy and got the interest because it was new and shiny. It isn't at the top because it is necessarily better in terms of software or functionality, but it is the best in terms of community for the new Linux user right now and that is what sets it apart.
It isn't Xorg/XF86 that are in question, it is the distro tools that configure them for you.
I have re-written quite a few xorg.conf files to deal with my dual-head display and have not yet come across a distro that handles it well enough to just use a GUI. I haven't tried Ubuntu on this setup but I can tell you that Mandriva, Slax and CentOS5 all do a decent job of setting up a basic config. I have to go in and reconfigure for every one of them but it beats the heck out of rebuilding from scratch for any of the dozens of distros I've tried that don't. Rebuilding is probably 30 minutes worth of work, but if that is representative of the average for tools in a distro, and I suspect it is, then you can use it as a quick rule of thumb.
If the dual head configuration is easy, then the distro is probably mature, if not then you will need command line expertise. For users who wonder what that means, if you don't know how to use vim then you shouldn't use a distro that doesn't handle dual head displays gracefully.
Slashdot Mirror
Their service hasn't exactly been the most reliable, so I've now pointed all my webmail accounts to forward to gmail. When I read this I was first smug, then realized that as soon as I get all uppity, gmail will hose me. Just goes to show that you should always back up to tape; no wait, floppy; hang on, cdrom ... dvd? usb extra drive.. paper????
Now I know your slashdot ID Ronald! Just wait until I show the boss your posts about overlords and electronic girlfriends.
Very simple points to consider:
I don't feel this is the right place for a point by point examination, but it presents no arguments not already adequately addressed by Christian apologists in other places.
If my boss makes me choose a color of mm, then I'm sure as heck going to develop a preference real quick, without any need for rationalizing my decision. Boss says I like blue better now? Okay, I like blue better now, just don't stop the paycheck.
Really, Leon Festinger didn't prove cognitive dissonance to me, all he showed is that experience teaches people to appreciate what they are most familiar with. Cognitive dissonance on the other hand, is about having reason to believe that something you already believe is untrue and still trying to find a way to hold to the questionable belief. Certainly I don't think the monkeys were ever given any reason to believe their choice was inferior, so I don't see this or Leon Festinger's experiments as having proved CD, although Leon at least could question his subjects about their beliefs and try to isolate CD.
I'd buy a dozen Windows licenses to run in Xen virtual machines at $5. I'd buy forty licenses if it were (really) open source at $80.
Instead I run Linux. Where is the profit? When I was in college, cs students could buy XP at $10. It was too much for too little then for me, and it still is.
Where is the profit? It is in the masses who need Windows and don't think $300 is too much. It's hard to blame MS for the tunnel vision of the masses.
Sancho: You have some valid points. It isn't that democracy itself is bad, but rather that the people who have the most control of the government, and the laws created by the government, are not for the most part in the control of the people supposedly represented. If you educate 10,000 people about the issue, then get their opinions, I'd be shocked to hear that most of them think the current system of content distribution is fair. If the will of the people, as determined by an educated majority were to actually be followed by the legislative branch and enforced, then The Pirate Bay would have to change their name.
It is by this definition that I call the the body of law bad from TPB's perspective. I'm don't think I have the education to make that call myself. The problem with law and government is that there isn't really much of a good way to do it. I can certainly see problems with our form of government (I do live in the US) but I've really not been able to determine how to fix it. Personally, I'm not willing to pay the penalties so I'm not willing to break the law to make a point. I'm also not willing to give my own money to those I believe are abusing their position, so I do without. I can live with that. I simply don't desire the content at the lower price and higher risk enough to break the law. I'm not making much of a difference, but it is a small one and isn't motivated by selfishness. I choose in this instance first to vote with my wallet. Second though, I'll vote with a ballot, as much as I can given other matters of conscience. I have been fairly consistent in voting for a primary of the two parties here, but if one came out and espoused a desire to see the system changed, providing they weren't otherwise too horribly objectionable, I'd vote for that party. No parties have come out with that position though, because they cannot, they either alienate their financial supporters or they alienate the voters. It's lose/lose for them, so I'm not holding my breath that my ballot will affect this issue any time soon.
TheVelvetFlamebait: That segues nicely into the question of whether allowing people to use your service to break the law in their own country is immoral. If you believe your laws are moral and the laws of another country are immoral, then how is it wrong to assist people in other countries if they choose to break their own laws? I think this is what TPB is actually doing. The real problem is that a huge number of the citizens of the US are willing to break the laws. If they weren't, then there would be no profit for TPB. If you're ticked off because it affects you negatively, well, that's where you get the opportunity to get your country's laws changed to stop allowing TPB to be able to do business with the US. If there is no jurisdiction to directly affect them, then censorship (blocking their IPs) would be sufficient alternative. I think China has done a good bit of research on how to control their citizens' Internet use, so it's not even uncharted territory.
Of course the obvious rebuttal to that is to more rigidly enforce the existing laws, track down the criminals and make them pay. If a significant enough portion of the population of any governed people starts breaking a law though, it is probably time to reconsider that law. Until I thought this through for this very post, I was still a fence sitter, but now I believe the laws are immoral and need to be changed and I do not believe it will happen in the reasonable future due to the reasons that Sancho clearly defined. Essentially I've decided that this is not an issue that is caused by some people doing something they know is wrong, but by a huge number of people who are willing to take significant risks (and I don't know how stupid you'd have to be to not realize that pirating content is a significant risk) because they feel the system is wrong. I don't know if your average pirate would be able to express it clearly without prompting, but starting asking those who do download, "Do you pirate the music because the record c
The Pirate Bay and others like it are fighting a battle where the clashing ideologies are essentially based on who has a right to make how much money. The *AA believe they have the right to profit the most from music and have the system of law to back them up. The opposing group believes that this system of law squelches art and freedom and may well eventually destroy the ability of the artist to have music, movies or other art distributed in a fair manner to the masses.
Since there is a body of law in question, the issue is not so simple as just two groups arguing, the one without the legal backing must by definition break the laws in order to do what they feel is ethically right. It is immoral and unethical to follow a bad law, and they believe the laws concerning copyright are bad ones.
Radiohead and allofmp3.com make convincing arguments that the current system does in fact depress creative and free expression. The issue doesn't affect me directly since I don't purchase and don't download and rarely listen to music and don't watch movies other than the ones on broadcast TV. Still, I watch closely since flouted laws tend to get changed after a lot of squabbling, and maybe someday there will be sufficient art out there that some of it will appeal to me.
Ironically, I will now remember ifpi.com easily, and never would have remembered anything to with pirate bay before. For me, this puts the link in my brain to reflect FSMs association of global warming with lack of pirates.
Now if they loose it, I will probably remember this article and be able to find the article and from there find the site, but isn't that sort of what good domain names are designed to help simplify?
I'm a long time Linux user but at work we have to run Windows Apps and VMWare wouldn't cut it on the hardware we have.
My boss bought a Mac for his house, and the other day asked me if I'd be interested in getting one for work as my regularly scheduled upgrade. It will end up costing the company an extra thousand dollars since we'll have to pay the full price for software that we could have gotten practically free with MS PCs, but we're getting two Macs, one for my use (probably in the developer category, in other words, I'll probably break it a couple times) and one for regular use and we'll be paying for VMWare Fusion, Windows XP and Outlook on top of the already fairly high price of getting the two machines. It adds up to costing more than an extra machine, but we're going to try it. We're getting to try it because Vista has been a pain on the half dozen machines we've put it on and the higher ups are starting to realize something is wrong when most of the major software partners we rely on don't support Vista yet.
So, with Linux still seen as too complex for the masses, we're looking for alternatives and Mac fits the bill. If we can test it sufficiently and get it proven to be usable, the possibility of having Macs in a corporate environment open up. It's far from a done deal, but it is possible where it wasn't just two years ago.
I respectfully disagree with the parent, laffer1; it is not games but corporate adoption that will decide whether Vista is the first step in losing the stranglehold that Windows has had on the OS market. People will become familiar with what they have to use at work and will buy the same thing. Macs are finally becoming competitive in features and pricing and once they are adopted in the corporate world, the home user market can follow. If you ask me, Microsoft got their advertising right by targeting the environment that controls the user experience while Mac has been aiming at the home user when that same user will use whatever they are familiar with from work and school. I wish that I could say Linux is ready, and it would do as well or better for me, but it isn't ready for the average worker. Mac, just maybe, might be.
Says who?
More to the point, you can't break your own rules and expect to be taken seriously, even more so if you're a standards committee.
Alternatively, bribe/badger/coax enough new and old members in via whatever loopholes you can find in order to get the rules changed. After that, the new rules say you're out if you don't participate in at least 75% of the meetings called for by at least 10% of the membership. All legal and tidy and somehow fitting, use the loopholes to patch the loopholes, heck it's real life recursion.
-- From The Philosophical Strangler
Every web page the infected connection tries to go to says: This is a message from [YourISP]. In accordance with Federal regulations, your Internet access has been temporarily suspended. Your connection has been identified as one which has the [Virus flavor of the week]. You can download a removal tool: [link here] or contact us at 800-whatever. If you prefer, you may contact us at the phone number listed on your service bill.
Every email gets bounced/returned with the same message.
It would work without the "In accordance with Federal regulations" but probably not as well as people are a lot more likely to complain about something they voluntarily pay for. It wouldn't be that hard to implement for any size ISP, and they could do anything from active scanning or passive monitoring to only reacting to reports of infected machines.
Wow, talk about the power of suggestion! Now I want a cigarette, shot and Mountain Dew.
I'm working though and can't. Curse you! (I'll be done and home soon though, so I'll think of your post and smile then.)
They sent me a Sunfire last year telling me it had capabilities it didn't. I sent it back. If $21,500 is the price tag, then this would outperform what I was considering at approximately the same price. I doubt these have the capabilities I was looking for, (I want Windows in Xen) but the price isn't going to be it's limiting factor.
By the way, if they're still running it, the Try and Buy program is every bit as good as it sounds. They shipped me a server for the asking, I tested it, and sent it back, all on their dime (except my time.) If I'd talked to salespeople honest enough to say "I don't know" rather than "of course" I wouldn't have had it sent in the first place and might be running one of their servers right now. Maybe next year.
Okay, I have to ask, have you or has anyone you know ever tried to run a Linux distro off of a NTFS system? I'm not sure why you'd want to but I'm curious as heck if it is possible.
When I read he would have given a finger.. it took me a minute to realize he meant "to part with" rather than "to display" and I had to re-evaluate which finger he meant.
No, then a few people would be generating useful content.
Dare to dream!
Is there actually a metric of why companies are turning to virtualization somewhere? We are doing it for stability of applications to a very small degree, but also for development ease, backup ease and also for a big part to consolidate and use hardware more efficiently. What about you, why are you considering/using/investigating virtualization?
Forget framing your roomie, the people you want to frame are the people who are messing up the curve. A lot of the classes I've taken were graded on a curve, so if the best performing students were having a bad day, my grade improved. (Assuming here that I wasn't the one at the top of the curve.)
So how do you improve your grades? Frame those who have the best grades. Even if they don't need the network access, even if they eventually prove themselves innocent, you can still pretty much be assured that dealing with the ban would cause them to lose focus. Time it so that they were dealing with it right when they'd be studying for the major exams otherwise.
No, this isn't a tatic limited to network access, but framing someone on a computer is much easier than many of the other possibilities. This rule just makes it easier and more beneficial, also probably safer, than other ways of distracting other students for improvement in your own grades.
Disclaimer: No, I've never done this, I'm simply pointing out the danger that I think was overlooked by school officials when they thought up this rule.
This is exactly the right approach to dealing with nuisances. When someone behaves in a childish manner, the best way to change their behavior is to make them understand that their actions can cause them more grief than they are willing to accept. It isn't about the damage they do, it is about the nuisance they cause. That said, there seems to be some bad analogies being used here.
This isn't like a kid slashing tires, this is like a kid who convinced you to slash your own tires. Even if he hands you his pocket knife, even if he tells you it will make your car faster, if you slash your own tires then the kid causing the nuisance only shares the blame with you.
The distinction here is that the "virus" writers didn't actually damage anyone's machines directly, they just convinced people to do something stupid (downloading and installing software from an unknown source is stupid.) I have told people that Alt+F4 would fix their problems before, always as a joke, but if they were stupid enough to believe me then they should consider it a cheap education.
Still nags this lingering guilt, maybe I need to read BOFH again.
I am a quiet man, but I laughed so loud at this, my neighbors might have heard.
Thank you.
Wow! Excellent point. Maybe NO company will ever want to put undisclosed root-kits in software for bigger companies (like Sony) because they'll fear litigation. Maybe Sony will never be able to get that kind of software from an outside company again!
Oh, wait, you didn't mean that you thought putting the fear of litigation into companies selling evil software was a bad thing did you?
I'm posting this from a Mandriva install that shares a drive with a Gentoo install and used to be where I had an OpenBSD install. The other disk has CentOS on it and probably will have OpenSUSE shortly. I try new distros and new releases of old distros on a regular basis. I'll probably try Ubuntu again in a couple months.
Mandrake tried to do what Ubuntu does, but it tried to do it years and years before Ubuntu existed. It did a decent job of starting on the path toward a newbie friendly desktop Linux distribution. Unfortunately, it has had times where the entire system was unstable, where the hardware either didn't work as expected or didn't work at all. I don't recommend Mandriva because I don't trust it to stay as stable as it appears to be in it's current incarnation and also because I know that people have an easier time finding other users with similar questions and issues if they use Ubuntu.
I think that Ubuntu sits where it does in terms of popularity because it came on the scene at the right time with the right goal, make it easy and got the interest because it was new and shiny. It isn't at the top because it is necessarily better in terms of software or functionality, but it is the best in terms of community for the new Linux user right now and that is what sets it apart.
It isn't Xorg/XF86 that are in question, it is the distro tools that configure them for you.
I have re-written quite a few xorg.conf files to deal with my dual-head display and have not yet come across a distro that handles it well enough to just use a GUI. I haven't tried Ubuntu on this setup but I can tell you that Mandriva, Slax and CentOS5 all do a decent job of setting up a basic config. I have to go in and reconfigure for every one of them but it beats the heck out of rebuilding from scratch for any of the dozens of distros I've tried that don't. Rebuilding is probably 30 minutes worth of work, but if that is representative of the average for tools in a distro, and I suspect it is, then you can use it as a quick rule of thumb.
If the dual head configuration is easy, then the distro is probably mature, if not then you will need command line expertise. For users who wonder what that means, if you don't know how to use vim then you shouldn't use a distro that doesn't handle dual head displays gracefully.