The main problem that I see with this idea is church is molding to cultural ideas
That's a problem, for sure, especially in the liberal denominations (today's version of the Sadducees).
But there are an awful lot of Pharisees too.
Take for example the Bible's teaching on sexuality. It is different from the world's in that sex is meant for a lifelong, monogamous relationship. But it nowhere suggests that it is a bad thing, or that there is anything wrong with marriage (God's answer to temptation for most people, according to 1 Cor. 7) for the great majority of people.
But many of today's churches lay additional burdens on people, pretending that these burdens are God's, when they are nowhere found in Scripture. For instance: try getting married without months if not years of premarital counseling, to someone who hasn't been a believer for at least 10 years, or to someone who isn't at least 30 years old. Or admit that you sometimes enjoy a bit of self-satisfaction because you believe this is better than being tempted to do something worse.
You will be told that you are disobeying God, when God never gave such commands. You will be told to "repent," and when you do not, you will be treated as harshly as if you had recently murdered someone.
Christianity is not about being conformed to the image of the world - or that of hypocritical, pharisaical Christians who are too busy pointing out the flaws in others to realize they too need God's forgiveness and healing.
It's about loving God, loving others, and seeking His forgiveness when you mess up.
Even more fundamentally it's about what He did for us, which, if we truly understand it, should motivate us to love and serve Him not out of fear, but gratitude.
I don't know who is worse - the Sadducees, who deny truth, or the Pharisees, who deny love.
All I know is that they agreed on only a few things, and one of those things is that they hated Jesus.:(
I couldn't agree more wholehearted. Indeed, when I was 20, I thought that all software had to be free. Now that I'm (past) 30, I sometimes wonder where all the paychecks get paid from.
When I was 20, I wanted to get rich writing software.
Then I realized that if I can only be rich by restricting the freedom of my fellow human beings, I don't want to be rich.
I am content to make a decent living writing and supporting software that respects their freedom, and lots of people are willing to pay me more than a decent living in exchange for doing so.
The bills get paid nicely because the value of free software far exceeds the cost of producing and maintaining it.
Today, I am rich by the standards of much of the world.
And I am grateful to God that I was able to earn a decent living - without having to in any way violate the rights of my fellow human beings.
Oh, I finally got the printer working. I just have to run gs -DSAFER -sDEVICE=ijs -sIjsServer=ijsgimpprint -sDeviceManufacturer=EPSON -sDeviceModel='escp2-c82' -sOutputFile=out -DNOPAUSE -- file.ps , and send the result with smbclient.
N00b! You shoulda read the FM, then you would have known that.:)
Furthermore, the student - in investigating parts of computing that are obscure to many - seems to be showing promise and intelligence. To attack the natural curiousity of the student is to stifle his natural inclination to learn and investigate
If you read a little about the
history of government schooling, you will see that that is exactly the purpose of having it in the first place.
Support of Wikipedia is, in a sense, support of the principles of democracy/communism itself
I'd say it's something far better than that.
The Wikipedia is much more in the spirit of an experiment in freedom. Freedom means that you do what you want as long as it doesn't harm others, and sharing information for personal, scientific, ethical, or other reasons is something that many of us choose to do with whatever freedom we have left.
Freedom isn't cheap. It never has been. It requires vigilance always, money almost always, and on occasion other forms of sacrifice.
I regret not being able to do much to support the Wikipedia at this precise moment, but when and if the opportunity does arise, I will do my part, and I hope others will do the same.
Be careful to keep client software updated as well, because all it takes is a remote local hole in something like your IRC client (these are common sadly) combined with the local root in the kernel, and you now have a remote root, and there isn't much a stateless firewall can do to help in this situation.
we would be placed on a moral level equal with Adolf Hitler and the Nazis
I agree with the rest of your post, but as for equal standing with Hitler, I think we're already well on our way.:(
Consider the following mass murders for which the U.S. government was at least partly responsible:
Over 10 million civilians during the Vietnam conflict, most during the period of U.S. involvement
Millions more in "proxy wars" in Nicaragua, Guatemala, and Afghanistan, among other places
Anywhere between 500,000 and 1,000,000 CHILDREN, and a smaller but still significant number of adult civilians, as a direct result of "U.N." sanctions (the U.N.'s own figures are in the low end of this range)
This isn't even counting the over 40 million abortions performed in the U.S. alone, the unknown but probably huge number of civilian deaths in Iraq, or the unknown but probably huge number of deaths resulting from U.S. biological, chemical, and nuclear warfare experiments.
It also doesn't take into account genocide against the Native American population, or for that matter the African-American and Hispanic populations of large cities, both of which continue albeit in subtle ways even now.
Nor does it take into account the huge death rate in our "prison" system which is really a system of organized slavery and murder, every bit as much as Hitler's prison camps. (For population control, AIDS and TB have proven to be nearly as effective as gas ovens, even if they inflict longer, more painful and more messy deaths than the most sadistic SS camp guards would have been able to stomach.)
Nor does it consider the fact that the early growth of both the Bolshevik and Nazi parties were funded in large part by U.S. industrialists, with the active support and encouragement of the "government" at the time.
Nor, finally (I could go on), does it take into account the likelihood that the U.S. will start the next world war, which will certainly be nuclear, and which will certainly result in its destruction along with much of the rest of the allegedly civilized world.
By any measure I can think of, the U.S. is among the most murderous and sick regimes in the history of the world. Only Stalin and perhaps Mao have managed to murder more people, and even they didn't manage to do so all over the world - there was a geographic focus to their viciousness, while there really isn't anyplace you can go to be completely safe from the murderous thugs that make up the U.S. "government."
"Government figures" have but one purpose: to justify the continuing expansion of the "government's" power. Absent some kind of corroborating evidence, I would consider them to be completely untrustworthy.
Most of the monitor failures I've experienced happened in clusters also (usually 2s or 3s). I have no idea why. They weren't usually the same make or model and weren't always plugged into the same physical circuits.
If you read the PNAC group's papers, they REALLY want viruses that can target specific groups. They believe they could be a useful political tool. They want this to kill certain ethnic groups within the US
I can't prove that things like AIDS, or U.S.-led efforts to ban DDT and other substances useful in the fight against malaria, were a deliberate effort to murder as many Africans, African-Americans, poor people in general, and homosexuals as the technology of the time would permit.
Not necessarily.
Paris, Hong Kong, and Tokyo are among the most densely populated cities in the world, yet also among the most prosperous.
Re:Today's kids = tomorrow's workers. Prepare them
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Reading, Writing, RFID
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your employer and government has an interest in your well-being. Granted, the interest isn't as overarching as the relationship between parent and child; more like rancher and cattle. But show me a rancher who doesn't take care of his cattle, and I'll show you a rancher who's out of business in a year.
You fucking asshole.
The government does NOT own me, nor does my employer.
The irony is that China is rapidly becoming more free while the U.S., already a police state, is rapidly becoming less free.
The Chinese people I know (mostly students and mostly from the mainland) rate the level of freedom in both places (China and the U.S.) as being comparable overall - better here in some ways, worse in others, and certainly not great in either place - but definitely comparable.
But if current trends continue, and if the Chinese finally tire of their anachronistic communist police state, then China could instantly become not only one of the more prosperous nations in the world, but one of the more free.
Meanwhile, the U.S. really no longer is even part of the free world, much less a leader of that world. While we were busy fighting the totalitarian collectivists of the communist variety, all over the world, we became totalitarian collectivists of a slightly different variety ourselves. But we have much better weapons, and much more arrogant and stupid "leaders," so I would say that even at our weakest and our worst, we in the U.S. are a greater threat to the world than the entire Soviet empire was at its strongest point.
The fact that "there's tons of legacy code out there" is proof enought that Visual Basic 6 (not.NET) will be with us for years to come.
I wouldn't count on it.
Old and new DLLs are usually incompatible.
Someday soon, Microsoft will release a "Critical Security Fix" that unintentionally breaks VB, probably in a subtle way. There may not be a fix, since VB6 is near EOL status.
There will be an outcry, but a short-lived one, as MS can very legitimately tell people that they have had more than 3 years to begin porting their code to VB.NET, which is supported, and that if they haven't, then this patch should serve as a "wake-up call."
Further "fixes" will break VB more and more completely, until the only way to run legacy VB apps is to do so on legacy machines and operating systems, and behind a stateful firewall that disallows anything not essential to the proper functioning of the app (which is probably a good idea anyway).
I wish Microsoft had made VB.NET upwardly compatible from VB6, but it didn't. Since it didn't, I do view VB6 code - especially procedural code, which won't port easily to.NET or anything comparable - as truly "legacy," and inherently near the end of its useful life.
Also, MS does have the option of simply adopting SAMBA.
Actually, if I'm not mistaken, Samba is GPL, and thus, MS would not be able to ship it in a proprietary product, without negotiating some type of license from the Samba folks.
Also, I recall a discussion about changing the Samba license to make it more BSD-friendly (BSD w/o advertising clause license can be linked into GPL software, but not vice versa). That went nowhere IIRC, not because of any animosity against the *BSD folks, but because the Samba team had exactly zero inclination to let M$ "embrace and extend" it.
I happen to be a strong fan of the GPL (and Samba!) and thus support this decision in spite of the hopefully minor inconvenience it may have caused. Samba is vitally important to the Free Software community, and, ironically, licensing it under M$-friendly terms could easily enable M$ to destroy it and along with it most of the ability to use Linux (or the BSDs) in a mixed *n*x - Windows environment.
I'm really, really, really honestly hoping that this article was a parody of the "I tried Linux after being a Windows user for 23 years!" type of articles we see in the "mainstream press." (And, yes, the number of years is intentionally wrong.)
I also thought that it was pretty obvious parody. It reads much more consistently and entertainingly in that light. Come on - someone smart enough to use Linux, but unable to figure out how to drag programs into the Quick Launch bar?
But as a parody of the way some Windows people give Linux a halfhearted try, without making an effort to understand how it works - I think it's priceless.
To do this, SCO would have to pay to file and prosecute all of those lawsuits. Such a move might make sense in a situation where the DDOSer has vastly more resources than the recipient, but that is obviously not the case here.
Having worked in litigation (but IANAL!!) I can assure you that it is quite possible for even a small legal department to file tens of thousands of nuisance lawsuits, on behalf of (or against) different parties, but having very similar subject matter, causes of action, etc.
Defending against these is a pain in the a** but not impossible, even for a modestly sized defendant.
There are law firms set up to handle either side of such matters (I worked for one).
How is it done? Automation. On both sides.
Courts, and/or the responding party(ies), may try to combine these into class actions, since the law and often the facts are similar or identical.
I don't think SCO will try this, but it is definitely not inconceivable that they might.
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The main problem that I see with this idea is church is molding to cultural ideas
That's a problem, for sure, especially in the liberal denominations (today's version of the Sadducees).
But there are an awful lot of Pharisees too.
Take for example the Bible's teaching on sexuality. It is different from the world's in that sex is meant for a lifelong, monogamous relationship. But it nowhere suggests that it is a bad thing, or that there is anything wrong with marriage (God's answer to temptation for most people, according to 1 Cor. 7) for the great majority of people.
But many of today's churches lay additional burdens on people, pretending that these burdens are God's, when they are nowhere found in Scripture. For instance: try getting married without months if not years of premarital counseling, to someone who hasn't been a believer for at least 10 years, or to someone who isn't at least 30 years old. Or admit that you sometimes enjoy a bit of self-satisfaction because you believe this is better than being tempted to do something worse.
You will be told that you are disobeying God, when God never gave such commands. You will be told to "repent," and when you do not, you will be treated as harshly as if you had recently murdered someone.
Christianity is not about being conformed to the image of the world - or that of hypocritical, pharisaical Christians who are too busy pointing out the flaws in others to realize they too need God's forgiveness and healing.
It's about loving God, loving others, and seeking His forgiveness when you mess up.
Even more fundamentally it's about what He did for us, which, if we truly understand it, should motivate us to love and serve Him not out of fear, but gratitude.
I don't know who is worse - the Sadducees, who deny truth, or the Pharisees, who deny love.
All I know is that they agreed on only a few things, and one of those things is that they hated Jesus. :(
Would He be welcome in most of today's churches?
Churches can be downright mean, especially if you manage to violate the mores of a particular congregation
I'm very sorry to have to agree with you, since that's not how it's supposed to be. But I must.
If you want a good church, look for truth and love. Both are necessary. Neither one alone is enough.
I was hired to break some guy's knee caps
You b*stard . . . that's MY job!!! (Note: look at my user page.)
I am not opposed to being paid for writing software and in fact I clearly stated that I am employed to write software.
What I do not do is to force people, using a corrupt system of "laws," "patents," etc., to refrain from sharing, modifying, or improving my software.
I couldn't agree more wholehearted. Indeed, when I was 20, I thought that all software had to be free. Now that I'm (past) 30, I sometimes wonder where all the paychecks get paid from.
When I was 20, I wanted to get rich writing software.
Then I realized that if I can only be rich by restricting the freedom of my fellow human beings, I don't want to be rich.
I am content to make a decent living writing and supporting software that respects their freedom, and lots of people are willing to pay me more than a decent living in exchange for doing so.
The bills get paid nicely because the value of free software far exceeds the cost of producing and maintaining it.
Today, I am rich by the standards of much of the world.
And I am grateful to God that I was able to earn a decent living - without having to in any way violate the rights of my fellow human beings.
Oh, I finally got the printer working. I just have to run gs -DSAFER -sDEVICE=ijs -sIjsServer=ijsgimpprint -sDeviceManufacturer=EPSON -sDeviceModel='escp2-c82' -sOutputFile=out -DNOPAUSE -- file.ps , and send the result with smbclient.
N00b! You shoulda read the FM, then you would have known that. :)
Actually according to some people Windex cures all ailments.
Furthermore, the student - in investigating parts of computing that are obscure to many - seems to be showing promise and intelligence. To attack the natural curiousity of the student is to stifle his natural inclination to learn and investigate
If you read a little about the history of government schooling, you will see that that is exactly the purpose of having it in the first place.
Support of Wikipedia is, in a sense, support of the principles of democracy/communism itself
I'd say it's something far better than that.
The Wikipedia is much more in the spirit of an experiment in freedom. Freedom means that you do what you want as long as it doesn't harm others, and sharing information for personal, scientific, ethical, or other reasons is something that many of us choose to do with whatever freedom we have left.
Freedom isn't cheap. It never has been. It requires vigilance always, money almost always, and on occasion other forms of sacrifice.
I regret not being able to do much to support the Wikipedia at this precise moment, but when and if the opportunity does arise, I will do my part, and I hope others will do the same.
Be careful to keep client software updated as well, because all it takes is a remote local hole in something like your IRC client (these are common sadly) combined with the local root in the kernel, and you now have a remote root, and there isn't much a stateless firewall can do to help in this situation.
Most old kernels (pre-2.4.23) have a local root vulnerability (at least) and need to be upgraded.
Brilliance and social skills tend to have an inverse relationship.
If that were true I'd be a genius!
we would be placed on a moral level equal with Adolf Hitler and the Nazis
I agree with the rest of your post, but as for equal standing with Hitler, I think we're already well on our way. :(
Consider the following mass murders for which the U.S. government was at least partly responsible:
This isn't even counting the over 40 million abortions performed in the U.S. alone, the unknown but probably huge number of civilian deaths in Iraq, or the unknown but probably huge number of deaths resulting from U.S. biological, chemical, and nuclear warfare experiments.
It also doesn't take into account genocide against the Native American population, or for that matter the African-American and Hispanic populations of large cities, both of which continue albeit in subtle ways even now.
Nor does it take into account the huge death rate in our "prison" system which is really a system of organized slavery and murder, every bit as much as Hitler's prison camps. (For population control, AIDS and TB have proven to be nearly as effective as gas ovens, even if they inflict longer, more painful and more messy deaths than the most sadistic SS camp guards would have been able to stomach.)
Nor does it consider the fact that the early growth of both the Bolshevik and Nazi parties were funded in large part by U.S. industrialists, with the active support and encouragement of the "government" at the time.
Nor, finally (I could go on), does it take into account the likelihood that the U.S. will start the next world war, which will certainly be nuclear, and which will certainly result in its destruction along with much of the rest of the allegedly civilized world.
By any measure I can think of, the U.S. is among the most murderous and sick regimes in the history of the world. Only Stalin and perhaps Mao have managed to murder more people, and even they didn't manage to do so all over the world - there was a geographic focus to their viciousness, while there really isn't anyplace you can go to be completely safe from the murderous thugs that make up the U.S. "government."
"Government figures" have but one purpose: to justify the continuing expansion of the "government's" power. Absent some kind of corroborating evidence, I would consider them to be completely untrustworthy.
Most of the monitor failures I've experienced happened in clusters also (usually 2s or 3s). I have no idea why. They weren't usually the same make or model and weren't always plugged into the same physical circuits.
80s actually - maybe early 70s. Retroviruses were definitely known and had been studied well prior to the time AIDS was invented.
s/it/they/.
(My grammar sucks when I'm pissed off.)
If you read the PNAC group's papers, they REALLY want viruses that can target specific groups. They believe they could be a useful political tool. They want this to kill certain ethnic groups within the US
I can't prove that things like AIDS, or U.S.-led efforts to ban DDT and other substances useful in the fight against malaria, were a deliberate effort to murder as many Africans, African-Americans, poor people in general, and homosexuals as the technology of the time would permit.
But it sure as shit did have that effect.
Not necessarily. Paris, Hong Kong, and Tokyo are among the most densely populated cities in the world, yet also among the most prosperous.
your employer and government has an interest in your well-being. Granted, the interest isn't as overarching as the relationship between parent and child; more like rancher and cattle. But show me a rancher who doesn't take care of his cattle, and I'll show you a rancher who's out of business in a year.
You fucking asshole.
The government does NOT own me, nor does my employer.
The irony is that China is rapidly becoming more free while the U.S., already a police state, is rapidly becoming less free.
The Chinese people I know (mostly students and mostly from the mainland) rate the level of freedom in both places (China and the U.S.) as being comparable overall - better here in some ways, worse in others, and certainly not great in either place - but definitely comparable.
But if current trends continue, and if the Chinese finally tire of their anachronistic communist police state, then China could instantly become not only one of the more prosperous nations in the world, but one of the more free.
Meanwhile, the U.S. really no longer is even part of the free world, much less a leader of that world. While we were busy fighting the totalitarian collectivists of the communist variety, all over the world, we became totalitarian collectivists of a slightly different variety ourselves. But we have much better weapons, and much more arrogant and stupid "leaders," so I would say that even at our weakest and our worst, we in the U.S. are a greater threat to the world than the entire Soviet empire was at its strongest point.
The fact that "there's tons of legacy code out there" is proof enought that Visual Basic 6 (not .NET) will be with us for years to come.
I wouldn't count on it.
Old and new DLLs are usually incompatible.
Someday soon, Microsoft will release a "Critical Security Fix" that unintentionally breaks VB, probably in a subtle way. There may not be a fix, since VB6 is near EOL status.
There will be an outcry, but a short-lived one, as MS can very legitimately tell people that they have had more than 3 years to begin porting their code to VB.NET, which is supported, and that if they haven't, then this patch should serve as a "wake-up call."
Further "fixes" will break VB more and more completely, until the only way to run legacy VB apps is to do so on legacy machines and operating systems, and behind a stateful firewall that disallows anything not essential to the proper functioning of the app (which is probably a good idea anyway).
I wish Microsoft had made VB.NET upwardly compatible from VB6, but it didn't. Since it didn't, I do view VB6 code - especially procedural code, which won't port easily to .NET or anything comparable - as truly "legacy," and inherently near the end of its useful life.
Also, MS does have the option of simply adopting SAMBA.
Actually, if I'm not mistaken, Samba is GPL, and thus, MS would not be able to ship it in a proprietary product, without negotiating some type of license from the Samba folks.
Also, I recall a discussion about changing the Samba license to make it more BSD-friendly (BSD w/o advertising clause license can be linked into GPL software, but not vice versa). That went nowhere IIRC, not because of any animosity against the *BSD folks, but because the Samba team had exactly zero inclination to let M$ "embrace and extend" it.
I happen to be a strong fan of the GPL (and Samba!) and thus support this decision in spite of the hopefully minor inconvenience it may have caused. Samba is vitally important to the Free Software community, and, ironically, licensing it under M$-friendly terms could easily enable M$ to destroy it and along with it most of the ability to use Linux (or the BSDs) in a mixed *n*x - Windows environment.
I'm really, really, really honestly hoping that this article was a parody of the "I tried Linux after being a Windows user for 23 years!" type of articles we see in the "mainstream press." (And, yes, the number of years is intentionally wrong.)
I also thought that it was pretty obvious parody. It reads much more consistently and entertainingly in that light. Come on - someone smart enough to use Linux, but unable to figure out how to drag programs into the Quick Launch bar?
But as a parody of the way some Windows people give Linux a halfhearted try, without making an effort to understand how it works - I think it's priceless.
To do this, SCO would have to pay to file and prosecute all of those lawsuits. Such a move might make sense in a situation where the DDOSer has vastly more resources than the recipient, but that is obviously not the case here.
Having worked in litigation (but IANAL!!) I can assure you that it is quite possible for even a small legal department to file tens of thousands of nuisance lawsuits, on behalf of (or against) different parties, but having very similar subject matter, causes of action, etc.
Defending against these is a pain in the a** but not impossible, even for a modestly sized defendant.
There are law firms set up to handle either side of such matters (I worked for one).
How is it done? Automation. On both sides.
Courts, and/or the responding party(ies), may try to combine these into class actions, since the law and often the facts are similar or identical.
I don't think SCO will try this, but it is definitely not inconceivable that they might.