It'd just be great if after all this time we actually find out something like it's not possible to leave the solar system without some sort of extreme propulsion system.
I agree with the other people here, in that you really should buy a gun of some kind. Learn how to use it and practice at a firing range frequently.
As far as warning shots got, I've got a story about that. There's a farmer who lives just outside of my town (I know him) and he has two identical shotguns. He keeps one in a gun case in his house and the other under the cusions of his couch. If someone starts messing with his livestock or anything he takes the one from under the couch and fires it in the air.
When the police show up about a discharge firearm he directs them to his shotgun in the gun case, which is of course not loaded and has not been fired.
I'm not sure if the police actually know he has the other one, he may not have it legally. His strategy works though. He used to get vandalized a lot and have people tip his cows all the time. Now, no one ever goes out there.
I think that it's a very good idea to keep track of the flights of people who may be dangerous to other passengers. However, I think that the list should be much more selective.
IMHO, I think it would make more sense to put two classes of people on the list. Those classes being anyone who was not born in the United States, and anyone who has a criminal record which includes a violent crime or a felony. We're primarily watching for terrorists and violent people. To me, it makes more sense to watch the types of people most likely to be a terrorist or a violent person.
When was the last time you met a 78 year old man who wanted to hijack a plane and crash it into something?
Also, I think it would be a show of good faith for Homeland Security to send a letter notifying people that they are on the watch list and why, thus offering them a chance to correct the issue ahead of time if they shouldn't be on it. Many would say that would just be alerting the enemy, but if they are really doing something wrong, and we know who they are, it won't matter if they know we know about them.
I would say that Yahoo has every right to do this. No one pays for their service, it's free, so no one really has much of a right to complain. However, that's not the whole story, in my opinion.
It would be all good and fine for them to do this if they had a functional Yahoo client for UNIX/Linux systems. The client they do release for *NIX has more bugs than I can shake a stick at. I would use it if it worked correctly.
The Windows Yahoo client supports chatrooms, sound, and video. The *NIX one doesn't support chatrooms at all, nor does it support voice or video. Gaim doesn't support voice or video, but the chatrooms do work. Therefore, I use Gaim.
I happen to have an AS400 from 1989 in my basement (running), along with a few i486SX cpu's for teaching unix classes, and my desktop I actually use has a hard drive from 1992 or so in it just to store my music.
When looking at statistics of this nature you should first consider that Apache accounts for 64.2% of all web servers on the internet, which could be followed to say that about 60% of all web servers use some form of Linux/UNIX. Only 23.54% of all web servers use Microsoft IIS. (statistics from netcraft).
This being said, it is only logical that more Linux based servers will be attacked than Windows based servers. In my opinion the main reason for the successful attacks against these two OS'es are simple. Linux servers have the potential to be extremely secure, but it's not easy for most people to make them secure. Therefore, the software itself is secure and most the problems are from user error. In the case of Windows, the server is very easy to configure, meaning the security features aren't hard to use, but the software itself has a ridiculous amount of flaws.
The real issue here is that the people setting up most of these Linux servers probably don't know much about what they're doing, and thus configure things wrong. Until better trained people are used to set uo these servers (or Linux is made easier to use) and Microsoft updates its coding practices, these are the sorts of statistics we can expect. Yes, more Linux servers were compromised than Windows servers, but if you look at the percentages that were compromised they are exactly the correct proportion when compared to the numbers of each which are deployed.
I can say that I've found a great use for e-books. I have pdf's of several very large and obscure books like the Lesser Key of Solomon, Crowley's Equinox, 777, The Golden Dawn, and other books (whose names I won't mention since few people would recognize the names). I've found this to be very useful, since these books are expensive, mostly available only as hard back, and a pain in the ass to carry around or store. Having them as e-books saves a ton of space and time, especially when looking for something in them.
I think the best market for e-books are libraries. Imagine going to the library and being able to grep the entire contents of the library to find books related to the subject you're looking for. Libraries have been lacking any really effective way of indexing since the concept of library came about. If they used e-books it would eliminate the problems almost entirely. Honestly, use grep, sed, awk, and a sql database and there you go. That's what I do for the books I have.
Slashdot Mirror
Comets do travel a great deal faster than anything we've ever built, so I'm not really sure what you're getting at here.
It'd just be great if after all this time we actually find out something like it's not possible to leave the solar system without some sort of extreme propulsion system.
William Shatner for President!
I agree with the other people here, in that you really should buy a gun of some kind. Learn how to use it and practice at a firing range frequently.
As far as warning shots got, I've got a story about that. There's a farmer who lives just outside of my town (I know him) and he has two identical shotguns. He keeps one in a gun case in his house and the other under the cusions of his couch. If someone starts messing with his livestock or anything he takes the one from under the couch and fires it in the air. When the police show up about a discharge firearm he directs them to his shotgun in the gun case, which is of course not loaded and has not been fired. I'm not sure if the police actually know he has the other one, he may not have it legally. His strategy works though. He used to get vandalized a lot and have people tip his cows all the time. Now, no one ever goes out there.
I think that it's a very good idea to keep track of the flights of people who may be dangerous to other passengers. However, I think that the list should be much more selective.
IMHO, I think it would make more sense to put two classes of people on the list. Those classes being anyone who was not born in the United States, and anyone who has a criminal record which includes a violent crime or a felony. We're primarily watching for terrorists and violent people. To me, it makes more sense to watch the types of people most likely to be a terrorist or a violent person. When was the last time you met a 78 year old man who wanted to hijack a plane and crash it into something?
Also, I think it would be a show of good faith for Homeland Security to send a letter notifying people that they are on the watch list and why, thus offering them a chance to correct the issue ahead of time if they shouldn't be on it. Many would say that would just be alerting the enemy, but if they are really doing something wrong, and we know who they are, it won't matter if they know we know about them.
I would say that Yahoo has every right to do this. No one pays for their service, it's free, so no one really has much of a right to complain. However, that's not the whole story, in my opinion.
It would be all good and fine for them to do this if they had a functional Yahoo client for UNIX/Linux systems. The client they do release for *NIX has more bugs than I can shake a stick at. I would use it if it worked correctly.
The Windows Yahoo client supports chatrooms, sound, and video. The *NIX one doesn't support chatrooms at all, nor does it support voice or video. Gaim doesn't support voice or video, but the chatrooms do work. Therefore, I use Gaim.
On most of my keyboards I remove the key.
I happen to have an AS400 from 1989 in my basement (running), along with a few i486SX cpu's for teaching unix classes, and my desktop I actually use has a hard drive from 1992 or so in it just to store my music.
When looking at statistics of this nature you should first consider that Apache accounts for 64.2% of all web servers on the internet, which could be followed to say that about 60% of all web servers use some form of Linux/UNIX. Only 23.54% of all web servers use Microsoft IIS. (statistics from netcraft).
This being said, it is only logical that more Linux based servers will be attacked than Windows based servers. In my opinion the main reason for the successful attacks against these two OS'es are simple. Linux servers have the potential to be extremely secure, but it's not easy for most people to make them secure. Therefore, the software itself is secure and most the problems are from user error. In the case of Windows, the server is very easy to configure, meaning the security features aren't hard to use, but the software itself has a ridiculous amount of flaws.
The real issue here is that the people setting up most of these Linux servers probably don't know much about what they're doing, and thus configure things wrong. Until better trained people are used to set uo these servers (or Linux is made easier to use) and Microsoft updates its coding practices, these are the sorts of statistics we can expect. Yes, more Linux servers were compromised than Windows servers, but if you look at the percentages that were compromised they are exactly the correct proportion when compared to the numbers of each which are deployed.
As I said, I don't mention the books that're more obscure for the sake of most people on this site. I was making an example.
I can say that I've found a great use for e-books. I have pdf's of several very large and obscure books like the Lesser Key of Solomon, Crowley's Equinox, 777, The Golden Dawn, and other books (whose names I won't mention since few people would recognize the names). I've found this to be very useful, since these books are expensive, mostly available only as hard back, and a pain in the ass to carry around or store. Having them as e-books saves a ton of space and time, especially when looking for something in them.
I think the best market for e-books are libraries. Imagine going to the library and being able to grep the entire contents of the library to find books related to the subject you're looking for. Libraries have been lacking any really effective way of indexing since the concept of library came about. If they used e-books it would eliminate the problems almost entirely. Honestly, use grep, sed, awk, and a sql database and there you go. That's what I do for the books I have.