Where I live (alberta) it's 18.
IMO millitary age should be identical to drinking age. If someone's willing to defned my country I'll be damned if I'm not willing to let them drink with me.
Bars tracking who comes and goes to prevent underage/disruptive individuals hardly sounds the same as having your everyday movements tracked
Here in Canada teens drinking at the bar isn't only an everyday activity: it's a way of life!
I'm not a disruptive person at a bar, but I'd rather not have people tracking where/when/how often I go to the pub. How long before this information is inappropiratly against someone to raise insurance (even though the driver has a perfect abstract) in a custody battle, or by employers. These records aren't confidential in the same way medical records are, it's certainly reasonable to question who may get access to them one way or another.
At least pot decriminalization/legalization is still in the works, I'll do my mind altering substances at poetry readings in beatnic cafes instead.
hen it was discovered she couldn't be sharing songs on pirate service Kazaa because she uses an incompatible Apple computer.
It's not like Macintosh users* can access Kazaa's FastTrack network thanks to poisoned [poisonedprject.com].
That would just be terrible!
* Poisoned is a front end to giFTd, it will not run on pre os x.2 machines.
We should all take this to heart; any computer that isn't turned off and locked in a safe at the bottom of an ocean on jupiter should be considered insecure, and even then...
The size of the windows audience has something to with the sheer number of viruses & worms, but that doesn't mean that mean that BSD/Mac OS/Linux are automatically just as insecure as Windows. Microsoft hasn't exactly gone out of it's way to ensure that users are safe and secure (not to the extent that OpenBSD has anyway)
Furthermore, *NIX has a massive presence in the server closets of the world. A worm that/virus that exploited these systems could be very lucrative for a malicious individual. - Stealing corporate data (so we could find out who exactly SCO buys the stuff McBride is smoking from) - DDoS attacks with OC-3 (rather than DSL/Dialup/Cable) - Spam directly from the mail servers
There are certainly good reasons to write *NIX worms/viruses, but I think a combination of cluefull administration, a well designed OS, and to (a smaller extent) obscurity work together to make them a particularly hard target (when compared with Windows)
Flying is hard enough - they tell you it's the safest way to travel. Now we find out it's run by a system famed for it's ability to crash?!
The service is so bad; the management was so bad. The system is just a mess, just a mess. I had my luggage delivered to Toronto, I was told on Saturday, so I don't have anything.
Seriously though, that sounds more like the airline's standard crumby service than the latest Microsoft worm/virus is to blame.
Most students could easily complete everything up to a highschool level education using any computing platform: Windows, Linux, or Mac OS. Windows is self-perpetuating: we teach Windows because it's popular, it's popular because it's what people know. It's a shame it's gotten to this state of affairs.
Even if a single platform is more cost effective to maintain than a mixed environment moving to Linux or BSD on the existing x86 hardware in a school would be cheaper than sticking with Windows licensing for Windows, Office, NT Server and on the next hardware upgrade cycle moving to Macintosh systems (if that's deamed to be the best move) or upgrading the x86 systems already there.
I think a two major reasons for the standardization on Windows has to do with the administrators trying to secure their employment (weekly patches = overtime) and the fear of maintaining something they aren't familar with.
Given sufficient motivation innocent people DO plead guilty - it wasn't too long ago in soviet russia (no, I'm not making that tired joke) that Stalin killed millions - many of which were upstanding members of the community who confessed to crimes that never occurred. Look at just about any dictatorship and you'll find evidence of innocent people pleading guilty to criminal acts in order to avoid or end terrible punishments.
I'm not saying that America is a tyrannical dictatorship - I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader - but the statements you made about a government unquestionably having MY best interests in mind fly in the face of dozens of years of history: sometimes they do not. Vigilance and over our governments is what keeps them from degenerating to the depths of those decrepit examples of our past.
Aren't there some billy goats at the ol' bridge you should be bothering?
iTMS offers protected AAC files only. Even though the iPod is cabable of playing MP3 files they are not available so there is no reason to suspect that Apple will either use these chips in iPod v4 or support Vorbis in software on the current or future iPod generations strictly because of the music store when they aren't even offering downloads in all of the ipod supported formats (AAC, MP3, AIFF, WAV)
Cool factor? Maybe, but there are plenty of other formats (even more common than OGG/Vorbis) that are likely to be supported on the iPod because they're in much wider spread use by the average joe such as RA, WMA, etc. We as geeks may not like those formats but a sizeable portion of iPod purchasers - >50% - are using Windows and just plain don't know any better and will use WMP to rip their tunes which defaults to WMA. RealPlayer also has a bad habbit of defaulting to formats other than MP3 when ripping - or at least that's how I remember it the last time I installed it years ago.
Adding another lossy but near-cd quality format doesn't help the situation. I'd bet on seeing FLAC on the ipod long before vorbis because at least it provides something the other formats don't: lossless compressed audio.
When you add the cd-rw/dvd rom it costs as much as an ibook (it's more expensive if you include the student discount).
Not that I'm evangalizing apple hardware here but doesn't $800 seam a little steap for those who aren't trying to make a political statement (screw microsoft) when both Dell and Apple offer cheaper systems?
Slashdot Mirror
Where I live (alberta) it's 18. IMO millitary age should be identical to drinking age. If someone's willing to defned my country I'll be damned if I'm not willing to let them drink with me.
Bars tracking who comes and goes to prevent underage/disruptive individuals hardly sounds the same as having your everyday movements tracked
Here in Canada teens drinking at the bar isn't only an everyday activity: it's a way of life!
I'm not a disruptive person at a bar, but I'd rather not have people tracking where/when/how often I go to the pub. How long before this information is inappropiratly against someone to raise insurance (even though the driver has a perfect abstract) in a custody battle, or by employers. These records aren't confidential in the same way medical records are, it's certainly reasonable to question who may get access to them one way or another.
At least pot decriminalization/legalization is still in the works, I'll do my mind altering substances at poetry readings in beatnic cafes instead.
hen it was discovered she couldn't be sharing songs on pirate service Kazaa because she uses an incompatible Apple computer.
It's not like Macintosh users* can access Kazaa's FastTrack network thanks to poisoned [poisonedprject.com]. That would just be terrible! * Poisoned is a front end to giFTd, it will not run on pre os x.2 machines.
We should all take this to heart; any computer that isn't turned off and locked in a safe at the bottom of an ocean on jupiter should be considered insecure, and even then...
The size of the windows audience has something to with the sheer number of viruses & worms, but that doesn't mean that mean that BSD/Mac OS/Linux are automatically just as insecure as Windows. Microsoft hasn't exactly gone out of it's way to ensure that users are safe and secure (not to the extent that OpenBSD has anyway)
Furthermore, *NIX has a massive presence in the server closets of the world. A worm that/virus that exploited these systems could be very lucrative for a malicious individual.
- Stealing corporate data (so we could find out who exactly SCO buys the stuff McBride is smoking from)
- DDoS attacks with OC-3 (rather than DSL/Dialup/Cable)
- Spam directly from the mail servers
There are certainly good reasons to write *NIX worms/viruses, but I think a combination of cluefull administration, a well designed OS, and to (a smaller extent) obscurity work together to make them a particularly hard target (when compared with Windows)
Flying is hard enough - they tell you it's the safest way to travel. Now we find out it's run by a system famed for it's ability to crash?!
The service is so bad; the management was so bad. The system is just a mess, just a mess. I had my luggage delivered to Toronto, I was told on Saturday, so I don't have anything.
Seriously though, that sounds more like the airline's standard crumby service than the latest Microsoft worm/virus is to blame.
Most students could easily complete everything up to a highschool level education using any computing platform: Windows, Linux, or Mac OS. Windows is self-perpetuating: we teach Windows because it's popular, it's popular because it's what people know. It's a shame it's gotten to this state of affairs. Even if a single platform is more cost effective to maintain than a mixed environment moving to Linux or BSD on the existing x86 hardware in a school would be cheaper than sticking with Windows licensing for Windows, Office, NT Server and on the next hardware upgrade cycle moving to Macintosh systems (if that's deamed to be the best move) or upgrading the x86 systems already there. I think a two major reasons for the standardization on Windows has to do with the administrators trying to secure their employment (weekly patches = overtime) and the fear of maintaining something they aren't familar with.
Given sufficient motivation innocent people DO plead guilty - it wasn't too long ago in soviet russia (no, I'm not making that tired joke) that Stalin killed millions - many of which were upstanding members of the community who confessed to crimes that never occurred. Look at just about any dictatorship and you'll find evidence of innocent people pleading guilty to criminal acts in order to avoid or end terrible punishments.
I'm not saying that America is a tyrannical dictatorship - I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader - but the statements you made about a government unquestionably having MY best interests in mind fly in the face of dozens of years of history: sometimes they do not. Vigilance and over our governments is what keeps them from degenerating to the depths of those decrepit examples of our past.
Aren't there some billy goats at the ol' bridge you should be bothering?
I've got the partner thing covered too!
Girls are great,they just takes a little while to download, that's all.
iTMS offers protected AAC files only. Even though the iPod is cabable of playing MP3 files they are not available so there is no reason to suspect that Apple will either use these chips in iPod v4 or support Vorbis in software on the current or future iPod generations strictly because of the music store when they aren't even offering downloads in all of the ipod supported formats (AAC, MP3, AIFF, WAV)
Cool factor? Maybe, but there are plenty of other formats (even more common than OGG/Vorbis) that are likely to be supported on the iPod because they're in much wider spread use by the average joe such as RA, WMA, etc. We as geeks may not like those formats but a sizeable portion of iPod purchasers - >50% - are using Windows and just plain don't know any better and will use WMP to rip their tunes which defaults to WMA. RealPlayer also has a bad habbit of defaulting to formats other than MP3 when ripping - or at least that's how I remember it the last time I installed it years ago.
Adding another lossy but near-cd quality format doesn't help the situation. I'd bet on seeing FLAC on the ipod long before vorbis because at least it provides something the other formats don't: lossless compressed audio.
When you add the cd-rw/dvd rom it costs as much as an ibook (it's more expensive if you include the student discount). Not that I'm evangalizing apple hardware here but doesn't $800 seam a little steap for those who aren't trying to make a political statement (screw microsoft) when both Dell and Apple offer cheaper systems?