The biggest problem with Linux for the Desktop, is this. Linux developers don't seem to remember (if they ever knew) what it was like to be an ignorant user.
Linux for the Desktop has to be made for the ignorant AOL "Me too!" posters that plagued Usenet back in the day.
My sister in law is no IT slouch, but has limited experience with *nix systems. She emailed me the other day to ask what the linux equivalent of dir/p was.
Ask a linux guy that question, and you can get several different answers. And it's a pretty good bet that some of them will involve things which are non-intuitive or just not common place to the *average* computer user. Like piping.
ls -a | less
was what she eventually wound up with, and only because I went off on a tangent about how less is more, and more was the original paginator etc... before I realised what I was doing, and shut the hell up.
Until linux can be made not just user friendly, but *ignorant* user friendly, it won't be a viable Desktop for the mainstream audiences.
That said, Ubuntu has made great strides in that direction.
Israel can grow crops with water amounts that makes everybody else blush with embarrassment.
Have they started using Palestinian blood then?
Israeli propaganda aside, you have to remember that Israel makes a practice of annexing orchards, houses, farms, etc.. and that's hardly a model for self-sufficiency. Not every nation in the world can demand lebensraum.
Israel diverts all of Palestinian Jordan River water and 87% of Palestinian ground water to the state of Israel proper and the illegal Jewish settlers. The remaining 13% of Palestinian ground water is distributed back to 2.5 million Palestinians living in the West Bank.
Israel cuts off Palestinian access to water by destroying wells (Between 2000 and mid-2006, Israel destroyed 244 of Gaza's wells and destroyed 6.2 miles of culinary water lines); destroying all Palestinian pumps and ditches accessing the Jordan River; destroying cisterns and irrigation systems; preventing the construction of new water infrastructure; preventing the repair of out-dated infrastructure; preventing Palestinians from drilling new wells; and hindering access through 'security measures' such as roadblocks, closures, checkpoints, and the wall.
The route of Israel's security wall delineates the eastern boundary of high groundwater production from the Western Aquifer. The wall fences those areas of high water production into Israel, closing off Palestinian access to more than 95% of their groundwater resources, over 630 million cubic meters of water per year.
Since 1967, not one permit has been granted for the drilling of new Palestinian controlled wells in the largest and most productive of all the aquifer basins, the Western Aquifer.
Palestinians pay from four to twenty times more for water than Jewish settlers pay, but are restricted to 10 to 60 liters of water per day, less than the 100 liters-per-day minimum standard set by the World Health Organization. Jewish settlers enjoy from 274 to 450 liters of water per day.
Five thousand Jewish settlers living in the Jordan Valley consume the equivalent of 75% of the water used by the entire West Bank population of over 2.5 million Palestinians.
Crops grown in the fertile Jordan Valley of the West Bank, are grown in Israeli settlements on Palestinian territory. http://bdsmovement.net/?q=node/519
30% of Gaza's arable farmland, and some of it's most fertile, lies within the 'buffer zone'. Farmers attempting to cultivate land in the 'buffer zone' are routinely met with barrages of live ammunition and occasional artillery shells.
Since 2007 Israel has also banned Gazan farmers from selling their crops abroad, where they might compete with Israeli produce http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article11414.shtml They are also facing further restrictions on the types and amounts of products they can grow.
Palestinians must obtain permits from Israel to grow crops. Permits are granted based on whether Palestinian crops compete with Israeli agricultural production. http://icahdusa.org/download/10
He's more likely one of the 25-30% of people who's opinion on governmental authority lies in the "Authoritarian loving" quadrant of the Political Compass.
They have a mind set that craves a strong authoritarian figure or government in their lives, regardless of its morals or lack of same.
I don't understand the mindset, but I know it exists.
as all the "psychics" who "remote viewed" this new Earth-like planet, and regaled their little corners of the internet with tales of really tall humanoid shaped tree dwellers (yeah, go figure) will now have to back-pedal like mad.
And still, their fans will continue to believe this nonsense.
capable of believing up to 16 contradictory things at a time, it's not going to get very far.
The Internet teaches us that President Obama's religion is a Muslim and Christian. His political beliefs are socialist, republican, democrat, and terrorist. He was born in Kenya, Hawaii, and Indonesia.
By the time it gets around to Michael Moore, it'll need a logic bypass.
They used to be taxed at even higher rates, and still had luxurious lifestyles but sadly that's no longer the point. The capacity for greed in the upper class has risen.
Along with this, it is now much much easier for capital flight. (ie for money to leave the country and seek out lower tax havens) If you try taxing the rich beyond their willingness to pay, they will find it a lot easier to simply move the bulk of their wealth somewhere else.
Give it time. There'll be a vastly inferior US remake soon enough, that will still make a lot more money and be more popular, while purists will prefer the original British version.
"we have military bases in almost every country in the world. Why?"
For the same reason the British Empire did, at its height. They represent the US ability to enforce its policies locally, should the need ever arise.
For all its vaunted love of capitalism and the free market, the US frequently relies on market protectionism abroad. (e.g. African farmers can't sell produce to their own people, because it's cheaper to ship subsidised product from Alabama)
Should any countries which have a US base on its soil try to do something radical, like close their markets to subsidised foreign produce, local US forces can make sure that doesn't happen.
Forget dope. Most lawyers *today* have coke habits, with hookers on the side. They aren't in favour of legalising them either. What's the point in being rich and powerful, if you can't readily obtain illegal pleasures denied to the common man?
"There is almost never a situation in the professional world where one must solve a problem with absolutely no references"
Can I just say that I'm actually kind of annoyed at this oft-repeated "truth". It very much depends on how wide or how narrow your "professional world" is.
If you spend all day sitting in a server room, yes, look something up if need be.
If you spend a lot of your day in front of potential clients who like to quiz you on how your proposed solutions to their problems are going to work, then you need to be quick on your feet and have a lot of different things ready to go in your head.
In other words, I'm not saying your original point is wrong, just that it's only true for a (possibly narrow) range of "professional worlds".
Even at this late stage, there are 1) People who still claim there were WMDs. 2) People who say there were WMD's but don't actually believe it anymore. 3) People who say we genuinely thought there WMD's and there was never any reason not to think so. 4) People who say we genuinely thought there WMD's but we were misled by bad intelligence. 5) People who say we genuinely thought there might be WMD's, but if we were wrong, we didn't really care. 6) People who say we never actually thought there were WMD's, but they made a good excuse to invade. 7) People who now say there were no WMD's, but pretend that they knew this all along. 8) People who claim that there never were WMD's, but no one would listen to them.
At any one time, any one of these subsects could be winning the ongoing flame war.
I can't help but think this exercise might have been more meaningful, had it been conducted over a page with less competing factions.
I can't do that with images, music, or anything else, and neither can any other agency. Otherwise, I could just download all the music in the world, and claim that I am building a database for future use in identifying stolen music.
Doesn't work that way.
And yet, bizarrely, it DOES work that way. Just not for the plebian masses like you and me. But for the elites, and our lords and masters, you betcha.
The police, for example, collect paedophiliac imagery and add it to the already massive database they have on the subject. Ostensibly, this is to help track down kids who have been sold into slavery and what not, and potentially identify perps as well as victims.
However, there was already at least one case which came into the public view, when someone who had access to this database accessed it from an unsecure machine across the internet. I could google the reference to this case, but I'm at work, and there's no way I'm going to enter pedo-like words into a search bar while at the office.
"They may make it easier to catch people afterwards, but they don't actually prevent anything."
Just to emphasise, they may make it easier to catch *people*. They do nothing to catch corporations obviously, though corporate crime is almost certainly a bigger threat to national security and well-being than any Joe Schmoe on the street.
In addition, by some strange coincidence, any time the police in the UK have been accused of misdeeds, (such as brutalising innocent members of the public) the relevant CCTV cameras have always been found to have been wiped/malfunctioning/looking in the wrong direction.
If street criminals have even 10% of the luck of these accused police officers, then the CCTV system is basically useless and pointless. We'd be better off relying on members of the public and ubiquitous phone cams. At least *they* have caught the occasional police brutality incident. That makes them superior to the CCTV system in my opinion, and cheaper too.
Two things : 1) The UK is hardly alone in being under the umbrella of Echelon. 2) Echelon now has about the same level of secrecy as Area 51. i.e. it's virtually entirely public knowledge at this point, and has been superseded by systems you have never heard of.
I just read about this, in a book called "13 Things That Do Not Make Sense"
JULY 20, 1976. Gilbert Levin is on the edge of his seat. Millions of kilometres away on Mars, the Viking landers have scooped up some soil and mixed it with carbon-14-labelled nutrients. The mission's scientists have all agreed that if Levin's instruments on board the landers detect emissions of carbon-14-containing methane from the soil, then there must be life on Mars.
Viking reports a positive result. Something is ingesting the nutrients, metabolising them, and then belching out gas laced with carbon-14. So why no party?
Because another instrument, designed to identify organic molecules considered essential signs of life, found nothing. Almost all the mission scientists erred on the side of caution and declared Viking's discovery a false positive. But was it?
The arguments continue to rage, but results from NASA's latest rovers show that the surface of Mars was almost certainly wet in the past and therefore hospitable to life. And there is plenty more evidence where that came from, Levin says. "Every mission to Mars has produced evidence supporting my conclusion. None has contradicted it."
Levin stands by his claim, and he is no longer alone. Joe Miller, a cell biologist at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, has re-analysed the data and he thinks that the emissions show evidence of a circadian cycle. That is highly suggestive of life.
Levin is petitioning ESA and NASA to fly a modified version of his mission to look for "chiral" molecules. These come in left or right-handed versions: they are mirror images of each other. While biological processes tend to produce molecules that favour one chirality over the other, non-living processes create left and right-handed versions in equal numbers. If a future mission to Mars were to find that Martian "metabolism" also prefers one chiral form of a molecule to the other, that would be the best indication yet of life on Mars.
"Something on Mars is ingesting nutrients, metabolising them and then belching out radioactive methane"
I think it's like the "Year of the Desktop" argument.
You say that the tools are already there, but like many Linux advocates also do, you seem to underestimate the laziness of the average computer user who doesn't want to think. They only want to be entertained.
The tools you talk about will have to be integrated in such a way as to be invisible to the average AOL user, and work without his knowledge or participation. Then and only then, will the postcard model of unencrypted data streams be obsolete.
Slashdot Mirror
It's no more dead than it is imminent.
The biggest problem with Linux for the Desktop, is this. Linux developers don't seem to remember (if they ever knew) what it was like to be an ignorant user.
Linux for the Desktop has to be made for the ignorant AOL "Me too!" posters that plagued Usenet back in the day.
My sister in law is no IT slouch, but has limited experience with *nix systems. She emailed me the other day to ask what the linux equivalent of dir /p was.
Ask a linux guy that question, and you can get several different answers. And it's a pretty good bet that some of them will involve things which are non-intuitive or just not common place to the *average* computer user. Like piping.
ls -a | less
was what she eventually wound up with, and only because I went off on a tangent about how less is more, and more was the original paginator etc... before I realised what I was doing, and shut the hell up.
Until linux can be made not just user friendly, but *ignorant* user friendly, it won't be a viable Desktop for the mainstream audiences.
That said, Ubuntu has made great strides in that direction.
Israel can grow crops with water amounts that makes everybody else blush with embarrassment.
Have they started using Palestinian blood then?
Israeli propaganda aside, you have to remember that Israel makes a practice of annexing orchards, houses, farms, etc.. and that's hardly a model for self-sufficiency. Not every nation in the world can demand lebensraum.
Israel diverts all of Palestinian Jordan River water and 87% of Palestinian ground water to the state of Israel proper and the illegal Jewish settlers. The remaining 13% of Palestinian ground water is distributed back to 2.5 million Palestinians living in the West Bank.
Israel cuts off Palestinian access to water by destroying wells (Between 2000 and mid-2006, Israel destroyed 244 of Gaza's wells and destroyed 6.2 miles of culinary water lines); destroying all Palestinian pumps and ditches accessing the Jordan River; destroying cisterns and irrigation systems; preventing the construction of new water infrastructure; preventing the repair of out-dated infrastructure; preventing Palestinians from drilling new wells; and hindering access through 'security measures' such as roadblocks, closures, checkpoints, and the wall.
The route of Israel's security wall delineates the eastern boundary of high groundwater production from the Western Aquifer. The wall fences those areas of high water production into Israel, closing off Palestinian access to more than 95% of their groundwater resources, over 630 million cubic meters of water per year.
Since 1967, not one permit has been granted for the drilling of new Palestinian controlled wells in the largest and most productive of all the aquifer basins, the Western Aquifer.
Palestinians pay from four to twenty times more for water than Jewish settlers pay, but are restricted to 10 to 60 liters of water per day, less than the 100 liters-per-day minimum standard set by the World Health Organization. Jewish settlers enjoy from 274 to 450 liters of water per day.
Five thousand Jewish settlers living in the Jordan Valley consume the equivalent of 75% of the water used by the entire West Bank population of over 2.5 million Palestinians.
Crops grown in the fertile Jordan Valley of the West Bank, are grown in Israeli settlements on Palestinian territory.
http://bdsmovement.net/?q=node/519
The Israeli military shoots unarmed farmers
http://palsolidarity.org/2010/06/12759/
30% of Gaza's arable farmland, and some of it's most fertile, lies within the 'buffer zone'.
Farmers attempting to cultivate land in the 'buffer zone' are routinely met with barrages of live ammunition and occasional artillery shells.
Since 2007 Israel has also banned Gazan farmers from selling their crops abroad, where they might compete with Israeli produce
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article11414.shtml
They are also facing further restrictions on the types and amounts of products they can grow.
Palestinians must obtain permits from Israel to grow crops. Permits are granted based on whether Palestinian crops compete with Israeli agricultural production.
http://icahdusa.org/download/10
He's more likely one of the 25-30% of people who's opinion on governmental authority lies in the "Authoritarian loving" quadrant of the Political Compass.
They have a mind set that craves a strong authoritarian figure or government in their lives, regardless of its morals or lack of same.
I don't understand the mindset, but I know it exists.
as all the "psychics" who "remote viewed" this new Earth-like planet, and regaled their little corners of the internet with tales of really tall humanoid shaped tree dwellers (yeah, go figure) will now have to back-pedal like mad.
And still, their fans will continue to believe this nonsense.
(/rant)
capable of believing up to 16 contradictory things at a time, it's not going to get very far.
The Internet teaches us that President Obama's religion is a Muslim and Christian. His political beliefs are socialist, republican, democrat, and terrorist. He was born in Kenya, Hawaii, and Indonesia.
By the time it gets around to Michael Moore, it'll need a logic bypass.
They used to be taxed at even higher rates, and still had luxurious lifestyles but sadly that's no longer the point.
The capacity for greed in the upper class has risen.
Along with this, it is now much much easier for capital flight. (ie for money to leave the country and seek out lower tax havens)
If you try taxing the rich beyond their willingness to pay, they will find it a lot easier to simply move the bulk of their wealth somewhere else.
"keeping the troops from doing what they were sent there to do, to fight or engage local people."
Well, at least they're finally being honest about it. None of this "To bring democracy" crap.
I wish there was a US version.
Give it time. There'll be a vastly inferior US remake soon enough, that will still make a lot more money and be more popular, while purists will prefer the original British version.
If memory serves, didn't the US government make the private ownership of gold illegal in times of severe crisis in the past?
Don't they have a precedent for seizing precious metals from their citizenry, without recompense?
Immediate attack on the parent poster's political affiliation
Politics has been tangentially mentioned, so I'll toss in a pithy pun relating to the bias of a mainstream television news network.
"we have military bases in almost every country in the world. Why?"
For the same reason the British Empire did, at its height. They represent the US ability to enforce its policies locally, should the need ever arise.
For all its vaunted love of capitalism and the free market, the US frequently relies on market protectionism abroad. (e.g. African farmers can't sell produce to their own people, because it's cheaper to ship subsidised product from Alabama)
Should any countries which have a US base on its soil try to do something radical, like close their markets to subsidised foreign produce, local US forces can make sure that doesn't happen.
That assumes that the Greens will actually honour that stance, as opposed to merely giving vocal support to gain some minority votes.
Milla Jovavich and Ali Larter, saving the world through passionate lesbian sex.
At least it will in my theatre.
The respawn time sucks everywhere, not just Afghanistan.
Forget dope. Most lawyers *today* have coke habits, with hookers on the side.
They aren't in favour of legalising them either. What's the point in being rich and powerful, if you can't readily obtain illegal pleasures denied to the common man?
I want my kills to look hyper-realistic. And soon.
"There is almost never a situation in the professional world where one must solve a problem with absolutely no references"
Can I just say that I'm actually kind of annoyed at this oft-repeated "truth".
It very much depends on how wide or how narrow your "professional world" is.
If you spend all day sitting in a server room, yes, look something up if need be.
If you spend a lot of your day in front of potential clients who like to quiz you on how your proposed solutions to their problems are going to work, then you need to be quick on your feet and have a lot of different things ready to go in your head.
In other words, I'm not saying your original point is wrong, just that it's only true for a (possibly narrow) range of "professional worlds".
Even at this late stage, there are
1) People who still claim there were WMDs.
2) People who say there were WMD's but don't actually believe it anymore.
3) People who say we genuinely thought there WMD's and there was never any reason not to think so.
4) People who say we genuinely thought there WMD's but we were misled by bad intelligence.
5) People who say we genuinely thought there might be WMD's, but if we were wrong, we didn't really care.
6) People who say we never actually thought there were WMD's, but they made a good excuse to invade.
7) People who now say there were no WMD's, but pretend that they knew this all along.
8) People who claim that there never were WMD's, but no one would listen to them.
At any one time, any one of these subsects could be winning the ongoing flame war.
I can't help but think this exercise might have been more meaningful, had it been conducted over a page with less competing factions.
They're not claiming copyright or publicly using it to make money on their website
Oh, I get it! If I don't claim copyright, or publicly use it to make money on my website, I can have a personal for-use copy of anything I like.
If only the courts thought the same way.
I can't do that with images, music, or anything else, and neither can any other agency. Otherwise, I could just download all the music in the world, and claim that I am building a database for future use in identifying stolen music.
Doesn't work that way.
And yet, bizarrely, it DOES work that way. Just not for the plebian masses like you and me. But for the elites, and our lords and masters, you betcha.
The police, for example, collect paedophiliac imagery and add it to the already massive database they have on the subject. Ostensibly, this is to help track down kids who have been sold into slavery and what not, and potentially identify perps as well as victims.
However, there was already at least one case which came into the public view, when someone who had access to this database accessed it from an unsecure machine across the internet. I could google the reference to this case, but I'm at work, and there's no way I'm going to enter pedo-like words into a search bar while at the office.
"They may make it easier to catch people afterwards, but they don't actually prevent anything."
Just to emphasise, they may make it easier to catch *people*.
They do nothing to catch corporations obviously, though corporate crime is almost certainly a bigger threat to national security and well-being than any Joe Schmoe on the street.
In addition, by some strange coincidence, any time the police in the UK have been accused of misdeeds, (such as brutalising innocent members of the public) the relevant CCTV cameras have always been found to have been wiped/malfunctioning/looking in the wrong direction.
If street criminals have even 10% of the luck of these accused police officers, then the CCTV system is basically useless and pointless.
We'd be better off relying on members of the public and ubiquitous phone cams. At least *they* have caught the occasional police brutality incident. That makes them superior to the CCTV system in my opinion, and cheaper too.
Two things : 1) The UK is hardly alone in being under the umbrella of Echelon.
2) Echelon now has about the same level of secrecy as Area 51. i.e. it's virtually entirely public knowledge at this point, and has been superseded by systems you have never heard of.
I just read about this, in a book called "13 Things That Do Not Make Sense"
JULY 20, 1976. Gilbert Levin is on the edge of his seat. Millions of kilometres away on Mars, the Viking landers have scooped up some soil and mixed it with carbon-14-labelled nutrients. The mission's scientists have all agreed that if Levin's instruments on board the landers detect emissions of carbon-14-containing methane from the soil, then there must be life on Mars.
Viking reports a positive result. Something is ingesting the nutrients, metabolising them, and then belching out gas laced with carbon-14.
So why no party?
Because another instrument, designed to identify organic molecules considered essential signs of life, found nothing. Almost all the mission scientists erred on the side of caution and declared Viking's discovery a false positive. But was it?
The arguments continue to rage, but results from NASA's latest rovers show that the surface of Mars was almost certainly wet in the past and therefore hospitable to life. And there is plenty more evidence where that came from, Levin says. "Every mission to Mars has produced evidence supporting my conclusion. None has contradicted it."
Levin stands by his claim, and he is no longer alone. Joe Miller, a cell biologist at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, has re-analysed the data and he thinks that the emissions show evidence of a circadian cycle. That is highly suggestive of life.
Levin is petitioning ESA and NASA to fly a modified version of his mission to look for "chiral" molecules. These come in left or right-handed versions: they are mirror images of each other. While biological processes tend to produce molecules that favour one chirality over the other, non-living processes create left and right-handed versions in equal numbers. If a future mission to Mars were to find that Martian "metabolism" also prefers one chiral form of a molecule to the other, that would be the best indication yet of life on Mars.
"Something on Mars is ingesting nutrients, metabolising them and then belching out radioactive methane"
I think it's like the "Year of the Desktop" argument.
You say that the tools are already there, but like many Linux advocates also do, you seem to underestimate the laziness of the average computer user who doesn't want to think. They only want to be entertained.
The tools you talk about will have to be integrated in such a way as to be invisible to the average AOL user, and work without his knowledge or participation. Then and only then, will the postcard model of unencrypted data streams be obsolete.
"Likewise when they speak of US losses, the US brought lots of military might that was crucial but it was Europeans doing most of the dying."
Actually, it was the Russians who did most of the dying. But other than that, fair point.