Where have you been? Improved technology has allowed a political climate to make killing civilians more difficult.
You might need to ask yourself the same question. About 50% of those who died in WW2 were civilian, up from 10% in WW1. In the US invasion of Panama in 1989 about 13 civilians were killed for every military death.
Iraq's ratio of civilian to miltary fatalities is currently running at about 33 to 1, and there is no reason to think that trend will not continue.
Why not start them off with Befunge or Brainfuck? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brainfuck If they survived that, even VB would seem like a sensible an consistently designed language....
This one's been around for a while. It's a useful resource, but some of the more specialised distros are easier to use for rescue disks. http://www.frozentech.com/content/livecd.php has a good list of them.
It's simple to get a *nix box which can not be compromised. Any of the Demolinux/Knoppix live distros which can boot from an inexpensive RO media are almost uncrackable, and even if the box were somehow compromised, all you'd need to do to clean it is reboot. That's not something MS will ever allow with Windows.
True, we've had a number of wars that killed a hundred thousand or more people (eg, particularly large ones include the final part of the Chinese civil war, the Korean war, Iran-Iraq war, and the current war in the Congo). But we haven't had wars since the Second World War that have killed tens of millions of people. That's what I'd consider a major war.
There have been about 25 million people killed in armed conflicts since the second world war. About 90% of those who died were civilians, up from 50% in WW2 and 10% in WW1. Many of those wars have also spilled into civil conflict, lawlessness and economic failures/famines which have resulted in even more deaths.
Actually, I have some good news for you. My brother in law is one of the candidates for these god-botherers, and he's always been one of those "Your body is the lord's temple, put down that beer and repent." kind of guys.
Anyway, a couple of years ago, one of his daughters got old enough to fly from the family nest, and moved from her home state to WA, where I live. A few weeks later I get a phone call from the in-laws because daughter has stopped phoning home and they're worried, would I drop by her place and see that she was OK.
So I did the right thing and drove over the next Saturday about middday and knocked on the door. It took a while for the door to open, and when it did, I was just about knocked over by the fumes. The quiet little daughter was about as hung over as I've seen anyone, and there were empty Southern Comfort bottles all over the floor, an ashtray full of roaches on the lounge and masculine snoring in the bedroom.
I suggested that she give daddy a call occasionally and left without waking the boyfriend. If she had as much taste in blokes as she did in booze, I didn't want to know him.
So I don't think you have a lot to worry about. Kids'll route their own way around parental roadblocks.
The sheer plunge near the bottom of the world's deepest cave, in a remote part of Georgia, doesn't automatically instantly inspire comparisons with Alan Warild's home country.
Probably explains why he was trying to find a short cut home...
A lot of human social structures tend to mimic nature, partly because we often conciously imitate succesful natural activities and partly because some structures are inherently efficient and will arise spontaneously.
Looking at malware and similar internet problems through the perspective of biological controls may be helpful in other aspects too - spammers, for example live in a remarkably similar ecologogical niche to human parasites such as head lice. Seeing how our current attempts to control those parasites are failing (because poisons etc select for the fittest individuals and create resistant populations) will help us evaluate potential controls for net parasites as well.
So now we have Organic LED's and Organic speakers.... perhaps one day we will have an organic computer!:-)
Everyone has at least one of those (sometimes two in the banjo-playing towns). Unfortunately, there seem to be some serious quality control issues in the production process.
That's probably because so few engineers ever manage to get involved in it.
In Australia, your domain name is tied to your business name. You are not allowed to have a.com.au domain which is different from your business name. If I wanted to change the domain, I'd have to rename the business.
I have changed business and domain names once before, but even with mailouts and phone calls to clients etc it cost an enormous amount in lost work, not to mention all of the ancillary costs associated with name changes.
As a one-man-band trying to earn money as well as administer the business, at some stage I have to make the decision that it's easier to just work for someone else.
Let us all take out a moment to consider how to best 'repay' the spammers
While I agree with all the disgust the community has against spammers, please try to control your responses. As a recurrent victim of "Joe Jobs" where a spammer forges my domain name in the Reply-To field of their junk, I'm already having to deal with thousands of bounced messages (currently about 120/minute) as well as the attacks of well-meaning but misguided people on my website.
I'm not sure what I've done to attract the attention of the spammer, but at the moment it looks like they'll succeed in putting me out of business - I can't use email while this is happening, since any filtering which brings the traffic down to a managable level also drops real messages.
Yeah, I was thinking "Crimson Skies" meets "Independance Day" and "Pearl Harbour". I love the Radebaugh style, and a genuinely stylish movie would be superb, but art deco jingoism's probably not going to do it for me.
It seems somewhat ironic that the US is so keen to extradite this fellow for what we hope is a fair trial, but are not prepared to return David Hicks or Mamdouh Habib to Autralia or to try them in a civilian court.
I've just bought RealBasic 5.5 to evaluate as a replacement for a number of MS Access licences. I haven't got far with the evaluation yet, but so far have not run into any problems with deployment etc - can you give me a hint about the pitfalls I should be looking for?
Metadata/Search based filesystems are based on the assumption that users do not know where their files are.
Folders and file structures can also be metadata. The benefits of an fs which can index files on multiple criteria become more apparent when you think about files which have multiple inheritances.
If you want to keep the folder metaphor, for example, having this sort of information in metadata would alow you to browse the data in folder structures which would morph to match the way you browsed.
For example, an image file which was relevant to both engineering and safety could appear as/images/engineering/safety if you were using an image editing program or as/engineering/safety/images if you were working with CAD tools.
This sort of structure is less useful for an individual who is managing their file collection themselves, but would be immensely valuable to organisations which need to make data available to diverse groups,
Siemens make a lot more than just cell phones. In fact there's a fair chance that the repeater stations your phone is getting calls from are buit by them. Not to mention the turbines and generators that power the base stations...
Having said that, their cell phone division blows big time. I owned a Siemens SL45 for a short while, until it self-destructed. I'd have to say their customer service was the worst I'd ever dealt with - unbelievably arrogant. I returned the phone for repair, they lost it for three months and eventually returned it, still not working and with even more damage (looked like someone had pried the case open with a screwdriver). In the end, after I'd wasted uncountable hours trying to get the thing back, they claimed it was water damaged (not true) and refused to have anything further to do with it.
It gets even better. Tony Abbot (Leader of the House, Minister for Health and Ageing) is running a smear campain about an issue called rentrort, to do with a property the opposition party is leasing back to the government at a phenomenal profit.
One of the keystones of the campaign is a website run by "volunteers", and which therefore slips under the AEC requirements for revealing campaign donations. The site is hosted on Tim Howard's Net Harbour servers. (rentrort.netharbour.com.au)
It's a dirty little game run by dirty little people, this politics thing...
SCO has other problems with Australian law as well. In essence, if they demand money (licence fees) from Australian Linux users without being able to demonstrate a valid reason, they may end up being charged with extortion.
I've sent several emails to SCO stating that I and my company (I own it) use Linux extensively, and asking them how much we owe them. They have not responded to any of the requests, and I believe the reason for their avoidance of the issue is that they are aware of the potential for charges to be broughtd against them.
On occasion, I find it quite relaxing watching the queries scroll up the screen like some wierdly twisted ascii lava lamp, and the content of some of those queries makes me feel reasuringly normal by comparison.
Sorry but the fact that this question still needs to be asked is a damning criticism of FOSS development.
No, it isn't. And whoever moderated this comment as insightful should hand in their mod points. There are plenty of open source projects which are far more useable than their closed equivalents. Firefox, Thunderbird, Webmin, Filezilla, Audacity and many others sit comfortably at or near the top of the usability pile. Self criticism may sometimes be constructive, but this usability cringe needs a bit of balance.
It think its just habit. In the tech world we tend to solve problems by a process of elimination, so I imagine the conversation would go something like "OK, the merger with DEC didn't work too well so we'll try it again with Compaq but this time we'll....."
Slashdot Mirror
Where have you been? Improved technology has allowed a political climate to make killing civilians more difficult.
You might need to ask yourself the same question.
About 50% of those who died in WW2 were civilian, up from 10% in WW1. In the US invasion of Panama in 1989 about 13 civilians were killed for every military death.
Iraq's ratio of civilian to miltary fatalities is currently running at about 33 to 1, and there is no reason to think that trend will not continue.
Why not start them off with Befunge or Brainfuck? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brainfuck If they survived that, even VB would seem like a sensible an consistently designed language....
If you're already comfortable with Knoppix I'd suggest you just install it. You can see the FAQ here http://www.knoppix.net/docs/index.php/FaqInstall.
What that gives you is a fairly complete Debian system, so once you have a net connection you can use apt to update it.
This one's been around for a while. It's a useful resource, but some of the more specialised distros are easier to use for rescue disks.
http://www.frozentech.com/content/livecd.php has a good list of them.
It's simple to get a *nix box which can not be compromised. Any of the Demolinux/Knoppix live distros which can boot from an inexpensive RO media are almost uncrackable, and even if the box were somehow compromised, all you'd need to do to clean it is reboot. That's not something MS will ever allow with Windows.
True, we've had a number of wars that killed a hundred thousand or more people (eg, particularly large ones include the final part of the Chinese civil war, the Korean war, Iran-Iraq war, and the current war in the Congo). But we haven't had wars since the Second World War that have killed tens of millions of people. That's what I'd consider a major war.
There have been about 25 million people killed in armed conflicts since the second world war. About 90% of those who died were civilians, up from 50% in WW2 and 10% in WW1. Many of those wars have also spilled into civil conflict, lawlessness and economic failures/famines which have resulted in even more deaths.
Actually, I have some good news for you. My brother in law is one of the candidates for these god-botherers, and he's always been one of those "Your body is the lord's temple, put down that beer and repent." kind of guys.
Anyway, a couple of years ago, one of his daughters got old enough to fly from the family nest, and moved from her home state to WA, where I live. A few weeks later I get a phone call from the in-laws because daughter has stopped phoning home and they're worried, would I drop by her place and see that she was OK.
So I did the right thing and drove over the next Saturday about middday and knocked on the door. It took a while for the door to open, and when it did, I was just about knocked over by the fumes. The quiet little daughter was about as hung over as I've seen anyone, and there were empty Southern Comfort bottles all over the floor, an ashtray full of roaches on the lounge and masculine snoring in the bedroom.
I suggested that she give daddy a call occasionally and left without waking the boyfriend. If she had as much taste in blokes as she did in booze, I didn't want to know him.
So I don't think you have a lot to worry about. Kids'll route their own way around parental roadblocks.
The sheer plunge near the bottom of the world's deepest cave, in a remote part of Georgia, doesn't automatically instantly inspire comparisons with Alan Warild's home country.
Probably explains why he was trying to find a short cut home...
A lot of human social structures tend to mimic nature, partly because we often conciously imitate succesful natural activities and partly because some structures are inherently efficient and will arise spontaneously.
Looking at malware and similar internet problems through the perspective of biological controls may be helpful in other aspects too - spammers, for example live in a remarkably similar ecologogical niche to human parasites such as head lice. Seeing how our current attempts to control those parasites are failing (because poisons etc select for the fittest individuals and create resistant populations) will help us evaluate potential controls for net parasites as well.
This would work best if it was an automatic part of a significant number of email clients.4 might do it.
Something like this http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=24563
So now we have Organic LED's and Organic speakers.... perhaps one day we will have an organic computer! :-)
Everyone has at least one of those (sometimes two in the banjo-playing towns). Unfortunately, there seem to be some serious quality control issues in the production process.
That's probably because so few engineers ever manage to get involved in it.
In Australia, your domain name is tied to your business name. You are not allowed to have a .com.au domain which is different from your business name. If I wanted to change the domain, I'd have to rename the business.
I have changed business and domain names once before, but even with mailouts and phone calls to clients etc it cost an enormous amount in lost work, not to mention all of the ancillary costs associated with name changes.
As a one-man-band trying to earn money as well as administer the business, at some stage I have to make the decision that it's easier to just work for someone else.
Let us all take out a moment to consider how to best 'repay' the spammers
While I agree with all the disgust the community has against spammers, please try to control your responses.
As a recurrent victim of "Joe Jobs" where a spammer forges my domain name in the Reply-To field of their junk, I'm already having to deal with thousands of bounced messages (currently about 120/minute) as well as the attacks of well-meaning but misguided people on my website.
I'm not sure what I've done to attract the attention of the spammer, but at the moment it looks like they'll succeed in putting me out of business - I can't use email while this is happening, since any filtering which brings the traffic down to a managable level also drops real messages.
Yeah, I was thinking "Crimson Skies" meets "Independance Day" and "Pearl Harbour". I love the Radebaugh style, and a genuinely stylish movie would be superb, but art deco jingoism's probably not going to do it for me.
It seems somewhat ironic that the US is so keen to extradite this fellow for what we hope is a fair trial, but are not prepared to return David Hicks or Mamdouh Habib to Autralia or to try them in a civilian court.
I've just bought RealBasic 5.5 to evaluate as a replacement for a number of MS Access licences. I haven't got far with the evaluation yet, but so far have not run into any problems with deployment etc - can you give me a hint about the pitfalls I should be looking for?
Yeah, well you root for your team your way. I'll keep doing it my way thank you very much.
Metadata/Search based filesystems are based on the assumption that users do not know where their files are.
/images/engineering/safety if you were using an image editing program or as /engineering/safety/images if you were working with CAD tools.
Folders and file structures can also be metadata. The benefits of an fs which can index files on multiple criteria become more apparent when you think about files which have multiple inheritances.
If you want to keep the folder metaphor, for example, having this sort of information in metadata would alow you to browse the data in folder structures which would morph to match the way you browsed. For example, an image file which was relevant to both engineering and safety could appear as
This sort of structure is less useful for an individual who is managing their file collection themselves, but would be immensely valuable to organisations which need to make data available to diverse groups,
Siemens make a lot more than just cell phones. In fact there's a fair chance that the repeater stations your phone is getting calls from are buit by them. Not to mention the turbines and generators that power the base stations...
Having said that, their cell phone division blows big time. I owned a Siemens SL45 for a short while, until it self-destructed. I'd have to say their customer service was the worst I'd ever dealt with - unbelievably arrogant.
I returned the phone for repair, they lost it for three months and eventually returned it, still not working and with even more damage (looked like someone had pried the case open with a screwdriver). In the end, after I'd wasted uncountable hours trying to get the thing back, they claimed it was water damaged (not true) and refused to have anything further to do with it.
It gets even better. Tony Abbot (Leader of the House, Minister for Health and Ageing) is running a smear campain about an issue called rentrort, to do with a property the opposition party is leasing back to the government at a phenomenal profit.
One of the keystones of the campaign is a website run by "volunteers", and which therefore slips under the AEC requirements for revealing campaign donations. The site is hosted on Tim Howard's Net Harbour servers. (rentrort.netharbour.com.au)
It's a dirty little game run by dirty little people, this politics thing...
SCO has other problems with Australian law as well. In essence, if they demand money (licence fees) from Australian Linux users without being able to demonstrate a valid reason, they may end up being charged with extortion.
I've sent several emails to SCO stating that I and my company (I own it) use Linux extensively, and asking them how much we owe them. They have not responded to any of the requests, and I believe the reason for their avoidance of the issue is that they are aware of the potential for charges to be broughtd against them.
There are a few places where you can check on live searches, and there are a lot of advertisers who are very interested in the results.
5 6041
http://searchenginewatch.com/facts/article.php/21
is a site which aggregates a lot of the searches.
On occasion, I find it quite relaxing watching the queries scroll up the screen like some wierdly twisted ascii lava lamp, and the content of some of those queries makes me feel reasuringly normal by comparison.
Speculation is useless.
From the Ruckus website's "How it Works" section.
http://www.ruckusnetwork.com/how_it_works.html
Content Protection:
Ruckus will protect copyrighted content and enforce usage rules with digital rights management (DRM) technology from Microsoft.
Sorry but the fact that this question still needs to be asked is a damning criticism of FOSS development.
No, it isn't. And whoever moderated this comment as insightful should hand in their mod points. There are plenty of open source projects which are far more useable than their closed equivalents.
Firefox, Thunderbird, Webmin, Filezilla, Audacity and many others sit comfortably at or near the top of the usability pile.
Self criticism may sometimes be constructive, but this usability cringe needs a bit of balance.
It think its just habit. In the tech world we tend to solve problems by a process of elimination, so I imagine the conversation would go something like
"OK, the merger with DEC didn't work too well so we'll try it again with Compaq but this time we'll....."