The Law has never been about logic and reason, and as The Law intersects more and more with technology, we shall see even more of this type of tomfoolery.
To expect a Judge to be able to understand one iota of network technology is is simply expecting too much. A Judge that tech savvy would not be a Judge for very long!
I suspect many wind up in Law and various civil servant positions precisely because they fail at technology and understanding it.
Being a Judge comes under the rubric of:
If you're smart enough to do the job,
You're not dumb enough to do the job!
Imagine being in a room completely covered with these carbon nanotubes. Even with a bright lamp with you, you'd feel as though you're sitting in outer space. Worse even, since you'd see no stars. It would be quite stunning, and could make a cool exhibit at some science museum.
I wonder what it would cost to do? It would be wicked cool to do this to a bedroom!!!!
If you trust everything the Food & Drug Administration tells you, good luck.
I don't deem dead land animal flesh safe to eat at all, cloned or not. And there are many studies to support this, including The China Study.
I'd worry more about the high proliferation of the use of High Fructose Corn Syrup, now used in nearly all process foods from Ketchup to cookies.
Not to mention the problems with Milk and other dairy products considering that 3/4ths of the world's population is lactose intolerant, just for starters.
Yes, there are definitely a few who do it for the love of teaching and doing "pure" research. Alas, the few are not representative of the many.
I personally would love to teach and do pure research, but it doesn't pay well, and I would be spending way too much of my time filling out grant proposals and doing test scores. Moreover, as -- as you say -- budgets become more restrained, the politics become more of a factor in being able to do real science.
The politics, I think will wind up driving science out of this country to others. The US is quickly becoming a second-class nation in the world. The US lags behind many other nations technically, academically, economically, and even morally. Sad state of affairs, really.
I -- and proudly so -- call myself an "Atheist" because it gets the message across quickly. In actual fact, I have moved far beyond any notions of "Atheism" -- that is to say, Atheism is only a tiny fraction of what I am and what I have become. But for simple minds, it saves me a lot of time.
I don't care as much about the meaning of words as I do using them as a memetic vehicle. Ultimately, human language itself is so limiting.
"In God we trust; from all others, we need source code."
I don't even trust God; I want his source code too!!!!
And besides, looking at the structure of complex systems in this universe, I'd say "God" is a very lousy programmer! It would seem he can do no better than what selectionist approaches would give us. And if "God" can do no better than natural selection, why posit a "God" at all?
At one time I thought Gingrich had a lot of good ideas. Not that I agreed with everything he said, but he seemed to be pointing in the right direction. I became rather disappointed with him to find that it was all just talk and he was just a political animal like the rest inside the belt.
Many -- including politicians, believe it or not -- seem to have good ideas and a good sense of where we should be, but fail to act on those ideas, even when its in their power to do so.
Politics is a joke, and I've given completely up on it after many years of trying that angle to little or no effect.
We need a better approach, and I am quietly working on it. More later.
Instead of the OLPC for the US, why not recycle old computers for that purpose? A lot of older computers that are no longer "found useful" could be recycled and refurbished, with a version of Linux loaded onto them that would be perfect for the task.
This would also make for a greener solution, and a small move away from our disposable mentality.
Also, the kids could take a firm part in the refurbishment and reuse of these old computers, which would also teach them some technical skills.
But ultimately, I smell a problem in the works here. So far, the push to place computers into schools have been met with mixed results, and usually the students are far more knowledgeable about the computers and their use than the teachers are. In other cases, control over the use of the computers by the schools can be rather draconian, hampering the free exploration of all the possibilities for fear of being suspended -- or worse.
In short, OLPC is not the panacea "everyone" hopes it will be. There are far deeper problems with US schools that will not be solved with sticking a computer on every kids' lap. For instance, it seems that many teachers in public schools are firmly against students using Wikipedia a source of information because "anybody can modify it". While this is true, the quality of the information on Wikipedia is not bad, and in most cases much better than the information you find in your average text book that public schools typically use. Besides, I always wondered why they couldn't just go there themselves and fix any information they found lacking. Obviously, they are not getting it. The problem stems from a deeper mindset that "authority is never wrong", and that's the whole thing that the Internet challenges.
I also question the value of giving a kid a laptop when perhaps her needs might be better served by giving her food and addressing health needs instead? The so-called "digital divide" is specious at best; there is a greater economic and health disparity issue that take priority, and I would say in large part it's more a problem of politics than of economics, anyway.
The flip-side of that sad reality is that if a prof DID know how to teach the students to industry expectations, said prof himself could go out into that industry and double his salary.
Certain jobs -- like teaching -- comes under my old adage of:
If you are smart enough to do the job, you're not dumb enough to do the job!
I'm sure you all can think of a number of other jobs that would fit that distinction!
While I agree to a good extent with many of the points pointed out in the article, the source of the article -- The Journal of Defense Software Engineering -- leads me to wonder. What these guys are interested in is creating newer and smarter killing technology for war. I have almost never heard of ADA being used outside of the military/government context. The writer seems to have an extremly strong bias towards strongly-typed languages, which I consider bad. Having done lots of C and C++ in my career, as well as lots of Python, PHP, Ruby, Perl, etc., I can say both strongly and weakly-typed languages have their places. If you are writing air-traffic control systems or other mission-critical systems that may result in the loss of human life if a bug is present, I would lean towards more strongly-typed languages (and NOT towards C++ or C!) If you are in the ever-changing web market where time to market is critical, weakly-typed languages like PHP, Python, Perl, and Ruby sings the day in allowing you to do rapid prototyping and deployment.
Java has its own special niche, kind of a middle-road for when you need reliable systems more or less quickly, but perhaps not by tomorrow, such as in financial institutions and what not.
C and C++ are meant for systems development, and excel at that, leveraging the power of writing in assembly without the hassles of assembly. You can make great and wondrous use of pointers if you know what you are doing. You can write fast real-time code that runs in a small footprint. You can also hang yourself easily if you have no clue.:-)
I have been around for a while, and still choose to do many things with the command-line and with emacs on Linux. I do work with those who would probably croak if I took away their Eclispe IDE. Though, for database architecture, I have chosen to use an IDE for that, simply because it makes it easy to make changes in the schema, and it creates all these pretty ER diagrams that I can share with others.
As far as exporting software development, good luck. From what I understand it's a crapshoot. In many cases you get crummy code, but you may not care about that if it works and you got it on the cheap. Of course, if you had to maintain it....!!!!
So, I think the author of that article is a bit overblown though he does make a number of salient points. And of course, I question his motives of brain-draining even more rare talent for the productions of weapons and other systems of mass destruction.
They don't have to be smart -- but just buy them from people that are.
And a way to confound the jamming will be found, of course.
All this will do is actually make flying less safe as it brings the attention of the terrorist to finding new ways to bring those jets down.
As I stated earlier, it's not hard to build your own laser if you know how to work glass or just understand how lasers work in general, never mind that industrial lasers are available everywhere. So now maybe the would-be terrorist will switch from using shoulder missiles to shoulder lasers. It may not have to be strong enough to burn through the fuselage, but to blind the pilots.
Well, the US government sure loves controlling its people through fear. And that is nothing new -- governments have a long history of controlling its subjects through fear.
What is the actual threat of an airline being hit by a shoulder missle launched over US soil? How many times have this happened in the past? Is there a real threat at all?
As far as I can tell, the threat of this is zero. And in the world at large, I ask the same questions. How many times have a US commerial jet has been attacked by a shoulder-launched missle -- or any missle at all? Does the outlay of the cost justifies arming all US commercial jets with this silly technology?
Now, what is really going on here? I don't want to sound like a conspiracy theory nut, but my guess is that those lasers will be use for purposes other than stated. The "sales pitch" to the public, of course, is to "protect" them from a non-existent threat. But what's the real story here? Flying is and still remains by far the safest mode of travel, and I say that even if one plane per year were to be brought down by a missle or other means even over US soil, airplanes would still remain the safest way to travel, given the 41,000 annual deaths on our roadways per year.
Now, on the other hand, think of what those lasers could really be used for. If the laser is strong enough to scramble guidiance systems on missles, it's also strong enough to fry people and vechiles on the ground. I also question how the lasers would be controlled. Would they be under the control of the piolot? Or under remote control somehwere else? If under remote control, that opens up even more vunerabilities -- a rouge cracker to take over the system and fry people or cars or buildings on the ground -- or the government could claim such happened.
Meanwhile, you start an arms race. What's to stop a would-be terrorist from building a plane-zapping laser that will not only be as effective at bringing down the plane, but no defense would exist against?
It's rather easy to build a CO2 laser if you know how to work glass. Or you can just purchase an industrial laser from anywhere. Much easier to move around than missles, can be used any number of times before the laser system itself burns out, and there would not be much of a trace of what brought the plane down.
I predict that if the US government start arming planes with lasers, would-be terrorists will rise to the occasion and show how easy it will be to defeat such a system. Lasers mounted on commercial jets will have the opposite effect in making flying less safe, not more, while at the same time giving the government a very dangerous weapon it could choose to use against civilians or could be comprimised by crackers -- perhaps even cracker terrorists -- to do any number of things.
We must put an end to the outlandish scemes of the US military. Give them the chance and they'll come up with "reasons" why even baby strollers should be militarized!!!!!
What I am more pissed about than electronic SPAM is the torrents of snail SPAM that arrives at my mail box every day, including multiple offers from a certain "What's in Your Wallet" credit card company. I have to spend time shredding these offers before throwing them out to prevent possible identity theft from dumpster diving tycoons. This time is wasted time I could better be spending writing great new software, enjoying my SO, and other enjoyable activities.
What I want is an option to opt out of *all* unsolicited junk mail, especially anything that is marked "To Resident". Imagine how many trees would be saved!!!
But you must understand that the spice of life is that very risk of being caught! That's what makes it so exciting!
Of course, when you DO get caught, all bets are off.
If Ralsky had been smart, he'd move his operation outside of any country with stiff anti-spamming laws. And being a multi-millionaire, this would've been easy for him to do.
Quite frankly, I am unimpressed with this story. This will not put a dent in spam. If anything, it'll only attract more to doing the same, for where there is money, there are exploiters. And perhaps they'll be smarter than Ralsky and do things in a manner that'll make it difficult to be caught -- or at the very least skip out of the country after accumulating so many $$$$$!
Meanwhile, I will still be deleting spam out of my inboxes. But I've been using a lot of whitelisting techniques to get around the spam issue. But then, I do host my own mail servers, which helps.
So, does that mean that if I write a compiler or scripting language, that I could be nailed for creating a hacker tool as well?
Well, they may as well outlaw all of software development, because any software tool can be put to malicious purposes.
What they should focus on instead are the actual actions taken by individuals to compromise someone's computer or network, not the tools they use to do it with. For instance, there's already a number of tools on the market and in FOSS that can do DDoS attacks -- but they are normally used to stress-test a web site or some other network application.
The whole "intent" bit is always a slippery slope, ready for Kangaroo Court time. Obviously, these idiot politicians never saw or read "Minority Report", where going after "pre-crime" turnned out to cause more problems than it solved.
Yes, the governments of the world are not unlike a bunch of monkeys with dangerous toys -- total unbridled power, without the wisdom nor the precision to use it properly.
As one who has designed GUI for many years (pre-Web), I can say that good GUI design is not an easy thing to come by.
You have to look at and understand your audience intimately. Demographics matter, too. What works for 20-somethings might totally confuse 50-somethings.
And today, good GUI design is even made trickier by the expectations users have from using the best applications and web sites. If your application is very "MySpace"-like and is intended for that same audience, you'd better make sure it's a good match.
Also, gone are the days you can expect your audience to RTFM to use your application. It must be obvious from the first click of the button.
But to our credit as GUI designers, today's audience is much more sophisticated than those pre-Web. So, if you stick to certain measures, it's actually easier than it was before. And there are many tools to help you, too.
I get harassed most of the time at the border between Canada and the US. If you appear to be anything than a boring tourist, you get yanked over and grilled with a thousand annoying and probing questions. Canadian customs even asked me how money I have in my bank account!!!!! What bug-eyed business is it of theirs how much money I keep in my bank accounts?
Governments exist to complicate our lives. They offer us little of any real value and harass us to the nth degree, take our money away to squander it on wasteful endeavors, and regulate us to death.
Now, my friends, what is wrong with this picture? And what are we going to do about it?
Since January 2006, behavior-detection officers have referred about 70,000 people for secondary screening, Maccario said. Of those, about 600 to 700 were arrested on a variety of charges, including possession of drugs, weapons violations and outstanding warrants.
Out of 70,000 people that were harassed by these so-called "Airport Profilers", only about 700 of them were found to be guilty of anything at all. That's a pretty lousy false-positive rate of 99%, which means, of course, 69,300 of these people were needlessly bothered and harassed and humiliated and personally violated.
Of the 700 or so that was guilty "of something", none were found to be "terrorists".
Am I missing something here? When was the last time a "terrorist" was found by the TSA in the US? And how much money is being spent on the TSA?
How many people die in traffic accidents per year? 41,000 or so? How many people in the US die of terrorism in the US per year? Let's average over a decade to account for 911. Over the past ten years, an estimated 410,000 died on our roadways, yet only 3000 by terrorists. So nearly 137 times the number of people in the last 10 years died on the road vs. terrorism, and yet how much money is spent on traffic safety vs. Homeland (In)Security? Am I missing something here?
You wonderful hard-earned gun-extracted Tax Dollars being put to such useful and meaningful work!!!
Is this even a real story? Or just something to "inspire conversation?" There were no reference links to any news story about how someone lost a job due to his off-time internet activities.
While it is a topic of concern, why waste time with it until it does become a legit concern? Don't we have enough real problems on our plates right now that we don't have to go fishing for "virtual pet peeves?"
Come on Slashdot, you have enough real material that you don't have to resort to this!
Having been a long-time Fedora user, I just switched to Ubuntu as my platform choice for development. Now, my particular development environment does have some dependency on the Fedora directory structure, but this was easy enough to work around on Ubuntu.
The thing I like about Ubuntu is that much of the software I had to hand-compile under Fedora is available with full functionality via apt-get on Ubuntu. Very nice. I don't know if Fedora 8 fixed this annoyance because I made the switch as F8 was released.
Ultimately, I muck about with the distro so much it doesn't really matter to me all that much anymore where it comes from.
One pet peeve for both Ubuntu and Fedora is the lack of support for having multiple monitors in a way that is easily configurable. I had to muck about directly with xorg.conf on Ubuntu as much as I had to do under Fedora to get all 3 of my monitors to come up properly! Come on, guys! This is a no-brainer on Windows and the Mac. Why is this still a pain under Linux???
Overall, I like Ubuntu a bit better than Fedora at this point -- though another pet peeve is that their default desktop is Gnome and not KDE. A minor nit, but one I find pestering.
Personally, I want no part in promoting technology to an organization that harms and kills innocent people -- such as the military. Let alone the recent tortures and illegal "detainments" the US military has engaged in.
"Yes, this village of children and their parents reduced to a smoky hole in a ground made possible by missiles running Linux!" Really, do we want that kind of association for something that is otherwise so wonder and represents the major achievement of OpenSource?
Sorry, I do not wish to OpenSource death and destruction. If the military wants to use Linux to manage their death infrastructure, not much we can do to stop them. But to encourage them to do so? Not in the name of OpenSource!!!!
Slashdot Mirror
To expect a Judge to be able to understand one iota of network technology is is simply expecting too much. A Judge that tech savvy would not be a Judge for very long!
I suspect many wind up in Law and various civil servant positions precisely because they fail at technology and understanding it.
Being a Judge comes under the rubric of:
If you're smart enough to do the job,
You're not dumb enough to do the job!
Well, now the cops can really make sure you understand them before they shoot you! Never forget Amadou Diallo!!!!
I wonder what it would cost to do? It would be wicked cool to do this to a bedroom!!!!
I don't deem dead land animal flesh safe to eat at all, cloned or not. And there are many studies to support this, including The China Study.
I'd worry more about the high proliferation of the use of High Fructose Corn Syrup, now used in nearly all process foods from Ketchup to cookies.
Not to mention the problems with Milk and other dairy products considering that 3/4ths of the world's population is lactose intolerant, just for starters.
But Mommy Government could never be wrong, right?
I personally would love to teach and do pure research, but it doesn't pay well, and I would be spending way too much of my time filling out grant proposals and doing test scores. Moreover, as -- as you say -- budgets become more restrained, the politics become more of a factor in being able to do real science.
The politics, I think will wind up driving science out of this country to others. The US is quickly becoming a second-class nation in the world. The US lags behind many other nations technically, academically, economically, and even morally. Sad state of affairs, really.
I don't care as much about the meaning of words as I do using them as a memetic vehicle. Ultimately, human language itself is so limiting.
Hint: I'm an Atheist.
My friends, it is high time we start encrypting everything. We'll just have to make PGP/GPG easier to use by the masses.
I don't even trust God; I want his source code too!!!!
And besides, looking at the structure of complex systems in this universe, I'd say "God" is a very lousy programmer! It would seem he can do no better than what selectionist approaches would give us. And if "God" can do no better than natural selection, why posit a "God" at all?
At one time I thought Gingrich had a lot of good ideas. Not that I agreed with everything he said, but he seemed to be pointing in the right direction. I became rather disappointed with him to find that it was all just talk and he was just a political animal like the rest inside the belt.
Many -- including politicians, believe it or not -- seem to have good ideas and a good sense of where we should be, but fail to act on those ideas, even when its in their power to do so.
Politics is a joke, and I've given completely up on it after many years of trying that angle to little or no effect.
We need a better approach, and I am quietly working on it. More later.
This would also make for a greener solution, and a small move away from our disposable mentality.
Also, the kids could take a firm part in the refurbishment and reuse of these old computers, which would also teach them some technical skills.
But ultimately, I smell a problem in the works here. So far, the push to place computers into schools have been met with mixed results, and usually the students are far more knowledgeable about the computers and their use than the teachers are. In other cases, control over the use of the computers by the schools can be rather draconian, hampering the free exploration of all the possibilities for fear of being suspended -- or worse.
In short, OLPC is not the panacea "everyone" hopes it will be. There are far deeper problems with US schools that will not be solved with sticking a computer on every kids' lap. For instance, it seems that many teachers in public schools are firmly against students using Wikipedia a source of information because "anybody can modify it". While this is true, the quality of the information on Wikipedia is not bad, and in most cases much better than the information you find in your average text book that public schools typically use. Besides, I always wondered why they couldn't just go there themselves and fix any information they found lacking. Obviously, they are not getting it. The problem stems from a deeper mindset that "authority is never wrong", and that's the whole thing that the Internet challenges.
I also question the value of giving a kid a laptop when perhaps her needs might be better served by giving her food and addressing health needs instead? The so-called "digital divide" is specious at best; there is a greater economic and health disparity issue that take priority, and I would say in large part it's more a problem of politics than of economics, anyway.
Ah, tunnel diodes! I loved playing with them when I was a kid! Brings back some fond memories...
Certain jobs -- like teaching -- comes under my old adage of:
If you are smart enough to do the job, you're not dumb enough to do the job!
I'm sure you all can think of a number of other jobs that would fit that distinction!
Java has its own special niche, kind of a middle-road for when you need reliable systems more or less quickly, but perhaps not by tomorrow, such as in financial institutions and what not.
C and C++ are meant for systems development, and excel at that, leveraging the power of writing in assembly without the hassles of assembly. You can make great and wondrous use of pointers if you know what you are doing. You can write fast real-time code that runs in a small footprint. You can also hang yourself easily if you have no clue. :-)
I have been around for a while, and still choose to do many things with the command-line and with emacs on Linux. I do work with those who would probably croak if I took away their Eclispe IDE. Though, for database architecture, I have chosen to use an IDE for that, simply because it makes it easy to make changes in the schema, and it creates all these pretty ER diagrams that I can share with others.
As far as exporting software development, good luck. From what I understand it's a crapshoot. In many cases you get crummy code, but you may not care about that if it works and you got it on the cheap. Of course, if you had to maintain it....!!!!
So, I think the author of that article is a bit overblown though he does make a number of salient points. And of course, I question his motives of brain-draining even more rare talent for the productions of weapons and other systems of mass destruction.
And a way to confound the jamming will be found, of course.
All this will do is actually make flying less safe as it brings the attention of the terrorist to finding new ways to bring those jets down.
As I stated earlier, it's not hard to build your own laser if you know how to work glass or just understand how lasers work in general, never mind that industrial lasers are available everywhere. So now maybe the would-be terrorist will switch from using shoulder missiles to shoulder lasers. It may not have to be strong enough to burn through the fuselage, but to blind the pilots.
Well, the US government sure loves controlling its people through fear. And that is nothing new -- governments have a long history of controlling its subjects through fear.
As far as I can tell, the threat of this is zero. And in the world at large, I ask the same questions. How many times have a US commerial jet has been attacked by a shoulder-launched missle -- or any missle at all? Does the outlay of the cost justifies arming all US commercial jets with this silly technology?
Now, what is really going on here? I don't want to sound like a conspiracy theory nut, but my guess is that those lasers will be use for purposes other than stated. The "sales pitch" to the public, of course, is to "protect" them from a non-existent threat. But what's the real story here? Flying is and still remains by far the safest mode of travel, and I say that even if one plane per year were to be brought down by a missle or other means even over US soil, airplanes would still remain the safest way to travel, given the 41,000 annual deaths on our roadways per year.
Now, on the other hand, think of what those lasers could really be used for. If the laser is strong enough to scramble guidiance systems on missles, it's also strong enough to fry people and vechiles on the ground. I also question how the lasers would be controlled. Would they be under the control of the piolot? Or under remote control somehwere else? If under remote control, that opens up even more vunerabilities -- a rouge cracker to take over the system and fry people or cars or buildings on the ground -- or the government could claim such happened.
Meanwhile, you start an arms race. What's to stop a would-be terrorist from building a plane-zapping laser that will not only be as effective at bringing down the plane, but no defense would exist against?
It's rather easy to build a CO2 laser if you know how to work glass. Or you can just purchase an industrial laser from anywhere. Much easier to move around than missles, can be used any number of times before the laser system itself burns out, and there would not be much of a trace of what brought the plane down.
I predict that if the US government start arming planes with lasers, would-be terrorists will rise to the occasion and show how easy it will be to defeat such a system. Lasers mounted on commercial jets will have the opposite effect in making flying less safe, not more, while at the same time giving the government a very dangerous weapon it could choose to use against civilians or could be comprimised by crackers -- perhaps even cracker terrorists -- to do any number of things.
We must put an end to the outlandish scemes of the US military. Give them the chance and they'll come up with "reasons" why even baby strollers should be militarized!!!!!
What I am more pissed about than electronic SPAM is the torrents of snail SPAM that arrives at my mail box every day, including multiple offers from a certain "What's in Your Wallet" credit card company. I have to spend time shredding these offers before throwing them out to prevent possible identity theft from dumpster diving tycoons. This time is wasted time I could better be spending writing great new software, enjoying my SO, and other enjoyable activities.
What I want is an option to opt out of *all* unsolicited junk mail, especially anything that is marked "To Resident". Imagine how many trees would be saved!!!
Of course, when you DO get caught, all bets are off.
If Ralsky had been smart, he'd move his operation outside of any country with stiff anti-spamming laws. And being a multi-millionaire, this would've been easy for him to do.
Quite frankly, I am unimpressed with this story. This will not put a dent in spam. If anything, it'll only attract more to doing the same, for where there is money, there are exploiters. And perhaps they'll be smarter than Ralsky and do things in a manner that'll make it difficult to be caught -- or at the very least skip out of the country after accumulating so many $$$$$!
Meanwhile, I will still be deleting spam out of my inboxes. But I've been using a lot of whitelisting techniques to get around the spam issue. But then, I do host my own mail servers, which helps.
Well, they may as well outlaw all of software development, because any software tool can be put to malicious purposes.
What they should focus on instead are the actual actions taken by individuals to compromise someone's computer or network, not the tools they use to do it with. For instance, there's already a number of tools on the market and in FOSS that can do DDoS attacks -- but they are normally used to stress-test a web site or some other network application.
The whole "intent" bit is always a slippery slope, ready for Kangaroo Court time. Obviously, these idiot politicians never saw or read "Minority Report", where going after "pre-crime" turnned out to cause more problems than it solved.
Yes, the governments of the world are not unlike a bunch of monkeys with dangerous toys -- total unbridled power, without the wisdom nor the precision to use it properly.
You have to look at and understand your audience intimately. Demographics matter, too. What works for 20-somethings might totally confuse 50-somethings.
And today, good GUI design is even made trickier by the expectations users have from using the best applications and web sites. If your application is very "MySpace"-like and is intended for that same audience, you'd better make sure it's a good match.
Also, gone are the days you can expect your audience to RTFM to use your application. It must be obvious from the first click of the button.
But to our credit as GUI designers, today's audience is much more sophisticated than those pre-Web. So, if you stick to certain measures, it's actually easier than it was before. And there are many tools to help you, too.
Governments exist to complicate our lives. They offer us little of any real value and harass us to the nth degree, take our money away to squander it on wasteful endeavors, and regulate us to death.
Now, my friends, what is wrong with this picture? And what are we going to do about it?
Out of 70,000 people that were harassed by these so-called "Airport Profilers", only about 700 of them were found to be guilty of anything at all. That's a pretty lousy false-positive rate of 99%, which means, of course, 69,300 of these people were needlessly bothered and harassed and humiliated and personally violated.
Of the 700 or so that was guilty "of something", none were found to be "terrorists".
Am I missing something here? When was the last time a "terrorist" was found by the TSA in the US? And how much money is being spent on the TSA?
How many people die in traffic accidents per year? 41,000 or so? How many people in the US die of terrorism in the US per year? Let's average over a decade to account for 911. Over the past ten years, an estimated 410,000 died on our roadways, yet only 3000 by terrorists. So nearly 137 times the number of people in the last 10 years died on the road vs. terrorism, and yet how much money is spent on traffic safety vs. Homeland (In)Security? Am I missing something here?
You wonderful hard-earned gun-extracted Tax Dollars being put to such useful and meaningful work!!!
While it is a topic of concern, why waste time with it until it does become a legit concern? Don't we have enough real problems on our plates right now that we don't have to go fishing for "virtual pet peeves?"
Come on Slashdot, you have enough real material that you don't have to resort to this!
The thing I like about Ubuntu is that much of the software I had to hand-compile under Fedora is available with full functionality via apt-get on Ubuntu. Very nice. I don't know if Fedora 8 fixed this annoyance because I made the switch as F8 was released.
Ultimately, I muck about with the distro so much it doesn't really matter to me all that much anymore where it comes from.
One pet peeve for both Ubuntu and Fedora is the lack of support for having multiple monitors in a way that is easily configurable. I had to muck about directly with xorg.conf on Ubuntu as much as I had to do under Fedora to get all 3 of my monitors to come up properly! Come on, guys! This is a no-brainer on Windows and the Mac. Why is this still a pain under Linux???
Overall, I like Ubuntu a bit better than Fedora at this point -- though another pet peeve is that their default desktop is Gnome and not KDE. A minor nit, but one I find pestering.
"Yes, this village of children and their parents reduced to a smoky hole in a ground made possible by missiles running Linux!" Really, do we want that kind of association for something that is otherwise so wonder and represents the major achievement of OpenSource?
Sorry, I do not wish to OpenSource death and destruction. If the military wants to use Linux to manage their death infrastructure, not much we can do to stop them. But to encourage them to do so? Not in the name of OpenSource!!!!