It took me longer to figure out that I didn't have a rot13 script on my computer than it took me to write one.
[shudder] Jeez, you Perl hackers really scare me sometimes. The first time I tried a Perl one-liner, it took me 20 minutes just to figure out what the proper command-line syntax was that bash would accept.:)
I've literally seen kilometers of left wing text condemning Israel on this and other issues, when I've seen less than meters about countries that are many times worse (even with a Palestinian description of Israel and an Amnesty or HRW description of the Arab dictators, Belorussia, etc, etc) This is an obvious example of double standards that True Believers have.
I can't tell if this description is meant to refer to America or not, but if it is, it isn't quite correct. You say you're Swedish, but don't mention whether you live or ever have lived in the US.
Anyway, you seem to mixing two different groups. In the US, the vast majority of devout Christians are strongly pro-Isreal. That is what forms the backbone of Isreal's support over here. The percentage of the population which is Jewish is actually relatively small. Generally, the "True Believers" here support Isreal. They are also mostly conservative, and not anywhere close to the left.
As for the "left-wing" being the enemy of Isreal, well, I'm left-wing and not anti-Isreali (unless you're using a different meaning of left-wing than I am? left-wing == liberal?). Anti-Semitism spans the whole political spectrum over here, but its usually confined to the uneducated underclass, or simply the ignorant (willfull, or biologically impaired), or those raised by racists/anti-semites (who are usually ignorant themselves). In other words, a "redneck hick", which is ironically what the poster you responded to accused you of being.:)
You know, the only people who buy this whole crap-load of a story are folks from the Middle East, who've been raised on rabid anti-Isreali propaganda that includes a hell of a lot of lies.
First, I'm not Jewish or Isreali, hell, I'm not even religious, but I stopped believing this crap after hearing the oft-repeated part about the "Jews wanting war and refusing peace" in 1948.
The truth: The Jewish council in Palestine approved The 1947 United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine. However the Palestinians, told by the neigboring Arab states (which were planning war no matter what) that they will destroy Isreal, chose war over peace. If you look at this map you'll see that Isreal would have been much smaller than they are now, if the Palestinians had chose the plan over war way back then.
I also find it amazingly hipocritical that you guys talk all about the bad things Isreal has done (and some of it is wrong, I don't argue that), and never, *ever*, *EVER* mention the terrorism being waged against Isreal's *civilians*.
Well, I got some grim news for you. If you wage a war against a nation's people, without giving them any alternative (Hamas clearly states that its goal is the destructioon of Isreal) for more than 50 YEARS, you should not be at all surprised when that nation becomes increasingly brutal towards you. It doesn't make it right, but that's just a fact of life and war and human psychology. You have reaped what you have sown.
where a guy was stuck in the terminal for 16 years.
More France bashing again? Jeez man, read the freakin' article you linked too. The very end of it should have given you a clue: NO ONE IS FORCING HIM TO STAY! Do a google and you'll find out from elsewhere that the guy is somewhat mentally challenged(1), and that the "paperwork problem" was resolved years ago, but he has yet to sign the papers. He's more comfortable in the simpler mini-world of that terminal than he is in the real world.
1: He apparently really believes the movie is about him, even though the Tom Hanks movie has a completely different character - the only similarity was being trapped in a stateless limbo in an airport due to red tape - but that hasn't been true for this guy for years.
And this will never work for the middle east situation???
I think it will eventually. Two things (at least) need to happen though: 1) The Palestinians get some rational leadership, and 2) when #1 happens, the moderates in Isreal are going to have to win a showdown with the Jewish religious extremists who wield far more power in Isreal than their numbers would suggest.
Unlike all the other Isreali bashing in this thread however, the next move isn't Isreal's to make. First, the Palestinians need to decide what is more important to them: making more martyrs for the Islamic Fundamentalists, or getting their land back. In other words, are you fighting this war with Isreal because of a clash of religions or because of a territorial dispute? No compromise is possible on the first one, but there is plenty of room for a solution on the later, with some reasonable leadership on both sides.
You forgot my assumption. As long as F/OS remains a tiny niche, ordinary users have little influence on it. If the progammers continue to do it for themselves, the masses won't adopt it. They'll continue to use closed code because it better satisfies their needs.
Yet some developers *are* willing to work towards the needs of end-users, look at the Gnome developers for example. The difference is they are *not* at the mercy of the end-users as your previous post implied.
Even more important here is the role of the "middle-men" like the commercial distro makers, they *are* beholden to the end-users since they're trying to get their money, so the distros hire the developers needed to improve F/OS for the end-user, and generally work with the people in charge of the F/OS projects to make their software better for a wider audience.
That's the beauty of the system, IMO. Let the core F/OS community continue writing code that solves their problems, and let the "middle-men", or the F/OS developers who *are* motivated to help the end-user, add the polish and provide the hand-holding. Everyone ends up either doing what they want to do, or they get paid to do it, and so for the most part, everyone wins.
It creates a problem for shops trying to standardize on Debian. Which version of the "unstable" tree are you going to offer on standard? Which upgrades/updates are necessary?
Then use one of the Debian derivitives instead (there is a list of them on Debian's website. Libranet, for example, released its latest version a few months ago with a lot of updated software (its not built on Debian Stable). If the *volunteers* of the Debian project aren't moving fast enough for you, then pay someone to do that work.
Look, if you expect both *frequent*, and *high-quality* releases without paying for it or helping to put it together, then you're a cheap-skate, plain and simple.
I've gotten really annoyed in the past, like the people who complained about Red Hat dropping their low-end version, when these folks weren't even paying Red Hat for what they were using. They were leeching off of Red Hat's hard work, and then had the gaul to bitch about it, when Red Hat dropped their low-end because, *gasp*, they weren't making a profit at the low end. Well, no wonder, since few people were actually buying it.
Debian is driven by part-time volunteers. As Debian becomes more sophisticated and complex, with an increasing number of packages available, its going to take longer for them to put those everything-but-the-kitchen-sink distributions together, because as the number of packages increases, unintended interactions between packages exponentially increase the difficulty of putting a distro together. So everyone complaining about Debian not being a fast-draw on the release, please do one of the following:
Buy a commercial version of Debian, like Libranet or Progeny. They've got people working full-time to make the distribution coherent, and some of your money will indirectly help Debian in the process since some of the developers working in these companies are helping develop/improve Debian-related software like apt, etc.
Pitch in and help Debian directly. Look at the packages that are most important to you and help out with them a little by sending patches for problems/improvements to the Debian Developer responsible for that package. You don't even have to know how to code, they can always use good bug reporters, and package testers.
If you are not willing or able to do one of the above, then consider yourself fortunate that so many people are willing to work so hard to put together something like Debian without expecting any payment in return, for *you* Debian is completely Free. Realizing your good fortune, you should now STOP BITCHING.
The left don't oppose to any type of energy source just because it has the word 'nuclear'.... We oppose energy sources that are clearly dangerous.
Who's this "we", kemosabe? I'm about as left as they come (but still not close to Ted Kennedy!:O), and I'm pro-nuclear. I don't believe this is a pure Left-vs-Right issue. It crosses political and demographic lines. Heck, if the original founder of Greenpeace can change his mind 20 years later and become pro-nuclear, I'm not sure you *can* categorize people on this issue with any kind of accuracy.
With 1st and 2nd generation plants this was true, but not with the later designs, where inherient safety was part of the design itself. Example: designs which have the reactor core with openings on its top sitting in some pool of liquid, all self-contained, with no means for the liquid to leave the chamber. If the core gets too hot the liquid expands, eventually reaching the openings at the top of the reactor, pouring in and killing the reaction. The only way for that reactor design to meltdown, would be for several basic laws of physics to fail simultaneously. (This was IIRC a Scandanavian design that I read about a few years ago. There are certainly by now other designs which are just as clever.)
2. Serious failures can also accur with modern reactors although the design is fundamentally different to the one used in Chernobyl. They are not immune just because of the way they are built (which is often claimed by energy groups). The different reactor design merely makes them more secure but not perfect.
See above. Tell me how a design that can only fail if multiple laws of physics and chemistry fail simultaneously isn't the closest anyone will ever get to perfect? Your example that you gave after the above quote is based on *old* reactor designs!
3. Fission itself is clean. But the nuclear waste is not. You cannot keep burying all the nuclear waste in some old mine for another 200-300 years. With a half-life period in the millions this is one hell of a legacy for our children.
Most of it doesn't have to be buried, actually. If the tree-huggers would stop blocking every nuclear power plant no matter the differences, we can build several integral fast reactors (IFR) which can burn the spent fuel from our current reactors for energy (as well as consuming all that weapons grade plutonium that is lying around). The rest? There are several promising ways to get rid of nuclear waste, including several methods involving deep insertion into the ocean floor at certain locations. Depending on who you ask, these ideas are not only feasible (although expense may be an issue) they are even safer than something like Yucca mountain, but unfortunatly politics has prevented further research into the idea because once the government decided on the Yucca Mountain site it stopped looking at other alternatives. Never mind that the tree-hugger's main strategy is to say no to everything, hoping that an escalating waste problem will prevent adoption of nuclear power. That may work here, but not everywhere else, while we remain moribund, countries like Japan and France are solving their energy problems with nuclear, and aren't the ones producing so much carbon dioxide.
4. What if something happens?
Indeed, we could get hit tomorrow by an asteriod and render this entire argument moot. Look, life is a gamble every time you leave your house, you have to look at the risk-reward ratio involved here, and it seems to me we are increasingly learning that there is a potentially *profound* risk, to a large portion of the 6 billion people on this planet, of continuing to produce carbon dioxide and releasing it into the atmosphere. All risks are relative.
[This post is in support of the parent, and really a response to the grand-parent]
Chernobyl wasn't an example of the danger of nuclear power, IMO, it was an example of the danger of *communism*. It gets really tedious having to point out to all these tree-huggers over and over again, that *nothing* like Chernobyl was ever built outside Soviet Russia, never would have been, and now that the USSR is gone, it *never* will again. Chernobyl, even when it was *brand spanking new* *massively* violated Western nuclear safety standards. For cryin' out loud folks, Chernobyl didn't even *have* a containment building!
The rest of the world has a containment structure made of at least 3 feet of concrete on all sides to keep a reactor explosion like the one that happened at Chernobyl from releasing any debris or radiation. The truth is, if Chernobyl had had a Western style containment structure, none of us outside of the USSR would ever have known about the accident, untill after the fall of the USSR, the accident would have been no worse then what happened at TMI. Remember, at TMI, half the reactor core melted down, but the containment structure was never breached, which is why there never was any significant, i.e. dangerous, release of radiation from TMI.
And since then of course, the rest of the world is now into the 3rd generation power plants, that are much safer than the ones we have now. Never mind the mini-reactor concept which would make a meltdown physically impossible because there literally isn't enough fuel to go critical. Or the integral fast reactor idea (IFR), which would result in a power plant that would produce a nuclear byproduct that was much less useful as potentially weapon's grade material, *and* it could *consume* the spent fuel of the current reactors (plus the leftover plutonium from weapons) we have now. We don't need to bury the stuff, it could be fed to an IFR and used to make energy! Unfortunately, the construction of a prototype here in the US (Japan already has some) was killed because our politicians misunderstood the technology (now how often does *that* happen?), and were convinced by the anti-nuclear folks that this was dangerous for proliferation, when its actually the exact opposite! And to top it all off? The cost to shut down the project was more than the cost to go ahead and finish it!... Forget the damn lawyers, I say the politicians should be first up against the wall....
So we don't build any new nuclear plants (I figure when brownouts become commonplace in about 25 years, we'll rush build more coal and oil burners and to hell with the environment), continue to use old ones that are getting older, and therefore more dangerous, and while the rest of the world leaves us behind, we continue to rely on our trusty coal burning plants, and Middle Eastern oil, which, when you add in the cost of the wars we have to fight to keep the oil flowing, and the lives lost, is costing us a fortune.
But thats what we Americans want, we think cheap gas is some kind of God-given right of ours, that electricity is some kind of manna from heaven that doesn't cost much, so we keep driving our SUVs, we keep buring that dirty coal, and we keep sending our young people to the other side of the world to die fighting religious lunatics for crude, and still there are very few Americans who have recognized just how stupid and insane our energy policy has become.
Here on/. though, the tree-hugger's FUD is still going strong, so the status quo is still a go.
And people want to know why I'm so cynical about my own country.... [Sigh]
Yes, apt-x is cool, there is no middle ground. What if I want a semi-new package, but I don't want to crash my machine using it? Stable is a couple years stale already, unstable is just that, and testing says it all. That leaves me to compile from source, and if I'm going to do that, might as well use slack.
Spoken by someone who clearly doesn't know Debian. This FUD is getting really old for a lot of us. I've been using Debian unstable for at least three *years* with only one catastrophic failure which I solved by booting off my "emergency boot disk" (a Knoppix CD) and reverting the package that caused the problem.
Unstable is constantly *CHANGING*, *not* constantly broken, that's what Debian means by "unstable". If you were more familar with Debian you would also know there *is* a middle ground and there is more to Debian than apt-get. There is aptitude and synaptic, which make it easy to more finely control the updates of your system, allowing you, for example, to only update the things you need and put the rest on hold, so you miss 95% of the minor problems that everyone suffers because they always run apt-get upgrade and update the world once or twice a day, when they probably don't *need* to have the latest and greatest of every package, and they are very unlikely to need it within 24 hours after its been released.
Bottom line: Using Debian Sid *responsibly* (update only what you need, and only once ever 7-10 days, not daily) is just as safe as using any other recently released distro. If it weren't, there wouldn't be so many people like me doing it.
You don't even realize how idiotic this sounds do you? A project is forked when it's not functional enough for someone, or a group of people. This basically means Debian is broken and you take it as some badge of honor. The top two distro's Fedora and Mandrake came from the same product.
The same product?... You mean one is, *gasp*, a *fork* of the other? Now I'm getting a headache trying to follow your logic here.:)
Please, the whole argument over the fork issue is way too simplistic. OS kernels are different from full distributions, and the developers of Linux are different from the BSD developers (who have 3 or 4 active forks of BSD ongoing). There is a general *trend* toward less forking with F/OS code, but it is only a characteristic, not a law. There are exceptions, or perhaps its the other way around, and the Linux kernel is the unusual exception. I personally don't believe there is a simple rule for this. I depends on what the software is for, who's writing it, how big the core devel team is, and how many people use it or depend on it.
If the day ever comes that the non-programming OSS users outnumber the nebulous OSS community, it won't even matter what the community thinks.
Ummm, hogwash. With F/OS software, the programmers ultimately call the shots because they're the ones that write the code. You're still thinking the in the old-fashioned, closed-source way, although given your/. handle, I'm not surprised:).
Red Hat is a profit-oriented company that has to listen to its customers to stay in business. But even though they employ a lot of programmers writing F/OS code, they don't get to dictate the direction of it. Linus has more control over the kernel than RH does, and the GNU/FSF people have more control over things like GCC and GLIBC than RH does. Since all the source is open, if RH did try to force something in their own direction, everyone else would just fork the code and continue on the path the larger F/OS community wants to go. The F/OS people on the other hand, fundamentally aren't controlled by the users, they're driven largely by their own interests. Why else do you so often hear comments like "show me the code", or "Great idea, do you have the patch"? Bottom line in the F/OS community: code talks, everything else is just hot air.
Now you have companies like RH trying to leverage the existing pool of F/OS software to make money, but that doesn't mean the rest of the F/OS community is at all concerned about what RH's customers think. They don't. RH's customers are RH's problem. When push comes to shove, the F/OS developers write code for themselves and no one else.
Considering the way the pecking order works in the F/OS community (your rep is based on the software you've written lately), your idea that non-programmers will "take over" is absurd.
No I couldn't because I am clearly mentally deficient.
Hmmm, if being a little lazy every once and awhile is a mental deficiency, then not only is this abnormality a nearly universal trait, I know I'm much more seriously afflicted than you are!
All i can say is technology makes the impossible possible
Untill we find a cheap and unlimited form of energy, then discover the magic of being able to cheaply convert that energy back to any form of matter we may need, the watchword is going to remain "impossible". Optimism is a good thing, and perhaps necessary in an engineer, but as one who as been waiting for fusion power for more than 30 years, I'm not going to hold my breath.
First, some bottled water has been shown to be nothing more than tap water.
Second, making something thats 99.9% "pure" or whatever versus something that is already 98% "pure" (in most places) may technically be an "improvement", but in the end how many people are *really* being helped by that fractional increase, and is it worth paying 10x or 20x for? The cost/benefit ratio is seriously out of whack on this one.:)
Third, didn't you see the show where they did blind taste tests at upscale New York resaurants (I think it was on David Letterman's show) and most people ended up thinking that New York's tap water was the "better" bottled water?!?
In most places the quality of tap water is so good that the chemical differences between it and bottled water aren't enough to notice, at least not without a chemical testing kit! The exception seems to be about the taste issue which is an aesthetic one (there are contaminants that alter taste which are perfectly safe, and therefore not regulated).
Yes, chlorine is a potential risk, but only in places where the water has high organic matter contamination at the source, if that is low, so is the chlorine residue, and at these low levels no one has shown that a significant health risk exists.
Yes, old plumbing can cause problems too, then again, you've got a better chance of being hit by lightning tomorrow then getting cancer from old plumbing. All risks are relative.
If you want to pay more for the taste of bottled water fine, but if you're drinking bottled water because you think tap water is unsafe, well, the odds are extremely likely that you're just wasting your money. Ask your local water provider for their last quality report (which they are now required to send their customers every few years or so), and see for yourself whether chlorine contamination is an issue for your area. Unless your house is very old, plumbing is not likely to be a significant problem, but if your paranoid, have your water tested at the tap and/or use a filter. Either way, you'll still end up saving money versus drinking bottled water.
I'm ingrained to make pages fast loading and I like crappy looking sites that load fast.
Procreate my good man! We need more folks like you on the net! Not everyone uses it for songs, videos and naked girls (in numerous formats). When I go to a site, I'm looking for information(**), not Flash-Crap.
*: But when going to/. I suppose its "misinformation"?
*: Except for the occasional porn run, once every 6 months or so. (Yes, I said months, thats my story, and I'm sticking to it!)
You know its too bad a lot of the modders never bothered to read your 3rd paragraph, they apparently stopped after the 2nd one to mod you up Funny. The 3rd para should have gotten an Insightful, IMO.
Q: Does anyone know how Neilson makes up for those folks who don't agree to participate? Those who refuse (like I did) no longer make the sample truly random and representative, right? I think its significant, because imagine who are the ones most likely to refuse? Folks who don't much care for TV, who only keep it for sports or news or something like a Discovery or History channel. Heck, I dropped cable because 95% of it was crap and the good stuff was not only rare, it was also mostly reruns. For the little I watched TV, I just didn't want the hassle of it all, so I said no. So when Neilson says the "average American watches X hours of TV per day", are they factoring in the ones who didn't participate in the survey?
And I'm tired of Gentoo zealots going around trying to start fights, especially with Debian users, I guess because you consider Debian the main competitor to Gentoo. The parent never mentioned what distro he used, so how you do know he uses Debian?
This does bring up an interesting point, however: state supreme courts commonly mandate that legislatures clarify or reword laws, but I can't recall a single instance of the SCOTUS doing this. Anyone wanna pipe up regarding this?
I believe its because SCOTUS can't do what state courts can do. In a way its like the issue of the line-item veto for POTUS (effectively legal for states, not legal for the federal government). SCOTUS can't "edit" the law, they can only decide whether the law, in its entirety, is constitutional or not. AFAIK, most of the states aren't set up with the same kind of mechanisms to control their constitution and government the way the federal government is.
This is an excellent example of why modding doesn't work on/.. Why the grandparent gets modded up, but the parent doesn't is incredible to me.
Historians have the saying that history gets written by the victors. Accountant's have the joke that there are lies, damned lies, and then there are statistics. By a similar token, "truth" gets defined by those who have the power, influence and/or charisma at the time to convince a majority that their "truth" is the "Real Truth(TM)".
As the parent dramatically shows, we have lived with Lincoln's "truth" for more than a century, because his power, influence, and charisma was unassailable by anyone till recently. It took DNA testing to prove that one of the greatest President's of our country LIED THROUGH HIS TEETH ABOUT A SEXUAL AFFAIR. Sound familar? Why are we surprised that history continues to repeat itself? After all, some things, like human sexual behavior, hasn't changed significantly in centuries.
Conservative's can't stand the idea that truth is relative and not an absolute, they accuse those who call truth "flexible" as immoral and without values. Yet, history continues to show us that not only is truth flexible, and often relative to the viewer/observer, but often one generation's truth is the next generation's "dirty little lie", I suppose that's at least better than the "Big Lie", but how much better?
Moral of this story: TAKE **NOTHING** AT FACE VALUE, NO MATTER THE SOURCE.
That leaving no way for companies that are in the position SCO claims to be in to defend IP they did not intend to release will result in companies that otherwise would release SOME of their code under GPL chosing to release NONE, for fear of compromsing the REST of it.
First of all, SCO's argument is crap. They've known at the highest level that they've continued to distribute the code under a GPL from their site, and THEY WILLFULLY CONTINUE TO DO SO BECAUSE THEY DON'T RECOGNIZE THE VALIDITY OF THE GPL. So this argument simply doesn't apply to them.
Second, how realisitic is this *really*, in another, more general case?. Because you are implying that they've already examined their own code and made a distinction between what they're willing to release under GPL and what they aren't (which SCO claims it never did). How likely are they then to *make* this mistake after explicitly and overtly doing the research to *avoid* the mistake? Its a stretch, to say the least.
If all the boring jobs are done by machines, i think you'll find it easier to achieve this kind of star-trek utopia you describe.
Only in a utopia with unlimited energy and resources is this possible. That's how ST gets away with it. In reality, resources aren't cheap and in infinite supply, they are expensive to find and process, and due to being finite they invariably get more expensive as time goes on. Meanwhile, the dream of fusion power is just that: a dream. As long as it takes energy and resources to produce the things we need, like food to start off with, then no one can "share it with many people at no cost", no matter how many robots we have. I'm a big fan of FOSS, but it exists because of the unique nature of computer software and eventually all digital content (i.e. because distribution and replication is at no cost, and no physical resources are needed given an already existing Internet), I really don't see any evidence that its applicable anywhere else where the widgets are physical objects.
"If you're not a liberal when you're 25, you have no heart. If you're not a conservative by the time you're 35, you have no brain"
NOOOOO!!! I'm 40 and still liberal! THIS MEANS I'M A MORON!!! What do I do?... YIKES!!! My neighbors will figure it out eventually... How to explain this?..... I got it!!!!.... I'll just tell everyone I have a rare case of early onset Alzheimer's! Yea! That'll work, since the conservatives are too stupid to know the difference!
You do realize, don't you, that you could have found this yourself in just 0.22 seconds with a google on "hitler religion god belief"? This is what annoys me about so much of the pontificating here on/., that many pontificators don't take just 5 seconds to find out if they're right or just speaking out of their... umm.... "other end".:)
Slashdot Mirror
It took me longer to figure out that I didn't have a rot13 script on my computer than it took me to write one.
:)
[shudder] Jeez, you Perl hackers really scare me sometimes. The first time I tried a Perl one-liner, it took me 20 minutes just to figure out what the proper command-line syntax was that bash would accept.
I can't tell if this description is meant to refer to America or not, but if it is, it isn't quite correct. You say you're Swedish, but don't mention whether you live or ever have lived in the US.
Anyway, you seem to mixing two different groups. In the US, the vast majority of devout Christians are strongly pro-Isreal. That is what forms the backbone of Isreal's support over here. The percentage of the population which is Jewish is actually relatively small. Generally, the "True Believers" here support Isreal. They are also mostly conservative, and not anywhere close to the left.
As for the "left-wing" being the enemy of Isreal, well, I'm left-wing and not anti-Isreali (unless you're using a different meaning of left-wing than I am? left-wing == liberal?). Anti-Semitism spans the whole political spectrum over here, but its usually confined to the uneducated underclass, or simply the ignorant (willfull, or biologically impaired), or those raised by racists/anti-semites (who are usually ignorant themselves). In other words, a "redneck hick", which is ironically what the poster you responded to accused you of being.
I call BULLSHIT!
You know, the only people who buy this whole crap-load of a story are folks from the Middle East, who've been raised on rabid anti-Isreali propaganda that includes a hell of a lot of lies.
First, I'm not Jewish or Isreali, hell, I'm not even religious, but I stopped believing this crap after hearing the oft-repeated part about the "Jews wanting war and refusing peace" in 1948.
The truth: The Jewish council in Palestine approved The 1947 United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine. However the Palestinians, told by the neigboring Arab states (which were planning war no matter what) that they will destroy Isreal, chose war over peace. If you look at this map you'll see that Isreal would have been much smaller than they are now, if the Palestinians had chose the plan over war way back then.
I also find it amazingly hipocritical that you guys talk all about the bad things Isreal has done (and some of it is wrong, I don't argue that), and never, *ever*, *EVER* mention the terrorism being waged against Isreal's *civilians*.
Well, I got some grim news for you. If you wage a war against a nation's people, without giving them any alternative (Hamas clearly states that its goal is the destructioon of Isreal) for more than 50 YEARS, you should not be at all surprised when that nation becomes increasingly brutal towards you. It doesn't make it right, but that's just a fact of life and war and human psychology. You have reaped what you have sown.
More France bashing again? Jeez man, read the freakin' article you linked too. The very end of it should have given you a clue: NO ONE IS FORCING HIM TO STAY! Do a google and you'll find out from elsewhere that the guy is somewhat mentally challenged(1), and that the "paperwork problem" was resolved years ago, but he has yet to sign the papers. He's more comfortable in the simpler mini-world of that terminal than he is in the real world.
1: He apparently really believes the movie is about him, even though the Tom Hanks movie has a completely different character - the only similarity was being trapped in a stateless limbo in an airport due to red tape - but that hasn't been true for this guy for years.
I think it will eventually. Two things (at least) need to happen though: 1) The Palestinians get some rational leadership, and 2) when #1 happens, the moderates in Isreal are going to have to win a showdown with the Jewish religious extremists who wield far more power in Isreal than their numbers would suggest.
Unlike all the other Isreali bashing in this thread however, the next move isn't Isreal's to make. First, the Palestinians need to decide what is more important to them: making more martyrs for the Islamic Fundamentalists, or getting their land back. In other words, are you fighting this war with Isreal because of a clash of religions or because of a territorial dispute? No compromise is possible on the first one, but there is plenty of room for a solution on the later, with some reasonable leadership on both sides.
Yet some developers *are* willing to work towards the needs of end-users, look at the Gnome developers for example. The difference is they are *not* at the mercy of the end-users as your previous post implied.
Even more important here is the role of the "middle-men" like the commercial distro makers, they *are* beholden to the end-users since they're trying to get their money, so the distros hire the developers needed to improve F/OS for the end-user, and generally work with the people in charge of the F/OS projects to make their software better for a wider audience.
That's the beauty of the system, IMO. Let the core F/OS community continue writing code that solves their problems, and let the "middle-men", or the F/OS developers who *are* motivated to help the end-user, add the polish and provide the hand-holding. Everyone ends up either doing what they want to do, or they get paid to do it, and so for the most part, everyone wins.
Then use one of the Debian derivitives instead (there is a list of them on Debian's website. Libranet, for example, released its latest version a few months ago with a lot of updated software (its not built on Debian Stable). If the *volunteers* of the Debian project aren't moving fast enough for you, then pay someone to do that work.
Look, if you expect both *frequent*, and *high-quality* releases without paying for it or helping to put it together, then you're a cheap-skate, plain and simple.
I've gotten really annoyed in the past, like the people who complained about Red Hat dropping their low-end version, when these folks weren't even paying Red Hat for what they were using. They were leeching off of Red Hat's hard work, and then had the gaul to bitch about it, when Red Hat dropped their low-end because, *gasp*, they weren't making a profit at the low end. Well, no wonder, since few people were actually buying it.
Debian is driven by part-time volunteers. As Debian becomes more sophisticated and complex, with an increasing number of packages available, its going to take longer for them to put those everything-but-the-kitchen-sink distributions together, because as the number of packages increases, unintended interactions between packages exponentially increase the difficulty of putting a distro together. So everyone complaining about Debian not being a fast-draw on the release, please do one of the following:
Who's this "we", kemosabe? I'm about as left as they come (but still not close to Ted Kennedy!
With 1st and 2nd generation plants this was true, but not with the later designs, where inherient safety was part of the design itself. Example: designs which have the reactor core with openings on its top sitting in some pool of liquid, all self-contained, with no means for the liquid to leave the chamber. If the core gets too hot the liquid expands, eventually reaching the openings at the top of the reactor, pouring in and killing the reaction. The only way for that reactor design to meltdown, would be for several basic laws of physics to fail simultaneously. (This was IIRC a Scandanavian design that I read about a few years ago. There are certainly by now other designs which are just as clever.)
See above. Tell me how a design that can only fail if multiple laws of physics and chemistry fail simultaneously isn't the closest anyone will ever get to perfect? Your example that you gave after the above quote is based on *old* reactor designs!
Most of it doesn't have to be buried, actually. If the tree-huggers would stop blocking every nuclear power plant no matter the differences, we can build several integral fast reactors (IFR) which can burn the spent fuel from our current reactors for energy (as well as consuming all that weapons grade plutonium that is lying around). The rest? There are several promising ways to get rid of nuclear waste, including several methods involving deep insertion into the ocean floor at certain locations. Depending on who you ask, these ideas are not only feasible (although expense may be an issue) they are even safer than something like Yucca mountain, but unfortunatly politics has prevented further research into the idea because once the government decided on the Yucca Mountain site it stopped looking at other alternatives. Never mind that the tree-hugger's main strategy is to say no to everything, hoping that an escalating waste problem will prevent adoption of nuclear power. That may work here, but not everywhere else, while we remain moribund, countries like Japan and France are solving their energy problems with nuclear, and aren't the ones producing so much carbon dioxide.
Indeed, we could get hit tomorrow by an asteriod and render this entire argument moot. Look, life is a gamble every time you leave your house, you have to look at the risk-reward ratio involved here, and it seems to me we are increasingly learning that there is a potentially *profound* risk, to a large portion of the 6 billion people on this planet, of continuing to produce carbon dioxide and releasing it into the atmosphere. All risks are relative.
[This post is in support of the parent, and really a response to the grand-parent]
Chernobyl wasn't an example of the danger of nuclear power, IMO, it was an example of the danger of *communism*. It gets really tedious having to point out to all these tree-huggers over and over again, that *nothing* like Chernobyl was ever built outside Soviet Russia, never would have been, and now that the USSR is gone, it *never* will again. Chernobyl, even when it was *brand spanking new* *massively* violated Western nuclear safety standards. For cryin' out loud folks, Chernobyl didn't even *have* a containment building!
The rest of the world has a containment structure made of at least 3 feet of concrete on all sides to keep a reactor explosion like the one that happened at Chernobyl from releasing any debris or radiation. The truth is, if Chernobyl had had a Western style containment structure, none of us outside of the USSR would ever have known about the accident, untill after the fall of the USSR, the accident would have been no worse then what happened at TMI. Remember, at TMI, half the reactor core melted down, but the containment structure was never breached, which is why there never was any significant, i.e. dangerous, release of radiation from TMI.
And since then of course, the rest of the world is now into the 3rd generation power plants, that are much safer than the ones we have now. Never mind the mini-reactor concept which would make a meltdown physically impossible because there literally isn't enough fuel to go critical. Or the integral fast reactor idea (IFR), which would result in a power plant that would produce a nuclear byproduct that was much less useful as potentially weapon's grade material, *and* it could *consume* the spent fuel of the current reactors (plus the leftover plutonium from weapons) we have now. We don't need to bury the stuff, it could be fed to an IFR and used to make energy! Unfortunately, the construction of a prototype here in the US (Japan already has some) was killed because our politicians misunderstood the technology (now how often does *that* happen?), and were convinced by the anti-nuclear folks that this was dangerous for proliferation, when its actually the exact opposite! And to top it all off? The cost to shut down the project was more than the cost to go ahead and finish it!
So we don't build any new nuclear plants (I figure when brownouts become commonplace in about 25 years, we'll rush build more coal and oil burners and to hell with the environment), continue to use old ones that are getting older, and therefore more dangerous, and while the rest of the world leaves us behind, we continue to rely on our trusty coal burning plants, and Middle Eastern oil, which, when you add in the cost of the wars we have to fight to keep the oil flowing, and the lives lost, is costing us a fortune.
But thats what we Americans want, we think cheap gas is some kind of God-given right of ours, that electricity is some kind of manna from heaven that doesn't cost much, so we keep driving our SUVs, we keep buring that dirty coal, and we keep sending our young people to the other side of the world to die fighting religious lunatics for crude, and still there are very few Americans who have recognized just how stupid and insane our energy policy has become.
Here on
And people want to know why I'm so cynical about my own country.... [Sigh]
Spoken by someone who clearly doesn't know Debian. This FUD is getting really old for a lot of us. I've been using Debian unstable for at least three *years* with only one catastrophic failure which I solved by booting off my "emergency boot disk" (a Knoppix CD) and reverting the package that caused the problem.
Unstable is constantly *CHANGING*, *not* constantly broken, that's what Debian means by "unstable". If you were more familar with Debian you would also know there *is* a middle ground and there is more to Debian than apt-get. There is aptitude and synaptic, which make it easy to more finely control the updates of your system, allowing you, for example, to only update the things you need and put the rest on hold, so you miss 95% of the minor problems that everyone suffers because they always run apt-get upgrade and update the world once or twice a day, when they probably don't *need* to have the latest and greatest of every package, and they are very unlikely to need it within 24 hours after its been released.
Bottom line: Using Debian Sid *responsibly* (update only what you need, and only once ever 7-10 days, not daily) is just as safe as using any other recently released distro. If it weren't, there wouldn't be so many people like me doing it.
P.S.: Cool kids want to get work done too!
The same product?
Please, the whole argument over the fork issue is way too simplistic. OS kernels are different from full distributions, and the developers of Linux are different from the BSD developers (who have 3 or 4 active forks of BSD ongoing). There is a general *trend* toward less forking with F/OS code, but it is only a characteristic, not a law. There are exceptions, or perhaps its the other way around, and the Linux kernel is the unusual exception. I personally don't believe there is a simple rule for this. I depends on what the software is for, who's writing it, how big the core devel team is, and how many people use it or depend on it.
Ummm, hogwash. With F/OS software, the programmers ultimately call the shots because they're the ones that write the code. You're still thinking the in the old-fashioned, closed-source way, although given your
Red Hat is a profit-oriented company that has to listen to its customers to stay in business. But even though they employ a lot of programmers writing F/OS code, they don't get to dictate the direction of it. Linus has more control over the kernel than RH does, and the GNU/FSF people have more control over things like GCC and GLIBC than RH does. Since all the source is open, if RH did try to force something in their own direction, everyone else would just fork the code and continue on the path the larger F/OS community wants to go. The F/OS people on the other hand, fundamentally aren't controlled by the users, they're driven largely by their own interests. Why else do you so often hear comments like "show me the code", or "Great idea, do you have the patch"? Bottom line in the F/OS community: code talks, everything else is just hot air.
Now you have companies like RH trying to leverage the existing pool of F/OS software to make money, but that doesn't mean the rest of the F/OS community is at all concerned about what RH's customers think. They don't. RH's customers are RH's problem. When push comes to shove, the F/OS developers write code for themselves and no one else.
Considering the way the pecking order works in the F/OS community (your rep is based on the software you've written lately), your idea that non-programmers will "take over" is absurd.
Hmmm, if being a little lazy every once and awhile is a mental deficiency, then not only is this abnormality a nearly universal trait, I know I'm much more seriously afflicted than you are!
Untill we find a cheap and unlimited form of energy, then discover the magic of being able to cheaply convert that energy back to any form of matter we may need, the watchword is going to remain "impossible". Optimism is a good thing, and perhaps necessary in an engineer, but as one who as been waiting for fusion power for more than 30 years, I'm not going to hold my breath.
First, some bottled water has been shown to be nothing more than tap water.
:)
Second, making something thats 99.9% "pure" or whatever versus something that is already 98% "pure" (in most places) may technically be an "improvement", but in the end how many people are *really* being helped by that fractional increase, and is it worth paying 10x or 20x for? The cost/benefit ratio is seriously out of whack on this one.
Third, didn't you see the show where they did blind taste tests at upscale New York resaurants (I think it was on David Letterman's show) and most people ended up thinking that New York's tap water was the "better" bottled water?!?
In most places the quality of tap water is so good that the chemical differences between it and bottled water aren't enough to notice, at least not without a chemical testing kit! The exception seems to be about the taste issue which is an aesthetic one (there are contaminants that alter taste which are perfectly safe, and therefore not regulated).
Yes, chlorine is a potential risk, but only in places where the water has high organic matter contamination at the source, if that is low, so is the chlorine residue, and at these low levels no one has shown that a significant health risk exists.
Yes, old plumbing can cause problems too, then again, you've got a better chance of being hit by lightning tomorrow then getting cancer from old plumbing. All risks are relative.
If you want to pay more for the taste of bottled water fine, but if you're drinking bottled water because you think tap water is unsafe, well, the odds are extremely likely that you're just wasting your money. Ask your local water provider for their last quality report (which they are now required to send their customers every few years or so), and see for yourself whether chlorine contamination is an issue for your area. Unless your house is very old, plumbing is not likely to be a significant problem, but if your paranoid, have your water tested at the tap and/or use a filter. Either way, you'll still end up saving money versus drinking bottled water.
Procreate my good man! We need more folks like you on the net! Not everyone uses it for songs, videos and naked girls (in numerous formats). When I go to a site, I'm looking for information(**), not Flash-Crap.
*: But when going to
*: Except for the occasional porn run, once every 6 months or so. (Yes, I said months, thats my story, and I'm sticking to it!)
You know its too bad a lot of the modders never bothered to read your 3rd paragraph, they apparently stopped after the 2nd one to mod you up Funny. The 3rd para should have gotten an Insightful, IMO.
Q: Does anyone know how Neilson makes up for those folks who don't agree to participate? Those who refuse (like I did) no longer make the sample truly random and representative, right? I think its significant, because imagine who are the ones most likely to refuse? Folks who don't much care for TV, who only keep it for sports or news or something like a Discovery or History channel. Heck, I dropped cable because 95% of it was crap and the good stuff was not only rare, it was also mostly reruns. For the little I watched TV, I just didn't want the hassle of it all, so I said no. So when Neilson says the "average American watches X hours of TV per day", are they factoring in the ones who didn't participate in the survey?
And I'm tired of Gentoo zealots going around trying to start fights, especially with Debian users, I guess because you consider Debian the main competitor to Gentoo. The parent never mentioned what distro he used, so how you do know he uses Debian?
I believe its because SCOTUS can't do what state courts can do. In a way its like the issue of the line-item veto for POTUS (effectively legal for states, not legal for the federal government). SCOTUS can't "edit" the law, they can only decide whether the law, in its entirety, is constitutional or not. AFAIK, most of the states aren't set up with the same kind of mechanisms to control their constitution and government the way the federal government is.
This is an excellent example of why modding doesn't work on /.. Why the grandparent gets modded up, but the parent doesn't is incredible to me.
Historians have the saying that history gets written by the victors. Accountant's have the joke that there are lies, damned lies, and then there are statistics. By a similar token, "truth" gets defined by those who have the power, influence and/or charisma at the time to convince a majority that their "truth" is the "Real Truth(TM)".
As the parent dramatically shows, we have lived with Lincoln's "truth" for more than a century, because his power, influence, and charisma was unassailable by anyone till recently. It took DNA testing to prove that one of the greatest President's of our country LIED THROUGH HIS TEETH ABOUT A SEXUAL AFFAIR. Sound familar? Why are we surprised that history continues to repeat itself? After all, some things, like human sexual behavior, hasn't changed significantly in centuries.
Conservative's can't stand the idea that truth is relative and not an absolute, they accuse those who call truth "flexible" as immoral and without values. Yet, history continues to show us that not only is truth flexible, and often relative to the viewer/observer, but often one generation's truth is the next generation's "dirty little lie", I suppose that's at least better than the "Big Lie", but how much better?
Moral of this story: TAKE **NOTHING** AT FACE VALUE, NO MATTER THE SOURCE.
First of all, SCO's argument is crap. They've known at the highest level that they've continued to distribute the code under a GPL from their site, and THEY WILLFULLY CONTINUE TO DO SO BECAUSE THEY DON'T RECOGNIZE THE VALIDITY OF THE GPL. So this argument simply doesn't apply to them.
Second, how realisitic is this *really*, in another, more general case?. Because you are implying that they've already examined their own code and made a distinction between what they're willing to release under GPL and what they aren't (which SCO claims it never did). How likely are they then to *make* this mistake after explicitly and overtly doing the research to *avoid* the mistake? Its a stretch, to say the least.
Only in a utopia with unlimited energy and resources is this possible. That's how ST gets away with it. In reality, resources aren't cheap and in infinite supply, they are expensive to find and process, and due to being finite they invariably get more expensive as time goes on. Meanwhile, the dream of fusion power is just that: a dream. As long as it takes energy and resources to produce the things we need, like food to start off with, then no one can "share it with many people at no cost", no matter how many robots we have. I'm a big fan of FOSS, but it exists because of the unique nature of computer software and eventually all digital content (i.e. because distribution and replication is at no cost, and no physical resources are needed given an already existing Internet), I really don't see any evidence that its applicable anywhere else where the widgets are physical objects.
NOOOOO!!! I'm 40 and still liberal! THIS MEANS I'M A MORON!!! What do I do?
How about this?
You do realize, don't you, that you could have found this yourself in just 0.22 seconds with a google on "hitler religion god belief"? This is what annoys me about so much of the pontificating here on