Your post is ignorant at best, disingenuous at worst.
You don't HAVE to use VOIP gateway services to get PTSN termination. Some people do that because it's cheaper, but it's entirely possible to use POTS or PRI with *. In fact, that is how I'm redoing my company's phone system. I'll have a PRI for PTSN terminiation/origination, and VOIP handsets. There's no reason whatsoever for my PBX box to be exposed to the Internet. Any remote extensions I want to connect will use VPN tunnels.
The bonus is that I get to migrate away from our stupid 10-year-old key system without paying an arm and a leg for a hardware-based PBX.
For example I'm a Law and Order nut. It's my favourite show and I can watch the espiodes over and over. I would love a Law and Order channel, that just showed it 24/7. Then, whenever I decided I wanted to see it, I could sit down and do so.
I know it's snarky to say, but for the reasonable sum of <insert_your_currency_here>, you could have your very own L&O Channel. I prefer the TiVo variant, but there are other options.
Really, though... Try a PVR sometime. There's always something good to watch when I turn the TV on. Red Dwarf marathon, anyone? (bless you, NH PBS!)
1. Enterprise use of Debian would help the project, with bug-fixes, with human, machine, and monetary resources, etc.
I agree. Unfortunately Debian has the "nobody to sue" problem. Management wants to know that there's someone they can call and scream at when things aren't working. This issue is partially addressed by the various small vendors that offer customized Debian-based distros, but there's nothing (AFAIK) on the level of RHEL.
2. The current release cycle is way too long, creating the problem I describe above, among others.
I also agree. From what I've read, so do the majority of the Debian release people. After Sarge is out, they are aiming to freeze/release much more often. I don't know what will happen when we run out of Toy Story characters, though.:)
3. Asking people to use backports and downgrades from broken packages is a way of ignoring the problems, rather than addressing their source.
Fair enough. I apologize for the vitriol, which in retrospect was harsher than I meant it to be. In my defense, however, you have to admit that your post seemed more whiny than constructive. You complained that Apache was broken for a week, and that no enterprise would allow their website to be down for a week. My reaction was to assume that you didn't know how to downgrade, if you suffered with a broken Apache for a week. Well, there's that old saying about what happens when one assumes...
I run testing on my web/mail server and recent upgrades have broken Apache twice.... No enterprise could have their website down for a week.
Giving up mod points to respond to this, because it's stupid.
Microsoft jokes aside, no enterprise should be running testing-grade software. If you want stable, run stable, damnit! I can't stand the posts from people who whine about testing/unstable breaking their systems and being unable to fix it. If you can't figure out how to downgrade from broken packages in testing/unstable, DON'T BLOODY RUN THOSE BRANCHES!
Hey, I was a noob at one point too, and I sure still have a lot to learn. But you have to admit that was a pretty blatant display of ignorance.
As so many other people have mentioned in this article and others, stable is stable. No it's not the newest and flashiest, but you really need to ask yourself if running the latest software on your production servers is the smartest idea. If you really, really need feature X that's in a newer version than what's in stable, consider http://backports.org/ or doing the backport yourself. They're usually not too involved unless you're trying to backport something like Perl.
If you can't/don't want to do backports, then maybe you really should consider something nice and safe like RHEL.
Re:One of the unfortunate things about Apache...
on
Hardening Apache
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Include conf/vhosts.conf for example.
This guy should get more + moderation! That method is one of the best ways to keep your apache configs sane, especially if you've got a whole bunch of servers that aren't part of a cluster or whatever (i.e. identical configs for all).
We actually take it a step further and do "Include conf.d/" from the httpd.conf, where conf.d is a subdirectory with configuration "containers" that are automatically included on startup/reload. That way we just drop individual vhost configs into their own files. No parsing/rewriting required for automation!
I got that trick from the way Debian does things in Sarge and started using it on our stable web servers. Dunno if other distros do it that way, but it's a great idea.
Mildly entertaining but overly-derivative tripe. It was, in turns, a pastiche of...
I think that's a bit harsh. I'll wholeheartedly agree with you that the story was heavily influenced by Huxley and Bradbury (in fact, "Brave New World" meets "Fahrenheit 451" is how I've usually described the film), but I don't think that somehow invalidates the uniqueness of the story.
True, the acting was a bit stiff, and the ending was kinda hokey, but there were some interesting ideas in there. I liked that the monks were not supernatural ala Neo, just extremely heavily trained in an obscure martial art. Of course the concept of 'Gunkata' is kinda silly, but it made for great popcorn-fodder that didn't make me want to stab my brain with a pencil.
How do you think the film should have acknowledged its influences? A voiceover from the director intoning "*cough* Yeah, the manditory drugging that every citizen is forced to participate in was a rip of Huxley's soma... Er, and here they're destroying the sense-offender's hideout with fire, that's a rip from Bradbury..."
Face it, anyone with half a clue would already recognize all of that stuff, and the other people wouldn't go back to read the sources anyhow. They just want to see stuff blown up and people shot. Oh, and the good guy getting the girl (muahahaha).
However, the Amish ARE uneducated... learning stops at 8th grade.
For a lot of kids in the US, anyhow, school past the 8th grade is just where society wants them to be so that they're not out causing trouble while their parents are at work. Of course, once the state-mandated lockup ends at about 2:30pm, they're free to go cause whatever mischief they like, but at least they're incarcerated for some of the day.
Actually solving the problem of making High School more relevant and useful would require a lot of serious retooling and rethinking of our educational system, and no one wants to do that!
It depends on the quality of your power supply, to some degree. I would have thought I personally average about 5 years between mains power outs;
The interesting thing is, though, that a good UPS will protect your gear from more than just blackouts. I run apcupsd on my various machines (talks to the UPS via the USB cable included) and I get notices about brownouts and surges that I woudn't otherwise have noticed (clock on the coffeemaker isn't blinking, etc.). Granted, I live in Maine, and the electrical grid here probably hasn't been upgraded in 50 years, but I've seen similar behavior in different locations.
Adding a UPS is also adding another point of failure; I have seen a UPS fail and trip offline for no reason at all.
It's true that the UPS is another POF, but on the other hand, what do you think the likelihood of the UPS failing is compared to the likelihood of getting weird power on the line? For the record, I've never seen an APC UPS just die. I've seen them lose their battery and beep every 6 hours, but that's to be expected. I'm not invalidating your experience, just stating that in my experience with hundreds of APC UPSes of varying capacities, I've never seen that.
How exactly is that requirement going to work when every VoIP company will move their servers offshore?
Why is this insightful? The usefulness of a VOIP company is pretty minimal (compared to p2p-based VOIP) if it can't terminate phone VOIP calls into the PSTN or provide DIDs, and to do that in the US it's gotta have servers in the US somewhere... Right?
That AD/HD is way way way over diagnosed by psychiatrists who can't tell the difference between a disease and parents who just don't fucking care any more.
Are you sure you mean psychiatrists? To be sure, there are definitely irresponsible/incompetent psychiatrists, and all doctors are human, so mistakes are made. On the other hand, and I really mean no insult, a lot of people really have no idea what the difference between a psychiatrist and a psychologist is, and would be hard-pressed to come up with an accurate distinction between the two.
In the US at least, one is a medical doctor, having gone through four years of medical school (the same type of school as your family doctor or brain surgeon, and that's AFTER at least four years of regular old college). Psychiatrists then go through one year of general medical residency (the Intern year), and after that typically 3 years of Psychiatry residency. Residency is sorta like an apprenticeship, in that you are working, but you're supervised and mentored by people with more experience than you (some programs are better at the mentoring than others).
Psychologists, on the other hand, are required to have no medical training whatsoever. They earn a PsyD, which is not a medical degree... And that's when they're actually a Psychologist and not a "Licensed Therapist" or whatever. That is a truly frightening thought whenever I hear about proposals to allow Psychologists to prescribe psychiatric medications. This rant is not to knock Psychologists, who do serve an important role, but they're not medical doctors. Same root word (Psyche), but totally different professions.
On the same note, a lot of ADD/ADHD diagnoses are made by family doctors with no specialized psychiatric training. The same goes for "mild depression".
(My wife's a shrink, and I get tired of ill-informed people making glaringly incorrect generalizations.)
you are using CS classes as an argument to show of your skill?
Interesting that you would nitpick that one point, and do it with poor grammar to boot. Did I strike a nerve?
No, I'm not using the fact that I had CS classes as a testament to my mad skillz. I was simply making the point that programming languages are just tools to be wielded by a programmer. If you've learned basic CS concepts (either in the context of a formal CS curriculum or by teaching yourself), it's fairly trivial to apply those concepts to any programming language. Some languages lend themselves to solving certain sets of problems more quickly and easily than others, though.
That probably makes too much sense to get through to you though, huh? I know, I know... There I go throwing logic into the argument again.
Second, and I'll probably be modded as troll for this, but all the programmers I know who like perl are sysadmin types who don't know better.
Well, I'm a 'sysadmin type', and Perl lets me get my job done with a minimum of fuss. I have lots of one-off tasks that would be tedious to do by hand, and shell scripting is just annoying. But I've also written a whole ISP provisioning system with Perl, and tied it into our company's proprietary billing system. If I'd been doing it with C or Java it would have taken me a lot longer and definitely wouldn't have been as stable as quickly as it was.
Is it possible for me to program in C or Java? Sure. I had CS classes. But for me, Perl is the right tool for most of my jobs. People like you who look down your noses at a 'scripting language for sysadmin types' are typically the sort of people whose messes I have to clean up because they have just enough knowledge to demand root on their workstation so they can screw things up.
You haven't taken the time to appreciate how Perl can be used in a sane manner to create stable, maintainable codebases and applications. That's fine, but it doesn't invalidate or devalue what the rest of us are doing with it.
I could go on, department after department. Most of the federal government is waste - probably near 90% of all dollars spent.
Hey, I agree with you. I'd LOVE to see most of the federal bureaucracy go away. It makes me sick to look at my paycheck and my wife's paycheck and realize what huge percentage of my salary is going to DC.
Like I said, I still feel that there is some role for the federal governement beyond border protection and interstate commerce regulation, but what we have now is just pointless.
Gated community or not, the people must decide they value education and elect a government that values it too.
Don't you think you're being a little simplistic? I am loathe to empower the Federal government any more than we have to, and in most cases am very much against the Feds redistributing wealth, but I feel that good education (and good healthcare) are things that would truly benefit the country as a whole.
I don't think it's as simple as incompetent local officials who can't provide for their constituents. To be sure, that most certainly is a component in many cases, but part of the problem is that not all areas of the country have the sort of tax base necessary to provide good education. If there is no industry to tax, and the citizens don't have the real estate/income to tax, where does the money come from? Do we just leave those parts of the country to rot? Do we encourage people to move to places of the country which can afford decent education? Then you're stuck with all those damn hicks and their kids in the same school as little Madison and Jacob! Horrors!
This is not the same issue as the linked article... Or the issue raised by some other posters (corporate welfare). I don't think it would cost that much to provide basic computing services to public schools, even if that is just one lab of Linux-based PCs fed by a shared DSL/Cable Modem connection. There is no reason for a public school to be running Exchange on multiple HP Proliants or whatever.
Where is the integrity of the corporations involved that they simply took the money for stupid ideas for out schools. These are their schools too.
Nah... The executives who make these decisions send their kids to private schools, and the outsource the labor to India or China, so they don't give a flying fuck about the poor state of public schools in the US.
We reassured most all of the second group with a strong privacy policy.
Yeah, that's worth about as much to me as Orbitz's strong privacy policy. I didn't know about the break-in until I started getting porn spam to the throwaway address I created for Orbitz. As soon as I did the research and realized what'd happened, I called Orbitz and demanded that they cancel my account and remove all of my personal information from their databases. Well, their response was that I should log in to my account and delete/poison the information. So I did, and haven't used them since.
It's a shame, though. I miss the reminders/status updates sent to my phone. They seemed to have a pretty good search engine for fares, too. At least the airlines have wised up in recent years and allow people to book with them directly online.
My father-in-law drives a Jetta with a horrible radio, and was told by an independent shop that a certain key is required (?) to remove the radio from the dash, and that he'd have to go to the dealer for that.
That is pure, unadulterated, bunk. I own two Jettas ('97 GLX and '01 GLX, for those who care), and have replaced both of the stock radios with nice Alpine head units. The "special key" is nothing more than a pair of U-shaped keys that I bought at Autozone for $3. You stick the keys in either side of the radio, wiggle 'em around a little, and pull. Presto-chango (with the help of a harness adapter), I've got CD/MP3 capability and much nicer sound in my cars.
Here's an example. This kit is much more than you need (and a LOT more expensive), but the U-keys on the left are all you need.
FWIW, I also used these keys on my Mom's Ford Ficus, to take a look at the in-dash cd changer which had a broken gear. She ultimately had to take it to the dealer for warranty repair, but at least I was able to tell her what was wrong before she went in to argue with them.
It's as if the senior military decision makers don't really understand how the military is really just another tool of diplomacy, and should be used in concert, planning and execution of all other diplomatic means.
This mentality really pisses me off. The military SHOULD NOT TO BE USED FOR DIPLOMACY!!! The military should not be used for "peacekeeping". The military should only brought in when shit is to be blown up and people are to die, horribly.
Period.
If the UN wants to conduct peacekeeping actions or whatever, the UN needs to work with its member nations to create a special peacekeeping force with the sole mandate of keeping the peace. Special training, special weapons (more nonlethal options, etc.), special purpose. If the peacekeepers fail, the military is brought in to fuck shit up.
The US military represents the pinnacle of mankind's awesome (and terrifying) ability to develop efficient ways to destroy lives and materiel. It should only, ONLY be used when the diplomats have failed and skulls need to be cracked.
For what it's worth, I'm no peacenik, and I have a lot of respect for the men and women in the US military (with the exception of those idiots at Abu Ghraib). I do think that we made a stupid decision by getting into Iraq the way we did, but now that we're there, we'd damn well better finish what we started.
What're your credentials to make such a claim? The DSM is not meant to be read like scripture... It gives practitioners a way to associate various behaviors and symptoms with specific disorders. No doubt the DSM is misused by some, but there are incompetent people in all sorts of fields.
Slashdot Mirror
Your post is ignorant at best, disingenuous at worst.
You don't HAVE to use VOIP gateway services to get PTSN termination. Some people do that because it's cheaper, but it's entirely possible to use POTS or PRI with *. In fact, that is how I'm redoing my company's phone system. I'll have a PRI for PTSN terminiation/origination, and VOIP handsets. There's no reason whatsoever for my PBX box to be exposed to the Internet. Any remote extensions I want to connect will use VPN tunnels.
The bonus is that I get to migrate away from our stupid 10-year-old key system without paying an arm and a leg for a hardware-based PBX.
For example I'm a Law and Order nut. It's my favourite show and I can watch the espiodes over and over. I would love a Law and Order channel, that just showed it 24/7. Then, whenever I decided I wanted to see it, I could sit down and do so.
I know it's snarky to say, but for the reasonable sum of <insert_your_currency_here>, you could have your very own L&O Channel. I prefer the TiVo variant, but there are other options.
Really, though... Try a PVR sometime. There's always something good to watch when I turn the TV on. Red Dwarf marathon, anyone? (bless you, NH PBS!)
1. Enterprise use of Debian would help the project, with bug-fixes, with human, machine, and monetary resources, etc.
:)
I agree. Unfortunately Debian has the "nobody to sue" problem. Management wants to know that there's someone they can call and scream at when things aren't working. This issue is partially addressed by the various small vendors that offer customized Debian-based distros, but there's nothing (AFAIK) on the level of RHEL.
2. The current release cycle is way too long, creating the problem I describe above, among others.
I also agree. From what I've read, so do the majority of the Debian release people. After Sarge is out, they are aiming to freeze/release much more often. I don't know what will happen when we run out of Toy Story characters, though.
3. Asking people to use backports and downgrades from broken packages is a way of ignoring the problems, rather than addressing their source.
Fair enough. I apologize for the vitriol, which in retrospect was harsher than I meant it to be. In my defense, however, you have to admit that your post seemed more whiny than constructive. You complained that Apache was broken for a week, and that no enterprise would allow their website to be down for a week. My reaction was to assume that you didn't know how to downgrade, if you suffered with a broken Apache for a week. Well, there's that old saying about what happens when one assumes...
Oh, well.
I run testing on my web/mail server and recent upgrades have broken Apache twice. ... No enterprise could have their website down for a week.
Giving up mod points to respond to this, because it's stupid.
Microsoft jokes aside, no enterprise should be running testing-grade software. If you want stable, run stable, damnit! I can't stand the posts from people who whine about testing/unstable breaking their systems and being unable to fix it. If you can't figure out how to downgrade from broken packages in testing/unstable, DON'T BLOODY RUN THOSE BRANCHES!
Hey, I was a noob at one point too, and I sure still have a lot to learn. But you have to admit that was a pretty blatant display of ignorance.
As so many other people have mentioned in this article and others, stable is stable. No it's not the newest and flashiest, but you really need to ask yourself if running the latest software on your production servers is the smartest idea. If you really, really need feature X that's in a newer version than what's in stable, consider http://backports.org/ or doing the backport yourself. They're usually not too involved unless you're trying to backport something like Perl.
If you can't/don't want to do backports, then maybe you really should consider something nice and safe like RHEL.
up 12 days, 22:30, 2 users, load averages: 993.20, 994.21, 994.56
.sigs I've ever read on /.
[*makes note to disable fork()]
That is one of the funniest
Still chuckling.
ObSimpsons...
Homer: "Florida?!? But that's America's wang!"
http://www.snpp.com/episodes/BABF16
I know you said teat, but I couldn't resist.
Include conf/vhosts.conf for example.
This guy should get more + moderation! That method is one of the best ways to keep your apache configs sane, especially if you've got a whole bunch of servers that aren't part of a cluster or whatever (i.e. identical configs for all).
We actually take it a step further and do "Include conf.d/" from the httpd.conf, where conf.d is a subdirectory with configuration "containers" that are automatically included on startup/reload. That way we just drop individual vhost configs into their own files. No parsing/rewriting required for automation!
I got that trick from the way Debian does things in Sarge and started using it on our stable web servers. Dunno if other distros do it that way, but it's a great idea.
Mildly entertaining but overly-derivative tripe. It was, in turns, a pastiche of ...
I think that's a bit harsh. I'll wholeheartedly agree with you that the story was heavily influenced by Huxley and Bradbury (in fact, "Brave New World" meets "Fahrenheit 451" is how I've usually described the film), but I don't think that somehow invalidates the uniqueness of the story.
True, the acting was a bit stiff, and the ending was kinda hokey, but there were some interesting ideas in there. I liked that the monks were not supernatural ala Neo, just extremely heavily trained in an obscure martial art. Of course the concept of 'Gunkata' is kinda silly, but it made for great popcorn-fodder that didn't make me want to stab my brain with a pencil.
How do you think the film should have acknowledged its influences? A voiceover from the director intoning "*cough* Yeah, the manditory drugging that every citizen is forced to participate in was a rip of Huxley's soma... Er, and here they're destroying the sense-offender's hideout with fire, that's a rip from Bradbury..."
Face it, anyone with half a clue would already recognize all of that stuff, and the other people wouldn't go back to read the sources anyhow. They just want to see stuff blown up and people shot. Oh, and the good guy getting the girl (muahahaha).
However, the Amish ARE uneducated... learning stops at 8th grade.
For a lot of kids in the US, anyhow, school past the 8th grade is just where society wants them to be so that they're not out causing trouble while their parents are at work. Of course, once the state-mandated lockup ends at about 2:30pm, they're free to go cause whatever mischief they like, but at least they're incarcerated for some of the day.
Actually solving the problem of making High School more relevant and useful would require a lot of serious retooling and rethinking of our educational system, and no one wants to do that!
Bravo, sir.
It depends on the quality of your power supply, to some degree. I would have thought I personally average about 5 years between mains power outs;
The interesting thing is, though, that a good UPS will protect your gear from more than just blackouts. I run apcupsd on my various machines (talks to the UPS via the USB cable included) and I get notices about brownouts and surges that I woudn't otherwise have noticed (clock on the coffeemaker isn't blinking, etc.). Granted, I live in Maine, and the electrical grid here probably hasn't been upgraded in 50 years, but I've seen similar behavior in different locations.
Adding a UPS is also adding another point of failure; I have seen a UPS fail and trip offline for no reason at all.
It's true that the UPS is another POF, but on the other hand, what do you think the likelihood of the UPS failing is compared to the likelihood of getting weird power on the line? For the record, I've never seen an APC UPS just die. I've seen them lose their battery and beep every 6 hours, but that's to be expected. I'm not invalidating your experience, just stating that in my experience with hundreds of APC UPSes of varying capacities, I've never seen that.
How exactly is that requirement going to work when every VoIP company will move their servers offshore?
Why is this insightful? The usefulness of a VOIP company is pretty minimal (compared to p2p-based VOIP) if it can't terminate phone VOIP calls into the PSTN or provide DIDs, and to do that in the US it's gotta have servers in the US somewhere... Right?
That AD/HD is way way way over diagnosed by psychiatrists who can't tell the difference between a disease and parents who just don't fucking care any more.
Are you sure you mean psychiatrists? To be sure, there are definitely irresponsible/incompetent psychiatrists, and all doctors are human, so mistakes are made. On the other hand, and I really mean no insult, a lot of people really have no idea what the difference between a psychiatrist and a psychologist is, and would be hard-pressed to come up with an accurate distinction between the two.
In the US at least, one is a medical doctor, having gone through four years of medical school (the same type of school as your family doctor or brain surgeon, and that's AFTER at least four years of regular old college). Psychiatrists then go through one year of general medical residency (the Intern year), and after that typically 3 years of Psychiatry residency. Residency is sorta like an apprenticeship, in that you are working, but you're supervised and mentored by people with more experience than you (some programs are better at the mentoring than others).
Psychologists, on the other hand, are required to have no medical training whatsoever. They earn a PsyD, which is not a medical degree... And that's when they're actually a Psychologist and not a "Licensed Therapist" or whatever. That is a truly frightening thought whenever I hear about proposals to allow Psychologists to prescribe psychiatric medications. This rant is not to knock Psychologists, who do serve an important role, but they're not medical doctors. Same root word (Psyche), but totally different professions.
On the same note, a lot of ADD/ADHD diagnoses are made by family doctors with no specialized psychiatric training. The same goes for "mild depression".
(My wife's a shrink, and I get tired of ill-informed people making glaringly incorrect generalizations.)
you are using CS classes as an argument to show of your skill?
Interesting that you would nitpick that one point, and do it with poor grammar to boot. Did I strike a nerve?
No, I'm not using the fact that I had CS classes as a testament to my mad skillz. I was simply making the point that programming languages are just tools to be wielded by a programmer. If you've learned basic CS concepts (either in the context of a formal CS curriculum or by teaching yourself), it's fairly trivial to apply those concepts to any programming language. Some languages lend themselves to solving certain sets of problems more quickly and easily than others, though.
That probably makes too much sense to get through to you though, huh? I know, I know... There I go throwing logic into the argument again.
Second, and I'll probably be modded as troll for this, but all the programmers I know who like perl are sysadmin types who don't know better.
Well, I'm a 'sysadmin type', and Perl lets me get my job done with a minimum of fuss. I have lots of one-off tasks that would be tedious to do by hand, and shell scripting is just annoying. But I've also written a whole ISP provisioning system with Perl, and tied it into our company's proprietary billing system. If I'd been doing it with C or Java it would have taken me a lot longer and definitely wouldn't have been as stable as quickly as it was.
Is it possible for me to program in C or Java? Sure. I had CS classes. But for me, Perl is the right tool for most of my jobs. People like you who look down your noses at a 'scripting language for sysadmin types' are typically the sort of people whose messes I have to clean up because they have just enough knowledge to demand root on their workstation so they can screw things up.
You haven't taken the time to appreciate how Perl can be used in a sane manner to create stable, maintainable codebases and applications. That's fine, but it doesn't invalidate or devalue what the rest of us are doing with it.
I could go on, department after department. Most of the federal government is waste - probably near 90% of all dollars spent.
Hey, I agree with you. I'd LOVE to see most of the federal bureaucracy go away. It makes me sick to look at my paycheck and my wife's paycheck and realize what huge percentage of my salary is going to DC.
Like I said, I still feel that there is some role for the federal governement beyond border protection and interstate commerce regulation, but what we have now is just pointless.
Didn't know them, but I think I spotted at least one of them in a movie storming Gondor.
ROFL! That's harsh man... Still laughing.
crawling through fiberglass insulation looking for where a squirrel chewed through an burgular alarm wire
:)
Did you find the furry motherfucker? That at least makes it a little more satisfying, to know that the bugger fried while performing the sabotage.
Probably not, though, with alarm wire. Not high enough voltage... Oh, well.
Gated community or not, the people must decide they value education and elect a government that values it too.
Don't you think you're being a little simplistic? I am loathe to empower the Federal government any more than we have to, and in most cases am very much against the Feds redistributing wealth, but I feel that good education (and good healthcare) are things that would truly benefit the country as a whole.
I don't think it's as simple as incompetent local officials who can't provide for their constituents. To be sure, that most certainly is a component in many cases, but part of the problem is that not all areas of the country have the sort of tax base necessary to provide good education. If there is no industry to tax, and the citizens don't have the real estate/income to tax, where does the money come from? Do we just leave those parts of the country to rot? Do we encourage people to move to places of the country which can afford decent education? Then you're stuck with all those damn hicks and their kids in the same school as little Madison and Jacob! Horrors!
This is not the same issue as the linked article... Or the issue raised by some other posters (corporate welfare). I don't think it would cost that much to provide basic computing services to public schools, even if that is just one lab of Linux-based PCs fed by a shared DSL/Cable Modem connection. There is no reason for a public school to be running Exchange on multiple HP Proliants or whatever.
Where is the integrity of the corporations involved that they simply took the money for stupid ideas for out schools. These are their schools too.
Nah... The executives who make these decisions send their kids to private schools, and the outsource the labor to India or China, so they don't give a flying fuck about the poor state of public schools in the US.
Corporate Integrity... There's a nice oxymoron.
If you use procmail and Maildirs, try this recipe:
Dumps whatever@your.domain into folders under spamtracker, e.g. slashdot@your.domain -> INBOX/spamtracker/slashdotI'm sure some awk guru will point out way to do this without the tr or cut pipelines, but I haven't bothered to figure it out.
We reassured most all of the second group with a strong privacy policy.
Yeah, that's worth about as much to me as Orbitz's strong privacy policy. I didn't know about the break-in until I started getting porn spam to the throwaway address I created for Orbitz. As soon as I did the research and realized what'd happened, I called Orbitz and demanded that they cancel my account and remove all of my personal information from their databases. Well, their response was that I should log in to my account and delete/poison the information. So I did, and haven't used them since.
It's a shame, though. I miss the reminders/status updates sent to my phone. They seemed to have a pretty good search engine for fares, too. At least the airlines have wised up in recent years and allow people to book with them directly online.
My father-in-law drives a Jetta with a horrible radio, and was told by an independent shop that a certain key is required (?) to remove the radio from the dash, and that he'd have to go to the dealer for that.
That is pure, unadulterated, bunk. I own two Jettas ('97 GLX and '01 GLX, for those who care), and have replaced both of the stock radios with nice Alpine head units. The "special key" is nothing more than a pair of U-shaped keys that I bought at Autozone for $3. You stick the keys in either side of the radio, wiggle 'em around a little, and pull. Presto-chango (with the help of a harness adapter), I've got CD/MP3 capability and much nicer sound in my cars.
Here's an example. This kit is much more than you need (and a LOT more expensive), but the U-keys on the left are all you need.
FWIW, I also used these keys on my Mom's Ford Ficus, to take a look at the in-dash cd changer which had a broken gear. She ultimately had to take it to the dealer for warranty repair, but at least I was able to tell her what was wrong before she went in to argue with them.
It's as if the senior military decision makers don't really understand how the military is really just another tool of diplomacy, and should be used in concert, planning and execution of all other diplomatic means.
This mentality really pisses me off. The military SHOULD NOT TO BE USED FOR DIPLOMACY!!! The military should not be used for "peacekeeping". The military should only brought in when shit is to be blown up and people are to die, horribly.
Period.
If the UN wants to conduct peacekeeping actions or whatever, the UN needs to work with its member nations to create a special peacekeeping force with the sole mandate of keeping the peace. Special training, special weapons (more nonlethal options, etc.), special purpose. If the peacekeepers fail, the military is brought in to fuck shit up.
The US military represents the pinnacle of mankind's awesome (and terrifying) ability to develop efficient ways to destroy lives and materiel. It should only, ONLY be used when the diplomats have failed and skulls need to be cracked.
For what it's worth, I'm no peacenik, and I have a lot of respect for the men and women in the US military (with the exception of those idiots at Abu Ghraib). I do think that we made a stupid decision by getting into Iraq the way we did, but now that we're there, we'd damn well better finish what we started.
What're your credentials to make such a claim? The DSM is not meant to be read like scripture... It gives practitioners a way to associate various behaviors and symptoms with specific disorders. No doubt the DSM is misused by some, but there are incompetent people in all sorts of fields.