Linux helps those who refuse to believe all they hear.
GNU/Linux is an operating system. It's not a damned religion. (Substitute Christ for Linux: Christ helps those who refuse to belive all they hear.) Linux is a tool to get a job done.
People don't "understand" their tools, they just use them and the tools just work. You don't "understand" your car, you just drive somewhere... understanding is never an issue until the vehicle malfunctions.
That it doesn't simply work and the *extent* to which it doesn't work is why GNU/Linux is, currently, a failure. Yes, that applies to most other operating systems, though still to lesser degrees than with Linux.
Re:$44 trillion is PV of debt in perpetuity
on
A Mighty Wind
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· Score: 1
Fortunately, since we can predict the weather with 100% accuracy for hundreds of years to come we could just put the wind farm in some location where it will always be windy.
That gives us a choice between Capitol Hill or a big Taco Bell.
Re:Be careful of your evidence
on
A Mighty Wind
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· Score: 1
The Brits recently decided that 'n'illion is 10^(3n+3), so we finally agree on something.
Re:Why the US fought Hitler
on
A Mighty Wind
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· Score: 2, Insightful
For as long as it had a choice, the US chose to stay out of the war.
Or, as Churchill put it, "the Americans always do the right thing after they've exercised every other option."
bear in mind that if we reduce our reliance on oil from the Middle East that the economies of the middle east will all sink like a 747 without an engine at 36,000 feet... plunging them all into a second stone age that, quite frankly, the world wouldn't give half a shit about.
We don't rely on oil from the Middle East. We use oil from all over the world, and anyone's oil can be substituted for anyone else's. In a word, it's fungible.
So if we passed a law saying, "the US will not import Saudi crude," some country would just reexport it to us.
*If* oil suddenly lost its value (cheap fusion power is invented) they wouldn't be that much worse off than Africa.... so I guess your comment about a second stone age is pretty much on target.
Whoa, you have no idea how political whoredom works.
Please explain exactly what 30,000 dollars is going to get you from someone who has raised 40 million. Give examples, sources and a rational explanation of the motives involved.
I see, because that $30,000 Microsoft donated to Bush (that's how much these companies typically donate, I'm probably off by 10 grand or so...) out of his total fund of $40,000,000 gives them a stranglehold on his decision making.
I guess you also think that if you buy a hundred shares of Microsoft, you're going to be let in on board meetings.
Example: the Democrats went after MS, and the Republicans defended them. So MS donates (more) to the GOP. Policy isn't based on donations, the opposite is the case: the two parties have fairly distinct ideologies and donors find whoever matches them. That's why Hollywood donates more to the Dems than the GOP, because the Dems are big supporters of the movie studios and keep Ralph Reed off their backs.
All I can say for sure is that, of the 3 browsers that I use on OS X, (Safari, Netscape,Explorer) Explorer is by far the slowest and buggiest of the lot.
Seriously? I haven't used Netscape in ages, but I use Camino on a regular basis...
Speed: Camino is the fastest, IMHO, followed by IE and Safari is usually choking. Sometimes Camino will kill the processor... generally IE is never too fast, but it doesn't soak the processor like the others.
Conformance: I'm splitting buginess into two parts: Yeah, Caminio and Safari are both more standards conformant... but IE renders a lot of pages that they won't.
Crashing: Safari is the worst offender here. Now, it's a far cry from the Nestcape 3 and 4 days, let alone IE 3, but it does occasionally lock up. I run the nightly builds of Camino, even these aren't as bad as Safari. (Unless, of course, there's static bustage or something, but generally it's more stable than Safari.) IE is final release. It almost never crashes.
What do I want? Simple: a free stable browser. Free as in beer, it's just a browser and I'm not going to pay for Opera because I don't do that much web work. By stable I mean gold master release, and by browser I mean just the stinkin' browser, not an embedded operating system. By those criteria, IE is the only player in the game right now.
Yup. Java the language isn't all that hard... but try explaining to a kid how classpaths work and all that nonsense, or imagine pulling up the APIs and being swamped with fifteen thousand classes.
Even the tutorials would be overwhelming to a kid.
Damn... I know the USSC dredged up a right to privacy from the 5th, but a right to convenience? Where do people come up with this stuff?
When you make a contract with the airline, they can stipulate absolutely any inconvenience they like as part of the contract. They can stipulate that all passengers must agree to an anal probe. Since it's a voluntary contract between two private entities, the bill of rights does not apply. Don't like commercial airlines? Buy your own plane.
The flip side of having a right is that you can sign it away. Example: I have the freedom of speech. I can agree with someone that, say, in exchange for employment, I won't disclose trade secrets. The flip side of freedom of speech, then, is freedom to not speak. The flip side of security in ones house is that you can invite someone in to search.
So what's the big deal if they cooperate with law enforcement? Where's the actual right being affected?
The 1 in 300 MILLION chance that someone is a terrorist on a domestic airline is NOT enough to completely destroy our rights to travel freely.
How is a 1 in 100 chance of having a few questions asked and your bags searched because of a false positive "completely destroying" any of your rights?
That's all El Al does and they NEVER have hijackings.
They also conduct 10 minute interviews with every person who goes through customs. Haven't flown there myself, but a good friend of mine has described it in detail, having gone back and forth dozens of times over the last few years. The security is far more extensive than air marshalls and a few gadgets on the planes.
Israel has a massive, complex security network, and you can't just extract a single entity, El Al, from it and pretend that none of the rest of the government's activities bear on how El Al works.
Designed to make the government even MORE powerful.
I'm as far from a leftist as you can get (note sig), and I think this whole obsession with airport security is pointless.
Who's obsession? The media's obsession or the government's obsession? I agree that the media's obsession is pointless, but I see zero evidence that there is any government obsession. As far as I can tell, we've been catching, bombing, and killing terrorists left and right. In case you hadn't noticed, there were two wars against state sponsors of terrorism. (Hussein's regime was paying Hamas suicide bombers, what, $25,000 to blow up innocents, that much is undisputed.)
Regardless of a no-fly list, there will not be another 9/11, simply because the passengers and pilots will not permit it.
And because there is clear guidance from the top as part of a concerted effort to prevent terrorism. Just as your car is relatively safe because, in addition to the obvious seat belts, there are many other safety features that may not be as effective, but contribute to overall safety.
Furthermore, there's a real possibility that inconveniencing passengers will cost lives. If flying becomes too much of a hassle, more people will drive, where they are far more likely to be killed.
Entirely true, but if we can pretty well stamp out terrorism we will be able to lift these measures. Also, over time we get better at implementing them, so this is sort of an investment of inconvenience.
As the saying goes "A chain is only as strong as its weakest link."
Nice aphorism... but you fail to actually connect the to the problem at hand. And the Maginot line is great for karma whoring, but again, totally unrelated to the issue at hand.
There's simply no way that a failure on the part of a checklist will force all the other parts of the checklist to fail as well.
What is this 'leftist' creature that you talk about? I have seen a dramatic increase in the use of the term in the last couple of years. No doubt its rise in popularity only coincidentally coincides with 2001/09/11. Unfortunately, it seems primarily to be used as a sort of epithet meant to discredit some or other class of opinions.
Generally it refers to progressives, in particular liberals and socialists. It can also refer to left of center moderates.
The snobbish might call it an ad hominem attack--the rest of us recognize it as name-calling. His points aren't valid, because he's a leftist.
I don't think ad hominen is out of reach, hell I've accused people of tu quoque arguments... I didn't insinuate anything about leftists, and that clearly wasn't the main drive of my argument.
Terrorists aren't the only ones with limited resources
It's a list. They check it with a computer. It's definitely one of the cheaper measures they can employ, as I mentioned.
One knee-jerk reaction people have, particularly leftists, is that the watch list is useless and easily evaded, and that it merely exists to make people feel secure.
The reason I single out liberals is that it's a problem they have with evaluating many other issues. In and of itself, a watch list doesn't do much. And this is a standard failure of analysis: it's easy to pooh-pooh any technique on its own, especially in matters of security or warfare, but that fails to see how it fits into the big picture. Terrorists have limited resources, and this forces them to divert those limited resources into getting false papers. It forces them to have to deal with more people, leaving a longer trail of evidence. When you're doing security, you're playing defense because you can never anticipate precisely what they'll do. What you want to do is force your opponent to take as many chances as possible, and ensure that at any point a mistake will foil them.
Any single measure, whether baggage screening, watch lists, can *not* be rationally analyzed independent of a whole system of checks and doublechecks.
Most egregious is the ACLU's highly irresponsible claim that this is a violation of civil liberties. False positives are *not* a violation of civil liberties. You do not have a right to convenience. You do not have an absolute right to fly because you're sharing that plane with 300 other people. This is just grandstanding by the ACLU. If they want to trash the administration, fine, but drop the sanctimony of civil liberties.
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This sounds so cowardly and backwards for true Linux enthusiasts.
Why would you think IBM gives a rat's ass about "true Linux enthusiasts"?
They settled because lawsuits are expensive, and generate bad publicity.
They're rational people: they just want an operating system that works. It's not a religion for them.
Linux helps those who refuse to believe all they hear.
GNU/Linux is an operating system. It's not a damned religion. (Substitute Christ for Linux: Christ helps those who refuse to belive all they hear.) Linux is a tool to get a job done.
People don't "understand" their tools, they just use them and the tools just work. You don't "understand" your car, you just drive somewhere... understanding is never an issue until the vehicle malfunctions.
That it doesn't simply work and the *extent* to which it doesn't work is why GNU/Linux is, currently, a failure. Yes, that applies to most other operating systems, though still to lesser degrees than with Linux.
Fortunately, since we can predict the weather with 100% accuracy for hundreds of years to come we could just put the wind farm in some location where it will always be windy.
That gives us a choice between Capitol Hill or a big Taco Bell.
The Brits recently decided that 'n'illion is 10^(3n+3), so we finally agree on something.
For as long as it had a choice, the US chose to stay out of the war.
Or, as Churchill put it, "the Americans always do the right thing after they've exercised every other option."
bear in mind that if we reduce our reliance on oil from the Middle East that the economies of the middle east will all sink like a 747 without an engine at 36,000 feet... plunging them all into a second stone age that, quite frankly, the world wouldn't give half a shit about.
We don't rely on oil from the Middle East. We use oil from all over the world, and anyone's oil can be substituted for anyone else's. In a word, it's fungible.
So if we passed a law saying, "the US will not import Saudi crude," some country would just reexport it to us.
*If* oil suddenly lost its value (cheap fusion power is invented) they wouldn't be that much worse off than Africa.... so I guess your comment about a second stone age is pretty much on target.
Only about 25% of our oil comes from the Middle East. Most of it (~40%) comes from South America.
First: you're comparing the total donated to *all* Dems and Reps with that donated to a single candidate.
Second: My number came from following the Enron scandal.
Third: From your own site, the *total* Bush got from the *entire* communications industry was around 3 million out of 112 million.
Sorry, you're not convincing anyone.
Whoa, you have no idea how political whoredom works.
Please explain exactly what 30,000 dollars is going to get you from someone who has raised 40 million. Give examples, sources and a rational explanation of the motives involved.
I'm a Republican and I'd knock you down for writing "do to" instead of "due to."
;-)
Of course, we're always happy when Dems complain, it means we must be doing something right.
20gwam?
As in "fuck it, I've been at this for months and I still can't type faster than 20 goddamned words a minute!"
Oh god, I soooo want a new desktop... ...but I soooo want a car...
ARRRRRRGHHH!!!!!
In other words, there are some decent replacements for the browser, and no one really uses MSN Messenger, but on all other points, we'd be fucked.
(iCal and Mail to replace Entourage... you're either joking or unemployed.)
I see, because that $30,000 Microsoft donated to Bush (that's how much these companies typically donate, I'm probably off by 10 grand or so...) out of his total fund of $40,000,000 gives them a stranglehold on his decision making.
I guess you also think that if you buy a hundred shares of Microsoft, you're going to be let in on board meetings.
Example: the Democrats went after MS, and the Republicans defended them. So MS donates (more) to the GOP. Policy isn't based on donations, the opposite is the case: the two parties have fairly distinct ideologies and donors find whoever matches them. That's why Hollywood donates more to the Dems than the GOP, because the Dems are big supporters of the movie studios and keep Ralph Reed off their backs.
All I can say for sure is that, of the 3 browsers that I use on OS X, (Safari, Netscape,Explorer) Explorer is by far the slowest and buggiest of the lot.
Seriously? I haven't used Netscape in ages, but I use Camino on a regular basis...
Speed: Camino is the fastest, IMHO, followed by IE and Safari is usually choking. Sometimes Camino will kill the processor... generally IE is never too fast, but it doesn't soak the processor like the others.
Conformance: I'm splitting buginess into two parts: Yeah, Caminio and Safari are both more standards conformant... but IE renders a lot of pages that they won't.
Crashing: Safari is the worst offender here. Now, it's a far cry from the Nestcape 3 and 4 days, let alone IE 3, but it does occasionally lock up. I run the nightly builds of Camino, even these aren't as bad as Safari. (Unless, of course, there's static bustage or something, but generally it's more stable than Safari.) IE is final release. It almost never crashes.
What do I want? Simple: a free stable browser. Free as in beer, it's just a browser and I'm not going to pay for Opera because I don't do that much web work. By stable I mean gold master release, and by browser I mean just the stinkin' browser, not an embedded operating system. By those criteria, IE is the only player in the game right now.
Yup. Java the language isn't all that hard... but try explaining to a kid how classpaths work and all that nonsense, or imagine pulling up the APIs and being swamped with fifteen thousand classes.
Even the tutorials would be overwhelming to a kid.
The 9/11 hijackers managed what they managed because:
1) There were no sky marshals
2) Everyone had been taught to give in to hijackers
Both of these are no longer true. Anyone who tries to hijack a US aircraft will be jumped by the every passenger on the plane.
And if they just decide to bomb the plane? The idea that we should let hijackers on board and hope we can beat them up is just fucking stupid.
Why the hell should you have to do that just to fly?
Because... this is getting old... there are 299 other people on that plane.
Will you allow the government to force each of us to submit to a computerized sobriety test each time we get behind the wheel?
What about the fact that we're already subjected to far more intrusive sobriety checkpoints?
I don't think these are *good* things and I'd vote against them, but to some extent they are necessary and they're totally lawful.
You've just blasted your own argument to hell there.
Crap, sorry... "whose" not "who's"...
Damn... I know the USSC dredged up a right to privacy from the 5th, but a right to convenience? Where do people come up with this stuff?
When you make a contract with the airline, they can stipulate absolutely any inconvenience they like as part of the contract. They can stipulate that all passengers must agree to an anal probe. Since it's a voluntary contract between two private entities, the bill of rights does not apply. Don't like commercial airlines? Buy your own plane.
The flip side of having a right is that you can sign it away. Example: I have the freedom of speech. I can agree with someone that, say, in exchange for employment, I won't disclose trade secrets. The flip side of freedom of speech, then, is freedom to not speak. The flip side of security in ones house is that you can invite someone in to search.
So what's the big deal if they cooperate with law enforcement? Where's the actual right being affected?
The 1 in 300 MILLION chance that someone is a terrorist on a domestic airline is NOT enough to completely destroy our rights to travel freely.
How is a 1 in 100 chance of having a few questions asked and your bags searched because of a false positive "completely destroying" any of your rights?
That's all El Al does and they NEVER have hijackings.
They also conduct 10 minute interviews with every person who goes through customs. Haven't flown there myself, but a good friend of mine has described it in detail, having gone back and forth dozens of times over the last few years. The security is far more extensive than air marshalls and a few gadgets on the planes.
Israel has a massive, complex security network, and you can't just extract a single entity, El Al, from it and pretend that none of the rest of the government's activities bear on how El Al works.
Designed to make the government even MORE powerful.
Huh? How?
I'm as far from a leftist as you can get (note sig), and I think this whole obsession with airport security is pointless.
Who's obsession? The media's obsession or the government's obsession? I agree that the media's obsession is pointless, but I see zero evidence that there is any government obsession. As far as I can tell, we've been catching, bombing, and killing terrorists left and right. In case you hadn't noticed, there were two wars against state sponsors of terrorism. (Hussein's regime was paying Hamas suicide bombers, what, $25,000 to blow up innocents, that much is undisputed.)
Regardless of a no-fly list, there will not be another 9/11, simply because the passengers and pilots will not permit it.
And because there is clear guidance from the top as part of a concerted effort to prevent terrorism. Just as your car is relatively safe because, in addition to the obvious seat belts, there are many other safety features that may not be as effective, but contribute to overall safety.
Furthermore, there's a real possibility that inconveniencing passengers will cost lives. If flying becomes too much of a hassle, more people will drive, where they are far more likely to be killed.
Entirely true, but if we can pretty well stamp out terrorism we will be able to lift these measures. Also, over time we get better at implementing them, so this is sort of an investment of inconvenience.
As the saying goes "A chain is only as strong as its weakest link."
Nice aphorism... but you fail to actually connect the to the problem at hand. And the Maginot line is great for karma whoring, but again, totally unrelated to the issue at hand.
There's simply no way that a failure on the part of a checklist will force all the other parts of the checklist to fail as well.
In other words, the goverment has the right to set up inconveniences as it wishes?
You're sharing a plane with 300 other people. Problems with reading comprehension?
What is this 'leftist' creature that you talk about? I have seen a dramatic increase in the use of the term in the last couple of years. No doubt its rise in popularity only coincidentally coincides with 2001/09/11. Unfortunately, it seems primarily to be used as a sort of epithet meant to discredit some or other class of opinions.
Generally it refers to progressives, in particular liberals and socialists. It can also refer to left of center moderates.
The snobbish might call it an ad hominem attack--the rest of us recognize it as name-calling. His points aren't valid, because he's a leftist.
I don't think ad hominen is out of reach, hell I've accused people of tu quoque arguments... I didn't insinuate anything about leftists, and that clearly wasn't the main drive of my argument.
Terrorists aren't the only ones with limited resources
It's a list. They check it with a computer. It's definitely one of the cheaper measures they can employ, as I mentioned.
One knee-jerk reaction people have, particularly leftists, is that the watch list is useless and easily evaded, and that it merely exists to make people feel secure.
The reason I single out liberals is that it's a problem they have with evaluating many other issues. In and of itself, a watch list doesn't do much. And this is a standard failure of analysis: it's easy to pooh-pooh any technique on its own, especially in matters of security or warfare, but that fails to see how it fits into the big picture. Terrorists have limited resources, and this forces them to divert those limited resources into getting false papers. It forces them to have to deal with more people, leaving a longer trail of evidence. When you're doing security, you're playing defense because you can never anticipate precisely what they'll do. What you want to do is force your opponent to take as many chances as possible, and ensure that at any point a mistake will foil them.
Any single measure, whether baggage screening, watch lists, can *not* be rationally analyzed independent of a whole system of checks and doublechecks.
Most egregious is the ACLU's highly irresponsible claim that this is a violation of civil liberties. False positives are *not* a violation of civil liberties. You do not have a right to convenience. You do not have an absolute right to fly because you're sharing that plane with 300 other people. This is just grandstanding by the ACLU. If they want to trash the administration, fine, but drop the sanctimony of civil liberties.