Bear in mind, that sort of intrusive product placement is nothing new; it was done in early radio as well as television. George Burns and Gracie Allen would be having some conversation when a neighbor would wander by and start telling them excitedly about how much whiter her husband's shirts came out since she started using new Spud! laundry detergent or whatever.
No kidding, I thought the tags for this story should include "suddenoutbreakofcommonsense". Just yesterday I reluctantly gave up a clock radio that I have been using for over 30 years, because a well-meaning relative gave me a new one for Christmas. The old one has been dropped hundreds of times; once when I was living in hot, humid Houston it had a colony of cockroaches living inside it; the case is so loose it pops apart if you so much as look at it -- yet it has not lost any functionality after three decades of wear and tear.
I expect the new one will need replacing in a year or so.
</getoffmylawn>
I would sell my children into slavery if MS would let me ditch all their idiotic UIs and replace them with Fluxbox. Windows would finally be usable and much less of a memory sinkhole!
Yes, but the intermediate steps between Africa and Hawaii included numerous habitable lands. When there's nothing but vacuum between you and the next nearest habitable world and it will take hundreds of generations to get there, you're pretty well screwed. Yes, *in theory* we can set up domed colonies on otherwise uninhabitable locations along the way, but that sure won't be as easy as pitching tents wherever you happen to settle and building up a colony out of the raw materials and available foods right there where you are.
Ha. No I haven't, because she's way out in western Colorado and has never come to visit him here in Wyoming. She's not only old enough to use Facebook, but also old enough to have a family of her own.
I'm missing the connection you suggest between using social networking sites and caring what other people think. I fought Facebook for years because it's just another flash in the pan fad, but while my son was at army basic training he mentioned that his unit had a Facebook page. So I signed up just to be able to read whatever news they posted.
Turns out friends I lost track of years ago are also there, and friends I'd like to keep up with but don't seem to use email much. So after my son came home I kept up with Facebook. Not because I give a flying Microsoft what people think, but because it's nice to know how my friends are doing -- I would not have otherwise known that a former colleague has been diagnosed with breast cancer, or the daughter of a family friend is having a baby. I block all the announcements of who is playing what games, I roll my eyes whenever one of them succumbs to the "If you care about SOME_CAUSE you will post this as your status" meme, and once in a while I can follow up with some concern -- "How did that operation turn out?" "Did you pass neurobiology?" "Did you get any cool pictures of that horrible growth before they removed it?"
Another thing Facebook revealed was that I'm far more social than I realized. I vowed from the start that I would never accept random friend requests; I only added as friends people I personally know, either in a current environment or a close relationship to in the past. That obnoxious kid whom I only remember because we sat in the same math class? Nope. My best friend's daughter whom I have never met? Nope. The girl who got stuck with me in a special reading group in the first grade because we were both ahead of the rest of the class? Boy, was I glad to find her! So anyway, even with my strict limits on who gets added as a friend, I have about 200. Every single one of them I can tell you about their family or work, I can picture their faces in my memory, I can remember why they are important to me.
As a typical antisocial nerd, I'm astounded. I honestly thought I couldn't count more than five friends across 47.78 years of life.
So yeah, Facebook has the potential to be a mind-numbing exercise in idiocy... but if you use it carefully, it's a great means of keeping up with friends when there isn't really a practical way to call up all 200 of them and ask how they're doing.
I don't; I was just refuting the statement that there is no way to verify user accounts before the user has posted anything. For a local population that can be handled by moderator(s) familiar with the region, that's sufficient. For a larger scale operation where the moderators are not necessarily in the same locality as the users, you would need to use some other method. Maybe ask the visitor to tell you how he feels about his mother?
My wife moderates a couple of local Freecycle [tm] lists, and she requires new subscribers to mention some nearby landmark in their neighborhood to show they really are local. The result: NO spam, ever. Once or twice in ten years she's actually had someone try to make up a plausible sounding name that they must have picked up from a yellow pages search because it referred to the name you can see on maps and not what everybody actually calls the place.
Too late, the bible publishing cartel beat you to it. And as a bible-thumping Baptist, it irks me that these folks want to charge royalties for me beating you over the head with words written ~2000 years ago.
This method of copying the previous generation of storage up to each new upgrade has led me to a series of recursively nested backups, because every time I upgrade the new hard disk has enough capacity to copy the entire previous hard disk into a small backup folder. So my current/backups/ folder has/backups/from2008Laptop which in turn has/backups/from2005PC which in turn has/backups/from2001-10GB which in turn has/backups/from1998-520MB etc. Somewhere in there are images from 5.25" install disks that I haven't needed in 20 years, but I'm afraid to delete and thus forever lose any ties to old work.
Which brings me back to OP's question: The best I can manage is a dusty old 5.25" floppy drive that, in theory, I could hook up and retrieve files from 1985-1995, but I doubt the diskettes themselves are still any good.
I'm still puzzling over the "creating a new system of information" part. I realize that from a marketing perspective, Facebook is ten bajillion times more successful than Friendster, Myspace, etc. but Zuckerberg didn't *create* social networking any more than Al Gore *created* the internet.
It's not a matter of respecting other religions; it's a matter of respecting other PEOPLE. As a Baptist, I believe that those who do not accept Jesus as the promised Messiah are not getting into heaven. As a follower of Christ's teachings to unconditionally love, I am *not* to find happiness in that consequence, nor am I to abuse or disparage those who have not accepted what I believe is the only path to salvation. I am expected to make sure they know how to avoid eternal destruction, but once they have that information the rest is up to God and not my problem.
Westboro Baptist Church ignores pretty much everything Jesus said on the subject of love and respect. Unless you have read the New Testament enough to grok what Paul and the other authors have to say on Christian canon, you have no basis to back up your concept of what "real Christianity" is or who does/does not illustrate those beliefs. From what I've seen, most people who claim to speak on behalf of God fail to grasp the simple concept of "love your neighbor". The higher profile of the speaker, the more it seems he or she gets into grandstanding and political posturing and arrogance, and loses any shred of humility and compassion that might have originally existed.
And I say this with the full realization that underneath it all, I'm no better than they are. I give in to my own prejudices from time to time; God knows I can be as arrogant and elitist as the worst of them. So I really try to avoid casting the first stone, either at nonbelievers or believers whose actions and words make them out to be idiots.
I won't take that bet. He has a point that the Huddled Masses use their browsers -- nay, the entirety of teh intrawebz -- for those limited purposes, but the set of people who use their browsers in such a limited capacity intersected with the set of users who would have the motivation and technical awareness to seek out and install a new browser and start using that by default is small to nonexistent.
I honestly wonder if people who resort to ad hominem attacks ever actually study the science or just repeat what they are told to believe. There was a time when "skeptic" was a GOOD thing in science. Remember how we're supposed to question assumptions, test those assumptions, and test them again to prove or disprove a theory? Come on, drop the "denier" tag and engage in real science discussions.
Are you aware that prominent AGW proponent Judith Curry has turned on her colleagues and is now questioning their findings? Of course they call her a heretic; she's not just parroting what they want her to say. Are you aware that sea ice is not retreating at all, but growing? Have you given any thought to wondering why the AGW community keeps needing to change the terminology? In the wake of decreasing temperatures and increasing snowstorms, it's no longer global warming but climate change. Now *any* weather event can be blamed on AGW, or is that AGC?
So to answer your question, yes, I'll believe you when we have freighters sailing the arctic. Then, just like the vikings, we can start farming Greenland again. In the meantime, I'll continue to watch the numbers and see how they don't add up. If you have any constructive proof, pay a visit to any of the skeptical blogs and have your say. You'll find that unlike AGW blogs, your comments will not be removed and people who attack you ad hominem will not be tolerated.
That may be true for people motivated to learn, but does it take into account those with a short attention span? I have found when I am reading text that is difficult to comprehend for one reason or another, my mind tends to just gloss over the parts that don't make sense and I can't recall a word of it ten minutes later.
Some of us older geeks have trouble bashing Apple because we remember the Apple of Woz's day. It breaks my heart when, in a moment of nostalgia, I cry out "Apple ][ Forever!" and people think that means I like Macs. As far as I'm concerned, Apple stopped being Apple when Woz left, and I totally agree that Mac et al are about as closed architecture as you can get.
I feel for the big newspapers, really I do. They spend a ton of money getting firsthand news (ignoring the wire services for the moment), spend another couple hundred kilos of money formatting it nicely for the web, and we want it all for free. They put ads up, we use ad blockers. They give up on all those reporters' salaries and just use wire services, and we complain that there's no local content.
We (as consumers) need to give the content providers SOMETHING that justifies all the money they spend on the content, or it won't last and the only news sources left will be J. Random Blogger and his incendiary, ill-informed rants against one party or another. I don't know about you, but "It was in The Times" carries a lot more weight for me than "It was on Slashdot" or "It was on Drudge" or "It was on Goatse" or whatever.
Let me know if you find a good karma system. I have been on/. for years, have never posted anything remotely spammy, have attempted to participate in discussions... so why is my karma set at "bad"? I have no idea what, if anything, I can do about that and because of it my comments never appear in any discussion threads. It is likely nobody will ever see this unless, as you say, they dig through the low rated posts.
Not that I'm bitter.
My family never kept birth/death records, or if they did those records went to relatives I never met. From my mother and father I got bupkis, so I had to do my own genealogical research from scratch to learn my family history (just for personal interest, not religious motivation).
To that end, I am sure glad they DO ask for birth dates; the 1910 and 1870 census tables have been invaluable sources of details about my mother's family from her grandfather on back. In the same way, I'm going to be as accurate as possible for the benefit of some descendants in 72+ years who gain access to the data I supply today.
If, in the meantime, some evil dictator finds out my name, race, address, and birthdate... well, I hope they know how to fill out a genealogical tree.
Bear in mind, I don't trust any level of government, of any political ideology, a bit. But I do apply risk/benefit analysis to any government interaction. Would it cause me more grief to fill out the census details or to lie about them? What's the worst that could happen either way? Which causes me the least grief in tax season, doing it their way or stubbornly protesting? When going along with their often farcical actions is the worse risk to my quality of life, I raise a stink. Try that some time, rather than assume all government activity is inherently evil or beneficial.
Higher than normal standard of integrity? I wish. My son tells me that after a couple of weeks of daily thefts from locked lockers at AIT, somebody is now trying to use bolt cutters on the more secure inner cabinets inside the lockers. The knowledge that whoever is doing this also carries around an M-16 and will soon be responsible for defending my country gives me nightmares...
Being 39 doesn't make you 'too old for tech'... being lazy, unwilling to change, inexperienced and out of touch does.
Absodoodily. I have been doing coding/tech support at my company for nigh-on 17 years, and last month they discontinued sales and support for the obsolete DOS products I helped develop in the early days of the company. All I ever did was Clipper database coding, and they will never need that skill any more.
So what did I do? Taught myself php, SQL, and umpteen flavours of VB. That plus the fact that I built a reputation for being a fast learner and play well with others meant that all my contacts at all levels in the organization pulled strings to make sure I still have a job doing what I do best - coding and troubleshooting. Now I have more work than I have time for and I'm learning new techniques every day. Not bad for a 46-year-old one trick pony.
In addition to the quick adaptation to a new environment, one other thing ensured job security: I'm not a primadonna. Yeah, VBscript and VB.net and vb.this.that.and.the-other-thing are tools of the devil, but it's what my company pays me to use. So I have a choice of bitching about how stupid they are for using those tools and how I'm too good to dirty my hands with them - and then searching for a new job - or adapting to do my best with the tools I'm given. I chose the latter. When the opportunity comes up I can throw in a suggestion in the form of constructive criticism ("You know, this has always given us trouble but I solved a similar problem on my website using php/mysql...") so I can improve my environment without pissing anybody off in the process.
Do you people never check Snopes before posting these inane stories, or modding them up as interesting/insightful/informative? It was an April Fool's joke!
Speaking of ignoring the facts... where did you get that "statistic" about large cities in Texas? Houston has nearly double the national average violent crime rate: http://www.cityrating.com/citycrime.asp?city=Houst on&state=TX
Same for Dallas - 1.80x national average. For those who don't remember their history, Dallas is where the "Amber" of "Amber Alert" fame was kidnapped and murdered.
I'm not saying gun control laws reduce crime, but I am saying there is ample evidence that lack of gun control does not reduce crime either. But thanks for proving the point of TFA:-)
You're not very likely to find linux running in in a trailer park, folks.
As a Christian right-wing nutjob who until recently lived in a trailer park, I have to disagree. I used the Linux From Scratch guide to build my own server which I use as a router to share my cable connection with the weird mix of Windows NT (required for work), 98 (wife's preference), and 95 (because the kids got hand-me-downs that I haven't gotten around to upgrading) boxes scattered around the house.
I also experimented with various flavors of content-based HTTP filters when the kids were old enough to have free access to the web from their rooms but not old enough to exercise common sense and judgement - for example, making sweeping generalizations about large groups of people in a public forum about technical issues. Nowadays they're smart enough that they don't need a human or automated babysitter to tell them what sites to avoid and how to engage in civil discourse.
Try removing some of that narrow-minded prejudice that clouds your judgement and you'll be amazed at how widespread Linux is.
Slashdot Mirror
Bear in mind, that sort of intrusive product placement is nothing new; it was done in early radio as well as television. George Burns and Gracie Allen would be having some conversation when a neighbor would wander by and start telling them excitedly about how much whiter her husband's shirts came out since she started using new Spud! laundry detergent or whatever.
Then of course there's the infamous Flintstones cigarette ad...
No kidding, I thought the tags for this story should include "suddenoutbreakofcommonsense". Just yesterday I reluctantly gave up a clock radio that I have been using for over 30 years, because a well-meaning relative gave me a new one for Christmas. The old one has been dropped hundreds of times; once when I was living in hot, humid Houston it had a colony of cockroaches living inside it; the case is so loose it pops apart if you so much as look at it -- yet it has not lost any functionality after three decades of wear and tear.
I expect the new one will need replacing in a year or so.
</getoffmylawn>
I would sell my children into slavery if MS would let me ditch all their idiotic UIs and replace them with Fluxbox. Windows would finally be usable and much less of a memory sinkhole!
Yes, but the intermediate steps between Africa and Hawaii included numerous habitable lands. When there's nothing but vacuum between you and the next nearest habitable world and it will take hundreds of generations to get there, you're pretty well screwed. Yes, *in theory* we can set up domed colonies on otherwise uninhabitable locations along the way, but that sure won't be as easy as pitching tents wherever you happen to settle and building up a colony out of the raw materials and available foods right there where you are.
Ha. No I haven't, because she's way out in western Colorado and has never come to visit him here in Wyoming. She's not only old enough to use Facebook, but also old enough to have a family of her own.
I'm missing the connection you suggest between using social networking sites and caring what other people think. I fought Facebook for years because it's just another flash in the pan fad, but while my son was at army basic training he mentioned that his unit had a Facebook page. So I signed up just to be able to read whatever news they posted.
Turns out friends I lost track of years ago are also there, and friends I'd like to keep up with but don't seem to use email much. So after my son came home I kept up with Facebook. Not because I give a flying Microsoft what people think, but because it's nice to know how my friends are doing -- I would not have otherwise known that a former colleague has been diagnosed with breast cancer, or the daughter of a family friend is having a baby. I block all the announcements of who is playing what games, I roll my eyes whenever one of them succumbs to the "If you care about SOME_CAUSE you will post this as your status" meme, and once in a while I can follow up with some concern -- "How did that operation turn out?" "Did you pass neurobiology?" "Did you get any cool pictures of that horrible growth before they removed it?"
Another thing Facebook revealed was that I'm far more social than I realized. I vowed from the start that I would never accept random friend requests; I only added as friends people I personally know, either in a current environment or a close relationship to in the past. That obnoxious kid whom I only remember because we sat in the same math class? Nope. My best friend's daughter whom I have never met? Nope. The girl who got stuck with me in a special reading group in the first grade because we were both ahead of the rest of the class? Boy, was I glad to find her! So anyway, even with my strict limits on who gets added as a friend, I have about 200. Every single one of them I can tell you about their family or work, I can picture their faces in my memory, I can remember why they are important to me.
As a typical antisocial nerd, I'm astounded. I honestly thought I couldn't count more than five friends across 47.78 years of life.
So yeah, Facebook has the potential to be a mind-numbing exercise in idiocy... but if you use it carefully, it's a great means of keeping up with friends when there isn't really a practical way to call up all 200 of them and ask how they're doing.
I don't; I was just refuting the statement that there is no way to verify user accounts before the user has posted anything. For a local population that can be handled by moderator(s) familiar with the region, that's sufficient. For a larger scale operation where the moderators are not necessarily in the same locality as the users, you would need to use some other method. Maybe ask the visitor to tell you how he feels about his mother?
My wife moderates a couple of local Freecycle [tm] lists, and she requires new subscribers to mention some nearby landmark in their neighborhood to show they really are local. The result: NO spam, ever. Once or twice in ten years she's actually had someone try to make up a plausible sounding name that they must have picked up from a yellow pages search because it referred to the name you can see on maps and not what everybody actually calls the place.
Too late, the bible publishing cartel beat you to it. And as a bible-thumping Baptist, it irks me that these folks want to charge royalties for me beating you over the head with words written ~2000 years ago.
This method of copying the previous generation of storage up to each new upgrade has led me to a series of recursively nested backups, because every time I upgrade the new hard disk has enough capacity to copy the entire previous hard disk into a small backup folder. So my current /backups/ folder has /backups/from2008Laptop which in turn has /backups/from2005PC which in turn has /backups/from2001-10GB which in turn has /backups/from1998-520MB etc. Somewhere in there are images from 5.25" install disks that I haven't needed in 20 years, but I'm afraid to delete and thus forever lose any ties to old work.
Which brings me back to OP's question: The best I can manage is a dusty old 5.25" floppy drive that, in theory, I could hook up and retrieve files from 1985-1995, but I doubt the diskettes themselves are still any good.
I'm still puzzling over the "creating a new system of information" part. I realize that from a marketing perspective, Facebook is ten bajillion times more successful than Friendster, Myspace, etc. but Zuckerberg didn't *create* social networking any more than Al Gore *created* the internet.
It's not a matter of respecting other religions; it's a matter of respecting other PEOPLE. As a Baptist, I believe that those who do not accept Jesus as the promised Messiah are not getting into heaven. As a follower of Christ's teachings to unconditionally love, I am *not* to find happiness in that consequence, nor am I to abuse or disparage those who have not accepted what I believe is the only path to salvation. I am expected to make sure they know how to avoid eternal destruction, but once they have that information the rest is up to God and not my problem.
Westboro Baptist Church ignores pretty much everything Jesus said on the subject of love and respect. Unless you have read the New Testament enough to grok what Paul and the other authors have to say on Christian canon, you have no basis to back up your concept of what "real Christianity" is or who does/does not illustrate those beliefs. From what I've seen, most people who claim to speak on behalf of God fail to grasp the simple concept of "love your neighbor". The higher profile of the speaker, the more it seems he or she gets into grandstanding and political posturing and arrogance, and loses any shred of humility and compassion that might have originally existed.
And I say this with the full realization that underneath it all, I'm no better than they are. I give in to my own prejudices from time to time; God knows I can be as arrogant and elitist as the worst of them. So I really try to avoid casting the first stone, either at nonbelievers or believers whose actions and words make them out to be idiots.
I won't take that bet. He has a point that the Huddled Masses use their browsers -- nay, the entirety of teh intrawebz -- for those limited purposes, but the set of people who use their browsers in such a limited capacity intersected with the set of users who would have the motivation and technical awareness to seek out and install a new browser and start using that by default is small to nonexistent.
I honestly wonder if people who resort to ad hominem attacks ever actually study the science or just repeat what they are told to believe. There was a time when "skeptic" was a GOOD thing in science. Remember how we're supposed to question assumptions, test those assumptions, and test them again to prove or disprove a theory? Come on, drop the "denier" tag and engage in real science discussions.
Try reading some of the more prominent opposition, such as Anthony Watts' Watts Up With That or Steve McIntyre's Climate Audit or Roger Pielke Sr.'s climate blog.
Are you aware that prominent AGW proponent Judith Curry has turned on her colleagues and is now questioning their findings? Of course they call her a heretic; she's not just parroting what they want her to say. Are you aware that sea ice is not retreating at all, but growing? Have you given any thought to wondering why the AGW community keeps needing to change the terminology? In the wake of decreasing temperatures and increasing snowstorms, it's no longer global warming but climate change. Now *any* weather event can be blamed on AGW, or is that AGC?
So to answer your question, yes, I'll believe you when we have freighters sailing the arctic. Then, just like the vikings, we can start farming Greenland again. In the meantime, I'll continue to watch the numbers and see how they don't add up. If you have any constructive proof, pay a visit to any of the skeptical blogs and have your say. You'll find that unlike AGW blogs, your comments will not be removed and people who attack you ad hominem will not be tolerated.
That may be true for people motivated to learn, but does it take into account those with a short attention span? I have found when I am reading text that is difficult to comprehend for one reason or another, my mind tends to just gloss over the parts that don't make sense and I can't recall a word of it ten minutes later.
Some of us older geeks have trouble bashing Apple because we remember the Apple of Woz's day. It breaks my heart when, in a moment of nostalgia, I cry out "Apple ][ Forever!" and people think that means I like Macs. As far as I'm concerned, Apple stopped being Apple when Woz left, and I totally agree that Mac et al are about as closed architecture as you can get.
I feel for the big newspapers, really I do. They spend a ton of money getting firsthand news (ignoring the wire services for the moment), spend another couple hundred kilos of money formatting it nicely for the web, and we want it all for free. They put ads up, we use ad blockers. They give up on all those reporters' salaries and just use wire services, and we complain that there's no local content. We (as consumers) need to give the content providers SOMETHING that justifies all the money they spend on the content, or it won't last and the only news sources left will be J. Random Blogger and his incendiary, ill-informed rants against one party or another. I don't know about you, but "It was in The Times" carries a lot more weight for me than "It was on Slashdot" or "It was on Drudge" or "It was on Goatse" or whatever.
No snarkiness detected, CF. I understand that one needs to participate to generate GOOD karma; I was asking how mine turned BAD.
Let me know if you find a good karma system. I have been on /. for years, have never posted anything remotely spammy, have attempted to participate in discussions... so why is my karma set at "bad"? I have no idea what, if anything, I can do about that and because of it my comments never appear in any discussion threads. It is likely nobody will ever see this unless, as you say, they dig through the low rated posts.
Not that I'm bitter.
My family never kept birth/death records, or if they did those records went to relatives I never met. From my mother and father I got bupkis, so I had to do my own genealogical research from scratch to learn my family history (just for personal interest, not religious motivation). To that end, I am sure glad they DO ask for birth dates; the 1910 and 1870 census tables have been invaluable sources of details about my mother's family from her grandfather on back. In the same way, I'm going to be as accurate as possible for the benefit of some descendants in 72+ years who gain access to the data I supply today. If, in the meantime, some evil dictator finds out my name, race, address, and birthdate... well, I hope they know how to fill out a genealogical tree. Bear in mind, I don't trust any level of government, of any political ideology, a bit. But I do apply risk/benefit analysis to any government interaction. Would it cause me more grief to fill out the census details or to lie about them? What's the worst that could happen either way? Which causes me the least grief in tax season, doing it their way or stubbornly protesting? When going along with their often farcical actions is the worse risk to my quality of life, I raise a stink. Try that some time, rather than assume all government activity is inherently evil or beneficial.
Higher than normal standard of integrity? I wish. My son tells me that after a couple of weeks of daily thefts from locked lockers at AIT, somebody is now trying to use bolt cutters on the more secure inner cabinets inside the lockers. The knowledge that whoever is doing this also carries around an M-16 and will soon be responsible for defending my country gives me nightmares...
Being 39 doesn't make you 'too old for tech'... being lazy, unwilling to change, inexperienced and out of touch does.
Absodoodily. I have been doing coding/tech support at my company for nigh-on 17 years, and last month they discontinued sales and support for the obsolete DOS products I helped develop in the early days of the company. All I ever did was Clipper database coding, and they will never need that skill any more. So what did I do? Taught myself php, SQL, and umpteen flavours of VB. That plus the fact that I built a reputation for being a fast learner and play well with others meant that all my contacts at all levels in the organization pulled strings to make sure I still have a job doing what I do best - coding and troubleshooting. Now I have more work than I have time for and I'm learning new techniques every day. Not bad for a 46-year-old one trick pony. In addition to the quick adaptation to a new environment, one other thing ensured job security: I'm not a primadonna. Yeah, VBscript and VB.net and vb.this.that.and.the-other-thing are tools of the devil, but it's what my company pays me to use. So I have a choice of bitching about how stupid they are for using those tools and how I'm too good to dirty my hands with them - and then searching for a new job - or adapting to do my best with the tools I'm given. I chose the latter. When the opportunity comes up I can throw in a suggestion in the form of constructive criticism ("You know, this has always given us trouble but I solved a similar problem on my website using php/mysql...") so I can improve my environment without pissing anybody off in the process.
Do you people never check Snopes before posting these inane stories, or modding them up as interesting/insightful/informative? It was an April Fool's joke!
Speaking of ignoring the facts... where did you get that "statistic" about large cities in Texas? Houston has nearly double the national average violent crime rate:t on&state=TX
:-)
http://www.cityrating.com/citycrime.asp?city=Hous
Same for Dallas - 1.80x national average. For those who don't remember their history, Dallas is where the "Amber" of "Amber Alert" fame was kidnapped and murdered.
I'm not saying gun control laws reduce crime, but I am saying there is ample evidence that lack of gun control does not reduce crime either. But thanks for proving the point of TFA
As a Christian right-wing nutjob who until recently lived in a trailer park, I have to disagree. I used the Linux From Scratch guide to build my own server which I use as a router to share my cable connection with the weird mix of Windows NT (required for work), 98 (wife's preference), and 95 (because the kids got hand-me-downs that I haven't gotten around to upgrading) boxes scattered around the house.
I also experimented with various flavors of content-based HTTP filters when the kids were old enough to have free access to the web from their rooms but not old enough to exercise common sense and judgement - for example, making sweeping generalizations about large groups of people in a public forum about technical issues. Nowadays they're smart enough that they don't need a human or automated babysitter to tell them what sites to avoid and how to engage in civil discourse.
Try removing some of that narrow-minded prejudice that clouds your judgement and you'll be amazed at how widespread Linux is.