I used to have unsupervised access to a classified area where non-camera cell phones were allowed, but two-way radios were not, which was inconvenient sometimes when I brought my handheld ham radio (HT) to work for some reason and wanted to leave straight from the lab. The kicker? There was a powerful military transceiver in the lab that had a wide frequency coverage, including being able to communicate unencrypted on the same frequencies as my HT.
Let me preface my response by saying that I have been Bush's strongest supporter, from Afghanistan to Iraq, and will -- if it comes to that -- support military action in Iran. When I heard about these wiretaps, I felt betrayed. This is why.
Proponents of the wiretap policy have set up a false dichotomy between warrantless wiretaps and no wiretaps at all. They have convinced 60% of Americans that the other 40% of us don't want terrorists' phones to be tapped. That is not true. There is a third option here in the form of a special court specifically designed for obtaining warrants of a sensitive national security nature. I believe that there was just cause for every call that was tapped, and as such, a warrant from the FISA court could have easily been obtained in every individual case.
You talk about protecting democracy. Part of that is protecting individual oversight by a judge every time the rights of an American citizen are abridged, before they are abridged. Oversight as part of a huge list of names, by an overworked congressional committee every few months is not enough.
Counting military casualties (wounded and killed), there have been approximately 20,000 american victims of terrorism since September 11th. In that same time, approximately 6 million americans have been victims of violent crime. Yet, inexplicably, a solid majority of the american public seems to believe that a judge must approve the search of murderers and child rapists on a individual basis, but that an american citizen with even an innocent association with a terrorist does not deserve that individual attention. I disagree, and I'm not the only conservative to do so.
I believe that Bush acted in good faith, but that he made the wrong decision in this case. He had the option of removing all doubt of the legality of his actions, and chose instead to act unilaterally. If one terrorist is released due to a legal technicality that could have been so easily avoided, that will truly be a tragedy.
The reason I own a gun is not to defend my home against intruders on a daily basis, or as a last means of redress against a tyrannical government. The only situation in which I can imagine myself using my own gun instead of the safer "run away and call 911" option, is to protect my family and property in the event of widespread looting and civil unrest -- when law enforcement and the military are overwhelmed -- or to provide food for my family if things get really bad.
That's why my gun is always locked away, unloaded, even though this doesn't make any sense to self-defense advocates. However, I think if most gun owners were really honest with themselves about why they own guns, they would tell you it is mostly because shooting stuff is really fun.
The concern is that the establishment clause used to be about the government not endorsing a religion, but more and more people have been claiming lately that it is about the government not endorsing any religious viewpoint. Our government has endorsed religious viewpoints from day one. The main basis of the Declaration of Independence was that men are "endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights," non-denominational prayers start legislative sessions, oaths of office are taken on the bible, tithing is tax deductible, the clergy has a special legal right to keep confessions confidential, we have a national cathedral, government offices are closed for Christian holidays, and I could go on.
The concern is that the interpretation of the free exercise clause is slowly mutating from "freedom of religion" to "freedom from exposure to religion." For example, there has been an increase of court cases in which merely allowing students to express their religious beliefs on public school grounds has been viewed as the government implicitly endorsing the religion of those students.
Thankfully, I am not aware of any such cases which have actually been decided against the students, but the fact that the cases even exist causes some school administrators to be overly cautious, and forces some students to argue for their rights that should be unassailable in this country.
When I was in grade school, I had a friend who didn't participate in some activities because of her religious beliefs. We all supported her constitutional right not to participate and she strongly supported our constitutional right to participate. Nowadays, the belief is becoming increasingly common that if one student may choose not to participate, then that student's constitutional rights are violated, and the activity should be prohibited for everyone. Atheism is slowly becoming the de facto state-sponsored religion.
I had a new project manager once who called too many meetings. I just stopped attending unproductive meetings, and gave the manager specific reasons why whenever he asked.
Amazingly to me, he started using more efficient means of distributing information to me, and when my presence was actually crucial to a meeting, he started arranging my agenda items to appear close to the start of the meeting, and excusing me from the remainder of the meeting whenever possible. My performance review did suffer slightly in the communication category, but my productivity and initiative ratings were through the roof.
The funny part is that there were people who were a lot busier than me, who couldn't figure out how I managed to get myself excused so often when they had to suffer. The fact was they never really tried. Never underestimate the power of being candid. You just might get what you want.
Actually, to be honest with you, I favor open source because it is what I am accustomed to. I started using it because it was convenient. Nothing in there about ethics or evil corporations, and I see the same attitude in the projects I contribute to. Only people who depend on commercial software hate commercial software. When you haven't had a windows partition in 6 years, it is kind of hard to make ideological comparisons. It's not like every time someone boots up windows, they think to themselves, "Doesn't capitalism produce better software than open source?"
It is my experience that people who only try open source software because they believe the development model is more ethical or because they want to "stick it to the man" don't last very long.
I hope you will let your elected representatives, including the president, know how you feel and not just hope for the ACLU to do what it does. While I respect the basic idea of the ACLU, it has evolved into an extreme liberal organization, with little political influence outside of the left wing.
On the other hand, this wiretap issue is one of those which even many conservatives who are also moderate civil libertarians (like myself) would be against. For example, the votes on passage of the patriot act reauthorization were highly polarized along party lines. However, largely unnoticed by the media, votes on amendments to increase civil liberty protections in the bill received widespread bipartisan support for the most part. Check out the amendments link (direct link changes) from the THOMAS page for the bill. I personally feel that the amendments sponsored by Mr. Flake, the republican representative from my district, are some of his best work all session.
With enough public opinion support, some progress on the wiretap issue may be able to be made in the executive and legislative branches, while groups like the ACLU take on what is sure to be a long battle in the judicial. I think at the very least, letting your representatives know how you feel will cause more attention to be placed on explicitly protecting civil liberties the next time Congress votes to authorize use of force.
I hear you. If only there were a way to get prints from a digital camera that one could put into a photo album like with film. That way we could have the best of both worlds, except for being able to hold negatives up to the light and say, "Hee hee, that tree is purple."
The replies I have seen so far have all been excellent suggestions for detecting buffer overflows on the heap. Adequate stack protection actually requires the code to be compiled with a compiler that adds extra checks to each function call. This page has more information on making gcc do what you want. Gentoo is very easy to set up for it, FYI, but it should be possible on any *nix distro without any kernel changes.
I feel your pain about bugs in libraries that you must use without the source code. I had an arrangement like that for nearly two years with extremely buggy code. Just relinking the static library with changes to my code, changing where in memory the library would reside, would often cause huge problems. Let's just say I got really good at debugging in assembly with gdb. I got where I could call them up and say something like, "you have some code at the end of function foo that looks like 'a[2] = b', but a was never allocated." They'd always reply with something like, "Yes it is... oh wait..."
The Bush administration didn't anticipate the mess in Iraq, they thought we'd be greeted as liberators and delared "mission accomplished" after the victory in conventional warfare...
Some quotes from the President's speech announcing the end of major combat operations in Iraq:
We have difficult work to do in Iraq. We're bringing order to parts of that country that remain dangerous.
The transition from dictatorship to democracy will take time, but it is worth every effort. Our coalition will stay until our work is done.
Our mission continues. Al Qaeda is wounded, not destroyed. The scattered cells of the terrorist network still operate in many nations, and we know from daily intelligence that they continue to plot against free people.
CBO has no basis for estimating other costs that might be associated with a conflict with Iraq such as the costs for coalition war fighting, reconstruction or foreign aid that the United States might choose to extend after a conflict ends, or assistance to casualties, including those that might result from the enemy's use of weapons of mass destruction.
Though admittedly they had no idea how expensive post-war operations in Iraq would be, this clearly shows they anticipated significant and difficult to estimate costs after the initial fighting, which Congress and the White House were aware of before use of force was authorized.
If anyone is guilty of not anticipating the mess in Iraq, it is the American public. I believe the President's words and actions clearly show that he had a pretty good idea of how difficult Iraq would be, but that he thought it would be worth the sacrifice. That may be more disturbing to people than the idea that it was mere miscalculation, but I believe that a few more years will show whether he was right.
Funny, I always thought fvwm was closer to XP's desktop than gnome or kde is, but that might just be me.
If Microsoft is going to decide to start selling 3.1 in developing countries, then I'd say the comparison might be fair. If the only source of the software is that stack of floppies that has been in my garage untouched for a decade, then I don't think it's going to work out. Additionally, I think it is only fair to configure the linux machines in a typical legacy configuration: lightweight window manager, abiword and gnumeric instead of openoffice.org, etc.
Besides, who decided that a developing country still catching up with 100 year old technology needs a 2006 computer system? A text-only 486 with lynx, pico, LaTeX, screen, mutt, mplayer, IRC, and some text based games like these is still light years ahead of what I had regular access to growing up. I'd rather have a school full of those than a few P4's running XP.
I just visited mccain.senate.gov, and it didn't set a cookie. However, I have an extensive list of.gov cookies set previously:
mccain.senate.gov (from earlier visits on my other computer)
schumer.senate.gov
durbin.senate.gov
kerry.senate.gov
judiciary.senate.gov
kyl.senate.gov
frist.senate.gov
hsc.house.gov
appropriations.house.gov
At least it's a bipartisan issue. I'd better delete them quickly or people might think I stay informed about my government. Good thing aljazeera.net doesn't set a cookie or my name might appear on the [...this text censored by the NSA...] list.
I forgot the first rule of posting to the Internet: someone will always take a joke seriously, even with an emoticon appended.
I am not so ignorant as to believe that everyone's political beliefs fit neatly into the boxes of republican or democrat. Nor am I so dogmatic as to ignore that those categories are applicable enough for most Americans, most of the time.
No one claims that democracy is perfect. It can't be unless people are homogenous. Almost everyone has an opinion on at least one issue which differs from the majority. A vote for a candidate is not an endorsement of his or her opinion on every single issue. It is merely an expression that one candidate's views are closest to yours on most of the issues that are most important to you.
I have never known a candidate to agree with me on every issue. That's why I don't restrict my voting to election day. My elected representatives regularly receive my opinion on all the current issues that are important to me.
The level of public support has a significant impact on the compromises in a bill, how moderates and sometimes minority party members vote, and if a bill even comes up for a vote in the first place. My former congressman once crossed party lines to cosponsor a bill I supported.
Another great example is the patriot act. A shift in public support not only enabled several moderating amendments to be passed so far -- due to efforts on both sides of the aisle that have received almost no media attention -- but also prompted a filibuster on a more moderate version of a bill that only had one nay vote in the senate 4 years ago. The end result will probably be that those portions of the patriot act will be renewed, but with even more amendments to make it a little more palatable to civil libertarians.
If you're a civil libertarian, your vote just counted for something, even if it wasn't as much as you originally hoped for. Choosing not to vote is your right, but there are unintended consequences for such a choice. No politician ever made a decision based on what a majority of non-voters believe, no matter how many +5 insightful comments those non-voters have in YRO.
Let me guess, you don't vote because you think your vote doesn't count. You make an interesting argument, but it is logically invalid and self defeating.
You should consider your vote as an aggregate of people who think as you do, rather than an individual vote. Don't make the mistake of assuming a bullet isn't dangerous because a single atom of lead isn't dangerous. People who voted for the loser in the last election are more likely to feel that their vote didn't count than those who voted for the winner. Therefore, statistically speaking, choosing not to vote because you feel your vote won't count is more likely to give an advantage to the person you don't want to win rather than have no effect at all on the outcome. That is completely counterintuitive on an individual basis. It only makes sense when you pull back and look at the big picture.
In addition, elected officials change their approach based on their perception of public opinion. Look at how democrats in congress changed their political tactics regarding the Iraq war after presidential approval plummeted last Fall. In an election, it is not only the majority vote that counts. The difference between a close race and a landslide is huge when you look at what actually gets accomplished after the election.
In short, your vote always counts even if it isn't obvious how. And you have nothing to lose except a few minutes of your time. Please always vote. Unless, of course, you're a democrat. Then I don't mind if you stay home;-)
There you go, ruining my evening by making me actually look up references to refute your unresearched claims.
Here is the FCC application for my 802.11b/g wireless router. At the bottom, it clearly states that it operates under FCC rule parts 15c, which indeed requires FCC certification of the device and not the user, but according to Title 47, part 15.5, "shall
not be deemed to have any vested or recognizable right to continued use
of any given frequency by virtue of prior registration or certification
of equipment."
I'll leave it to you to read the rest of that section, which confirms what I originally stated about interference to licensed users. Licensed users of the frequency are only responsible to not cause interference to other licensed users of that frequency, just like a broadcast radio station doesn't have to care if he interferes with those little FM transmitters that people plug their ipods into so they can listen on their car radio. An amateur radio license is no less valid than the license for your local top 40 radio station. And the authority to operate that little FM transmitter is the same authority for wi-fi routers and microwave ovens, with the same FCC certification requirements.
While technically a request to shut down must come from the FCC and a licensed user can only "ask nicely", just like enforcing the speed limit must come from a law enforcement officer, the fact is that the law is on the side of the licensed user.
Contrast this with the CB and family radio services, for example, which have frequencies specifically set aside for sole use by unlicensed users, with strict equipment specifications. That is what I would consider public spectrum.
There is nothing in section 97.313 that limits the power output to less than 1500 W in that band. However, I concede that there are other requirements for RF exposure, a "minimum necessary power" requirement, and other technical issues that probably limit it practically to 100 W or so. There are probably further restrictions somewhere in the code where unattended operation is concerned. A license is enough permission to use those bands. The only additional requirement needed to run 1500 W of power is a routine environmental evaluation which proves that humans won't be over-exposed (required for transmissions over 250 Watts in that band). The process of performing such an evaluation is a subject of the extra class amateur radio license exam. However, if it is shown that 1500 W was used where 1 W would have been sufficient, the licensee is subject to heavy fines, seizure of his equipment, and forfeiture of his license.
I'm not trumpeting my own horn or going on a power trip, just clearing up a common misconception that wi-fi frequencies are somehow reserved for wi-fi, and trying to present an interesting and extreme counter example. You can argue that wi-fi has become so ubiquitous that it deserves some protection from interference, and I would agree with you, but the current law makes no such guarantee, and it is indeed only through the voluntary cooperation of legitimate licensees of that spectrum (hams aren't the only ones) that lawful interference with wi-fi isn't widespread.
I apologize if I came off snobby, but consider that someone who has passed three increasingly difficult exams dealing with FCC regulations, and has years of experience and training in building and operating radio equipment in compliance with those regulations, has earned the right to speak with some authority on the subject. I'm happy to admit when I'm wrong, but you might want to actually back it up with fact the next time you think you're breaking a power trip.
WiFi does not use "public spectrum." It falls under part 15 rules and therefore uses spectrum that is allocated to licensed users, at extremely low power, with the understanding that it must not cause interference and must accept any interference. In other words, your WiFi router has no more right to transmit on that channel than your neighbor's microwave oven has.
As a licensed user of several of the WiFi channels I can transmit at 1500 watts over an entire city, if necessary to establish communication, and can interfere with any unlicensed WiFi routers on my channel with impunity. Not only that, if any of those routers are interfering with my signal, they are legally required to shut down or at least change channel.
Think that's unfair? The designers of WiFi were aware of those requirements when they first selected the frequencies. Luckily for all you unlicensed users of WiFi, most of us hams are nice guys who like WiFi for our own networks, and are excited about the availability of cheap hardware for using that part of the spectrum.
I'll agree with you about slashdot leaning to the left. However, intelligence has very little to do with political tendencies, except that those who are more intelligent are more likely to know which party actually represents their fiscal and social interests the best. The poor, who have lower average IQ, have as much tendency to lean to the left as college professors, who have higher average IQ. On the other hand, many poor people and college professors are very conservative.
I've installed numerous versions of Ada and C++ compilers, window managers, gtk, qt, lyx, and more in ~/bin under Solaris without root. Almost all file permission problems are solvable by contacting the file owner directly without involving an admin, and that's usually the courteous thing to do anyway. Things that do actually require root are few and far between in my book. Even if you really need to do something regularly like restart a web server, it can be easily arranged with a one time change to a sudoers file or something. However, that is the exception rather than the rule.
Press releases aren't always bad. For example, I find a press release from a Senator's web site detailing his position on an issue to be much more accurate than the one-sentence summary that the press might make about his position.
Actually, in the Internet age, it is so easy to obtain primary sources of information that I only use secondary sources like the press for commentary or to point out things I may have missed elsewhere, especially for political news.
For example, if a politician makes a speech that has the press in an uproar, I'll read the transcript of the entire speech or watch the video and form my own opinion, then see what the mass media has to say about it. Al Jazeera's coverage of Bush's speeches can provide quite a bit of insight into the mindset of that region of the World.
Want to know what kind of judge Samuel Alito is? Read his decisions. Want to know why the governor vetoed that bill? Read her letter to the legislature. Want to know what issues are the most important to your congressman? Look up his votes and his speeches in the congressional record. Want to know what's going on in local politics? Look up the agenda for the next town council meeting and read the minutes from the last one. Wonder how far the USA PATRIOT act goes? Read it. Want to know what the democrat or republican parties are focusing on? Read their web sites.
Think that going straight to the source is too much work? You probably already go to a lot of different secondary source web sites for information. The added bonus is that government sponsored web sites are almost always banner ad free and require no registration.
It doesn't just work for politics either. Are you going to get better coverage of the game from the 5 minutes at the end of the news or from nfl.com? Newspaper weather page or weather.com?
I agree. Modding of stories would add a nice aspect to slashdot. The other thing I would love to see is some user profile questions where you rate yourself on spectrums like liberal/conservative, evolutionism/creationism, microsoft/linux and so on, so we can add or subtract mod points like the current system for new users, short posts, long posts, etc. Although reading at +3 usually yields good results for me, sometimes an ultra-conservative creationist like myself can feel pretty alone on slashdot.
What an insensitive and ill-informed comment. While it is true that women who were premature themselves are slightly more likely to have a premature baby, this is probably due to physical problems of the mother and not due to any genetic predisposition. Wives of men who were premature babies are not any more likely to have a premature baby than anyone else.
Go spend a day in the NICU before you decide that these babies are not worth saving. Preemies are no different than any other babies except for some health problems. You probably know more adults than you realize who were born prematurely. Or perhaps you believe that any human life with any medical condition is not worth preserving? One of my daughter's main problems resulting from her premature birth is far-sightedness. Perhaps we should keep everyone who wears glasses from "polluting" the gene pool. Despite having suffered some brain damage during birth, I suspect my baby girl has more sense than you.
Sure, every self-respecting geek experiments on their kids.
Experiment #1: When my baby girl was old enough that she would turn to look at us when we said something, we got a long tube that we could talk through so that my voice would appear to come from my wife, and vice versa. Turns out my daughter looked at the correct parent, no matter where the voice came from.
Experiment #2: "Her favorite TV show is the wiggles, just look how captivated she is," my wife says. "She just likes the flashy light," I say. "Look, she's just as captivated when I turn it to C-SPAN." Of course, that wasn't very scientific of me, because politicians are often the most childish people on TV.
Experiment #3: Baby likes banging on the computer keyboard, so I set her up with her own account and let her go crazy to test the million monkeys theory on a smaller scale. She hasn't written anything that compiles yet, but at least she has a much lower security vulnerability rate than internet explorer. It's all about choosing the right metrics. Note that there is no measurable difference in her productivity between the dvorak and standard layouts. Bonus: I can now make ad hominem attacks on slashdot that my one year old has more desktop linux experience than you.
So what about you other slashdotters who have spawned child processes? What (harmless) experiments do you do on them?
Slashdot Mirror
I used to have unsupervised access to a classified area where non-camera cell phones were allowed, but two-way radios were not, which was inconvenient sometimes when I brought my handheld ham radio (HT) to work for some reason and wanted to leave straight from the lab. The kicker? There was a powerful military transceiver in the lab that had a wide frequency coverage, including being able to communicate unencrypted on the same frequencies as my HT.
Proponents of the wiretap policy have set up a false dichotomy between warrantless wiretaps and no wiretaps at all. They have convinced 60% of Americans that the other 40% of us don't want terrorists' phones to be tapped. That is not true. There is a third option here in the form of a special court specifically designed for obtaining warrants of a sensitive national security nature. I believe that there was just cause for every call that was tapped, and as such, a warrant from the FISA court could have easily been obtained in every individual case.
You talk about protecting democracy. Part of that is protecting individual oversight by a judge every time the rights of an American citizen are abridged, before they are abridged. Oversight as part of a huge list of names, by an overworked congressional committee every few months is not enough.
Counting military casualties (wounded and killed), there have been approximately 20,000 american victims of terrorism since September 11th. In that same time, approximately 6 million americans have been victims of violent crime. Yet, inexplicably, a solid majority of the american public seems to believe that a judge must approve the search of murderers and child rapists on a individual basis, but that an american citizen with even an innocent association with a terrorist does not deserve that individual attention. I disagree, and I'm not the only conservative to do so.
I believe that Bush acted in good faith, but that he made the wrong decision in this case. He had the option of removing all doubt of the legality of his actions, and chose instead to act unilaterally. If one terrorist is released due to a legal technicality that could have been so easily avoided, that will truly be a tragedy.
That's why my gun is always locked away, unloaded, even though this doesn't make any sense to self-defense advocates. However, I think if most gun owners were really honest with themselves about why they own guns, they would tell you it is mostly because shooting stuff is really fun.
The concern is that the interpretation of the free exercise clause is slowly mutating from "freedom of religion" to "freedom from exposure to religion." For example, there has been an increase of court cases in which merely allowing students to express their religious beliefs on public school grounds has been viewed as the government implicitly endorsing the religion of those students.
Thankfully, I am not aware of any such cases which have actually been decided against the students, but the fact that the cases even exist causes some school administrators to be overly cautious, and forces some students to argue for their rights that should be unassailable in this country.
When I was in grade school, I had a friend who didn't participate in some activities because of her religious beliefs. We all supported her constitutional right not to participate and she strongly supported our constitutional right to participate. Nowadays, the belief is becoming increasingly common that if one student may choose not to participate, then that student's constitutional rights are violated, and the activity should be prohibited for everyone. Atheism is slowly becoming the de facto state-sponsored religion.
It's only a matter of time before we will be able to buy a porcelain keyboard at thinkgeek.
Amazingly to me, he started using more efficient means of distributing information to me, and when my presence was actually crucial to a meeting, he started arranging my agenda items to appear close to the start of the meeting, and excusing me from the remainder of the meeting whenever possible. My performance review did suffer slightly in the communication category, but my productivity and initiative ratings were through the roof.
The funny part is that there were people who were a lot busier than me, who couldn't figure out how I managed to get myself excused so often when they had to suffer. The fact was they never really tried. Never underestimate the power of being candid. You just might get what you want.
It is my experience that people who only try open source software because they believe the development model is more ethical or because they want to "stick it to the man" don't last very long.
Sounds like the same kind of logic I've heard all week in Alito's confirmation hearings. Ever thought about running for Senate?
On the other hand, this wiretap issue is one of those which even many conservatives who are also moderate civil libertarians (like myself) would be against. For example, the votes on passage of the patriot act reauthorization were highly polarized along party lines. However, largely unnoticed by the media, votes on amendments to increase civil liberty protections in the bill received widespread bipartisan support for the most part. Check out the amendments link (direct link changes) from the THOMAS page for the bill. I personally feel that the amendments sponsored by Mr. Flake, the republican representative from my district, are some of his best work all session.
With enough public opinion support, some progress on the wiretap issue may be able to be made in the executive and legislative branches, while groups like the ACLU take on what is sure to be a long battle in the judicial. I think at the very least, letting your representatives know how you feel will cause more attention to be placed on explicitly protecting civil liberties the next time Congress votes to authorize use of force.
I hear you. If only there were a way to get prints from a digital camera that one could put into a photo album like with film. That way we could have the best of both worlds, except for being able to hold negatives up to the light and say, "Hee hee, that tree is purple."
I feel your pain about bugs in libraries that you must use without the source code. I had an arrangement like that for nearly two years with extremely buggy code. Just relinking the static library with changes to my code, changing where in memory the library would reside, would often cause huge problems. Let's just say I got really good at debugging in assembly with gdb. I got where I could call them up and say something like, "you have some code at the end of function foo that looks like 'a[2] = b', but a was never allocated." They'd always reply with something like, "Yes it is ... oh wait..."
Some quotes from the President's speech announcing the end of major combat operations in Iraq:
The Congressional Budget Office cost estimate of the war states:
CBO has no basis for estimating other costs that might be associated with a conflict with Iraq such as the costs for coalition war fighting, reconstruction or foreign aid that the United States might choose to extend after a conflict ends, or assistance to casualties, including those that might result from the enemy's use of weapons of mass destruction.
Though admittedly they had no idea how expensive post-war operations in Iraq would be, this clearly shows they anticipated significant and difficult to estimate costs after the initial fighting, which Congress and the White House were aware of before use of force was authorized.
If anyone is guilty of not anticipating the mess in Iraq, it is the American public. I believe the President's words and actions clearly show that he had a pretty good idea of how difficult Iraq would be, but that he thought it would be worth the sacrifice. That may be more disturbing to people than the idea that it was mere miscalculation, but I believe that a few more years will show whether he was right.
If Microsoft is going to decide to start selling 3.1 in developing countries, then I'd say the comparison might be fair. If the only source of the software is that stack of floppies that has been in my garage untouched for a decade, then I don't think it's going to work out. Additionally, I think it is only fair to configure the linux machines in a typical legacy configuration: lightweight window manager, abiword and gnumeric instead of openoffice.org, etc.
Besides, who decided that a developing country still catching up with 100 year old technology needs a 2006 computer system? A text-only 486 with lynx, pico, LaTeX, screen, mutt, mplayer, IRC, and some text based games like these is still light years ahead of what I had regular access to growing up. I'd rather have a school full of those than a few P4's running XP.
- mccain.senate.gov (from earlier visits on my other computer)
- schumer.senate.gov
- durbin.senate.gov
- kerry.senate.gov
- judiciary.senate.gov
- kyl.senate.gov
- frist.senate.gov
- hsc.house.gov
- appropriations.house.gov
At least it's a bipartisan issue. I'd better delete them quickly or people might think I stay informed about my government. Good thing aljazeera.net doesn't set a cookie or my name might appear on the [...this text censored by the NSA...] list.Ooh ooh. I know this one! I'm not a rocket scientist, but I took a class in college.
1 billion Chinese people jumping simultaneously x ~60 kg average weight = ?
Do they have to be holding a magnet?
I am not so ignorant as to believe that everyone's political beliefs fit neatly into the boxes of republican or democrat. Nor am I so dogmatic as to ignore that those categories are applicable enough for most Americans, most of the time.
No one claims that democracy is perfect. It can't be unless people are homogenous. Almost everyone has an opinion on at least one issue which differs from the majority. A vote for a candidate is not an endorsement of his or her opinion on every single issue. It is merely an expression that one candidate's views are closest to yours on most of the issues that are most important to you.
I have never known a candidate to agree with me on every issue. That's why I don't restrict my voting to election day. My elected representatives regularly receive my opinion on all the current issues that are important to me.
The level of public support has a significant impact on the compromises in a bill, how moderates and sometimes minority party members vote, and if a bill even comes up for a vote in the first place. My former congressman once crossed party lines to cosponsor a bill I supported.
Another great example is the patriot act. A shift in public support not only enabled several moderating amendments to be passed so far -- due to efforts on both sides of the aisle that have received almost no media attention -- but also prompted a filibuster on a more moderate version of a bill that only had one nay vote in the senate 4 years ago. The end result will probably be that those portions of the patriot act will be renewed, but with even more amendments to make it a little more palatable to civil libertarians.
If you're a civil libertarian, your vote just counted for something, even if it wasn't as much as you originally hoped for. Choosing not to vote is your right, but there are unintended consequences for such a choice. No politician ever made a decision based on what a majority of non-voters believe, no matter how many +5 insightful comments those non-voters have in YRO.
You should consider your vote as an aggregate of people who think as you do, rather than an individual vote. Don't make the mistake of assuming a bullet isn't dangerous because a single atom of lead isn't dangerous. People who voted for the loser in the last election are more likely to feel that their vote didn't count than those who voted for the winner. Therefore, statistically speaking, choosing not to vote because you feel your vote won't count is more likely to give an advantage to the person you don't want to win rather than have no effect at all on the outcome. That is completely counterintuitive on an individual basis. It only makes sense when you pull back and look at the big picture.
In addition, elected officials change their approach based on their perception of public opinion. Look at how democrats in congress changed their political tactics regarding the Iraq war after presidential approval plummeted last Fall. In an election, it is not only the majority vote that counts. The difference between a close race and a landslide is huge when you look at what actually gets accomplished after the election.
In short, your vote always counts even if it isn't obvious how. And you have nothing to lose except a few minutes of your time. Please always vote. Unless, of course, you're a democrat. Then I don't mind if you stay home ;-)
Here is the FCC application for my 802.11b/g wireless router. At the bottom, it clearly states that it operates under FCC rule parts 15c, which indeed requires FCC certification of the device and not the user, but according to Title 47, part 15.5, "shall not be deemed to have any vested or recognizable right to continued use of any given frequency by virtue of prior registration or certification of equipment."
I'll leave it to you to read the rest of that section, which confirms what I originally stated about interference to licensed users. Licensed users of the frequency are only responsible to not cause interference to other licensed users of that frequency, just like a broadcast radio station doesn't have to care if he interferes with those little FM transmitters that people plug their ipods into so they can listen on their car radio. An amateur radio license is no less valid than the license for your local top 40 radio station. And the authority to operate that little FM transmitter is the same authority for wi-fi routers and microwave ovens, with the same FCC certification requirements.
While technically a request to shut down must come from the FCC and a licensed user can only "ask nicely", just like enforcing the speed limit must come from a law enforcement officer, the fact is that the law is on the side of the licensed user.
Contrast this with the CB and family radio services, for example, which have frequencies specifically set aside for sole use by unlicensed users, with strict equipment specifications. That is what I would consider public spectrum.
There is nothing in section 97.313 that limits the power output to less than 1500 W in that band. However, I concede that there are other requirements for RF exposure, a "minimum necessary power" requirement, and other technical issues that probably limit it practically to 100 W or so. There are probably further restrictions somewhere in the code where unattended operation is concerned. A license is enough permission to use those bands. The only additional requirement needed to run 1500 W of power is a routine environmental evaluation which proves that humans won't be over-exposed (required for transmissions over 250 Watts in that band). The process of performing such an evaluation is a subject of the extra class amateur radio license exam. However, if it is shown that 1500 W was used where 1 W would have been sufficient, the licensee is subject to heavy fines, seizure of his equipment, and forfeiture of his license.
I'm not trumpeting my own horn or going on a power trip, just clearing up a common misconception that wi-fi frequencies are somehow reserved for wi-fi, and trying to present an interesting and extreme counter example. You can argue that wi-fi has become so ubiquitous that it deserves some protection from interference, and I would agree with you, but the current law makes no such guarantee, and it is indeed only through the voluntary cooperation of legitimate licensees of that spectrum (hams aren't the only ones) that lawful interference with wi-fi isn't widespread.
I apologize if I came off snobby, but consider that someone who has passed three increasingly difficult exams dealing with FCC regulations, and has years of experience and training in building and operating radio equipment in compliance with those regulations, has earned the right to speak with some authority on the subject. I'm happy to admit when I'm wrong, but you might want to actually back it up with fact the next time you think you're breaking a power trip.
As a licensed user of several of the WiFi channels I can transmit at 1500 watts over an entire city, if necessary to establish communication, and can interfere with any unlicensed WiFi routers on my channel with impunity. Not only that, if any of those routers are interfering with my signal, they are legally required to shut down or at least change channel.
Think that's unfair? The designers of WiFi were aware of those requirements when they first selected the frequencies. Luckily for all you unlicensed users of WiFi, most of us hams are nice guys who like WiFi for our own networks, and are excited about the availability of cheap hardware for using that part of the spectrum.
I'll agree with you about slashdot leaning to the left. However, intelligence has very little to do with political tendencies, except that those who are more intelligent are more likely to know which party actually represents their fiscal and social interests the best. The poor, who have lower average IQ, have as much tendency to lean to the left as college professors, who have higher average IQ. On the other hand, many poor people and college professors are very conservative.
I've installed numerous versions of Ada and C++ compilers, window managers, gtk, qt, lyx, and more in ~/bin under Solaris without root. Almost all file permission problems are solvable by contacting the file owner directly without involving an admin, and that's usually the courteous thing to do anyway. Things that do actually require root are few and far between in my book. Even if you really need to do something regularly like restart a web server, it can be easily arranged with a one time change to a sudoers file or something. However, that is the exception rather than the rule.
Actually, in the Internet age, it is so easy to obtain primary sources of information that I only use secondary sources like the press for commentary or to point out things I may have missed elsewhere, especially for political news.
For example, if a politician makes a speech that has the press in an uproar, I'll read the transcript of the entire speech or watch the video and form my own opinion, then see what the mass media has to say about it. Al Jazeera's coverage of Bush's speeches can provide quite a bit of insight into the mindset of that region of the World.
Want to know what kind of judge Samuel Alito is? Read his decisions. Want to know why the governor vetoed that bill? Read her letter to the legislature. Want to know what issues are the most important to your congressman? Look up his votes and his speeches in the congressional record. Want to know what's going on in local politics? Look up the agenda for the next town council meeting and read the minutes from the last one. Wonder how far the USA PATRIOT act goes? Read it. Want to know what the democrat or republican parties are focusing on? Read their web sites.
Think that going straight to the source is too much work? You probably already go to a lot of different secondary source web sites for information. The added bonus is that government sponsored web sites are almost always banner ad free and require no registration.
It doesn't just work for politics either. Are you going to get better coverage of the game from the 5 minutes at the end of the news or from nfl.com? Newspaper weather page or weather.com?
I agree. Modding of stories would add a nice aspect to slashdot. The other thing I would love to see is some user profile questions where you rate yourself on spectrums like liberal/conservative, evolutionism/creationism, microsoft/linux and so on, so we can add or subtract mod points like the current system for new users, short posts, long posts, etc. Although reading at +3 usually yields good results for me, sometimes an ultra-conservative creationist like myself can feel pretty alone on slashdot.
Go spend a day in the NICU before you decide that these babies are not worth saving. Preemies are no different than any other babies except for some health problems. You probably know more adults than you realize who were born prematurely. Or perhaps you believe that any human life with any medical condition is not worth preserving? One of my daughter's main problems resulting from her premature birth is far-sightedness. Perhaps we should keep everyone who wears glasses from "polluting" the gene pool. Despite having suffered some brain damage during birth, I suspect my baby girl has more sense than you.
Experiment #1: When my baby girl was old enough that she would turn to look at us when we said something, we got a long tube that we could talk through so that my voice would appear to come from my wife, and vice versa. Turns out my daughter looked at the correct parent, no matter where the voice came from.
Experiment #2: "Her favorite TV show is the wiggles, just look how captivated she is," my wife says. "She just likes the flashy light," I say. "Look, she's just as captivated when I turn it to C-SPAN." Of course, that wasn't very scientific of me, because politicians are often the most childish people on TV.
Experiment #3: Baby likes banging on the computer keyboard, so I set her up with her own account and let her go crazy to test the million monkeys theory on a smaller scale. She hasn't written anything that compiles yet, but at least she has a much lower security vulnerability rate than internet explorer. It's all about choosing the right metrics. Note that there is no measurable difference in her productivity between the dvorak and standard layouts. Bonus: I can now make ad hominem attacks on slashdot that my one year old has more desktop linux experience than you.
So what about you other slashdotters who have spawned child processes? What (harmless) experiments do you do on them?