I have no problems with a default install defaulting to more secure and less access - even access from the LAN. I'd personally prefer that almost all services were shut off or blocked by default, to be manually enabled when you knew you needed it.
In general, it is always a balance in deciding default configuration parameters and default-to-no-access is the right decision.
Back when I admin'd a university department's mail server, I had the following happen:
I had to come in on the weekend for a 30-second necessity. I had my two year old with me running errands and stopped by the university. We went in and in the 30 seconds it took me to get a guy's phone number off a scrap of paper on the desk, my son had noticed the blinking lights next to the shiny button - right at toddler eye-level. He pushed the button and we left. I got a call from my 'on-call' employee when I got home asking if I knew anything about the mail server being down (paged alert) - he asked me if I knew why it was turned off:).
In uh, lesser environments, it happens. My two year old would never be in one of my current company's datacenters.
1) plenty of point doing non-offsite backups. Or doing off-site backups another way etc. Are you _really_ saying that there exist no times in which you'd like to do backups where off-site backups are not required? I can think of many hypothetical and at least one real-world example where the need for offsite backups is non-existent (though would be nice, but hey, free money would be nice too).
2) Integration costs and administrative difficulties. Develop a custom OS and then sell accounts to your customers and make sure you get backups, have them accessable for _your customers_ and then make it so that your customers can rebrand the entire interface and sell it as their own. Not possible with Veritas. Aslo, verify-after-write either takes double the number of tape drives or halves your throughput.
3) Perhaps I didn't phrase my question right - I meant "From the time when the customer realizes he's done something really stupid, to the time he get's his files back, how much wall clock time has elapsed?"
4)For you, this is a need. For us, we back up about 60 TB of data monthly and need only to have it available for 30 days. This is all we guarantee our customers and when I say guarantee, I really mean that our SLA states that we _try_ but that there is no official guarantee. Besides, our 'tape' or 'offline raid' backups are not the primary backup of the data. We both fully mirror on the server each disk with customer data, and then have another disk in the server that has a full dump of the customer data as of 'last night' local time.... And no, raid boxes will have been replaced in 7 years, with new ones holding 30 days worth of full and incremental backups because our needs are different than yours.
I was merely trying to point out with my post that real world applications exist where D2D backups make good sense.
That's what raid is for. The SATA raid-arrays that are on the market are _relatively_ reliable compared to single disks. They are NOT as reliable as _good_ scsi disks, but they are quite reliable enough for this purpose. What you really need to do is compare this to the reliability of tape. Even great backup tape systems are not _that_ reliable. Right now we use Spectralogic jukeboxes... Not cheap stuff and we still have issues with tape now and then.
Did you even read what I said? My post was CLEARLY trying to point out that in some cases D2D backups make great sense. I outlined one set of circumstances that D2D would be good for. Your post then just says "Welll, I dont have the same needs so YOUR WRONG".
BM sell a LTO2 tape drive with autoloader, about $10000, capacity of 200GB uncompressed per tape (400gb with hardware compression), capable of holding 7 tapes, giving 1.5TB of storage for a fraction of the cost of a raid5 array of similar storage capacity and reliability, all in the space of a shoebox.
To quote you "Absolute nonsense."
Promise VTrak 15100 (3u rack mount) array holding 15 400GB SATA drives is about 5.47 TB raid-5 and costs, fully populated with disks about $10,500.
Put backup images on this array, including your incrementals, etc and you can backup quite a bit.
Combine this with a $1000 tape drive for 'offsite' and 'archive' purposes and you can have quick and easy restores along with your other needs.
Bah. We backup our RAID-5, and for good reason. [...] When we got hit by a hacker a few years ago, after we had expelled him from the system we just restored from tape. Show me your RAID-5 doing that.
You're missing the point. Instead of buying a large tape jukebox, buy a SECOND large raid-5 array that is about 5x larger than the first and then write backup images of the first one to the second. Ie weekly full dumps and nightly incrementals - then you can have backups from any time in the last several days, or from each week going back a month or so.
Depending on your mix of restores and the egos of the faculty involved ("Ignore those students and fix MY problem NOW!" - dont get me started about lack of practical computer knowlege some CS professors have) you might be able to more easily find, and more quickly restore your backups from disk images than you might from tape. And you can MUCH more easily verify-after-write your disk images than you can your tape images.
You'll find that a big raid array or two will cost in the same range as a big AIT-3 jukebox in $/TB of storage.
You LOOSE offsite backup though and the ability to buy more media so you can occasionally make long-term archives.
A medium sized RAID-5 Array with a smaller cheaper single-tape drive would address both issues and might cost less. It would also certainly have quicker restores.
(in case I wasn't clear - we plan on just replacing the tape drive with the disk array and write full or incremental nightly backup images to the array...)
Since we are backing up about 2000 machines and have to spool nightly backup images to a centra place before they go to tape anyway, why not just get a BIG spooling area and never bother putting it on tape?
You're clearly uninformed - a 4U Nexan 'ATA-Beast' array with fiberchannel connect to a server holding 43 300G SATA drives RAID-5'd works out to about 11.72 TB - costs about $41,000 fully populated.
Or, if you want a bit cheaper - Promise VTrak 15100 (3U) with an Ultra-160 scsi interface and 15 400G SATA drives Raid-5'd is about 5.47 TB for about $11,000.
This is right in the same pricerange (in $/gig) as a giant spectra-logic 20000 tape changer with 200 AIT-3 tapes. about $85,000 for 31 TB of storage.
So, what it really comes down to is - 1) do you need 'offsite' backups? 2) how often do you have to do restores and find the right tapes, etc. 3) how quick do the restores have to be, and 4) how long do you need to keep the data.
For my company, we need backups for about 30 days, and haven't been able to muster off-site backups for a variety of logistical reasons even with tape. We have a guy who's full time job it is to do restores for our customers. We do do _some_ offsite backups but for the majority of our customers, we do not.
For us doing nightly/weekly backups to disk and saving for 30 days is about the same cost as doing it to tape, but we can do the needed restores much faster and without occasional physical manipulation. So, it looks like we are going to be changing to 'Disk to Disk' or D2D backups sometime soon.
Cost wise, the initial outlay is about the same, but for our business model, the speed of finding and making restores (including nightly incrementals) is really a win.
We wouldn't invade other corn producing countries because we have more than enough corn here to go around.
People are starving in the US still... No, not like in North Korea, but still...
Since you brought up Occams Razor before, lets look at your statements again - you say that we have secured oil and that at some time in the distant future, this is going to bennefit Bush's buddies. Seems like they'd be better off with an oil shortage -- supply and demand set the prices - demand isn't going away... The iraq oil revenues are going back into the country's infrastructure and not into Cheney's pockets... You have this complicated conspiracy theory that depends on lots of folks doing things that are not in their best interest when the simple explanation is that we THOUGHT that Iraq had much more capability than it currently does. The nuclear-threats of N. Korea didn't happen till after the Iraq situation was well under way....
I fully agree with you that the supposed link between Al Queda and Hussein was silly and significantly overplayed. On the other hand, Norhtern Iraq where some desert bases were was not as far under the thumb of Sadam as the rest of the country... He tolerated Al Queda's presense there because of the PITA that it would be to deal with getting them out.
If the war in Iraq was about eliminating a threat to the US and freeing an oppressed people from tyranny, again explain why we aren't invading N Korea.
You make your unsubstantiated claims about this again and state that I have yet to prove anything. And yet, you do not specificly address any of my previous statement where I _did_ explain why we are not in N. Korea right now. At least have the courtesy to read and respond to my statements before you spout off your opinions again. You have the opinion that this is all about oil, and you use that opinion to support your argument about why we are not in N. Korea. Then you use the fact that we are not in N. Korea to support your belief that this is all about oil. When other possible explanations that make as much sense (or more) as yours are offered you merely resort to tautology. You ask me to explain again why we are not in N. Korea when I have already offered a reasonable and not-unlikely reason that you have yet to refute. My explanation can be summed up in one word - China. See my previous posting for a more detailed explanation.
It's not his fault that the occasional intolerant bigot can easily make the news. For each of those jackasses, there were 30 or 40 people out doing 'good' things for their families, friends, neighbors, and strangers. The problem is that people doing good things isn't very newsworthy. What you hear about in the newspaper and on TV/radio is the bad stuff that the small percentage of idiots does. Most of the general good in the people in our country is taken for granted.
I lost my wallet a while back in a major shopping mall. It was mailed back to me by a complete stranger, with all cash intact. A check with my credit card companies shows that no illicit purchases were made etc (cards already cancelled by the time they got back to me -- what a hassle - oh well) .
I came out of my house the other morning to get in my truck to go to work and I saw 4 different neighbors two houses down all digging a trench to fix an elderly man's water main. The man had been out trying to do it himself and the other neighbors had seen him and pitched right in to help. 1.5 hour later and the leaking portion of the line is exposed so that it can be fixed.
My sister was recently divorced and not doing well financially (the family helped her out...) and members of the church she attends anonymously brought gifts for her and the kids, several times in the week before Christmas - someone even tracked down her landlord and paid 2 months rent...
I could go on.... You dont see this stuff in the news. Now and then you see a real aberation, and that makes the news - the good stuff that happens all around you every day never does.
I agree with a lot of what you've said - and I admit that we probably dont know all the reasoning that went into the war. The long term effects of peace, human rights, stability, US influence, oil, etc were/are probably all motivators in this conflict.
Interesting to look at what is going on in Libya - Qadhafi could see the writing on the wall and _seems_ to be implementing real changes in his country.
I really have a problem with people (not you) who keep saying that we need to be getting out of Iraq quickly - regardless of why/how we got involved in this - now that we are there, we have an obligation to put the effort and time into making things right there. This means democracy, this means staying there quite a long time keeping things stable while democracy takes root - this means keeping out the small- and big-time warlords who would take over if we left right away.
Now that we are there, we have an obligation to stay the course and make things better there.
I can't overlook the fact that almost every single person in a high ranking position in the current administration has extensive ties to the oil industry....... and they have secured a large supply of oil.....
So if Bush had been from Iowa where the major industry is Corn you think he would have gone looking for other corn producing nations in the world to pick a fight with? Bush works with people he knows and trusts. By simple demographics, you'll find that everyone bush knew politically happend to be from Texas where Oil is a pretty big thing. By the nature of our political system, people who are high up in businesses tend to be the ones who can afford to get into politics - so lets use Occams razor again and look at the simple explanation - there is no consipiracy by the oil industry to get 'their man' elected to help them. Bush picked people that he 1) knew, and 2) knew he could work with.
Then you have the silliness to assert that the US has 'secured a large supply of oil' - if this is the case then why are oil prices up? Oh yeah more conspiracy - those texans are in cahoots with the OPEC... It doesn't look like much will be made of the oil in Iraq for quite some time...
And if you are going to bring up Occams Razor, lets look at the fact that you are saying a government conspiracy to start a war to get oil is going on when a simpler explanation is that Bush did indeed feel that the nation was threatened by Iraq. Occams Razor is a great tool when you only have a few choices you are choosing between and the choices are mutually exclusive, but real life is almost always complicated enough that the simplest explanations are too simple. Given this, I'd bet that there is some hawk-pacifying going on, some oil-interest, some honest national defense concerns etc. It is not all black and white and I'm willing to take Bush's word for it when he says he truly believed that our nation was in significant danger.
As for N. Korea - why aren't we there? Because 1) China is in the region and has enough resourses to keep North Korea in line and they have a STRONG incentive to do so. and 2) because China would freak out if we were to invade North Korea.
If you live in a nice neighborhood and there are big piles of trash in the street in front of several houses, and you want things clean, you work on the houses that most need looking after, taking into account which neighbors of yours will also be motivated to work on the cleanup - the guy with front-end loader and a dumpster doesn't need you over working in front of his house...
China can keep that region of the world stable without much military work from the US's part.
by your reasoning the only reason to have weapons and fight a war is to "make someone else plough for you".
This is a classical logical fallacy - I say 'A implies B' and you then respond "by your logic B implies A" and then you built an argument on this flawed premise.
My statement simply means that if you dont defend yourself with force that you will have serious problems no matter how nice and understanding and peace-loving you are. The rest of your argument appears to be an attemt to show how foolish my reasoning is by following it to it's logical conclusion. However, you used faulty logic, so you didn't succede.
Your try and ?extend? my reasoning to imply that simple reactionary defense is the only possible justifiable action (ie we shouldn't have been warring with Iraq because they didn't directly threaten us). If you believe that you should NEVER use force to stand up for what you believe, then I understand your point of view. I do not agree with that point of view however because I believe that sometimes you have to war for other reasons and simple reactionary defense. And, by reactionary defense I mean 'wating around till someone attacks you to fight back.'
As for rethinking what I said, you read a lot of things into my argument that are not there.
Wake up and smell the *sig-laden-with-coffee*:) - This thing in Iraq is NOT about oil -- in either the long run or the short run. This may not be the case for you and this particular issue, but generally people see their own faults in others - Bush and many others claim that we are there to do the right thing - get rid of a real threat to US and world saftey and stability - to remove a REALLY evil dictator from power. If you read other motives there, perhaps you have your own problems with being honest about your own motives. I try to take people at face value since I expect others to take me at face value. By the accounts of people who have known him a long time, Bush appears to be an essentially honest person who wants to do the _right_ thing. Compared to our last president, I think that he is MUCH more honest about his motivations.
Yes, war and death suck. Yes people on both sides of the conflict are dying, daily. Yes, according to the information we had at the time it was NECESSARY to enter Iraq - in retrospect, we probably could have waited and things MIGHT be different, but hindsight is always 20-20. No war has ever been won without tragedy. Is this one going to turn out to be worth it? We wont know for 10 or 20 years.
Yes, I know that you have issues with the war. Those issues appear to be based mostly on the questionable media assertion that our president can not actually [GASP!] tell the truth about his motivations.
So the 'next generation' that you represent (you do NOT represent me...) is all about understanding and getting along?
Those who beat thier swords into plowshares will plow for those who dont...
Wake up and realize that you can be nice and understanding and want to get along as much as you possibly can, and people will STILL want to use force to take away things from you.
"... Just as the pill doesn't prevent people from contracting STD's, the ability to grow..."
I've heard statements like this before, but really, please tell me - what idiot would ever think that the pill - a PREGNANCY preventing device would do anything for STD's? Do you know anyone that stupid? I don't.
What you're not getting is that while this behavior may not be unconstitutional, that restricting it isn't either. Companies do not have a CONSTITUTIONAL right to advertized in any way they choose. It is a plain legal fact that municipalities, states, and the federal government, have the right to control business behavior. Close to every city will have laws about the types, sizes, and locations of signs that a business can put up for instance. Heck we have laws saying certain types of business are completely illegal - though in Utah the 'network-marketing' is all the rage among the annoying and stupid segment of the pouplation)
SO, if a legal body (ie Utah state legislature) decides to restrict certain types of constitutionally allowed advertising they can, and do.
I haven't read the law, and I dont know if it is a good one or a bad one. But I do know that your similarly informed statement about them being on solid legal ground is incorrect. States CAN regulate the types of advertising allowed within the state.
Just got a new Dell optiplex gx270 at work today, and the first thing done to the box was to wipe XP off of it. FreeBSD installed quickly, and now I'm copying over my homedir from the old optiplex gx1 that I've been using as my desktop...
I guess if you are accusing me of being not the normal consumer for these machines, I'll agree, but I am a software developer, I (my company) just bought a dell, and I want nothing to do with XP. If we could have purchased the box without the XP license we would have but we were required to get the license.
I build my home machines, but for work, I take what I can con the IT group into ordering for me - which is 'standard dell minitower' in our internal ordering form.
I've got an IBM PC/RT with megapixel dispaly, 3 300 Meg ESDI drives, and MAXED out at 16 meg of ram sitting outside my office in Orem Utah - free to the first taker that wants to haul it away!:) Right now it boots MACH or did last time it was plugged in. At one point it was my desktop machine - back when personal computers had 30 meg hard drives, 900 Meg of space was positively palatial!
I believe it has a variant of X11R4 or R3 installed...
Your statement is based on an implied statement something like this:
"Most people do not often need network display in their windowing systems. Most X users dont use network display."
To which I respond, "Most of the peolpe I know who use X, use remote display daily. I personally use remote display daily. One of X's biggest strengths is remote network displays."
I am not necessarily a valid statistical sample and I am well aware of it. For MANY people, your statement is true, but there are a LOT of other people for which it is false.
On the other hand, your point that having a local-only core with a remote module for those who need it is ok. I agree with you as long as the protocol directly supports it and I dont have to have special software on the client but rather I just have to add a local module to use it.
Yeah, I guess I can buy that argument - at least partly, though food is only one of the 500 things we have to worry about if we stopped depending on the outside world.
To bring the discussion back on topic though - at least if we could produce net power from corn at least we might be able to end the corn subsidies since the farms can actually at least break even.
(though some have argued methanol takes lots of energy to produce -- I dont know the science so I'll hope for the best)
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I have no problems with a default install defaulting to more secure and less access - even access from the LAN. I'd personally prefer that almost all services were shut off or blocked by default, to be manually enabled when you knew you needed it.
In general, it is always a balance in deciding default configuration parameters and default-to-no-access is the right decision.
Back when I admin'd a university department's mail server, I had the following happen:
:).
I had to come in on the weekend for a 30-second necessity. I had my two year old with me running errands and stopped by the university. We went in and in the 30 seconds it took me to get a guy's phone number off a scrap of paper on the desk, my son had noticed the blinking lights next to the shiny button - right at toddler eye-level. He pushed the button and we left. I got a call from my 'on-call' employee when I got home asking if I knew anything about the mail server being down (paged alert) - he asked me if I knew why it was turned off
In uh, lesser environments, it happens. My two year old would never be in one of my current company's datacenters.
1) plenty of point doing non-offsite backups. Or doing off-site backups another way etc. Are you _really_ saying that there exist no times in which you'd like to do backups where off-site backups are not required? I can think of many hypothetical and at least one real-world example where the need for offsite backups is non-existent (though would be nice, but hey, free money would be nice too).
... And no, raid boxes will have been replaced in 7 years, with new ones holding 30 days worth of full and incremental backups because our needs are different than yours.
2) Integration costs and administrative difficulties. Develop a custom OS and then sell accounts to your customers and make sure you get backups, have them accessable for _your customers_ and then make it so that your customers can rebrand the entire interface and sell it as their own. Not possible with Veritas. Aslo, verify-after-write either takes double the number of tape drives or halves your throughput.
3) Perhaps I didn't phrase my question right - I meant "From the time when the customer realizes he's done something really stupid, to the time he get's his files back, how much wall clock time has elapsed?"
4)For you, this is a need. For us, we back up about 60 TB of data monthly and need only to have it available for 30 days. This is all we guarantee our customers and when I say guarantee, I really mean that our SLA states that we _try_ but that there is no official guarantee. Besides, our 'tape' or 'offline raid' backups are not the primary backup of the data. We both fully mirror on the server each disk with customer data, and then have another disk in the server that has a full dump of the customer data as of 'last night' local time.
I was merely trying to point out with my post that real world applications exist where D2D backups make good sense.
(speaking of reliability, I meant .... NOT as reliable as _good_ scsi disk RAID arrays, but they are quite.....)
That's what raid is for. The SATA raid-arrays that are on the market are _relatively_ reliable compared to single disks. They are NOT as reliable as _good_ scsi disks, but they are quite reliable enough for this purpose. What you really need to do is compare this to the reliability of tape. Even great backup tape systems are not _that_ reliable. Right now we use Spectralogic jukeboxes... Not cheap stuff and we still have issues with tape now and then.
Did you even read what I said? My post was CLEARLY trying to point out that in some cases D2D backups make great sense. I outlined one set of circumstances that D2D would be good for. Your post then just says "Welll, I dont have the same needs so YOUR WRONG".
Gee - well thought out.
BM sell a LTO2 tape drive with autoloader, about $10000, capacity of 200GB uncompressed per tape (400gb with hardware compression), capable of holding 7 tapes, giving 1.5TB of storage for a fraction of the cost of a raid5 array of similar storage capacity and reliability, all in the space of a shoebox.
To quote you "Absolute nonsense."
Promise VTrak 15100 (3u rack mount) array holding 15 400GB SATA drives is about 5.47 TB raid-5 and costs, fully populated with disks about $10,500.
Put backup images on this array, including your incrementals, etc and you can backup quite a bit.
Combine this with a $1000 tape drive for 'offsite' and 'archive' purposes and you can have quick and easy restores along with your other needs.
Bah. We backup our RAID-5, and for good reason. [...] When we got hit by a hacker a few years ago, after we had expelled him from the system we just restored from tape. Show me your RAID-5 doing that.
You're missing the point. Instead of buying a large tape jukebox, buy a SECOND large raid-5 array that is about 5x larger than the first and then write backup images of the first one to the second. Ie weekly full dumps and nightly incrementals - then you can have backups from any time in the last several days, or from each week going back a month or so.
Depending on your mix of restores and the egos of the faculty involved ("Ignore those students and fix MY problem NOW!" - dont get me started about lack of practical computer knowlege some CS professors have) you might be able to more easily find, and more quickly restore your backups from disk images than you might from tape. And you can MUCH more easily verify-after-write your disk images than you can your tape images.
You'll find that a big raid array or two will cost in the same range as a big AIT-3 jukebox in $/TB of storage.
You LOOSE offsite backup though and the ability to buy more media so you can occasionally make long-term archives.
A medium sized RAID-5 Array with a smaller cheaper single-tape drive would address both issues and might cost less. It would also certainly have quicker restores.
(in case I wasn't clear - we plan on just replacing the tape drive with the disk array and write full or incremental nightly backup images to the array...)
Since we are backing up about 2000 machines and have to spool nightly backup images to a centra place before they go to tape anyway, why not just get a BIG spooling area and never bother putting it on tape?
You're clearly uninformed - a 4U Nexan 'ATA-Beast' array with fiberchannel connect to a server holding 43 300G SATA drives RAID-5'd works out to about 11.72 TB - costs about $41,000 fully populated.
Or, if you want a bit cheaper - Promise VTrak 15100 (3U) with an Ultra-160 scsi interface and 15 400G SATA drives Raid-5'd is about 5.47 TB for about $11,000.
This is right in the same pricerange (in $/gig) as a giant spectra-logic 20000 tape changer with 200 AIT-3 tapes. about $85,000 for 31 TB of storage.
So, what it really comes down to is - 1) do you need 'offsite' backups? 2) how often do you have to do restores and find the right tapes, etc. 3) how quick do the restores have to be, and 4) how long do you need to keep the data.
For my company, we need backups for about 30 days, and haven't been able to muster off-site backups for a variety of logistical reasons even with tape. We have a guy who's full time job it is to do restores for our customers. We do do _some_ offsite backups but for the majority of our customers, we do not.
For us doing nightly/weekly backups to disk and saving for 30 days is about the same cost as doing it to tape, but we can do the needed restores much faster and without occasional physical manipulation. So, it looks like we are going to be changing to 'Disk to Disk' or D2D backups sometime soon.
Cost wise, the initial outlay is about the same, but for our business model, the speed of finding and making restores (including nightly incrementals) is really a win.
People are starving in the US still... No, not like in North Korea, but still...
Since you brought up Occams Razor before, lets look at your statements again - you say that we have secured oil and that at some time in the distant future, this is going to bennefit Bush's buddies. Seems like they'd be better off with an oil shortage -- supply and demand set the prices - demand isn't going away... The iraq oil revenues are going back into the country's infrastructure and not into Cheney's pockets... You have this complicated conspiracy theory that depends on lots of folks doing things that are not in their best interest when the simple explanation is that we THOUGHT that Iraq had much more capability than it currently does. The nuclear-threats of N. Korea didn't happen till after the Iraq situation was well under way....
I fully agree with you that the supposed link between Al Queda and Hussein was silly and significantly overplayed. On the other hand, Norhtern Iraq where some desert bases were was not as far under the thumb of Sadam as the rest of the country... He tolerated Al Queda's presense there because of the PITA that it would be to deal with getting them out.
If the war in Iraq was about eliminating a threat to the US and freeing an oppressed people from tyranny, again explain why we aren't invading N Korea.
You make your unsubstantiated claims about this again and state that I have yet to prove anything. And yet, you do not specificly address any of my previous statement where I _did_ explain why we are not in N. Korea right now. At least have the courtesy to read and respond to my statements before you spout off your opinions again. You have the opinion that this is all about oil, and you use that opinion to support your argument about why we are not in N. Korea. Then you use the fact that we are not in N. Korea to support your belief that this is all about oil. When other possible explanations that make as much sense (or more) as yours are offered you merely resort to tautology. You ask me to explain again why we are not in N. Korea when I have already offered a reasonable and not-unlikely reason that you have yet to refute. My explanation can be summed up in one word - China. See my previous posting for a more detailed explanation.
I lost my wallet a while back in a major shopping mall. It was mailed back to me by a complete stranger, with all cash intact. A check with my credit card companies shows that no illicit purchases were made etc (cards already cancelled by the time they got back to me -- what a hassle - oh well) .
I came out of my house the other morning to get in my truck to go to work and I saw 4 different neighbors two houses down all digging a trench to fix an elderly man's water main. The man had been out trying to do it himself and the other neighbors had seen him and pitched right in to help. 1.5 hour later and the leaking portion of the line is exposed so that it can be fixed.
My sister was recently divorced and not doing well financially (the family helped her out...) and members of the church she attends anonymously brought gifts for her and the kids, several times in the week before Christmas - someone even tracked down her landlord and paid 2 months rent...
I could go on.... You dont see this stuff in the news. Now and then you see a real aberation, and that makes the news - the good stuff that happens all around you every day never does.
Interesting to look at what is going on in Libya - Qadhafi could see the writing on the wall and _seems_ to be implementing real changes in his country.
I really have a problem with people (not you) who keep saying that we need to be getting out of Iraq quickly - regardless of why/how we got involved in this - now that we are there, we have an obligation to put the effort and time into making things right there. This means democracy, this means staying there quite a long time keeping things stable while democracy takes root - this means keeping out the small- and big-time warlords who would take over if we left right away.
Now that we are there, we have an obligation to stay the course and make things better there.
So if Bush had been from Iowa where the major industry is Corn you think he would have gone looking for other corn producing nations in the world to pick a fight with? Bush works with people he knows and trusts. By simple demographics, you'll find that everyone bush knew politically happend to be from Texas where Oil is a pretty big thing. By the nature of our political system, people who are high up in businesses tend to be the ones who can afford to get into politics - so lets use Occams razor again and look at the simple explanation - there is no consipiracy by the oil industry to get 'their man' elected to help them. Bush picked people that he 1) knew, and 2) knew he could work with.
Then you have the silliness to assert that the US has 'secured a large supply of oil' - if this is the case then why are oil prices up? Oh yeah more conspiracy - those texans are in cahoots with the OPEC... It doesn't look like much will be made of the oil in Iraq for quite some time...
And if you are going to bring up Occams Razor, lets look at the fact that you are saying a government conspiracy to start a war to get oil is going on when a simpler explanation is that Bush did indeed feel that the nation was threatened by Iraq. Occams Razor is a great tool when you only have a few choices you are choosing between and the choices are mutually exclusive, but real life is almost always complicated enough that the simplest explanations are too simple. Given this, I'd bet that there is some hawk-pacifying going on, some oil-interest, some honest national defense concerns etc. It is not all black and white and I'm willing to take Bush's word for it when he says he truly believed that our nation was in significant danger.
As for N. Korea - why aren't we there? Because 1) China is in the region and has enough resourses to keep North Korea in line and they have a STRONG incentive to do so. and 2) because China would freak out if we were to invade North Korea.
If you live in a nice neighborhood and there are big piles of trash in the street in front of several houses, and you want things clean, you work on the houses that most need looking after, taking into account which neighbors of yours will also be motivated to work on the cleanup - the guy with front-end loader and a dumpster doesn't need you over working in front of his house...
China can keep that region of the world stable without much military work from the US's part.
And other people in this thread were saying _I_ have a sad, scary world view? Take off your tinfoil hat dude.
What a myopic, unrealistic, and idealistic world you've created for yourself! Eventually you'll see the error of your ways.
This is a classical logical fallacy - I say 'A implies B' and you then respond "by your logic B implies A" and then you built an argument on this flawed premise.
My statement simply means that if you dont defend yourself with force that you will have serious problems no matter how nice and understanding and peace-loving you are. The rest of your argument appears to be an attemt to show how foolish my reasoning is by following it to it's logical conclusion. However, you used faulty logic, so you didn't succede.
Your try and ?extend? my reasoning to imply that simple reactionary defense is the only possible justifiable action (ie we shouldn't have been warring with Iraq because they didn't directly threaten us). If you believe that you should NEVER use force to stand up for what you believe, then I understand your point of view. I do not agree with that point of view however because I believe that sometimes you have to war for other reasons and simple reactionary defense.
And, by reactionary defense I mean 'wating around till someone attacks you to fight back.'
As for rethinking what I said, you read a lot of things into my argument that are not there.
Wake up and smell the *sig-laden-with-coffee*
Yes, war and death suck. Yes people on both sides of the conflict are dying, daily. Yes, according to the information we had at the time it was NECESSARY to enter Iraq - in retrospect, we probably could have waited and things MIGHT be different, but hindsight is always 20-20. No war has ever been won without tragedy. Is this one going to turn out to be worth it? We wont know for 10 or 20 years.
Yes, I know that you have issues with the war. Those issues appear to be based mostly on the questionable media assertion that our president can not actually [GASP!] tell the truth about his motivations.
So the 'next generation' that you represent (you do NOT represent me...) is all about understanding and getting along?
Those who beat thier swords into plowshares will plow for those who dont...
Wake up and realize that you can be nice and understanding and want to get along as much as you possibly can, and people will STILL want to use force to take away things from you.
not to mention that the grandparent post also spoke of duel booting instead of DUAL booting...
choose your weapon...
I've heard statements like this before, but really, please tell me - what idiot would ever think that the pill - a PREGNANCY preventing device would do anything for STD's? Do you know anyone that stupid? I don't.
What you're not getting is that while this behavior may not be unconstitutional, that restricting it isn't either. Companies do not have a CONSTITUTIONAL right to advertized in any way they choose. It is a plain legal fact that municipalities, states, and the federal government, have the right to control business behavior. Close to every city will have laws about the types, sizes, and locations of signs that a business can put up for instance. Heck we have laws saying certain types of business are completely illegal - though in Utah the 'network-marketing' is all the rage among the annoying and stupid segment of the pouplation)
SO, if a legal body (ie Utah state legislature) decides to restrict certain types of constitutionally allowed advertising they can, and do.
I haven't read the law, and I dont know if it is a good one or a bad one. But I do know that your similarly informed statement about them being on solid legal ground is incorrect. States CAN regulate the types of advertising allowed within the state.
Just got a new Dell optiplex gx270 at work today, and the first thing done to the box was to wipe XP off of it. FreeBSD installed quickly, and now I'm copying over my homedir from the old optiplex gx1 that I've been using as my desktop...
I guess if you are accusing me of being not the normal consumer for these machines, I'll agree, but I am a software developer, I (my company) just bought a dell, and I want nothing to do with XP. If we could have purchased the box without the XP license we would have but we were required to get the license.
I build my home machines, but for work, I take what I can con the IT group into ordering for me - which is 'standard dell minitower' in our internal ordering form.
I've got an IBM PC/RT with megapixel dispaly, 3 300 Meg ESDI drives, and MAXED out at 16 meg of ram sitting outside my office in Orem Utah - free to the first taker that wants to haul it away! :) Right now it boots MACH or did last time it was plugged in. At one point it was my desktop machine - back when personal computers had 30 meg hard drives, 900 Meg of space was positively palatial!
I believe it has a variant of X11R4 or R3 installed...
Your statement is based on an implied statement something like this:
"Most people do not often need network display in their windowing systems. Most X users dont use network display."
To which I respond, "Most of the peolpe I know who use X, use remote display daily. I personally use remote display daily. One of X's biggest strengths is remote network displays."
I am not necessarily a valid statistical sample and I am well aware of it. For MANY people, your statement is true, but there are a LOT of other people for which it is false.
On the other hand, your point that having a local-only core with a remote module for those who need it is ok. I agree with you as long as the protocol directly supports it and I dont have to have special software on the client but rather I just have to add a local module to use it.
Yeah, I guess I can buy that argument - at least partly, though food is only one of the 500 things we have to worry about if we stopped depending on the outside world.
To bring the discussion back on topic though - at least if we could produce net power from corn at least we might be able to end the corn subsidies since the farms can actually at least break even.
(though some have argued methanol takes lots of energy to produce -- I dont know the science so I'll hope for the best)