He's been recklessly running off at the mouth for a week now about war on this, war on that, war, war, war, bomb this, bomb that, kill, kill, kill. He even speaks rudely of other countries, which is not doing us any good whatsoever. During a press conference the other day he rolled his eyes, smirked and made a snippy, condescending remark when asked something about Pakistan.
Bush's response to this conjures images of a speeding pickup truck full of drunken, whooping rednecks, heading on a road trip to shoot them as many gol'darned towelheads as they can find.
Colin Powell, on the other hand, has a very large clue. I would feel a hundred times more comfortable if he were the one in charge. Watch a press conference with him on C-Span, and then compare his demeanor and approach to Bush's. Powell is wise, professional, and diplomatic. He is very firm and focused but doesn't come across as an Imperialist warmonger. He works with other countries instead of pushing them around.
Sigh. I'm sure this 'War on Terrorism' will be no more successful than the 'War on Drugs', or the 'War on Poverty'. Anytime the federal government declares war on something, it seems that problem only becomes larger. Indeed, right now Bush is not pulling out the roots of terrorism, but actually watering them.
Nuclear strikes against Afghanistan will only exacerbate the various conditions that encourage disillusioned youths to join terrorist organizations, and throw their own lives away in a manner calculated to take the lives of others.
A broad, sustained conventional military campaign with even low levels of civilian casualties will accomplish that just fine. No nukes necessary. There are plenty of extremists waiting to take bin Laden's place, and we're about to stir up enough venom against the U.S. to give them all the inspiration and support they need.
If we indiscriminately bomb the hell out of Afghanistan, and continue trampling over Iranian, Iraqi, Sudanese and Pakistani civilians, we will surely create a whole new generation of bin Ladens. Perhaps this is exactly what bin Laden wants, and the acts on 9/11 were just bait. Sort of like a giant DoS attack using broadcast ICMP reflectors.
No matter. The American people are filled with a bloodlust which will not be satisfied until we have taken at least as many innocent lives as the terrorists, and imposed U.S. dominance on every Muslim country in the region.
And the cycle of violence will continue, with wave after wave of terrorism on U.S. soil.
So we're looking at roughly $15,000 U.S., plus some miscellaneous expenses like rental cars, hotel stays, etc.
They probably spent a bit more... just pointing out that something like this could be pulled off on a budget. Especially if you use someone else's planes instead of buying your own.
Are we referring to the "innocent people" who were dancing in the streets celebrating this "victory" ? Somehow I am finding it hard to be sympathetic to their plight, I guess I already used up all my sympathy on people who deserved it.
No, Rambo. We're referring to innocent people like these women. These people are not responsible for today's actions, and do not deserve to die.
Please don't be a blind nationalist. This tragedy would not have happened if it weren't for our government's interventionist Middle East policy. The poster makes some excellent points.
I started to, but did a search and found that it was forwarded to several other groups, including alt.terrorism (or something like that) so I'm sure it's already been picked up by the spooks.
Better to not overwhelm them with duplicate info. The server hosting their tip submission form is already struggling.
Great. My (awesome) cable ISP is switching over to @Home in a couple weeks. I am *not* looking forward to it. If the service sucks as bad as everyone tells me it does I'll bite the bullet, get a frac T1 and move all my servers from colocation to in-house to offset the cost.
Please, someone, tell me that @Home is not really all that bad.
Re:But it gets you compact code
on
MenuetOS Debuts
·
· Score: 1
If writing an operating system takes time X in assembly, and has speed Y, and say doing it entirely in C takes time 2x and has speed Y/4 , I'd wager that for most sets of values, I can buy 4 times the hardware cheaper than I can buy 2x the labor to build one 4x faster.
Damn. You're breaking out, like, economics. Nice.
When hardware becomes more expensive and/or Moore's law slows down, the pendulum will swing the other way, and a highly optimized OS will be more desirable.
People tend to waste that which is plentiful, and conserve on that which is scarce.
Technically it isn't under the GPL. From this page :
OpenOffice.org uses a dual license strategy for the source code. These licenses are the GNU Lesser General Public License(LGPL) and the Sun Industry Standards Source License (SISSL).
Re:Hate to say, sounds like a dot-bomb strategy...
on
HP Buys Compaq
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· Score: 1
Really big boxes that address 2.83 assloads of RAM
Thank you for that very clear explanation and demonstration.
I always sanitize user supplied input and URL variables, especially when I'm going to insert it into a database. Someone could do the same thing you just described with SQL, by entering something like "14; DELETE FROM table"
I'll be more careful about sanitizing data before I output it now.
Mandrake is arguably the best desktop distribution around, but still has a lot of shortcomings. It's simply sloppy and unpolished in some areas, and their QA process seems rushed.
It's good to finally see some competition in the Linux KDE-based desktop-focused distro market.
Another good example is the querty keyboard, which was adopted precisely because it was inferior, (forcing slower typing precluded key jams), but made an empire for its inventor because the first secretaries learned it and everyone else had to follow.
We are cutting funding to education (or at least not expanding it to meet demand)
That's not true. School funding has risen something like 4-fold in the last 10 years.
Money is not the problem in the least. The public school system is fundamentally broken and hopelessly mired in bureaucracy.
Basically, the compulsory government school system is one of the biggest monopolies in the world. Neither the students nor their parents have any real control over the type of education they receive, save for the opportunity to participate in shouting matches at School Board meetings. The PTA is a joke - it's basically just a bake sale club.
IMHO, we need competition in education, so that a variety of alternative methods (like the Sudbury Model) can be tried, and the best can rise to the top. The authoritarian, 50's-era blackboard and memorization method simply does not prepare students for anything resembling the real world.
If they really want to make a different, why not provide vocational training for the disadvantaged so they can actually learn a skill to help them better themselves. Now, that would be money better spent.
An even better way to make a difference would be to eliminate minimum wage laws, which serve as a barrier to employment for those with few marketable skills. Get people into the workforce and let them learn on the job, real world style.
I remember when I worked at a bike shop many years ago, there was a guy from the homeless shelter up the street who would stop by several days a week asking for odd jobs. I think he made regular rounds of all the businesses downtown, and we were just one stop of many. Anyway, the bike shop owner would pay him to clean the parking lot every Saturday, and would often find other odd jobs for him to do. The guy was hard working, punctual and honest, but really didn't know how to do anything but pick up cans.
My point is that people like this are on the verge of entering the workforce, but the value of their labor is less than minimum wage. There are many employers who would give them an entry-level position doing odd jobs like keeping the parking lot clean, but are not able to reconcile the payroll expense of a minimum wage position with the value of the person's labor.
There are some who are upset by any suggestions to lower or elminate the minimum wage. I realize that most people have a gut reaction that 'people need a living wage'... but jobs simply do not materialize out of thin air. Higher minimum wages cause higher unemployment. Lower minimum wages result in lower unemployment. Ergo, it is more humane to eliminate minimum wage laws.
Since Ricochet just went down the tubes, hop on eBay and see if you can buy up a bunch of wireless modems from the former users, then see if you can talk former engineers into lending a little technical guidance.
Or do 4Mbps over line-of-sight spread spectrum with YAGI antennas... AirLAN or whatever it's called. That's only up to 2 miles though.
Also consider packet amateur radio. At one time there were some good PC applications to store and forward email along hops.
Another less obvious choice might be FidoNet, which has an Internet mail gateway. (If you're on a FidoNet node your address is something like (phutureboy@z5.n109.e43@fidonet.org). It uses dialup to pass emails through multiple nodes in a hub and spoke network, can be configured to exchange mail late at night when the rates are low, will run on a 386 with DOS and is *very* resilient in situations where the phone service is shitty. Or you could use UUCP to exchange mail in much the same manner...
Finally, for wired runs up to 16 miles at 1.2 -19.2 Kbps, consider using PPP over short-haul modems. They are super-cheap - like $25 each, and use 1- or 2-pair copper wire (like speaker wire). IIRC, these can also be used on LAD phone circuits in the U.S. I forget the name of the brand I used once, but this should turn up some for you...
I suspect you're in for a struggle trying to get decent connectivity to the rest of the world right off the bat. Keep in mind that there are also huge benefits to connecting people in Africa with each other. You may be better off to focus on regional networks, and once those are in place you'll have more users to band together and help get a decent outbound connection in place.
Anyway, good luck, and drop a note once you've got them wired and let us know how it went.
Actually, it's getting better. I installed KDE 2.2 the other day, and found that Konqueror is getting really really good. It's still slower than IE, but from what I understand they're working on that with the objpreload stuff. I also have had luck with Galeon.
What do the packages have to do with anything? In Postgres the number of connections is controlled by a config file. What this really means is that they didn't tune their database server. (Or at least didn't tune it for the slashdot-effect.)
Yes, I'm sure the following config line would take care of everything. (I'm sure it's not Postgres syntax, but you get the idea)
Ah, the final release versions are buggy as well. I've been running the 'drake since 6.0, and have found every release to have its own quirks and broken features.
For example, 7.2 would shut down, but never report that it was done shutting down, so I had to guess when it was done before powering off. 8.0's Software Manager doesn't retrieve and install dependencies the way it says it's supposed to, and even though my USB wheel trackball was configured successfully during the install, it didn't work once I rebooted. Had to do some investigative work to fix that one.
I really wish they would put the final releases through more rigorous testing. Mandrake is definitely a very cool distro, but it's not yet as polished and reliable as Windows. I still recommend it though.
Slashdot Mirror
and I bet you the Taliban leadership is "rich" by Afghani standards.
Well, it doesn't hurt that the U.S. just gave them $43 million in the name of fighting the War on Drugs. Ah, the tangled web we weave.
How has Bush not been cautious?
He's been recklessly running off at the mouth for a week now about war on this, war on that, war, war, war, bomb this, bomb that, kill, kill, kill. He even speaks rudely of other countries, which is not doing us any good whatsoever. During a press conference the other day he rolled his eyes, smirked and made a snippy, condescending remark when asked something about Pakistan.
Bush's response to this conjures images of a speeding pickup truck full of drunken, whooping rednecks, heading on a road trip to shoot them as many gol'darned towelheads as they can find.
Colin Powell, on the other hand, has a very large clue. I would feel a hundred times more comfortable if he were the one in charge. Watch a press conference with him on C-Span, and then compare his demeanor and approach to Bush's. Powell is wise, professional, and diplomatic. He is very firm and focused but doesn't come across as an Imperialist warmonger. He works with other countries instead of pushing them around.
Sigh. I'm sure this 'War on Terrorism' will be no more successful than the 'War on Drugs', or the 'War on Poverty'. Anytime the federal government declares war on something, it seems that problem only becomes larger. Indeed, right now Bush is not pulling out the roots of terrorism, but actually watering them.
Nuclear strikes against Afghanistan will only exacerbate the various conditions that encourage disillusioned youths to join terrorist organizations, and throw their own lives away in a manner calculated to take the lives of others.
A broad, sustained conventional military campaign with even low levels of civilian casualties will accomplish that just fine. No nukes necessary. There are plenty of extremists waiting to take bin Laden's place, and we're about to stir up enough venom against the U.S. to give them all the inspiration and support they need.
If we indiscriminately bomb the hell out of Afghanistan, and continue trampling over Iranian, Iraqi, Sudanese and Pakistani civilians, we will surely create a whole new generation of bin Ladens. Perhaps this is exactly what bin Laden wants, and the acts on 9/11 were just bait. Sort of like a giant DoS attack using broadcast ICMP reflectors.
No matter. The American people are filled with a bloodlust which will not be satisfied until we have taken at least as many innocent lives as the terrorists, and imposed U.S. dominance on every Muslim country in the region.
And the cycle of violence will continue, with wave after wave of terrorism on U.S. soil.
When will we learn?
(see subject)
Yeah, I left that out for a reason :P
How much funding does one really need for this?
Flight training school: 4 * $3500 = $14000
Cardboard cutters: 8 * $5 = $40
One-way plane tickets: 8 * 150 = $1200
So we're looking at roughly $15,000 U.S., plus some miscellaneous expenses like rental cars, hotel stays, etc.
They probably spent a bit more... just pointing out that something like this could be pulled off on a budget. Especially if you use someone else's planes instead of buying your own.
Are we referring to the "innocent people" who were dancing in the streets celebrating this "victory" ? Somehow I am finding it hard to be sympathetic to their plight, I guess I already used up all my sympathy on people who deserved it.
No, Rambo. We're referring to innocent people like these women. These people are not responsible for today's actions, and do not deserve to die.
Please don't be a blind nationalist. This tragedy would not have happened if it weren't for our government's interventionist Middle East policy. The poster makes some excellent points.
Hmm. Maybe that POST should be sent to the FBI!
I started to, but did a search and found that it was forwarded to several other groups, including alt.terrorism (or something like that) so I'm sure it's already been picked up by the spooks.
Better to not overwhelm them with duplicate info. The server hosting their tip submission form is already struggling.
Great. My (awesome) cable ISP is switching over to @Home in a couple weeks. I am *not* looking forward to it. If the service sucks as bad as everyone tells me it does I'll bite the bullet, get a frac T1 and move all my servers from colocation to in-house to offset the cost.
Please, someone, tell me that @Home is not really all that bad.
If writing an operating system takes time X in assembly, and has speed Y, and say doing it entirely in C takes time 2x and has speed Y/4 , I'd wager that for most sets of values, I can buy 4 times the hardware cheaper than I can buy 2x the labor to build one 4x faster.
Damn. You're breaking out, like, economics. Nice.
When hardware becomes more expensive and/or Moore's law slows down, the pendulum will swing the other way, and a highly optimized OS will be more desirable.
People tend to waste that which is plentiful, and conserve on that which is scarce.
I should go sleep now.
Technically it isn't under the GPL. From this page :
OpenOffice.org uses a dual license strategy for the source code. These licenses are the GNU Lesser General Public License(LGPL) and the Sun Industry Standards Source License (SISSL).
Really big boxes that address 2.83 assloads of RAM
Damn, that's a lot of RAM.
2. It would be nice if I could put my favorite links on the menu bar, like with Navigator.
Yeah, this works. It even puts the little favicon.ico picture next to them.
You can't drag and drop them there, though. You have to add them as a bookmark, and then go into Edit Bookmarks and move them to the Toolbar folder.
Thank you for that very clear explanation and demonstration.
I always sanitize user supplied input and URL variables, especially when I'm going to insert it into a database. Someone could do the same thing you just described with SQL, by entering something like "14; DELETE FROM table"
I'll be more careful about sanitizing data before I output it now.
Can anyone clearly explain cross-site scripting?
I've seen a few explanations of it but they didn't make any sense. I'm slow like that.
Mandrake is arguably the best desktop distribution around, but still has a lot of shortcomings. It's simply sloppy and unpolished in some areas, and their QA process seems rushed.
It's good to finally see some competition in the Linux KDE-based desktop-focused distro market.
Another good example is the querty keyboard, which was adopted precisely because it was inferior, (forcing slower typing precluded key jams), but made an empire for its inventor because the first secretaries learned it and everyone else had to follow.
n omist.html
Sorry, that's been disproven:
http://www.independent.org/tii/news/liebowitz_eco
Yeah, I always chuckle when I see that.
I have not been able to bring myself to place a checkmark in the box.
We are cutting funding to education (or at least not expanding it to meet demand)
That's not true. School funding has risen something like 4-fold in the last 10 years.
Money is not the problem in the least. The public school system is fundamentally broken and hopelessly mired in bureaucracy.
Basically, the compulsory government school system is one of the biggest monopolies in the world. Neither the students nor their parents have any real control over the type of education they receive, save for the opportunity to participate in shouting matches at School Board meetings. The PTA is a joke - it's basically just a bake sale club.
IMHO, we need competition in education, so that a variety of alternative methods (like the Sudbury Model) can be tried, and the best can rise to the top. The authoritarian, 50's-era blackboard and memorization method simply does not prepare students for anything resembling the real world.
If they really want to make a different, why not provide vocational training for the disadvantaged so they can actually learn a skill to help them better themselves. Now, that would be money better spent.
An even better way to make a difference would be to eliminate minimum wage laws, which serve as a barrier to employment for those with few marketable skills. Get people into the workforce and let them learn on the job, real world style.
I remember when I worked at a bike shop many years ago, there was a guy from the homeless shelter up the street who would stop by several days a week asking for odd jobs. I think he made regular rounds of all the businesses downtown, and we were just one stop of many. Anyway, the bike shop owner would pay him to clean the parking lot every Saturday, and would often find other odd jobs for him to do. The guy was hard working, punctual and honest, but really didn't know how to do anything but pick up cans.
My point is that people like this are on the verge of entering the workforce, but the value of their labor is less than minimum wage. There are many employers who would give them an entry-level position doing odd jobs like keeping the parking lot clean, but are not able to reconcile the payroll expense of a minimum wage position with the value of the person's labor.
There are some who are upset by any suggestions to lower or elminate the minimum wage. I realize that most people have a gut reaction that 'people need a living wage'... but jobs simply do not materialize out of thin air. Higher minimum wages cause higher unemployment. Lower minimum wages result in lower unemployment. Ergo, it is more humane to eliminate minimum wage laws.
Since Ricochet just went down the tubes, hop on eBay and see if you can buy up a bunch of wireless modems from the former users, then see if you can talk former engineers into lending a little technical guidance.
Or do 4Mbps over line-of-sight spread spectrum with YAGI antennas... AirLAN or whatever it's called. That's only up to 2 miles though.
Also consider packet amateur radio. At one time there were some good PC applications to store and forward email along hops.
Another less obvious choice might be FidoNet, which has an Internet mail gateway. (If you're on a FidoNet node your address is something like (phutureboy@z5.n109.e43@fidonet.org). It uses dialup to pass emails through multiple nodes in a hub and spoke network, can be configured to exchange mail late at night when the rates are low, will run on a 386 with DOS and is *very* resilient in situations where the phone service is shitty. Or you could use UUCP to exchange mail in much the same manner...
Finally, for wired runs up to 16 miles at 1.2 -19.2 Kbps, consider using PPP over short-haul modems. They are super-cheap - like $25 each, and use 1- or 2-pair copper wire (like speaker wire). IIRC, these can also be used on LAD phone circuits in the U.S. I forget the name of the brand I used once, but this should turn up some for you...
I suspect you're in for a struggle trying to get decent connectivity to the rest of the world right off the bat. Keep in mind that there are also huge benefits to connecting people in Africa with each other. You may be better off to focus on regional networks, and once those are in place you'll have more users to band together and help get a decent outbound connection in place.
Anyway, good luck, and drop a note once you've got them wired and let us know how it went.
Actually, it's getting better. I installed KDE 2.2 the other day, and found that Konqueror is getting really really good. It's still slower than IE, but from what I understand they're working on that with the objpreload stuff. I also have had luck with Galeon.
What do the packages have to do with anything? In Postgres the number of connections is controlled by a config file. What this really means is that they didn't tune their database server. (Or at least didn't tune it for the slashdot-effect.)
Yes, I'm sure the following config line would take care of everything. (I'm sure it's not Postgres syntax, but you get the idea)
MaxConnections 93498787446
Ah, the final release versions are buggy as well. I've been running the 'drake since 6.0, and have found every release to have its own quirks and broken features.
For example, 7.2 would shut down, but never report that it was done shutting down, so I had to guess when it was done before powering off. 8.0's Software Manager doesn't retrieve and install dependencies the way it says it's supposed to, and even though my USB wheel trackball was configured successfully during the install, it didn't work once I rebooted. Had to do some investigative work to fix that one.
I really wish they would put the final releases through more rigorous testing. Mandrake is definitely a very cool distro, but it's not yet as polished and reliable as Windows. I still recommend it though.