Good. If injecting our values and culture onto the Middle East is what's required to get them to behave by the rules of the civilized world then I'm all for it.
More supremacist bullshit. "White Man's Burden" and all that crap. Do you really think you are the first bigot to come up with this idea that his, and only his, view of the world is "civilized"?
Rome was civilization. Rome had running water, central heating, higher education, etc, etc. If our enemies want to be considered part of civilization then they should start playing by the rules.
They also had mass slavery and based their entire "civilization" on pillage of others. They were a culture of thieves. When their ability to redirect the wealth of their conquests to themselves became compromised, Rome folded. Rome did not play by any fucking "rules", unless by "rules" you mean "he who is the most vile and vicious gets to steal from the corpse of his victim".
Seeing your whining about "civilization" and your praise of the jackals that were the Roman Empire, reminds me of people who used to praise the Nazis in the 1930s as "civilized" because they've brought "order" to Germany and "Herr Adolf" got the trains to run on time. Another great "civilization" for you to emulate...
I don't want more gore and blood.
Everything you had said contradicts this statement.
I want an end to the wars that we are currently fighting. The best way to win a war is to kill enough of the enemy so that the remainder realizes that the fight isn't worth carrying on. If we aren't willing to do this then it probably isn't worth fighting in the first place.
So you are advocating genocide. Some "enemies" are thus because you gave them very little other options. Their fight is to the last man, woman and child standing because you offer them subjugation or death. But then again such is the wake of empires.
We wouldn't have invaded Afghanistan if the Government of that country wasn't harboring a group that murdered thousands of our citizens. Funny how you seem to gloss over that fact.
Except, of course, you managed to gloss over the fact that the "government" of Afghanistan was directly the result if CIA's meddling during 1980s, that Al-Queda itself is a CIA creation (in collaboration with Pakistani Intelligence) and finally that the "government" was simply a band of quarrelling tribal warlords and clerics that was recognized abroad by only 2 countries. So you've came, murdered thousands of both Taliban and bystanders, put your own imported puppets in charge, played favourites amongst the warlords and now are dewy-eyed, hurt and oh-so-surprised that things are going to shit 6 years later. In goes another 60,000 Imperial Centurions....
The whole shtick of destabilizing other nations, causing mayhem and carnage, and then using it as an excuse to "come to the rescue" is getting rather old. Incidentally, this was also a strategy of the Roman Empire, evil fucks that they were.
It's funny that someone who says the truth hurts can't bring himself to use the accepted and proper noun for a citizen of the United States: American.
Accepted how? It is true that in common usage "American" came to become a short-hand for "the citizen of USA". But "Americans" are, by definition, denizens of America, the continent. That includes the whole of North America and South America. It only underlines my point, as to the self-centred, narcissistic attitudes of the citizens of the USA that they would claim a continent-wide description for themselves exclusively and not bat an eye at this. I used "USian" here as a shortcut, because it is more precise. Truth, you know.
We are nothing like Ancient Rome. If we behaved like the Romans we would have killed every single male of military age in Afghanistan a long time ago.
You know nothing of Ancient Rome. Ancient Rome was far more like the USA in its policies than is comfortable for you. It did not kill all males, it subjugated the conquered cultures and slowly injected Roman values and culture into them until they became wholly subservient to Rome. Rome even promoted some of the conquered to the role of Roman Citizens (while at the same time virtually enslaving the rest). It allowed for control with far less effort on the part of the central government, as it was in the interest of the newly appointed upper class to police their own backyard. This is the very same strategy that the US has used in Iraq and is attempting to use in Afghanistan.
Say what you will about the Romans but they knew how to keep the enemies of civilization in line.
The Romans only knew how to keep enemies of Rome in line (for a while). Your imbecilic assumption that Rome = Civilization only goes to show ho warped your mind is.
We've long since forgotten how to do that. More's the pity.
Precisely the ass-hat attitude I was describing. The USian mind yearning for more gore and blood of all those "dirty", "uncivilized" "outsiders" who dare to resist the "liberation" and "civilization" (defined as vapid, US-centric, rabid consumerism). Not enough mass graves, and they need more napalm apparently.
I wasn't aware that enemies on the battlefield were entitled to due process before being killed. Could you point out this nugget of international law for me?
That is a handy excuse: do not like due process? Simple: invade some place, declare it a "battlefield" and all those inconvenient to you as "enemies", or better yet "unlawful combatants" and presto! No more pesky international law... or any law for that matter.
In short, you are a perfect example of what I was talking about, narcissistic, vile, arrogant, callous, sociopathic, self-appointed "bringer of civilization" to the "barbarians". The likes of you litter history books, usually somewhere under the heading of "supremacist warmongers".
Tell me, what are the intentions of the people who those drones are targetting? How many innocents have those men killed this year? How many weddings, funerals, markets, and religious services have they bombed in service to their god of hate and blood?
Simple answer: no one has any idea. The people targeted by the drones for extra-judicial assassinations are always and without exception "suspected" "militants" - i.e. people who might militantly oppose US interests, or interests of US sponsored warlords in some way or another. Some might be mass murderers, some merely opposed to their US-appointed "government" or simply enemies of some US informants. Or random bystanders. There is no way to tell.
But one thing can be known for certain, the hordes of children killed by the drones were definitely not "targeting" anyone.
So the bottom line is this: when you choose to descend to the levels of the atrocities that you accuse your "evil" opponents of... you yourself have become the very evil you claim to fight. Which is clearly the case with the US of A, and which all rational observer have pointed out a long time ago.
While Slashdot is international in scope, it is still predominantly a US-centric site. Expect to be moderated into oblivion. Truth hurts and US-ians want *absolutely nothing* to do with it. Avoidance of truth is precisely why they have meticulously constructed a nearly impregnable bubble of self-centered dogma around themselves.
Speaking against the policies of the USA here clashes terribly with the "national mythology" which has been methodically and insistently injected into the minds of USians for generations now, even the supposedly well educated ones who ostensibly gather at sites such as this.
It conflicts with this view of the world where they are the "Knights of Freedom in Shining Armour on White Chargers" upon whom the entire planet dearly depends for its liberties and its masses for their daily crumbs, a world in which their network of military installations in over half of the countries of the planet does not herald an Imperial ambition, like with all the other "lesser" cultures and countries past, but instead it indicates a kindly, fatherly concern for the betterment (defined as shift towards US-centric world-view) of the "poor wretches".
All and any challengers to this world-view are "evil-doers" and have to be exterminated with prejudice, no matter the number of bystanders killed in the process... as long as they are not US citizens. In fact, very much like Ancient Rome where the citizens were a different breed from the conquered and the "ungrateful" slaves outnumbered them 3:1, the only "people" in the view of US-ians are.... US-ians. The "lesser" creatures, although not outright enslaved as Rome had it, still "enjoy" only a marginal status as "somewhat sentient" in the view of the US-ians, and they should be grateful for it, for after-all all of the positive developments in their lives can be, in the US-ian dogma, attributed directly and exclusively to the US.
I could go on, as could pretty much anyone outside the US who is not inspiring to join the global "winners" in hopes of snatching some crumbs from the feast of their upper echelons of corporate nobility, and the extent of this attitude of the US citizens is far far greater then just this. But then again one could only look at the tens of thousands of dead, hundreds of thousands of maimed and wounded and millions of dispossessed the US "liberators" (with some help from sycophantic side-kicks) have produced in just the last decade alone to get an idea...
And on the topics of the drones, everyone outside of the US should by now know quite well how they are used: to assassinate, remotely (with no regard for bystanders, due process or any of that "coddling" stuff) people whom US suspects of the greatest crime possible, in this Universe - i.e. opposing US interests. I envision, in some 30 years time, a world where hundreds of thousands of US drones roam the skies of all 3rd world nations, and a good portion of the "allied" ones, conducting "targetted assassinations", Israel-style, of anyone who dares to oppose our "kindly and magnanimous" global "benefactors". For "our own good", you understand.
Dude, you do not seem to understand. Prepaid cards are a money laundering loophole, far more serious to the powers-that-be than some nerds downloading pilfered porn off of RapidShare. You are thinking: "merry mouse-and-cat chases with the RIAA", they are thinking: "Osama Bin Laden agents paying for communications and bomb components". It doesn't take a genius to figure out what is going to happen in this case.
fun fact. anyone downloading junk from these sites is probably downloading an encrypted container file like rar or 7zip, under a completely false file
Really? How then do you find this file? Unless you and your buddies are into psychic connections, there is somewhere, where a lot of you turkeys congregate, a "translation" to the real contents and the password to extract it. Unless you expect MPAAs of the world to be illiterate, they can read it as well as you do. Considering yourself oh-soooo-much-smarter-then-your-dumb-by-definition-adversary is the hallmark of elementary school "cryptography". In keeping with this, I fully expect you to lecture me next on the use of ROT-13 as an "advanced" method of "hiding" stuff.
another fun fact. the most popular, and therefore hardest to police sites are all free to use, with improved premium access being a pay-to-play option, not a mandate.
The article specifically mentions the likes of RapidShare, which is decidedly not in that category. But fear not, I am sure the other sites expect to make oodles on continuing to offer terabytes of bandwidth just out of their love of sharing.... or perhaps they are just hoping that enough suckers pays before they go bust. Note that places like YouTube are millions of dollars in the red.
BT (and any other pure P2P system) is safer simply because there are additional hoops for the MPAAs of the world to jump through (like ISPs and privacy laws) to get your identity and even so such identity is unreliable (unless your lawyer is a dolt or you have been completely unprepared and are keeping all your downloaded stuff in the open, have no WiFi routers etc).
This is of course not an impregnable defence but its orders of magnitude harder to crack then simply asking MegaUpload for all your downloads in your account, cross-correlated with your identity coming from your financial record (note that the prickly ISP problem has been circumnavigated neatly).
P2P can be made far more secure, and it has been, like for example the Japanese Winny system (which was a cross between something like FreeNet and a typical P2P system like Gnutella) and its more modern successor the Perfect Dark. If coupled with steganographic storage, good user practices and other tricks, such systems can be made near-impractical to crack, to the point that mere knowledge of the IP address is (practically) useless from the perspective of copyright witch-hunters.
Again, you're disregarding prepaid credit cards that leave no such trail. You are aware it's nearly 2010 correct?
I addressed the gift cards in another reply to a poster below.
In short: they are not available in most countries, in many where they allow them they do not work online and in the last remaining few places the FATF is doing their best to make them unusable online. I do not expect that fight to last very long, by 2011 or so none of them will work online anymore.
You also act like you've never heard of prepaid credit cards.
"Gift" (i.e. anonymous and prepaid) credit cards do not exist in many countries, and in many of those that allow them the cards do not work online.... precisely because they are anonymous. In fact the whole idea of "gift" cards is being considered a loophole that goes against the recommendations of FATF (Financial Action Task Force on Money Laundering). Anonymity is a precious commodity and is considered a weapon in the "Wars" on Terrorism, Drugs, Alcohol, Privacy and Whatever Else Can Be Made Into A Cash-cow For Security And Defence Corporations And An Excuse For Authoritarian Crusades.
Subsequently, I would not get too used to these cards being around.
No, its first time I hear of the thing, although the concept is rather old and has been done in response to previous scam sites trying to obfuscate or lock contents and get people to pay for releasing it. Naturally the operators if the scam sites will do everything in their power to prevent this "jdownloader" from working (as they are "losing" their ad revenue and "premium account" money to it as it makes "free" downloading less of an getting-a-root-canal-dentistry-experience they want you to have) and this will quickly devolve into an arms race, where your "jdownloader" will work today, by screwed up tomorrow as some site takes counter-measures, work on the next Tuesday again when devs respond, then quit on Thursday etc and so on.
It's a cat-and-mouse game, where the mouse usually is more savy and has a head-start.
Not if the mouse was stupid enough to forward its Credit Card number to the cat, who then finds its billing-address-mouse-hole and sits there waiting for it...
Actually, moving to paid services is one of those short-sighted, brain-dead lemming moves the general public gets involved in periodically. This is simply so because most such sites need actual payment to download (unless you want to download 1 file per 24 hours at something like 10k/s in the "free", "oh how much faster it would go if you only gave us your Credit Card number", "trial" mode - and never you mind horrid java-script hells of a "web page" all of these "services" feature).
The end result is that there is a complete trail of uploaders, their IP Addresses, their emails, but what's even better, there is a complete trail of all downloaders, including their IP Addresses, emails, user ids and, the Holy Grail of RIAA, MPAA and BSA snooping campaigns: actual financial transactions of these donwloaders which immediately yield their identities and bonus preculde any possible defense of "sharing between friends" as there is actual money changing hands.
In short: stupidity squared on the part of any people who use RapidShare, MegaUpload and a bunch of similar scams, people who have no clue about the implications of their actions and were, due to their ignorance of technology driven into arms of these scams by the PR campaigns against P2P, people who got brainwashed into believing that the direct-download sites are "safer". All it will take is one of them getting sued and happily forking over all the logs and financial records. Than again, odds are that some of them are already controlled by MPAA etc as a result of some behind-the-scenes settlements.
No such thing was possible with BitTorrent as a vast majority of tracker sites are anonymous. The snobs participating in "private trackers" had more elevated levels of exposure because of their "registration" process offered additional levels of forensic evidence. In fact most P2P systems offer as the only point of identification the IP Address, which does not immediately translate into a personal identification (unlike your MasterCard with which you paid RapidShare) due to dynapmic IP assignments, possible WiFi holes, access by other people to your computer and what not.
In short, it will take only a series of mega-busts of MegaUpload users, followed by rapid (due to excellent and undeniable forensic evidence) convictions, until the lemmings will run back to more anonymous and thus more sane methods of file-sharing.
Well then the pirates should add a counter ads to their pirated copies, mocking the original (like they already do with the MPAA ads in some torrents in the West). I see it something like this: The camera guy starts shooting, the cops bust in with guns drawn, the camera guy's lens flips up and a rocket launcher engages the cops, who back out, return with a tank, at which point the camera guy extends an antena and calls Gojira, the cops call Mothra, Tokyo gets flattened... you get the idea...
[1] And yes, I know exactly how inane the idea of a deserving target is, given the topic of this sub thread, and grandparent post in particular. Take the phrase as tongue in cheek.
Actually in this case it is rather easy and clear-cut: the organizers and promoters of this "contest" are quite deserving of this sort of attention indeed. Anonymous should simply turn these would-be Gestapo members' self-righteous shit on them. See how they like the taste of their own medicine, the feeling of their own petards up their asses... you get the idea.
You are confused. Hurd is a kernel which uses the Mach micro-kernel as its core. The whole idea of a micro-kernel is that it is a minimalistic foundation upon which you build the actual kernel environment. Similarly, the BSD kernel has a Mach micro-kernel elements, like the virtual memory management system borrowed from Mach. MAC OS X has a Mach/BSD hybrid environment. Etc and so on.
You mean like they did when they got fed up with Debian and migrated to Ubuntu?
This is nonsense. Most of Ubuntu packages are unaltered Debian packages. While Ubuntu has a different target audience, it depends in its entirety on the good will of the Debian project.
Is this a stepping stone to Debian moving from Linux to BSD permanently?
Unless the elected leaders of Debian all go insane at the same time, not very likely.
I'm trying to figure out if the FreeBSD licenses are more compatible with the Debian philosphy, or less.
Far less. If Debian were to ever go BSD as its primary license (see point one), somewhere in the vicinity of 90% of its contributors would leave, probably to start a new GPL-ed distribution.
Inclusion of the BSD kernel is not the same as an adoption of the BSD philosophy, as the kernel is an interchangeable component of the whole, very much like the much maligned Hurd is, of which there is also a Debian-based experimental distro.
Unfortunately for that theory, secrecy is increasingly more unworkable. Even back in the WWII days it already required full-time efforts of organizations like the ones headed by the "gentlemen" I listed.... and it still did not quite work.
And with technological progress, any attempts at secrecy will by definition require more and more draconian methods to accomplish.
Which is incidentally the true aim of the vast majority of those who harp on the "need for secrecy" and "protecting ignorant people" and "walls with brave men on them" and similar crap. What they really want is unchecked, unquestionable power over average individuals, ostensibly "to protect them" and "for their own good". They call themselves "defenders" and "protectors" and "Homeland Security". I call them vile, power-hungry, authoritarian jack-asses, far, far worse than the supposed evils they "protect" us from (and not a few of which were outright manufactured by the very same "valiant protectors". See also under: CIA + Al Qeida).
I'm reasonably sure I could set this up with group policies in about the same amount of time as it would take to set up my personal computer.
Well, nothing is ever that simple in real life, especially when there are tens of applications that could be impacted and multiple versions of Windows around etc. What usually happens is that some virtualized test network is set up, people screw around with policy settings and centralized deployment of stuff for weeks on end, then they go "live", only to discover that some hardware that could not be vitrtualized in the test environment is wreaking untold havoc or some such, get yelled at by bosses and users, changes are rolled back, more testing, lather-rinse-repeat and eventually the thing wobbles unsteadily forward as the "production environment".
Dude, I am writing on Slashdot, in an Windows-related article about.... wait for it... flaws of Windows (from my perspective).
And you come here to lecture me on how to either tell people not to use the stuff (not very practical "advice" in a de-facto business software monopoly conditions) or to "suck it up" because "technology changes". That it could change for the better for more people, particularly for people in my position rather than only for game players and Facebook addicts, apparently did not cross your mind at all. Possibly because that option is not visible from where your head is up Microsoft's arse. Which makes any further discussion with you on the subject rather pointless.
I believe the term "fanboi" applies it your case quite admirably.
What are these humongous icons and doo-dads that you speak of?
The entire menu structure is taking up much more surface area than it used in Windows 2000, XP has had the same issue with its Fischer-Price interface, which is the reason why most businesses I am familiar with had it turned off to gain room for various shortcuts and what not deployed from central servers via Roaming User Profiles and what not.
The task bar icons? Go to taskbar, right click, properties, "use Small Icons".
It does not work anymore for the menu, since changing the icon size does not get rid of the bloated XP-style menu itself, which consists of two panels and is twice the width of the Win 2000 one.
Desktop Icons? Right Click on Desktop, View, Small Icons.
Sure, and naturally I am going to do it on 200 desktops individually, right? Or screw around with Group Policies until cows come home?
Excessive junk on the start menu? Right click on start menu, properties, customize, turn the stuff off.
See above. Not only it is no longer quite possible, as some junk cannot be gotten rid of, but it now adds another pile of work involving screwing around with company-wide, barely functional as it is, group policy mess.
Spurious animations? Turn off Windows Aero.
More screwing around with group policies. I think I see a pattern developing here...
I'm guessing you are at a skill level of at least moderate, probably advanced in terms of computer related stuff...so changing the look of the desktop to suit your needs does not seem like a very daunting task.
Lots of things are possible given sufficiently absurd amounts of effort. The point is that Windows, since XP days has been less and less optimized in its default form for business deployment and more and more as an "entertainment platform". And so people who have to deal with large numbers of users and demanding business configuration find dealing with this feature set, utterly useless from the point of view of business, more and more frustratingly pointless.
Bash Windows 7 if you want, but Bash it for important things.... don't bash it for default superficial settings that would take a one time investment of 10 minutes to make look the way you want.
Sure, 10 minutes times 200 desktops, or alternatively days of messing with and testing group policy scripts and what not. You see, in your entire response you assumed that because you can customize your singular home desktop in 10 minutes, it automatically means that everything is fine and dandy and everyone complaining about this is just a malcontent. Which is exactly as I see Microsoft and most of its products, as optimized to the individual stand-alone PC users who are entirely in control of "their" PCs, or at most home-office users with 3 PCs or so, and at the same time expending only a minimal modicum of effort to make the thing workable (barely) in corporate environments and large scales of deployment. Vista is the perfect example of this, having been utterly unready for any corporate work and focusing nearly entirely on snazzy visuals, multimedia and associated DRM schemes. I see Windows 7 so far as a new kludge, desperately cobbled together when it became apparent that Vista is a total flop when it comes to corporate IT. Barely acceptable, minimal improvement.
And the rest? How do you get the "Classic view" (a.k.a. Win2000-like) back on Windows 7? How do you make the thing give back the desktop space claimed by all the humongous icons and other doo-dads that fill up the typical 1024x768 business LCD in no time flat with just a few apps installed? What about all the spurious animations that make RDP sessions a nightmare?
The move towards bigger and bigger icons and more and more animations might work fine for people who are trying to purchase 67" monitors along with their new windows PCs that need 16GB RAM and twelve-core CPUs to get the Notepad going, all so that they can go on Facebook and play WoW on them, but the rest of us who actually have to use this crap in business for a living, frequently over low-bandwidth Internet connections, we are somewhat less impressed with all the gigantic muffler-extenders and undercarriage full of blue neon lights that come welded-on in this thing beyond any possibility of removal.
That, and lack of knowledge about various "trivialities", like science etc, is the sure-fire path to mind-boggling religious woo-woos, assorted New-Age hokum, and sooner or later to "spiritual" stock market Ponzi schemes.
I have more respect for a man who can drop a transmission than one who knows the top three reasons why Chavez is an awesome leader.
Which is truly great if one needs one's transmission overhauled. Of course when one is interested in what Chavez is up to... then not so much. Which is precisely the point. People who care about their transmissions far more than about the geo-political goings-on, should not then act surprised and violently upset when their opinions on the global affairs are summarily put into the "laughable nonsense" file.
You see, what you are trying to do here is the classic case of "have your cake and eat it too". Either you are willing to invest the time and effort to get informed, at which point you get the chance of your opinion having some probability of being correct, or you are pretty much guaranteed to be wrong and thus justly treated like the ignorant hillbilly you seem when you try, loudly, very very loudly, to enforce your "view" on those who actually spent time trying to learn the stuff. A fact which most anti-intellectuals refuse to accept (which is why they are anti-intellectuals and why they watch Fox). Which, incidentally, was historically always quite popular at times, the "an-angry-and-menacing-mob-is-always-right" (particularly when confronting wimpy "intellectuals", "professors", "scientists" and the like) branch of philosophical approach to scientific debate never quite having gone out of style.
To put it in the terms you mentioned, it is like having some salesman show up and demand that you take his advice as to the exact procedure of removal of that hypothetical transmission, despite having never seen one up close, never you mind knowing how one works. But he claims that he doesn't need to know so because he has far more respect for people who know how to calculate compound interest lease payments in their head, than some "trivial" "transmission repair" knowledge.
You see, he goes for the Mammon "spirituality" view of the world, where Everything Is A Sale (sadly I am not kidding, I personally knew a salesman who actually believed that life was one gigantic, never-ending series of Sales).
The self righteous sanctimony and distain you have of what is CLEARLY more people than ABC/NBC/CBS and probably CNN combined is interesting...
Someone already pointed out that this is an argumentum ad populum type of logical fallacy and so I will skip right to this:
I'd love to compare the literacy of say those that watch what is on those channels to that of what is on Fox News.
If by "literacy" you mean "knowledge about the current affairs", then ask and you shall receive.
From there: the 2nd least informed and most confused (about basic geographic, geopolitical and other everyday facts) class of viewers: Fox News Viewers. Beaten only by the Network Morning Shows, of the "How to make Cookies with Martha Stewart and 3 other bimbo celebrities" variety, firmly holding the rather dubious honour of being the dumbest audience ever.
Conversely, most informed audience: The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Oops.
Somehow I do not think this is what you were looking for.
And the rest of the drivel you posted goes down hill from here, to the point that it is not even worth responding to.
Slashdot Mirror
More supremacist bullshit. "White Man's Burden" and all that crap. Do you really think you are the first bigot to come up with this idea that his, and only his, view of the world is "civilized"?
They also had mass slavery and based their entire "civilization" on pillage of others. They were a culture of thieves. When their ability to redirect the wealth of their conquests to themselves became compromised, Rome folded. Rome did not play by any fucking "rules", unless by "rules" you mean "he who is the most vile and vicious gets to steal from the corpse of his victim".
Seeing your whining about "civilization" and your praise of the jackals that were the Roman Empire, reminds me of people who used to praise the Nazis in the 1930s as "civilized" because they've brought "order" to Germany and "Herr Adolf" got the trains to run on time. Another great "civilization" for you to emulate ...
Everything you had said contradicts this statement.
So you are advocating genocide. Some "enemies" are thus because you gave them very little other options. Their fight is to the last man, woman and child standing because you offer them subjugation or death. But then again such is the wake of empires.
Except, of course, you managed to gloss over the fact that the "government" of Afghanistan was directly the result if CIA's meddling during 1980s, that Al-Queda itself is a CIA creation (in collaboration with Pakistani Intelligence) and finally that the "government" was simply a band of quarrelling tribal warlords and clerics that was recognized abroad by only 2 countries. So you've came, murdered thousands of both Taliban and bystanders, put your own imported puppets in charge, played favourites amongst the warlords and now are dewy-eyed, hurt and oh-so-surprised that things are going to shit 6 years later. In goes another 60,000 Imperial Centurions ....
The whole shtick of destabilizing other nations, causing mayhem and carnage, and then using it as an excuse to "come to the rescue" is getting rather old. Incidentally, this was also a strategy of the Roman Empire, evil fucks that they were.
Accepted how? It is true that in common usage "American" came to become a short-hand for "the citizen of USA". But "Americans" are, by definition, denizens of America, the continent. That includes the whole of North America and South America. It only underlines my point, as to the self-centred, narcissistic attitudes of the citizens of the USA that they would claim a continent-wide description for themselves exclusively and not bat an eye at this. I used "USian" here as a shortcut, because it is more precise. Truth, you know.
You know nothing of Ancient Rome. Ancient Rome was far more like the USA in its policies than is comfortable for you. It did not kill all males, it subjugated the conquered cultures and slowly injected Roman values and culture into them until they became wholly subservient to Rome. Rome even promoted some of the conquered to the role of Roman Citizens (while at the same time virtually enslaving the rest). It allowed for control with far less effort on the part of the central government, as it was in the interest of the newly appointed upper class to police their own backyard. This is the very same strategy that the US has used in Iraq and is attempting to use in Afghanistan.
The Romans only knew how to keep enemies of Rome in line (for a while). Your imbecilic assumption that Rome = Civilization only goes to show ho warped your mind is.
Precisely the ass-hat attitude I was describing. The USian mind yearning for more gore and blood of all those "dirty", "uncivilized" "outsiders" who dare to resist the "liberation" and "civilization" (defined as vapid, US-centric, rabid consumerism). Not enough mass graves, and they need more napalm apparently.
That is a handy excuse: do not like due process? Simple: invade some place, declare it a "battlefield" and all those inconvenient to you as "enemies", or better yet "unlawful combatants" and presto! No more pesky international law ... or any law for that matter.
In short, you are a perfect example of what I was talking about, narcissistic, vile, arrogant, callous, sociopathic, self-appointed "bringer of civilization" to the "barbarians". The likes of you litter history books, usually somewhere under the heading of "supremacist warmongers".
Simple answer: no one has any idea. The people targeted by the drones for extra-judicial assassinations are always and without exception "suspected" "militants" - i.e. people who might militantly oppose US interests, or interests of US sponsored warlords in some way or another. Some might be mass murderers, some merely opposed to their US-appointed "government" or simply enemies of some US informants. Or random bystanders. There is no way to tell.
But one thing can be known for certain, the hordes of children killed by the drones were definitely not "targeting" anyone.
So the bottom line is this: when you choose to descend to the levels of the atrocities that you accuse your "evil" opponents of ... you yourself have become the very evil you claim to fight. Which is clearly the case with the US of A, and which all rational observer have pointed out a long time ago.
Spell-checker gone bad.
While Slashdot is international in scope, it is still predominantly a US-centric site. Expect to be moderated into oblivion. Truth hurts and US-ians want *absolutely nothing* to do with it. Avoidance of truth is precisely why they have meticulously constructed a nearly impregnable bubble of self-centered dogma around themselves.
Speaking against the policies of the USA here clashes terribly with the "national mythology" which has been methodically and insistently injected into the minds of USians for generations now, even the supposedly well educated ones who ostensibly gather at sites such as this.
It conflicts with this view of the world where they are the "Knights of Freedom in Shining Armour on White Chargers" upon whom the entire planet dearly depends for its liberties and its masses for their daily crumbs, a world in which their network of military installations in over half of the countries of the planet does not herald an Imperial ambition, like with all the other "lesser" cultures and countries past, but instead it indicates a kindly, fatherly concern for the betterment (defined as shift towards US-centric world-view) of the "poor wretches".
All and any challengers to this world-view are "evil-doers" and have to be exterminated with prejudice, no matter the number of bystanders killed in the process ... as long as they are not US citizens. In fact, very much like Ancient Rome where the citizens were a different breed from the conquered and the "ungrateful" slaves outnumbered them 3:1, the only "people" in the view of US-ians are .... US-ians. The "lesser" creatures, although not outright enslaved as Rome had it, still "enjoy" only a marginal status as "somewhat sentient" in the view of the US-ians, and they should be grateful for it, for after-all all of the positive developments in their lives can be, in the US-ian dogma, attributed directly and exclusively to the US.
I could go on, as could pretty much anyone outside the US who is not inspiring to join the global "winners" in hopes of snatching some crumbs from the feast of their upper echelons of corporate nobility, and the extent of this attitude of the US citizens is far far greater then just this. But then again one could only look at the tens of thousands of dead, hundreds of thousands of maimed and wounded and millions of dispossessed the US "liberators" (with some help from sycophantic side-kicks) have produced in just the last decade alone to get an idea...
And on the topics of the drones, everyone outside of the US should by now know quite well how they are used: to assassinate, remotely (with no regard for bystanders, due process or any of that "coddling" stuff) people whom US suspects of the greatest crime possible, in this Universe - i.e. opposing US interests. I envision, in some 30 years time, a world where hundreds of thousands of US drones roam the skies of all 3rd world nations, and a good portion of the "allied" ones, conducting "targetted assassinations", Israel-style, of anyone who dares to oppose our "kindly and magnanimous" global "benefactors". For "our own good", you understand.
Dude, you do not seem to understand. Prepaid cards are a money laundering loophole, far more serious to the powers-that-be than some nerds downloading pilfered porn off of RapidShare. You are thinking: "merry mouse-and-cat chases with the RIAA", they are thinking: "Osama Bin Laden agents paying for communications and bomb components". It doesn't take a genius to figure out what is going to happen in this case.
Really? How then do you find this file? Unless you and your buddies are into psychic connections, there is somewhere, where a lot of you turkeys congregate, a "translation" to the real contents and the password to extract it. Unless you expect MPAAs of the world to be illiterate, they can read it as well as you do. Considering yourself oh-soooo-much-smarter-then-your-dumb-by-definition-adversary is the hallmark of elementary school "cryptography". In keeping with this, I fully expect you to lecture me next on the use of ROT-13 as an "advanced" method of "hiding" stuff.
The article specifically mentions the likes of RapidShare, which is decidedly not in that category. But fear not, I am sure the other sites expect to make oodles on continuing to offer terabytes of bandwidth just out of their love of sharing.... or perhaps they are just hoping that enough suckers pays before they go bust. Note that places like YouTube are millions of dollars in the red.
BT (and any other pure P2P system) is safer simply because there are additional hoops for the MPAAs of the world to jump through (like ISPs and privacy laws) to get your identity and even so such identity is unreliable (unless your lawyer is a dolt or you have been completely unprepared and are keeping all your downloaded stuff in the open, have no WiFi routers etc).
This is of course not an impregnable defence but its orders of magnitude harder to crack then simply asking MegaUpload for all your downloads in your account, cross-correlated with your identity coming from your financial record (note that the prickly ISP problem has been circumnavigated neatly).
P2P can be made far more secure, and it has been, like for example the Japanese Winny system (which was a cross between something like FreeNet and a typical P2P system like Gnutella) and its more modern successor the Perfect Dark. If coupled with steganographic storage, good user practices and other tricks, such systems can be made near-impractical to crack, to the point that mere knowledge of the IP address is (practically) useless from the perspective of copyright witch-hunters.
I addressed the gift cards in another reply to a poster below.
In short: they are not available in most countries, in many where they allow them they do not work online and in the last remaining few places the FATF is doing their best to make them unusable online. I do not expect that fight to last very long, by 2011 or so none of them will work online anymore.
"Gift" (i.e. anonymous and prepaid) credit cards do not exist in many countries, and in many of those that allow them the cards do not work online .... precisely because they are anonymous. In fact the whole idea of "gift" cards is being considered a loophole that goes against the recommendations of FATF (Financial Action Task Force on Money Laundering). Anonymity is a precious commodity and is considered a weapon in the "Wars" on Terrorism, Drugs, Alcohol, Privacy and Whatever Else Can Be Made Into A Cash-cow For Security And Defence Corporations And An Excuse For Authoritarian Crusades.
Subsequently, I would not get too used to these cards being around.
No, its first time I hear of the thing, although the concept is rather old and has been done in response to previous scam sites trying to obfuscate or lock contents and get people to pay for releasing it. Naturally the operators if the scam sites will do everything in their power to prevent this "jdownloader" from working (as they are "losing" their ad revenue and "premium account" money to it as it makes "free" downloading less of an getting-a-root-canal-dentistry-experience they want you to have) and this will quickly devolve into an arms race, where your "jdownloader" will work today, by screwed up tomorrow as some site takes counter-measures, work on the next Tuesday again when devs respond, then quit on Thursday etc and so on.
Not if the mouse was stupid enough to forward its Credit Card number to the cat, who then finds its billing-address-mouse-hole and sits there waiting for it...
Actually, moving to paid services is one of those short-sighted, brain-dead lemming moves the general public gets involved in periodically. This is simply so because most such sites need actual payment to download (unless you want to download 1 file per 24 hours at something like 10k/s in the "free", "oh how much faster it would go if you only gave us your Credit Card number", "trial" mode - and never you mind horrid java-script hells of a "web page" all of these "services" feature).
The end result is that there is a complete trail of uploaders, their IP Addresses, their emails, but what's even better, there is a complete trail of all downloaders, including their IP Addresses, emails, user ids and, the Holy Grail of RIAA, MPAA and BSA snooping campaigns: actual financial transactions of these donwloaders which immediately yield their identities and bonus preculde any possible defense of "sharing between friends" as there is actual money changing hands.
In short: stupidity squared on the part of any people who use RapidShare, MegaUpload and a bunch of similar scams, people who have no clue about the implications of their actions and were, due to their ignorance of technology driven into arms of these scams by the PR campaigns against P2P, people who got brainwashed into believing that the direct-download sites are "safer". All it will take is one of them getting sued and happily forking over all the logs and financial records. Than again, odds are that some of them are already controlled by MPAA etc as a result of some behind-the-scenes settlements.
No such thing was possible with BitTorrent as a vast majority of tracker sites are anonymous. The snobs participating in "private trackers" had more elevated levels of exposure because of their "registration" process offered additional levels of forensic evidence. In fact most P2P systems offer as the only point of identification the IP Address, which does not immediately translate into a personal identification (unlike your MasterCard with which you paid RapidShare) due to dynapmic IP assignments, possible WiFi holes, access by other people to your computer and what not.
In short, it will take only a series of mega-busts of MegaUpload users, followed by rapid (due to excellent and undeniable forensic evidence) convictions, until the lemmings will run back to more anonymous and thus more sane methods of file-sharing.
Well then the pirates should add a counter ads to their pirated copies, mocking the original (like they already do with the MPAA ads in some torrents in the West). I see it something like this: The camera guy starts shooting, the cops bust in with guns drawn, the camera guy's lens flips up and a rocket launcher engages the cops, who back out, return with a tank, at which point the camera guy extends an antena and calls Gojira, the cops call Mothra, Tokyo gets flattened ... you get the idea ...
In fact, who needs the movie they were pirating?
Actually in this case it is rather easy and clear-cut: the organizers and promoters of this "contest" are quite deserving of this sort of attention indeed. Anonymous should simply turn these would-be Gestapo members' self-righteous shit on them. See how they like the taste of their own medicine, the feeling of their own petards up their asses ... you get the idea.
You are confused. Hurd is a kernel which uses the Mach micro-kernel as its core. The whole idea of a micro-kernel is that it is a minimalistic foundation upon which you build the actual kernel environment. Similarly, the BSD kernel has a Mach micro-kernel elements, like the virtual memory management system borrowed from Mach. MAC OS X has a Mach/BSD hybrid environment. Etc and so on.
This is nonsense. Most of Ubuntu packages are unaltered Debian packages. While Ubuntu has a different target audience, it depends in its entirety on the good will of the Debian project.
Unless the elected leaders of Debian all go insane at the same time, not very likely.
Far less. If Debian were to ever go BSD as its primary license (see point one), somewhere in the vicinity of 90% of its contributors would leave, probably to start a new GPL-ed distribution.
Inclusion of the BSD kernel is not the same as an adoption of the BSD philosophy, as the kernel is an interchangeable component of the whole, very much like the much maligned Hurd is, of which there is also a Debian-based experimental distro.
Unfortunately for that theory, secrecy is increasingly more unworkable. Even back in the WWII days it already required full-time efforts of organizations like the ones headed by the "gentlemen" I listed .... and it still did not quite work.
And with technological progress, any attempts at secrecy will by definition require more and more draconian methods to accomplish.
Which is incidentally the true aim of the vast majority of those who harp on the "need for secrecy" and "protecting ignorant people" and "walls with brave men on them" and similar crap. What they really want is unchecked, unquestionable power over average individuals, ostensibly "to protect them" and "for their own good". They call themselves "defenders" and "protectors" and "Homeland Security". I call them vile, power-hungry, authoritarian jack-asses, far, far worse than the supposed evils they "protect" us from (and not a few of which were outright manufactured by the very same "valiant protectors". See also under: CIA + Al Qeida).
Are you paraphrasing a quote from Heinrich Himmler or Lavrentiy Beria? Or perheaps Erich Mielke?
Because, you know, they all would have been very fond of something like that.
Well, nothing is ever that simple in real life, especially when there are tens of applications that could be impacted and multiple versions of Windows around etc. What usually happens is that some virtualized test network is set up, people screw around with policy settings and centralized deployment of stuff for weeks on end, then they go "live", only to discover that some hardware that could not be vitrtualized in the test environment is wreaking untold havoc or some such, get yelled at by bosses and users, changes are rolled back, more testing, lather-rinse-repeat and eventually the thing wobbles unsteadily forward as the "production environment".
Until some "update" comes.
And then back to Step 1.
Dude, I am writing on Slashdot, in an Windows-related article about .... wait for it ... flaws of Windows (from my perspective).
And you come here to lecture me on how to either tell people not to use the stuff (not very practical "advice" in a de-facto business software monopoly conditions) or to "suck it up" because "technology changes". That it could change for the better for more people, particularly for people in my position rather than only for game players and Facebook addicts, apparently did not cross your mind at all. Possibly because that option is not visible from where your head is up Microsoft's arse. Which makes any further discussion with you on the subject rather pointless.
I believe the term "fanboi" applies it your case quite admirably.
The entire menu structure is taking up much more surface area than it used in Windows 2000, XP has had the same issue with its Fischer-Price interface, which is the reason why most businesses I am familiar with had it turned off to gain room for various shortcuts and what not deployed from central servers via Roaming User Profiles and what not.
It does not work anymore for the menu, since changing the icon size does not get rid of the bloated XP-style menu itself, which consists of two panels and is twice the width of the Win 2000 one.
Sure, and naturally I am going to do it on 200 desktops individually, right? Or screw around with Group Policies until cows come home?
See above. Not only it is no longer quite possible, as some junk cannot be gotten rid of, but it now adds another pile of work involving screwing around with company-wide, barely functional as it is, group policy mess.
More screwing around with group policies. I think I see a pattern developing here...
Lots of things are possible given sufficiently absurd amounts of effort. The point is that Windows, since XP days has been less and less optimized in its default form for business deployment and more and more as an "entertainment platform". And so people who have to deal with large numbers of users and demanding business configuration find dealing with this feature set, utterly useless from the point of view of business, more and more frustratingly pointless.
Sure, 10 minutes times 200 desktops, or alternatively days of messing with and testing group policy scripts and what not. You see, in your entire response you assumed that because you can customize your singular home desktop in 10 minutes, it automatically means that everything is fine and dandy and everyone complaining about this is just a malcontent. Which is exactly as I see Microsoft and most of its products, as optimized to the individual stand-alone PC users who are entirely in control of "their" PCs, or at most home-office users with 3 PCs or so, and at the same time expending only a minimal modicum of effort to make the thing workable (barely) in corporate environments and large scales of deployment. Vista is the perfect example of this, having been utterly unready for any corporate work and focusing nearly entirely on snazzy visuals, multimedia and associated DRM schemes. I see Windows 7 so far as a new kludge, desperately cobbled together when it became apparent that Vista is a total flop when it comes to corporate IT. Barely acceptable, minimal improvement.
And the rest? How do you get the "Classic view" (a.k.a. Win2000-like) back on Windows 7? How do you make the thing give back the desktop space claimed by all the humongous icons and other doo-dads that fill up the typical 1024x768 business LCD in no time flat with just a few apps installed? What about all the spurious animations that make RDP sessions a nightmare?
The move towards bigger and bigger icons and more and more animations might work fine for people who are trying to purchase 67" monitors along with their new windows PCs that need 16GB RAM and twelve-core CPUs to get the Notepad going, all so that they can go on Facebook and play WoW on them, but the rest of us who actually have to use this crap in business for a living, frequently over low-bandwidth Internet connections, we are somewhat less impressed with all the gigantic muffler-extenders and undercarriage full of blue neon lights that come welded-on in this thing beyond any possibility of removal.
That, and lack of knowledge about various "trivialities", like science etc, is the sure-fire path to mind-boggling religious woo-woos, assorted New-Age hokum, and sooner or later to "spiritual" stock market Ponzi schemes.
Which is truly great if one needs one's transmission overhauled. Of course when one is interested in what Chavez is up to ... then not so much. Which is precisely the point. People who care about their transmissions far more than about the geo-political goings-on, should not then act surprised and violently upset when their opinions on the global affairs are summarily put into the "laughable nonsense" file.
You see, what you are trying to do here is the classic case of "have your cake and eat it too". Either you are willing to invest the time and effort to get informed, at which point you get the chance of your opinion having some probability of being correct, or you are pretty much guaranteed to be wrong and thus justly treated like the ignorant hillbilly you seem when you try, loudly, very very loudly, to enforce your "view" on those who actually spent time trying to learn the stuff. A fact which most anti-intellectuals refuse to accept (which is why they are anti-intellectuals and why they watch Fox). Which, incidentally, was historically always quite popular at times, the "an-angry-and-menacing-mob-is-always-right" (particularly when confronting wimpy "intellectuals", "professors", "scientists" and the like) branch of philosophical approach to scientific debate never quite having gone out of style.
To put it in the terms you mentioned, it is like having some salesman show up and demand that you take his advice as to the exact procedure of removal of that hypothetical transmission, despite having never seen one up close, never you mind knowing how one works. But he claims that he doesn't need to know so because he has far more respect for people who know how to calculate compound interest lease payments in their head, than some "trivial" "transmission repair" knowledge.
You see, he goes for the Mammon "spirituality" view of the world, where Everything Is A Sale (sadly I am not kidding, I personally knew a salesman who actually believed that life was one gigantic, never-ending series of Sales).
Someone already pointed out that this is an argumentum ad populum type of logical fallacy and so I will skip right to this:
If by "literacy" you mean "knowledge about the current affairs", then ask and you shall receive.
From there: the 2nd least informed and most confused (about basic geographic, geopolitical and other everyday facts) class of viewers: Fox News Viewers. Beaten only by the Network Morning Shows, of the "How to make Cookies with Martha Stewart and 3 other bimbo celebrities" variety, firmly holding the rather dubious honour of being the dumbest audience ever.
Conversely, most informed audience: The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Oops.
Somehow I do not think this is what you were looking for.
And the rest of the drivel you posted goes down hill from here, to the point that it is not even worth responding to.