I respect your views. My original post was to clear up the fallacy of "Australia has no guns". We do have guns. They're restricted, and quite reasonable (to us).
They would come to collect innocent bodies and take a statement. I'd prefer they come to collect the criminal's body if it had to come to that.
You'll notice those numbers are presented in absolute figures, and that it hovers around less than 100 per year homicide deaths by guns. That's sweet bugger-all compared to the 12,000 or so you guys have every year.
I don't want to say what's good for you, but I know in my own mind that free-for-all unrestricted, unregulated gun ownership in Australia would do more harm than good for us.
a) I don't recall claiming anything one way or another that the "new" gun laws (after our own Port Arthur massacre) were meant to affect crime stats in any way. b) The only "new" thing about the "new, tougher gun laws" were mainly just that the government decided they'd rather the public didn't own automatic weapons at all. Apart from the government turning existing recommended firearm/ammunition storage safety requirements into laws, and exposing gun owners to audits to ensure compliance, I really don't think much changed at all. NB: My parents are gun owners, not me. c) From (b), and the fact presented in (a), it's hardly surprising that crime stats haven't changed.
So what's the conclusion?
Very simple: as a society, we believe there is zero benefit to owning these types of weapons. Conversely, there is much to lose.
This has nothing to do with crime, and everything to do with culture.
It is such an alien, amazing, surreal thing to entertain the thought of trying to asassinate members of government with firearms as a means to make the world a better place.
If it ever got so bad that this was necessary, you're going to need more of a plan than just buying big guns.
And here's what you said:
Not being murdered is not a privelage. Not being raped is not a privelage. You call America's culture scary? I think that a culture where being victimized is a safe bet is probably a heluva lot scarier.
The simple fact of the matter is, I don't know anybody who lives in fear. Perhaps that just means I don't know anybody. I've lived in three different towns, and I'm currently in a mostly Asian area of a capital city (Brisbane). At all times of my life I've been able to leave the house unlocked while I sleep. In fact, sometimes I go out and I don't even bother locking up then either.
To think that sleeping with a gun under your pillow is your definition of "safety" and "freedom", is surreal to me.
Furthermore, I have no idea what relevance any of those statistics are supposed to have with gun ownership. Can you please explain the link between sexual assault and guns? What constitutes "attempted murder"? How in the bloody hell is "Kidnapping" supposed to be reduced by gun laws?
As you know, there are lies, damn lies, and statistics.
Also, according to the Australian Institute of Criminology, in "Report #46: Homicide in Australia, 2001-2002", published in April 2003, homicides jumped another 20% in FY2001-02.
Yes, Let's see what the Australian Institute of Criminology has to say about gun deaths: http://www.aic.gov.au/publications/cfi/cfi066.html . It has a nice pretty graph, please have a look and tell me there isn't a downward trend. Also note that it's presented in absolute numbers, and if it compensated for population growth by using per capita numbers it'd be a lot steeper downward slope. 77% of all firearm deaths are suicides.
Between 2001 and 2002, the proportion of murders, attempted murders, kidnapping/abductions and robberies that involved a weapon decreased. In 2002, attempted murder was the offence most likely to involve either a firearm (22 per cent) or knife (35 per cent) whereas sexual assault was the offence least likely to involve a weapon.
Try and go to the source for your facts; you might find the "filtering" you've encountered has skewed or contextless numbers.
Now, let's get down to the real issue: Was the withdrawal of automatic weapons from the public aimed at reducing crime? No. It was to win votes for the government of the day, in response to Por
Very valid points, and I do agree with most of what you said. Although, I am skeptical that unrestricted free-for-all gun ownership is really going to help your chances of internally defeating the world's most powerful superpower with the world's most expensive military any more than gun ownership laws that impose at least a few restrictions such as licensing/safety requirements.
About the "socialist" ethic (btw: Aussie "intellectuals" are lamenting the fact we're going more and more towards American-style individualism, but that's a different story): it isn't that they believe it's "up to somebody else", it's just that by definition - a socialist society doesn't need such things.
And as with most things of this nature, it appears that nobody is right, balance seems impossible.
Okay. Not sufficient to prove yourself worthy of wielding a deadly weapon, but ok.
2. Because I want to
Okay. Personally, I'd say if you've got such little respect for lethal weapons you probably shouldn't be owning a gun - but that's irrelevant.
3. Because doing so in no way harms or violates the rights of others without violating other laws and statutes already on the books.
Not sure how this is meant to be relevant...
4. Because unless the government has good reason to fear the people, they will have no reason to respect their rights and liberties
Who said this had anything to do with the government fearing anyone? The Port Arthur massacre causing the revocation of licenses and buy-back of automatic weapons involved a massacre of civillians, it had nothing to do with the government "serving itself" other than the fact they wanted to win votes by pretending to do something about it (and yes, the weapons that were used were unregistered/unlicensed anyway - that's the hilarious part - so no, gun laws will not prevent a repeat of Port Arthur).
All I can say is: We have a massive impedance mismatch here. A culture clash.
In Australia, we automatically exclude the possibility of using a gun against a human. Writing "Self-defence" on the application form to obtain a gun license will guarantee you won't get to own one (legally).
It's mind-boggling to me the way someone can write a post like this and still believe their country is in any way free. As Johann Goethe said, Nobody is more hopelessly enslaved than the one who falsely believes he is free.
It's mind-boggling to me the way someone can write a post like this and still believe their country is any way free.
Obviously we have different definitions of the meaning of "free". Somehow, in your infinite wisdom, you've managed to connect "freedom" with "unrestricted free-for-all gun ownership". WTF? It's mind-boggling to me that you think you are "free" and "safe". Have fun sleeping with a gun under your pillow, out of fear of your fellow citizens.
Personally, and this is because I live in a different country to you, I do not associate the "government" with gun ownership at all. The government doesn't come into it. Let's get real here: if you really want to over-throw the government, you're going to have to come up with a better plan than "let's buy some really big guns".
And Mr Bainter, your quote by the honourable JW von Goethe applies equally to you on this matter.
Honestly...do no criminals own guns over there? Do they all beat you with sacks of wet noodles? No knives? No clubs? No sticks with a nail in it? Nobody bigger and stronger preys on those who are smaller and weaker?
So, you admit your gun ownership has isn't just to do with overthrowing the government. This is where our two countries differ mightily: the percentage of criminals in Australia using guns to commit crime is absolutely minimal compared to yours. Of the people I know affected by crime, besides house burglary and shop vandalism, none involved a gun. I don't even know a friend of a friend of a friend who was involved in a crime that involved guns. In fact, I would be willing to bet that the majority of criminals in the city have never even fired a gun.
Indeed, I have some acquaintences who have been beaten up by gangs - beaten unconcious - when walking home after a night out. There weren't any guns mentioned there either.
Believe me, when there's a gun involved in a crime, it hits the newspapers. For you guys, it seems like a daily event. "And up next, the weather!"
Yet somehow, you, as a law-abiding citizen should not have the right to own the means to defend yourself again
My original post was in response to a post that implied that Australia doesn't have guns. We do. They're restricted.
Secondly, massive culture difference here. Nobody needs "self defense" of lethal force. We don't have even a fraction of the gun deaths per capita that you do.
As a human being, you have a right to safety. Apparently, Americans think this means sleeping with a gun under your pillow. I would despair if it ever got that way in Australia.
Most of the time, I don't worry about locking my house at night. How about you? Burglers here just don't have guns. I bet most city criminals have never even fired a gun. Because chances are the people they're robbing haven't either, so why bother?
The point is, the society as a whole is made less safe when irresponsible people with inadequate training and lax handling/storage protocols are given lethal weapons.
The original intent of my post was to point out that we do have guns in Australia, it's perfectly legal to own them, just that a) Regulated handling and storage, b) Prove you "need" one (sport purposes are acceptable), c) Automatic weapons are barred and pistols are restricted.
The original point of my post was in response to "... guns? what guns?". Australians still have access to guns, where needed.
As I've said in another post here, I just cannot fathom how you can think a constant state of fear where it's expected that if you want to be safe, that you should carry a lethal weapon, is "how things should be".
Can one not look at themselves, compare themselves to other countries and think there is no room for improvement? For every american that died on 9/11, there were 4 in that year alone who felt obliged to use their "right to bear arms" to shoot and kill fellow Americans in homocides.
I'm not saying it's necessarily bad, for you guys, but you cannot take your culture and expect everyone else to like it or think it's good. Not all ideas fit everywhere in the world. For instance, I highly doubt a strictly capitalist regime in China would have all their billions of rice paddy farmers sending their kids off to university (granted, "Communism" as they call whatever it is there hasn't done this either).
We would rather feel safe in our homes, not having to worry about locking the house at night, than accept a constant state of fear and concerning yourself with the possibility that you might one day have to sentence a fellow human death.
I hope that if you do intend to "overthrow" your tyrannical government, you've got a better plan than "let's buy some big fucking guns".
There are many interesting issues revolving around - if the US government can ignore the "right to bear arms" section of the constitution, then what else do they feel obliged to ignore when convenient.
Besides that, however, you can't use your own atmosphere of fear and extrapolate your reasoning and beliefs onto another culture.
As much as Austrlia is trying its best to absorb the "American Way (tm)", one thing we don't want is a constant feeling of fear.
I can't imagine what it must be like to think that your only ticket to safety is to own a lethal weapon that hopefully you'll be able to use sooner than the "predator" can.
I can't help but think that the "we have to protect ourselves", "it's our right to protect ourselves" thing is just a self-fulfilling prophecy. A kind of positive-feedback system, feeding itself.
But for all the guns, people wouldn't need so many guns.
I did some research for an ethics (engineering ethics, of all things) debate topic at university (not to demonise america - something to do with personal vs professional responsibility). In the same year 2,973 people were killed on 9/11 [1] - Americans felt obliged to "protect themselves" against fellow Americans, lethally, in 11,671 [2] homocides using guns.
America supposedly has the highest rate of gun deaths per capita in the world, and is home to something like 40% of the world's firearms.
Isn't this just a little bit alarming? Are you saying this is the "best way"? The "way it should be"? Is there no room for improvement here?
What the bloody hell does crime stats have to do with anything?
It seems you don't get it.
a) I don't recall claiming anything one way or another that the "new" gun laws (after our own Port Arthur massacre) were meant to affect crime stats in any way. b) The only "new" thing about the "new, tougher gun laws" were mainly just that the government decided they'd rather the public didn't own automatic weapons at all. Apart from the government turning existing recommended firearm/ammunition storage safety requirements into laws, and exposing gun owners to audits to ensure compliance, I really don't think much changed at all. NB: My parents are gun owners, not me. c) From (b), and the fact presented in (a), it's hardly surprising that crime stats haven't changed.
So what's the conclusion?
Very simple: as a society, we believe there is zero benefit to owning these types of weapons. Conversely, there is much to lose.
This has nothing to do with crime, and everything to do with culture.
It is such an alien, amazing, surreal thing to entertain the thought of trying to asassinate members of government with firearms as a means to make the world a better place.
If it ever got so bad that this was necessary, you're going to need more of a plan than just buying big guns.
Thanks, interesting comments. Do you run 100Mbit from the PCs into a switch with a gigabit uplink to the server? My experience was about 18 months ago and upgrading to gigabit (just on the server + new switch) was going to be about $2000 AUD, so the customer was quite wary about investing additional money when their annual subscription to Intuit was already around the $10K AUD mark.
Do they have any intention of moving to a client/server model? I'm seriously thinking of embarking on a project to write and sell my own software to fill this gap. And having just said that I probably sound like I don't have any comprehension of the effort required to write accounting systems:-)
Do your clients use a CRM app of some kind? At the previous shop I worked at they were selling Act!, along with the QB plugin. It had... issues.
As an Australian, I can say you're right about everything except the guns. If you're a private citizen and have a valid use for a rifle, it's just a matter of paperwork, always has been even before the buyback scheme. Which, by the way, was mostly about removing automatic weapons from the public - fair enough too; I highly doubt there's many legitimate reasons to fire hundreds of rounds per minute (some that were in the business of culling feral stock from helicopter had cause to complain though). Pistols are difficult, because apart from sport there's no practical reason to have one, although IIRC if you're part of a gun club I believe it isn't too much hassel if you use pistols that are kept at the club at all times.
This might appear odd to you, I guess it's a culture difference. You have an absolutely fucking scary culture with guns over there. In Australia, we automatically exclude the possibility of using a gun against a human. Writing "Self-defence" on the application form to obtain a gun license will guarantee you won't get to own one (legally). Unlike Americans, we don't believe guns are useful just because it's a gun. We acknowledge it's a lethal weapon which must be used with care. It is a priveledge, not a right. A liability, a responsibility. We acknowledge that not every random bastard on the street is going to be responsible and rational enough to engage in safe gun ownership. You must have a legitimate reason to own one, this includes agricultural and sporting applications. Letting people own a gun purely because "it's teh c00l" or "self protection" does not benefit society at all.
As for the smh article, the PM does not have absolutel control. Even if his legislation does get through, it is highly vulnerable to a high court challenge. One of the fundamental parts of our constitution is a separation of powers between the executive and judicial arms of the government. His new legislation expects the courts to become "servants to the government" by "assisting where necessary" with speedy issueing of warrants etc. even in cases where suspects may have no actual evidence (in the traditional sense) against them.
This is upsetting a lot of QCs (Queen's Council - top brass barristers) and a couple of state-level governments.
It is unlikely the judicial branch will take this lying down - this won't be the first time the government will be "disappointed" by the courts not doing their bidding.
Holy jeebus, you use Quickbooks between 40 users!?
My god. I had no idea an app that shared a massive company file across SMB could scale to that many users.
My last job had a customer with 10 quickbooks users. It was the most painful experience for them; eventually they ditched it for something far more ugly but at least was client/server based.
Transferring a 300MiB company file every time you do a transaction search... waiting for a lock before you can do that search because someone is printing statements... is just outrageous.
Don't get me wrong - Quickbooks is great for 5 users - but too many companies experience extreme suffering when they try to grow beyond that. Firstly, becuase it takes them too long to give up on Quickbooks and move on, and secondly, because the client/server alternatives out there replace QB's frustrating multiuser experience with a tortuous and pathetic UI (along with a lack of features, or expensive add-ons to get what you take for granted in QB, and a LOT of inflexibilty)...
Or is there some version of QB2005 I'm not aware of? Please tell me more... I'm fascinated.
I worked for a company who, among other things, serviced ATMs. Although it wasn't 8 years ago, they certainly looked after some of that era (and then some).
They serviced Diebold, IBM and NCR machines, among others (like those little cash terminals). If the ATM goes offline for "maintenance", the authorised field tech has to call the Bank's NOC and obtain a new 3DES key to punch into the thing.
And believe me, if there is _ANY_ kind of network problem which prevents the ATM from authorising a transaction (EVERY transaction is authorised over the network before dispensing cash), it just sits there blinking "out of order".
When ATMs screw up, they will happily eat your cards, vomit ink on your receipts, and give you LESS cash than you are charged for, but everything about their design screams "no free money for you".
If you have a dispute about an ATM incorrectly dispensing cash, they can do an individual audit at your request on the machine which should show up anomolies.
They have procedures and practices that are continually monitoring and tracking the "performance" of these ATMs. If there's a discrepency in the amount of cash reported as going out vs the amount going in, it doesn't last long...
As an Australian, when I hear "customs" I think: disease and pest control (our single biggest export is primary industries), drug detection, and general enforcement of importation restrictions (this includes import/export of endangered/restricted species, banned or restricted weapons, etc).
"Oh yeah, they get import duty tax too..."
For what its worth, what little I've purchased overseas (FPGAs, LCDs and microcontrollers) has never been slugged with import duty, even on a $9000 AUD order from the UK. I guess you have to be dealing with whole shipping containers of stuff instead of loose freight items..
Haha, well if by "allowed" you mean "not allowed" then yes.
The judge in question has resigned from the bar and his career is over. He will have a criminal conviction against his name.
Is the states a pristine country where there is a complete lack of corruption? Somehow I don't think so. Even the smh article you linked to was not really high-level corruption: nobody in "the system" is trying to cover up for him (perhaps hospital staff are though), and his colleagues in the justice system seem to be doing their job to have the law applied to him like any other common man.
He stole the vial from the sealed collection box; it doesn't take a national conspiracy to have it removed somehow. Co-conspirators at the hospital? Maybe. Has justice failed? Not really: he's already ended his career and it looks like he'll get a criminal conviction anyway.
Perhaps he'll buy himself a new alfa romeo to cheer himself up.
I see. Perhaps our strict anti drink-driving laws are the reason for the more liberal use of blood tests. I forget the specifics, but young drivers automatically lose their license for at least 12 months; I think this is mostly because "provisional" licenses only come with 6 demerit points (IIRC) and DD gets you slogged with 10 or more, even if you're just over the limit. If they can make a special case to the court, proving they need to be able to drive for their employment and livlihood, they can apply to have that suspension period reduced or even given special driving "permits" (I think it boils down to: only allowed work-related driving..). I know one of my brother's friends who, after proving he needed to drive, was given the choice of a reduced suspension period OR a very restricted "work-only" license that would last much longer than his original suspension period.
Even older drivers who have an absolutely clean record get suspensions; again I can't remember the specifics but I think it's something like 6 months. I know a couple of my father's friends who lost their licenses for 6 months after coming back from golf and having drunk just enough to be tipped over the legal limit of 0.05.. (they were around 0.07, IIRC).
Worse/repeat offenders go to jail, get community orders, and generally get the judges really pissed off...
Here in Australia, the road-side breath test (RBT) just gets you dragged to the police station, where they take a blood sample. It's the blood sample that gets you convicted, not the RBT... additionally, they take two blood samples: one for you, one for them.
Aren't blood samples used in the US? Do you not have that option?
I agree to a certain extent, and I think if you were to attempt to build an office workflow based around "paperless" and entirely electronic document exchange, HTML could fit the bill quite well. But I can see a possible reason as to why HTML isn't used for more inter-office document exchange.
1) It quickly becomes a collection of files (figures, pictures, diagrams, charts, formulas, etc) which are inconvenient to manage. You have to attach say six different files to your email, or mess around with zipping it up, likewise at the recipient end. 2) Printing
As for (1), there's Microsoft's Compiled HTML which forms the basis of their help file format, not sure why that isn't an option in FLOSS (maybe it is, I haven't researched).
For (2), people want to control how the formatting looks on the printed page. You don't get that in HTML. And most word-processing, let's face it, is meant to be printed on paper. Depressing that computers have yet to provide a solution to the paperless office... but that's the way things are.
In my opinion, documents > 5 pages or so should be written in LaTeX but that's just me:-) (and for those that groan at this thought, take a look at Lyx).
Sorry but what would you consider an open processor then? All the documentation on the Opteron is available free of charge. What more are you looking for them to provide?
I'm not sure that Opteron is necessarily more "open" than Sparc. NEC and Fujitsu (and probably others) sell sparc-based machines.
The fact that it hasn't attracted the attention of consumer-level manufacturers has nothing to do with its "open-ness"...
If there's something specific about Opteron that is more "open" than sparc, I'd like to hear about it.
NB: Don't get me wrong. I wouldn't pay for a SMP Sparc box over an SMP Opteron one. Especially with their dual-core CPUs in each socket.
Machine is a Athlon 64 3400+ with 4gb ram and 10,000rpm SATA drives (RAID 0). Found it to be too slow to be useful. Ended up settling on a Dell Optiplex GX1 (450MHz, 128mb ram) over Remote Desktop.
I think what you saw was the exception, not the norm. VMWare is a very successful product. For the majority of applications where I've deployed it I have not seen anywhere near the slow-down you have noticed. You say you aren't interested in windows, but you're talking about "Remote Desktop"? If you ask me, I think you had a misconfigured host system running some dodgy windows installation.
Like I said, VMWare works best if you're running headless servers. It has half-decent gigabit networking support. Disk I/O is slow when living in.vmdk image files rather than a native disk. If your server tasks are CPU-bound, VMWare fits the bill in the majority of cases. Even if it isn't, the vast majority of "server hardware" out there is grossly under-utilised, and the performance penalty VMWare incurs is unnoticeable.
If you're talking about high-performance, low-cost, then no, VMWare isn't going to fit. They do sell a rather expensive 16-CPU version which supposedly has very good performance on a select list of big-iron hardware ("big" as in x86 "big"). From their marketing propaganda, it seems to use a Xen-like (heh) approach where special VMWare software/drivers/OS hooks are required for the host OS. Difference being, of course, that VMWare has Microsoft support to make a modified Windows run in high-performance virtualisation a reality.
Are we talking about the same application, or did it make some major improvements in the last four months?
I've been using it since 4.0. Specifically to run legacy Windows shit on Linux. It's really the "only" solution (you imply Xen is the "only" solution for the OP, when it clearly is not and likely never will be a possible solution at all). The biggest performance hit I see is in disk I/O. Overall, the VMWare machine seems to be about 70% the speed of what it should be running native on the host hardware, but I haven't done any subjective tests. It just works, and I was and still am surprised by the performance it manages. As far as RDP access is concerned: it is indistinguishable from a real Windows box. I was making use of the gigabit vmnet drivers on P4 boxen with 1GiB RAM.
Haven't tried that since I'm not interested in Windows servers.
Then you have no relevance to the discussion... OP wanted to know about Windows virtualisation.
MS _DOES_ support VMWare. WHQL certified drivers and everything.
True. However, that's not what I meant. I was meaning more along the lines of optimization. If Windows was ported to Xen, which do you think would win in terms of performance?
Again, I'd ask you to read the VMWare propaganda. If you ask me, a tossup between VMWare ESX server and Xen 3 (when finished) with Windows support (unlikely) would be interesting. Because they both seem to use similar technology. I'm not sure who would win.
As for VMWare Workstation/GSX vs Xen, you're comparing apples and oranges. Despite that, the performance disparity really isn't as drastic as you claim, for the majority of deployments where I have seen VMWare being used. If you're trying to squeeze blood out of stone, striving for the best utilisation of your cheap hardware - then you're talking about a scene where VMWare isn't even trying to live in. You really mis-understand the target market for VMWare. It's a competent, fast-enough solution for admins wanting to consolidate, partition, and easily manage their low to medium-traffic servers. Not to mention software developers and support desks.
Currently I use UML for all my virtual server needs and am beginning trials on Xen.
Compared to UML, it seems to be quite a bit faster, but I find the need to reboot when changes to the dom0 parameters are made a little restrictive. Additionally, SMP suppor
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I respect your views. My original post was to clear up the fallacy of "Australia has no guns". We do have guns. They're restricted, and quite reasonable (to us).
l (it's a pretty graph).
They would come to collect innocent bodies and take a statement. I'd prefer they come to collect the criminal's body if it had to come to that.
See, that's the thing. It just isn't necessary here. Check out these stats: http://www.aic.gov.au/publications/cfi/cfi066.htm
You'll notice those numbers are presented in absolute figures, and that it hovers around less than 100 per year homicide deaths by guns. That's sweet bugger-all compared to the 12,000 or so you guys have every year.
I don't want to say what's good for you, but I know in my own mind that free-for-all unrestricted, unregulated gun ownership in Australia would do more harm than good for us.
Cheers
To quote myself:
And here's what you said:
The simple fact of the matter is, I don't know anybody who lives in fear. Perhaps that just means I don't know anybody. I've lived in three different towns, and I'm currently in a mostly Asian area of a capital city (Brisbane). At all times of my life I've been able to leave the house unlocked while I sleep. In fact, sometimes I go out and I don't even bother locking up then either.
To think that sleeping with a gun under your pillow is your definition of "safety" and "freedom", is surreal to me.
Furthermore, I have no idea what relevance any of those statistics are supposed to have with gun ownership. Can you please explain the link between sexual assault and guns? What constitutes "attempted murder"? How in the bloody hell is "Kidnapping" supposed to be reduced by gun laws?
As you know, there are lies, damn lies, and statistics.
Yes, Let's see what the Australian Institute of Criminology has to say about gun deaths: http://www.aic.gov.au/publications/cfi/cfi066.html . It has a nice pretty graph, please have a look and tell me there isn't a downward trend. Also note that it's presented in absolute numbers, and if it compensated for population growth by using per capita numbers it'd be a lot steeper downward slope. 77% of all firearm deaths are suicides.
.
Alright, howabout this: http://www.aic.gov.au/publications/cfi/cfi062.html
Tidbits:
Try and go to the source for your facts; you might find the "filtering" you've encountered has skewed or contextless numbers.
Now, let's get down to the real issue: Was the withdrawal of automatic weapons from the public aimed at reducing crime? No. It was to win votes for the government of the day, in response to Por
Very valid points, and I do agree with most of what you said. Although, I am skeptical that unrestricted free-for-all gun ownership is really going to help your chances of internally defeating the world's most powerful superpower with the world's most expensive military any more than gun ownership laws that impose at least a few restrictions such as licensing/safety requirements.
About the "socialist" ethic (btw: Aussie "intellectuals" are lamenting the fact we're going more and more towards American-style individualism, but that's a different story): it isn't that they believe it's "up to somebody else", it's just that by definition - a socialist society doesn't need such things.
And as with most things of this nature, it appears that nobody is right, balance seems impossible.
I respect your views, thanks.
Okay. Not sufficient to prove yourself worthy of wielding a deadly weapon, but ok.
Okay. Personally, I'd say if you've got such little respect for lethal weapons you probably shouldn't be owning a gun - but that's irrelevant.
Not sure how this is meant to be relevant...
Who said this had anything to do with the government fearing anyone? The Port Arthur massacre causing the revocation of licenses and buy-back of automatic weapons involved a massacre of civillians, it had nothing to do with the government "serving itself" other than the fact they wanted to win votes by pretending to do something about it (and yes, the weapons that were used were unregistered/unlicensed anyway - that's the hilarious part - so no, gun laws will not prevent a repeat of Port Arthur).
All I can say is: We have a massive impedance mismatch here. A culture clash.
It's mind-boggling to me the way someone can write a post like this and still believe their country is any way free.
Obviously we have different definitions of the meaning of "free". Somehow, in your infinite wisdom, you've managed to connect "freedom" with "unrestricted free-for-all gun ownership". WTF? It's mind-boggling to me that you think you are "free" and "safe". Have fun sleeping with a gun under your pillow, out of fear of your fellow citizens.
Personally, and this is because I live in a different country to you, I do not associate the "government" with gun ownership at all. The government doesn't come into it. Let's get real here: if you really want to over-throw the government, you're going to have to come up with a better plan than "let's buy some really big guns".
And Mr Bainter, your quote by the honourable JW von Goethe applies equally to you on this matter.
So, you admit your gun ownership has isn't just to do with overthrowing the government. This is where our two countries differ mightily: the percentage of criminals in Australia using guns to commit crime is absolutely minimal compared to yours. Of the people I know affected by crime, besides house burglary and shop vandalism, none involved a gun. I don't even know a friend of a friend of a friend who was involved in a crime that involved guns. In fact, I would be willing to bet that the majority of criminals in the city have never even fired a gun.
Indeed, I have some acquaintences who have been beaten up by gangs - beaten unconcious - when walking home after a night out. There weren't any guns mentioned there either.
Believe me, when there's a gun involved in a crime, it hits the newspapers. For you guys, it seems like a daily event. "And up next, the weather!"
Check out the other posts in this thread... scary :-(
Again, another one who just doesn't get it.
My original post was in response to a post that implied that Australia doesn't have guns. We do. They're restricted.
Secondly, massive culture difference here. Nobody needs "self defense" of lethal force. We don't have even a fraction of the gun deaths per capita that you do.
As a human being, you have a right to safety. Apparently, Americans think this means sleeping with a gun under your pillow. I would despair if it ever got that way in Australia.
Most of the time, I don't worry about locking my house at night. How about you? Burglers here just don't have guns. I bet most city criminals have never even fired a gun. Because chances are the people they're robbing haven't either, so why bother?
The point is, the society as a whole is made less safe when irresponsible people with inadequate training and lax handling/storage protocols are given lethal weapons.
Sure, good point.
The original intent of my post was to point out that we do have guns in Australia, it's perfectly legal to own them, just that a) Regulated handling and storage, b) Prove you "need" one (sport purposes are acceptable), c) Automatic weapons are barred and pistols are restricted.
The original point of my post was in response to "... guns? what guns?". Australians still have access to guns, where needed.
As I've said in another post here, I just cannot fathom how you can think a constant state of fear where it's expected that if you want to be safe, that you should carry a lethal weapon, is "how things should be".
Can one not look at themselves, compare themselves to other countries and think there is no room for improvement? For every american that died on 9/11, there were 4 in that year alone who felt obliged to use their "right to bear arms" to shoot and kill fellow Americans in homocides.
I'm not saying it's necessarily bad, for you guys, but you cannot take your culture and expect everyone else to like it or think it's good. Not all ideas fit everywhere in the world. For instance, I highly doubt a strictly capitalist regime in China would have all their billions of rice paddy farmers sending their kids off to university (granted, "Communism" as they call whatever it is there hasn't done this either).
We would rather feel safe in our homes, not having to worry about locking the house at night, than accept a constant state of fear and concerning yourself with the possibility that you might one day have to sentence a fellow human death.
I hope that if you do intend to "overthrow" your tyrannical government, you've got a better plan than "let's buy some big fucking guns".
There are many interesting issues revolving around - if the US government can ignore the "right to bear arms" section of the constitution, then what else do they feel obliged to ignore when convenient.
0 5.pdff
Besides that, however, you can't use your own atmosphere of fear and extrapolate your reasoning and beliefs onto another culture.
As much as Austrlia is trying its best to absorb the "American Way (tm)", one thing we don't want is a constant feeling of fear.
I can't imagine what it must be like to think that your only ticket to safety is to own a lethal weapon that hopefully you'll be able to use sooner than the "predator" can.
I can't help but think that the "we have to protect ourselves", "it's our right to protect ourselves" thing is just a self-fulfilling prophecy. A kind of positive-feedback system, feeding itself.
But for all the guns, people wouldn't need so many guns.
I did some research for an ethics (engineering ethics, of all things) debate topic at university (not to demonise america - something to do with personal vs professional responsibility). In the same year 2,973 people were killed on 9/11 [1] - Americans felt obliged to "protect themselves" against fellow Americans, lethally, in 11,671 [2] homocides using guns.
America supposedly has the highest rate of gun deaths per capita in the world, and is home to something like 40% of the world's firearms.
Isn't this just a little bit alarming? Are you saying this is the "best way"? The "way it should be"? Is there no room for improvement here?
[1] pp2, http://judiciary.house.gov/media/pdfs/kadidal0526
[2] 2,749 (WTO) + 184 (Pentagon) + 40 (Flight 93) - pp552, http://www.9-11commission.gov/report/911Report.pd
What the bloody hell does crime stats have to do with anything?
It seems you don't get it.
a) I don't recall claiming anything one way or another that the "new" gun laws (after our own Port Arthur massacre) were meant to affect crime stats in any way.
b) The only "new" thing about the "new, tougher gun laws" were mainly just that the government decided they'd rather the public didn't own automatic weapons at all. Apart from the government turning existing recommended firearm/ammunition storage safety requirements into laws, and exposing gun owners to audits to ensure compliance, I really don't think much changed at all. NB: My parents are gun owners, not me.
c) From (b), and the fact presented in (a), it's hardly surprising that crime stats haven't changed.
So what's the conclusion?
Very simple: as a society, we believe there is zero benefit to owning these types of weapons. Conversely, there is much to lose.
This has nothing to do with crime, and everything to do with culture.
It is such an alien, amazing, surreal thing to entertain the thought of trying to asassinate members of government with firearms as a means to make the world a better place.
If it ever got so bad that this was necessary, you're going to need more of a plan than just buying big guns.
I'm not from the US, so I may be ill-informed. It does seem that there are issues with travelling in the US, Even if you're american. Additionally, there are some (admittedly crack-pot looking) sites keeping a a list of government endorsed breaches of the first amendment.
Then of course, there's what appears to be the FBI acting as thought police.
Thanks, interesting comments. Do you run 100Mbit from the PCs into a switch with a gigabit uplink to the server? My experience was about 18 months ago and upgrading to gigabit (just on the server + new switch) was going to be about $2000 AUD, so the customer was quite wary about investing additional money when their annual subscription to Intuit was already around the $10K AUD mark.
:-)
Do they have any intention of moving to a client/server model? I'm seriously thinking of embarking on a project to write and sell my own software to fill this gap. And having just said that I probably sound like I don't have any comprehension of the effort required to write accounting systems
Do your clients use a CRM app of some kind? At the previous shop I worked at they were selling Act!, along with the QB plugin. It had... issues.
As an Australian, I can say you're right about everything except the guns. If you're a private citizen and have a valid use for a rifle, it's just a matter of paperwork, always has been even before the buyback scheme. Which, by the way, was mostly about removing automatic weapons from the public - fair enough too; I highly doubt there's many legitimate reasons to fire hundreds of rounds per minute (some that were in the business of culling feral stock from helicopter had cause to complain though). Pistols are difficult, because apart from sport there's no practical reason to have one, although IIRC if you're part of a gun club I believe it isn't too much hassel if you use pistols that are kept at the club at all times.
This might appear odd to you, I guess it's a culture difference. You have an absolutely fucking scary culture with guns over there. In Australia, we automatically exclude the possibility of using a gun against a human. Writing "Self-defence" on the application form to obtain a gun license will guarantee you won't get to own one (legally). Unlike Americans, we don't believe guns are useful just because it's a gun. We acknowledge it's a lethal weapon which must be used with care. It is a priveledge, not a right. A liability, a responsibility. We acknowledge that not every random bastard on the street is going to be responsible and rational enough to engage in safe gun ownership. You must have a legitimate reason to own one, this includes agricultural and sporting applications. Letting people own a gun purely because "it's teh c00l" or "self protection" does not benefit society at all.
As for the smh article, the PM does not have absolutel control. Even if his legislation does get through, it is highly vulnerable to a high court challenge. One of the fundamental parts of our constitution is a separation of powers between the executive and judicial arms of the government. His new legislation expects the courts to become "servants to the government" by "assisting where necessary" with speedy issueing of warrants etc. even in cases where suspects may have no actual evidence (in the traditional sense) against them.
This is upsetting a lot of QCs (Queen's Council - top brass barristers) and a couple of state-level governments.
It is unlikely the judicial branch will take this lying down - this won't be the first time the government will be "disappointed" by the courts not doing their bidding.
We haven't heard the end of this: Anti-terror laws: 'unconstitutional' summit
Holy jeebus, you use Quickbooks between 40 users!?
My god. I had no idea an app that shared a massive company file across SMB could scale to that many users.
My last job had a customer with 10 quickbooks users. It was the most painful experience for them; eventually they ditched it for something far more ugly but at least was client/server based.
Transferring a 300MiB company file every time you do a transaction search... waiting for a lock before you can do that search because someone is printing statements... is just outrageous.
Don't get me wrong - Quickbooks is great for 5 users - but too many companies experience extreme suffering when they try to grow beyond that. Firstly, becuase it takes them too long to give up on Quickbooks and move on, and secondly, because the client/server alternatives out there replace QB's frustrating multiuser experience with a tortuous and pathetic UI (along with a lack of features, or expensive add-ons to get what you take for granted in QB, and a LOT of inflexibilty)...
Or is there some version of QB2005 I'm not aware of? Please tell me more... I'm fascinated.
That sounds absolutely insane.
:-)
I worked for a company who, among other things, serviced ATMs. Although it wasn't 8 years ago, they certainly looked after some of that era (and then some).
They serviced Diebold, IBM and NCR machines, among others (like those little cash terminals). If the ATM goes offline for "maintenance", the authorised field tech has to call the Bank's NOC and obtain a new 3DES key to punch into the thing.
And believe me, if there is _ANY_ kind of network problem which prevents the ATM from authorising a transaction (EVERY transaction is authorised over the network before dispensing cash), it just sits there blinking "out of order".
When ATMs screw up, they will happily eat your cards, vomit ink on your receipts, and give you LESS cash than you are charged for, but everything about their design screams "no free money for you".
If you have a dispute about an ATM incorrectly dispensing cash, they can do an individual audit at your request on the machine which should show up anomolies.
They have procedures and practices that are continually monitoring and tracking the "performance" of these ATMs. If there's a discrepency in the amount of cash reported as going out vs the amount going in, it doesn't last long...
You must have strange ATMs in the US
As an Australian, when I hear "customs" I think: disease and pest control (our single biggest export is primary industries), drug detection, and general enforcement of importation restrictions (this includes import/export of endangered/restricted species, banned or restricted weapons, etc).
"Oh yeah, they get import duty tax too..."
For what its worth, what little I've purchased overseas (FPGAs, LCDs and microcontrollers) has never been slugged with import duty, even on a $9000 AUD order from the UK. I guess you have to be dealing with whole shipping containers of stuff instead of loose freight items..
Haha, well if by "allowed" you mean "not allowed" then yes.
The judge in question has resigned from the bar and his career is over. He will have a criminal conviction against his name.
Is the states a pristine country where there is a complete lack of corruption? Somehow I don't think so. Even the smh article you linked to was not really high-level corruption: nobody in "the system" is trying to cover up for him (perhaps hospital staff are though), and his colleagues in the justice system seem to be doing their job to have the law applied to him like any other common man.
He stole the vial from the sealed collection box; it doesn't take a national conspiracy to have it removed somehow. Co-conspirators at the hospital? Maybe. Has justice failed? Not really: he's already ended his career and it looks like he'll get a criminal conviction anyway.
Perhaps he'll buy himself a new alfa romeo to cheer himself up.
I see. Perhaps our strict anti drink-driving laws are the reason for the more liberal use of blood tests. I forget the specifics, but young drivers automatically lose their license for at least 12 months; I think this is mostly because "provisional" licenses only come with 6 demerit points (IIRC) and DD gets you slogged with 10 or more, even if you're just over the limit. If they can make a special case to the court, proving they need to be able to drive for their employment and livlihood, they can apply to have that suspension period reduced or even given special driving "permits" (I think it boils down to: only allowed work-related driving..). I know one of my brother's friends who, after proving he needed to drive, was given the choice of a reduced suspension period OR a very restricted "work-only" license that would last much longer than his original suspension period.
Even older drivers who have an absolutely clean record get suspensions; again I can't remember the specifics but I think it's something like 6 months. I know a couple of my father's friends who lost their licenses for 6 months after coming back from golf and having drunk just enough to be tipped over the legal limit of 0.05.. (they were around 0.07, IIRC).
Worse/repeat offenders go to jail, get community orders, and generally get the judges really pissed off...
Here in Australia, the road-side breath test (RBT) just gets you dragged to the police station, where they take a blood sample. It's the blood sample that gets you convicted, not the RBT... additionally, they take two blood samples: one for you, one for them.
Aren't blood samples used in the US? Do you not have that option?
I agree to a certain extent, and I think if you were to attempt to build an office workflow based around "paperless" and entirely electronic document exchange, HTML could fit the bill quite well. But I can see a possible reason as to why HTML isn't used for more inter-office document exchange.
:-) (and for those that groan at this thought, take a look at Lyx).
1) It quickly becomes a collection of files (figures, pictures, diagrams, charts, formulas, etc) which are inconvenient to manage. You have to attach say six different files to your email, or mess around with zipping it up, likewise at the recipient end.
2) Printing
As for (1), there's Microsoft's Compiled HTML which forms the basis of their help file format, not sure why that isn't an option in FLOSS (maybe it is, I haven't researched).
For (2), people want to control how the formatting looks on the printed page. You don't get that in HTML. And most word-processing, let's face it, is meant to be printed on paper. Depressing that computers have yet to provide a solution to the paperless office... but that's the way things are.
In my opinion, documents > 5 pages or so should be written in LaTeX but that's just me
Sorry but what would you consider an open processor then? All the documentation on the Opteron is available free of charge. What more are you looking for them to provide?
I'm not sure that Opteron is necessarily more "open" than Sparc. NEC and Fujitsu (and probably others) sell sparc-based machines.
The fact that it hasn't attracted the attention of consumer-level manufacturers has nothing to do with its "open-ness"...
If there's something specific about Opteron that is more "open" than sparc, I'd like to hear about it.
NB: Don't get me wrong. I wouldn't pay for a SMP Sparc box over an SMP Opteron one. Especially with their dual-core CPUs in each socket.
You must have a tall desk :-)
I think what you saw was the exception, not the norm. VMWare is a very successful product. For the majority of applications where I've deployed it I have not seen anywhere near the slow-down you have noticed. You say you aren't interested in windows, but you're talking about "Remote Desktop"? If you ask me, I think you had a misconfigured host system running some dodgy windows installation.
Like I said, VMWare works best if you're running headless servers. It has half-decent gigabit networking support. Disk I/O is slow when living in
If you're talking about high-performance, low-cost, then no, VMWare isn't going to fit. They do sell a rather expensive 16-CPU version which supposedly has very good performance on a select list of big-iron hardware ("big" as in x86 "big"). From their marketing propaganda, it seems to use a Xen-like (heh) approach where special VMWare software/drivers/OS hooks are required for the host OS. Difference being, of course, that VMWare has Microsoft support to make a modified Windows run in high-performance virtualisation a reality.
Are we talking about the same application, or did it make some major improvements in the last four months?
I've been using it since 4.0. Specifically to run legacy Windows shit on Linux. It's really the "only" solution (you imply Xen is the "only" solution for the OP, when it clearly is not and likely never will be a possible solution at all). The biggest performance hit I see is in disk I/O. Overall, the VMWare machine seems to be about 70% the speed of what it should be running native on the host hardware, but I haven't done any subjective tests. It just works, and I was and still am surprised by the performance it manages. As far as RDP access is concerned: it is indistinguishable from a real Windows box. I was making use of the gigabit vmnet drivers on P4 boxen with 1GiB RAM.
Haven't tried that since I'm not interested in Windows servers.
Then you have no relevance to the discussion... OP wanted to know about Windows virtualisation.
True. However, that's not what I meant. I was meaning more along the lines of optimization. If Windows was ported to Xen, which do you think would win in terms of performance?
Again, I'd ask you to read the VMWare propaganda. If you ask me, a tossup between VMWare ESX server and Xen 3 (when finished) with Windows support (unlikely) would be interesting. Because they both seem to use similar technology. I'm not sure who would win.
As for VMWare Workstation/GSX vs Xen, you're comparing apples and oranges. Despite that, the performance disparity really isn't as drastic as you claim, for the majority of deployments where I have seen VMWare being used. If you're trying to squeeze blood out of stone, striving for the best utilisation of your cheap hardware - then you're talking about a scene where VMWare isn't even trying to live in. You really mis-understand the target market for VMWare. It's a competent, fast-enough solution for admins wanting to consolidate, partition, and easily manage their low to medium-traffic servers. Not to mention software developers and support desks.
Currently I use UML for all my virtual server needs and am beginning trials on Xen.
Compared to UML, it seems to be quite a bit faster, but I find the need to reboot when changes to the dom0 parameters are made a little restrictive. Additionally, SMP suppor
For save and exit, you can use:
:x
ZZ
OR
Note on "ZZ": there's no need for semi-colon, yes it's upper-case but you'll notice the shift key is pretty close the Z key.
Vim isn't perfect, but as with most things worth learning, if you get over the initial learning curve it can be rewardingly productive.
~
:help the damned
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E149: Sorry, no help for the damned 0,0-1 All
:-(