> Uhm... you're saying that the gnu tools and projects should be
assessed by their coding style?
No, he's saying they should be assessed by how well they're coded.
One comparison: bash v *BSD sh
One's a statically compiled bloated piece of crap which you can't
replace on certain systems without breaking the system.
The other's nearly half the size and isn't full of bugs.
Get this straight: Bash is a Mickey Mouse piece of code which has no
right in calling itself a system shell. It ain't
the only bit of GNU code which looks pretty sickly even under the most
trivial inspection either.
Compare it to ksh and bash looks positively retarded. (Have they
sorted out ansii escapes yet? Thought not)
Use GNU code for religious reasons but don't use it if you've got work
to do or care about using good tools.
The one bit of GNU code that really bugs me: Emacs
What exactly is it? A Mayan calendar? An OS? Or a complete piece of
garbage?
Come on you GNU hippies, Linux commies and RMS catamites!!! Mod a filthy FreeBSDer like me down.... I demand it!!!;)
(Confession: I'm also a filthy vim user with a pile of karma to burn:)
First off, there are documented cases in the medical literature of
successful, professional people who have managed to function perfectly
well with a heroin addiction for some 40+ years. A large percentage of
those will be Drs with a readily available supply of pharmaceutical
grade heroin and clean needles.
These people are as "normal" as me. I have to push a needle into
myself twice a day to give myself insulin, they do it to give
themselves heroin.
What I try to do is ensure that the person's life is fulfilled to the
degree that they think their life should be fulfilling. When you
really sit down with someone who is addicted, and focus on how that
addiction has impacted their quality of life, it is almost always the
case that the person can identify ways that their life has fallen
short of their expectations as a result of their addiction. Not 100%
of the time, but very close.
I'll tell you what I tell my doctor when she moans to me about my
smoking "Advise me of the health risks & then butt out of my
personal drug consumption"
> > "Are they the ones snapping up all the anti-depressants spat out by the drug industries?"
Not all, but unfortunately you are right in that antidepressant
prescriptions are written at a much higher rate than they probably
should be. And yes part of it is because of the pharmaceutical
companies. They are certainly prescribed at a higher rate than the
base rate of mental illness in the population.
I've been taking Seroxat/Paroxetine (Paxil(US?)) for a number of
years and if I miss a dose I feel suicidal. To my mind, on that basis,
Seroxat represents a significant risk to my health. If I missed a dose
of heroin, if I were addicted to it, at least I'd be unlikely to die.
You must know that SSRIs (even in the drug co's cooked up studies) are
barely better than placebo and worse than CBT etc.
I used to do pharmaceutical market research and I'll fill you in on
something shocking I found: you can manipulate doctor's opinions based
on their own social and cultural prejudices. You can also manipulate the
studies: just bin the unhelpful ones.
> (2) generally speaking, people's lives are better in the absence of addictive substances
Agreed. But humans have used addictive substances for millenia, get over it and leave us humans alone.
> (3) I honestly don't think there is any such thing as a casual, non-addicted heroin user.
Wrong. I was one some 20+ yrs ago. (I didn't inject).
I also operate on the premise that certain substances have more
serious consequences attached to them once a person does become
addicted. Heroin, cocaine, Mmethamphetamine, etc... have much more
serious consequences attached to them than, say, nicotine.
It's OK to operate on that premise if you assess the harm of
the drug properly and not based on social, legal and cultural
prejudice.
I will argue until the cows come home that alcohol represents a far
more serious threat to peoples well-being than all those you mentioned
put together. What's more the evidence supports me.
Tell my sister and I that the 40 yrs we each spent dealing with our
abusive, demented, alcoholic father (Werneke-Korsakoffs) wouldn't have been
better spent dealing with someone with a heroin addiction.
I can tell you now, that we had no help from the medical profession
and as a direct result we are now both poorer to the tune of half a
million quid each. (Dishonest Doctors? Yes, they exist.)
I can't tell you how despondent I feel when I read a post such as
yours (I'm guessing you're a dr or nurse) and no mention is
made of the most damaging drug in Western society: alcohol.
Should you or any other posters in this thread wish to talk about this
further, feel free to email me (I'll treat all communication in
confidence) but glesga_kiss and yourself have made it into my friends
list:)
Frank
echo "f r a n k @ e s p e r a n c e - l i n u x . c o . u k" | sed 's///g'
> It's unclear to me exactly why that is considered an
> improvement.[methadone over heroin].
It is not seen as an improvement by honest doctors ie. doctors
who take their hippocratic oath seriously and don't do their
governments bidding.
I was treated in a mental hospital about 10 yrs ago for alcoholism
(UK) and there were a number of heroin addicts in there being treated
with methadone. They said the methadone was disgusting in every
possible way. (They became the living dead on it).
The consultant psychiatrist wanted to treat his patients with heroin.
People with a heroin addiction can lead perfectly normal lives,
those on methadone can't. Yet the government wouldn't allow him for
purely political reasons: red top newspapers screaming "Junkies get
heroin on National Health Service Scandal!"
The psychiatrist (Dr Marks) made a fuss about it, saw that he would
make no progress in changing attitudes and then pissed off to
Switzerland where they have an enlightened drugs policy:
* Needle exchange (no Aids or hep)
* Heroin prescription (no stealing or shitty side effects)
The UK eventually solved all their mental health problems: it's called
"Care in the Community" also known as "do fuck all for them and if
they break the law chuck them in prison".
I'm currently doing my bit by lobbying my MP but I feel I will make no
progress either and will follow Dr. Marks' in going abroad to a
country where mental health problems equates to a trip to hospital and
not prison. One needs to protect ones family, right? (Alcoholism and
other mental health problems have a genetic component).
Sorry to be OT but people need informing of what is exactly going on
in their name and the public disgrace that is mental health provision
in large parts of the Western world.
> I agree there is a problem in the community with stuff like this.
> Personally, I tend to ignore the community and just use the
language the way I feel it's best used.
I started getting into Perl about 5 yrs ago and subscribed to
comp.lang.perl.misc
I have never come across a newsgroup inhabited by so many arseholes.
The flaming of newbies was encouraged and posting obfuscated code par
for the course. There was an overwhelming sense of how many Perl
programmers thought themselves a cut above everybody else; full of
people who would handily put obfuscated Perl in their sigs so that you
could straightaway identify them as:
(a) A language snob. (b) A fucktard.
I unsubscribed from the group but persisted with Perl. For me, Perl
fills the gap between shell scripts and pukka standalone apps (it's
even pretty easy to GUIfy a script with Tk).
I found the best resources to be the Camel book and Cookbook from
O'Reilly.
I bet a lot of people got put off Perl by that group at that time -
God curse their black souls! It was a shame because there were some
good contributions on the group from people like Randal.
Date: Tue, 8 Feb 2005 18:15:32 +0000
Subject: Spyware on FreeBSD!?
Cc: FreeBSD chat
Bad news, looks like my machine has been infected with some Spyware.
I noticed that on surfing to: http://news.bbc.co.uk/ or anything under
that domain, I was getting some outgoing activity and Firefox was
after a URL (as shown by the status bar) somewhere under the domain:
http://bbcnewscouk.112.2o7.net/
A quick Google on 2o7.net confirmed my worst fears: spyware!
Looks like some sort of perl script which returns a 2x2 gif, whilst
harvesting your browsing habits (and screen & windowsize - by calling
Javascript functions in Firefox?)
I wonder if they use different sub-domains to collect stats on
different sites. This particular variant seems to be only activated by
a visit to BBC news.
I had a grovel in the source of the BBC news homepage but found no
reference to 2o7.net (For a minute I thought the BBC had turned evil
on me!)
I'm going to do a little bit more investigation on it - I tried
removal by obliterating my Firefox profile but no joy. The only thing
I saved was my bookmarks file, which looks sound.
Spyware on a unix machine? Tell me it's not so!:(
BTW: FreeBSD 4.11-PRERELEASEfirefox-1.0.r1,1
I know the latter has some vulnerabilities and I'll update it in due
course (and the OS).
I think I'm going to build Links/Lynx with SSL and use that for my
banking from now on (if I can).
Anybody aware of other reports of spyware infecting Unix machines?
Anyway, I'm gutted. I feel like I've been violated and humiliated. In
short, I feel like a Windows user does everyday!!
The truth: I feel a bit pissed off but I urge people to take no action
against 2o7.net like DOS or cracking their webserver and trashing
it.....I'll do that myself;)
Further information: it uses Javascript and I'm guessing it came
with an XPI I installed. I'll try and determine which one and post
back to freebsd-chat. To disable: turn off Javascript & firewall off 207.net both outgoing and incoming.
I'll also post back here when this story gets duped in a few days time;)
> Can someone tell me what is humourous about human beings being
raped and sodomized ?
It's a variant of the banana skin joke. It's funny when something
dangerous happens to somebody else but not when it happens to you.
Read: Vilayanur S. Ramachandran's Reith lecture to learn about some of the neuroscience behind it.
I'm probably in a similar position to many in that I find the rape
gags funny (I'd argue that it's inhuman not to) but I deplore the male
rape that goes on in American prisons.
Remember that geeks like Dimitry Skylarov get thrown into American
prisons and people wonder why Alan Cox refuses to go to the States!
It's just one of many reasons I refuse to go to the States...Guantanamo
and Abu Ghraib are just different aspects of the same culture of abuse
within American prisons.
"Land of the Free", where "Free" includes a large tool jammed up your backside....it's funny because it's true:(
Is the state of Massachusetts stupid enough to drop the long term
benefits of open standards and open formats for an indeterminate,
short term gain?
Since with proprietary software there is always kickbacks involved,
you just have to stir that up with a few politicians and my money is
on the state going for the MS "solution".
I'm cynical because
I've seen a lot of governments (esp. UK) talk a lot about open formats
but it just doesn't happen. Hence, UK govt sites being littered with.doc's:(
A tidal surge of 6 feet doesn't mean that the entire ocean rose 6 feet
all around the island. This surge is essentially a large swell coming
from one direction.
The wave would have had a very long amplitude because of the deepwater
to the east.
It the case of Diego Garcia, it came from the
east. Most of the development on DG is on the west side. The tidal
surge was essentially deflected/absorbed by the east side of the U
shaped land mass (see map [ntlworld.com]) and likely resulted in
little more than a slight rise in water height in the central lagoon,
and little if any flooding on the west side.
The Maldives are interesting because there was extensive
damage, flooding & loss of life. Yet the islands of the
Maldives are exactly what Diego Garcia are: coral atolls perched on the
eastern edge of the Chagos plateau with deepwater to the east. In
those circumstances my belief is that DG must have suffered
extensive flooding (it wasn't just the eastern Maldives that
copped the flooding E.g Look at Faafu - 18 boats lost on one atoll).
I might have bought the story that there was only "some damage" but no
damage? No loss of life? (Don't the servicemen go down to the beach?)
BTW, my newspaper asserted
shortly after the tsunami that Diego Garcia was "forewarned of the
approaching tsunami" and hence spared....who told them that and why
was it then after dropped?
I'd also point out that the epicentre of the quake was north of east
of DG.
> I am part of the University of central Florida Amateur Radio Club...
Perhaps you could tell us what you know about Diego Garcia? The
military have put up a BS report
saying all is well due to a freak geological anomaly that protected
the island and there was only a tidal surge of 6ft anyway.
But DG is on average only 4ft above sea level.....so by my calculations they were on average covered in 2ft of water (assuming the BS report bares any resemblance to the truth), which doesn't quite equate with things being "alright".
Me? I'll just sit and wait for the black helicopters to turn up....but
somebody has to bear the bad news to the American people that their most important military asset (bar their carrier group - where was that?) in the Indian Ocean has been wiped out.
After all, they have to pay for it to be repaired (or abandoned?). Do
the right thing, abandon it and give it back to the Diego Garcians
rather than using it to bomb foreigners from. The story of how the
Diego Garcians were treated is shameful. (Somebody else can link to that).
> Asteroids this small, if they were to enter the atmosphere, would
> break up and the pieces would burn up on entry. Little or none of it
> would reach the ground in any form you could recover it.
I think your assertion is somewhat sweeping.
It's got to depend on what velocity the asteroid has, it's composition
and it's shape.
I'd also point to Skylab (it was bigger than the asteroid but
less dense), significant chunks of which still fell on Western Australia.
> An End User License covers whatever in the hell
the licenseor wants. It covers usage, etc.
Why is commercial software virtually alone (AFAIK) in demanding that you abide
by a lengthy EULA written in legalese which demands your firstborn if
you use the product?
If I buy a drill from Bosch they don't get me to abide by a EULA which
stops me from using the drill for certain purposes, or performance
testing the drill against competitors and publishing the results.
The worst thing about these EULAs is that they attempt to infringe
your rights as a consumer.
When I get a EULA the first thing I do with it is throw it in the bin.
There's a limit (and it's quite limited) as to what demands you can
make of a customer who purchases your product (at least over here in
Europe).
As far as I'm concerned, as long as I don't make copies of the
software to distribute, then I'll do what I like with my copy.
I also hold an entitlement in law to return a product which is "not
fit for purpose". My opinion is that XP falls into that category -
certainly without SP2 (hook up to 'net and get owned in minutes).
Irrespective of the MS EULA saying that the
software may not be "fit for purpose" and you have to accept it "as
is", I hold an inalienable right in British consumer law to return stuff to a supplier if it's not.
The MS EULA as it stands is an unfair contract
and it would get struck down in a British court if they tried to
enforce the unreasonable parts. The shameful thing is that
these EULAs give consumers the impression that they have no rights
once they've "agreed" to the EULA. That's misleading bordering on the
criminal IMHO.
One question: Why don't the FSF make a legal attack on these EULAs
which do so much to infringe customers rights?
> Of course, I've heard from some military buffs I know that the US economy
> needs a major military deployment every two years in order to survive.
So true. Why exactly do we still need NATO? And what's more a NATO
which bombs European civilians? (Yugoslavia) Anything to do with the arms
business being huge in all western countries perchance?
Once these organisations are established, whether they be the military
or the commercial software establishment, they have a life of their own.
And what sustains them? Money.
Whilst there's a pile of money sloshing around (and more money the
better), the people involved are happy with the status quo
because there are kickbacks and skim-offs to be had.
You're naive if you don't think that commercial software producers are
above bribing civil servants, ministers etc.... just look at
the arms business - it's like pigs gathering around a swill bucket.
Perversely, I think OSS will get more traction in the commercial
sphere. Shareholders will hold their companies to account if they blow
millions on commercial software. Whereas an electorate have little
interest in what software their government buys:(
Even if Tony Blair decided that the UK govt should go all OSS tomorrow, I
still wouldn't vote for him.
> What kind of idiot buys Craftsman expecting professional-grade tools?
> The craftsman line is clearly marketed to the weekend do-it-yourself crowd.
Agreed. From my experience, I think the DIYers would be better off
buying quality tools though.
For example, my neighbour bought a jigsaw for 20 quid. Got it home and
one of the allen bolts that needed loosening to put in a blade
"rounded" out because it's a POS. It's a 15 mile drive to take it back
and what is it going to be replaced with? Another POS that will
probably require another journey.
Factor in cost of petrol/gas (expensive here) plus time and the 100
quid Makita starts to represent a bargain.
I have bought cheap tools before.....never again, they're inevitably a false
economy even if your ambition is limited to sticking a shelf up.
> And if you think drivers don't make an impact, look at the differences
> between teammates. Each F1 team has two drivers, and often you'll see
> one driver consistently outperform the other. Examples: Michael
> Schumacher, Mark Webber, Fernando Alonso, Juan-Pablo Montoya, Jason Button.
Hiring drivers in F1 is baroque. Yes, the outstanding drivers in the
junior formulas get snapped up (eg. Schumacher) but the guys
who make up the numbers are often hired on the basis of how much
sponsorship they will bring with them to the team.
Hence, a lot of the drivers are from rich families where daddy provided
sponsorship in the junior formulas.
So you a hire a guy who can't drive and is seconds slower than everybody else
because he brings a couple of million sponsorship to your team....then
you build a supercomputer at vast expense to knock off a few tenths
from his slow times.
No. It doesn't make sense to me either but it indicates how much money
has got to do with winning in F1 and how little everything else
has.
Wild guess: If you did the numbers, you'd probably find that
performance of a car corresponds quite closely to the budget of the
team.....with some exceptions.
> Very satisfied with their lifetime deal. They didn't even ask for a receipt,
> because you can't really buy Craftsman tools anywhere else.
Search rec.woodworking for Crapsman and you get an idea of what the
pro's think of Craftsman's tools.
A lifetime guarantee is worthless
to me if the tool is going to let me down on a job; I don't earn money
taking defective kit back to the store. Top tip: buy Makita tools and
they'll work out cheaper than Craftsmen in the long run even though
the inital outlay is much more.
If I want to buy kit, then I check usenet and mailing lists to get
real life reviews, or post and ask for a recommendation.
As for computer kit, benchmarks to me are worthless; firstly because
they're "cooked" and secondly Moore's law tells
me that 6 months down the road, the benchmarks and performance will
suck.
Anyway, that's my excuse for buying cheap computer kit:)
> And there is a distinct whiff of one of the most vile of odors: marketing.
I have to agree.
Everything I hear about this Ken Jennings makes me dislike him.
Why didn't he use his position as "unchallenged uber-geek" to
do something for the general public good rather than flogging some
crumb-ridden piece of crap?
String 'im up with cat5 is what I say! He's made us geeks look like a
bunch of tuppeny whores.
> All you need is a Gillette Venus for Women razor, which is similar to
> the Mach 3 you may already use on your face but tweaked for shaving
> larger areas. Just take the razor and shave the part of the pubic hair
> from the base of the penis straight up to the navel. More exposed skin
> in a straight line with the penis creates an illusion of more penis.
It's not often I complain about the moderators but shouldn't this be
+5 Informative? Are the mods all women or something? or on crack?
Anyway, damn them all to hell! I'm off down to my supermarket tomorrow to clean
them out of Gillette Venus for Women. Expect me back under
a new/.username....possibly "Errol Flynn".
Have Gillette created the best product of all time?
The time & money it will save me from replying to all those spam
mails...
The C/C++/C#/Java debate is a complete red-herring.
The FA's author's analysis:
software monoculture + network + "unsafe" languages = security problems
is overly simplistic to my mind.
Imagine a world where OpenBSD (written in C) was the predominant OS,
is he really saying that we would have the same problems?
My opinion is that there is no economic incentive for MS to
produce an OS or applications that are robust and secure. After all
we're dealing with a monopoly here which doesn't have to compete on
the desktop space.
If they did, where would the "upgrade income" come from? The "upgrade
income" comes from people who need more features but more importantly
need the promised stability of MS's latest platform.
We were promised that the NT based XP would deliver us from the evils
of the DOS based Windows (yet things have got worse), now we are
promised that Longhorn will do that (I'll lay money on it that it wont).
If they produced a platform as solid as OpenBSD securitywise, then
people have all of a sudden lost a good deal of incentive to upgrade
and fill the MS coffers.
It beggars belief that MS with their money, programming talent and a
"safe" language can't produce a solid OS. Apple can with a lot less resources,
so you have to ask yourself:
"Why don't Microsoft want to produce a solid platform?"
...and then follow the money....
Their business model requires that their platform is always
semi-broken and the answer to all the brokenness is the next MS
platform round the corner (although it never is, of course).
If they didn't have a monopoly, then this business model would come
crumbling down. Yet the articles author has nothing to say about the
MS monopoly, the upgrade cycle (in the commercial software world) and
how it impacts security.
> It seems to only be the US version of google that censored. Performing
> the same search on google.co.uk (for example) reveals no censorship.
I did a search on google.co.uk and none of the torture pictures show up. But on the first page a picture of happy, smiling Iraqis and American troops cutting a ribbon shows up courtesy of Centcom - I think that picture made me feel more nauseous than the torture pics.
Google have to come up with a pretty convincing explanation as to why
these searches turn up nothing - an explanation that doesn't include
censorship or technical incompetence or else I'm off to find me a better
search engine.
If as others have suggested that they don't update their picture index
for 6 months.....well that's pretty pathetic from the leading search
engine if it's the case.
A toxicologist, Camilo Uribe, who studied the coca, said: "The quality and percentage of hydrochloride from each leaf is much better, between 97 and 98 per cent. A normal plant does not get more than 25 per cent, meaning that more drugs and of a higher purity can be extracted."
Looks like the "War on Drugs"® has turned out to be about
successful as the "War on Terror"®
But then the "War on Drugs" was never about drugs and the "War on
Terror" was never about terror.
> This sounds terrible - but I've always thought that a guy who
> couldn't see wouldn't really be able to grasp the full privacy
> implications of any aspects of government policy.
My problem with a blindman being in charge of a large government
department is that he can't possibly assess all the data necessary to
come to a competent decision - he quite literally can't see what is
going on around him!
I am yet to see any sort of article in any sort of media about whether
Blunkett is fit to be a government minister. Something that needs
serious discussion....without accusations of prejudice being bandied
about.
The national ID scheme will be a waste of money and bypassed by
villains. Even by Blunkett's best estimates only 99 out of 100 people
will likely have an ID card. If you are a terrorist you are not
going to get one and if you do it will be somebody elses. That defeats
any purpose the ID scheme may have.
There are good reasons why the typical citizen currently has a number
of cards, keys and other access tokens. Cramming more function into a
token makes it more liable to failure, more complex to maintain, a
more attractive target for forgers, and a greater threat to privacy.
> Ok, slashdot, let's see who can come up with the best off-the-wall
> looney conspiracy theories to twist this around as a malicious,
> underhanded tactic, and some kind of "proof" that Bush is evil incarnate!
Challenge accepted!
Obviously the site is aimed at Americans with a vote and by denying
access to those abroad, the aim is obvious (to everyone accept
you): the Republicans don't want Americans who are abroad to look
at the site.
Now let's have a think as to which noticeable segment of the American
electorate is abroad....
Well it may have escaped your notice Dave, but there are currently
120,000+ Yankee troops serving in Iraq, there are 10's of thousands
others in Germany, Kosovo, Afghanistan and doing their worst in many
other places aswell!
Let's see if we can now come up with a reason why the Republican's
would not want those troops looking at their site....
How about this....
GWB (bless his cotton socks) does not want American troops reading a
lot of gibberish about how he is going to pursue the "War on
Terror"® because that means that they will be sent to other countries
and then be shot at by unfriendly and ungrateful locals.
If they read the rabid nonsense on that site, then they will not vote
for GWB. Remember that the last election came down to a handful of
votes and by all accounts this one is going to be close too.
> Hell, within the last week, they had to start using Akamai! That
> alone should prove to a normal person that there are clearly traffic
> concerns at play.
Dave, I have to say this: you are exceptionally thick.
How much do you suppose that the Republicans are spending on the
campaign? What proportion of that budget do you suppose would be spent
on bandwidth if they allowed access to that site from abroad?
And don't tell me they can go through a proxy, we're talking about
grunts here.
> While you're at it, explain to me how it's right for the Guardian to
> encourage its UK readers, i.e., not US citizens, to start a letter
> writing and email campaign to Ohioans encouraging them to vote for
> John Kerry, or, better yet, calling for the assassination of the
> sitting US president [mercurynews.com]! (Even as a "joke".)
>
> "In a regular column in The Guardian newspaper's Saturday TV listings
> magazine, Charlie Brooker described Bush in scathing terms, and
> concluded: "John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald, John Hinckley Jr.,
> where are you now that we need you?" "
I wrote to Charle Brooker about his tasteless joke and how it had
upset a Slashdot reader who clearly thought that the American
president was some sort of divine entity. He wrote back:
My apologies to the Slashdot reader with the humour deficit. What I
meant to write (but was changed by a sub-ed) was:
"We Brits should string GWB up by his testicles and get a trained
proctologist to examine him with a red hot poker"
I hope my post has cleared up a few misunderstandings for you.
> Except the problem is that due to the insane policies of the last
> Consevative goverment we now use large amounts of natural gas to
> generate electricity in the United Kingdom. Shear utter madness really.
...and how have the Labour government addressed an over reliance
on Russian gas over the past 7 years?
Answer: By doing nothing in it's most violent form.
But on to the problem of heat/electric in case of an outage. Do you
need your PCs as part of your business? If so, buy a generator. I
bought a generator this year from these people and so far I've
been very happy with it. Make sure you stick your UPS between
the generator and your computing kit, since it will supress any spikes in output.
For heat & light, I'd suggest you use a
Vapalux M320.
They'll burn for over 6 hrs without a refill and will keep a room warm
aswell as providing light. (I use mine in Finland - just summer and Autumn though).
With those 2 bits of kit and the expenditure of £750 you will be
in good shape to survive pretty much anything.
Slashdot Mirror
> Uhm... you're saying that the gnu tools and projects should be assessed by their coding style?
No, he's saying they should be assessed by how well they're coded.
One comparison: bash v *BSD sh
One's a statically compiled bloated piece of crap which you can't replace on certain systems without breaking the system.
The other's nearly half the size and isn't full of bugs.
Get this straight: Bash is a Mickey Mouse piece of code which has no right in calling itself a system shell. It ain't the only bit of GNU code which looks pretty sickly even under the most trivial inspection either.
Compare it to ksh and bash looks positively retarded. (Have they sorted out ansii escapes yet? Thought not)
Use GNU code for religious reasons but don't use it if you've got work to do or care about using good tools.
The one bit of GNU code that really bugs me: Emacs
What exactly is it? A Mayan calendar? An OS? Or a complete piece of garbage?
Come on you GNU hippies, Linux commies and RMS catamites!!! Mod a filthy FreeBSDer like me down .... I demand it!!! ;)
(Confession: I'm also a filthy vim user with a pile of karma to burn :)
First off, there are documented cases in the medical literature of successful, professional people who have managed to function perfectly well with a heroin addiction for some 40+ years. A large percentage of those will be Drs with a readily available supply of pharmaceutical grade heroin and clean needles.
These people are as "normal" as me. I have to push a needle into myself twice a day to give myself insulin, they do it to give themselves heroin.
What I try to do is ensure that the person's life is fulfilled to the
degree that they think their life should be fulfilling. When you
really sit down with someone who is addicted, and focus on how that
addiction has impacted their quality of life, it is almost always the
case that the person can identify ways that their life has fallen
short of their expectations as a result of their addiction. Not 100%
of the time, but very close.
I'll tell you what I tell my doctor when she moans to me about my smoking "Advise me of the health risks & then butt out of my personal drug consumption"
> > "Are they the ones snapping up all the anti-depressants spat out by the drug industries?"
I've been taking Seroxat/Paroxetine (Paxil(US?)) for a number of years and if I miss a dose I feel suicidal. To my mind, on that basis, Seroxat represents a significant risk to my health. If I missed a dose of heroin, if I were addicted to it, at least I'd be unlikely to die.Not all, but unfortunately you are right in that antidepressant prescriptions are written at a much higher rate than they probably should be. And yes part of it is because of the pharmaceutical companies. They are certainly prescribed at a higher rate than the base rate of mental illness in the population.
You must know that SSRIs (even in the drug co's cooked up studies) are barely better than placebo and worse than CBT etc.
I used to do pharmaceutical market research and I'll fill you in on something shocking I found: you can manipulate doctor's opinions based on their own social and cultural prejudices. You can also manipulate the studies: just bin the unhelpful ones.
> (2) generally speaking, people's lives are better in the absence of addictive substances
Agreed. But humans have used addictive substances for millenia, get over it and leave us humans alone.
> (3) I honestly don't think there is any such thing as a casual, non-addicted heroin user.
Wrong. I was one some 20+ yrs ago. (I didn't inject).
I also operate on the premise that certain substances have more serious consequences attached to them once a person does become addicted. Heroin, cocaine, Mmethamphetamine, etc... have much more serious consequences attached to them than, say, nicotine.
It's OK to operate on that premise if you assess the harm of the drug properly and not based on social, legal and cultural prejudice.
I will argue until the cows come home that alcohol represents a far more serious threat to peoples well-being than all those you mentioned put together. What's more the evidence supports me.
Tell my sister and I that the 40 yrs we each spent dealing with our abusive, demented, alcoholic father (Werneke-Korsakoffs) wouldn't have been better spent dealing with someone with a heroin addiction.
I can tell you now, that we had no help from the medical profession and as a direct result we are now both poorer to the tune of half a million quid each. (Dishonest Doctors? Yes, they exist.)
I can't tell you how despondent I feel when I read a post such as yours (I'm guessing you're a dr or nurse) and no mention is made of the most damaging drug in Western society: alcohol.
Should you or any other posters in this thread wish to talk about this further, feel free to email me (I'll treat all communication in confidence) but glesga_kiss and yourself have made it into my friends list :)
> It's unclear to me exactly why that is considered an
It is not seen as an improvement by honest doctors ie. doctors who take their hippocratic oath seriously and don't do their governments bidding.> improvement.[methadone over heroin].
I was treated in a mental hospital about 10 yrs ago for alcoholism (UK) and there were a number of heroin addicts in there being treated with methadone. They said the methadone was disgusting in every possible way. (They became the living dead on it).
The consultant psychiatrist wanted to treat his patients with heroin. People with a heroin addiction can lead perfectly normal lives, those on methadone can't. Yet the government wouldn't allow him for purely political reasons: red top newspapers screaming "Junkies get heroin on National Health Service Scandal!"
The psychiatrist (Dr Marks) made a fuss about it, saw that he would make no progress in changing attitudes and then pissed off to Switzerland where they have an enlightened drugs policy:
* Needle exchange (no Aids or hep)
* Heroin prescription (no stealing or shitty side effects)
The UK eventually solved all their mental health problems: it's called "Care in the Community" also known as "do fuck all for them and if they break the law chuck them in prison".
I'm currently doing my bit by lobbying my MP but I feel I will make no progress either and will follow Dr. Marks' in going abroad to a country where mental health problems equates to a trip to hospital and not prison. One needs to protect ones family, right? (Alcoholism and other mental health problems have a genetic component).
Sorry to be OT but people need informing of what is exactly going on in their name and the public disgrace that is mental health provision in large parts of the Western world.
> I agree there is a problem in the community with stuff like this.
> Personally, I tend to ignore the community and just use the language the way I feel it's best used.
I started getting into Perl about 5 yrs ago and subscribed to comp.lang.perl.misc
I have never come across a newsgroup inhabited by so many arseholes.
The flaming of newbies was encouraged and posting obfuscated code par for the course. There was an overwhelming sense of how many Perl programmers thought themselves a cut above everybody else; full of people who would handily put obfuscated Perl in their sigs so that you could straightaway identify them as:
(a) A language snob.
(b) A fucktard.
I unsubscribed from the group but persisted with Perl. For me, Perl fills the gap between shell scripts and pukka standalone apps (it's even pretty easy to GUIfy a script with Tk).
I found the best resources to be the Camel book and Cookbook from O'Reilly.
I bet a lot of people got put off Perl by that group at that time - God curse their black souls! It was a shame because there were some good contributions on the group from people like Randal.
> You're an idiot
It grieves me to say this: but Mr.AC you're right!
I'm also a buffoon and a fool to boot.
Please feel welcome to mod my original post as: -5, Bonkers
Short answer: I failed to parse the BBC's privacy statement or do a whois on 2o7.net.
As other have mentioned, the BBC (or rather a 3rd party they've contracted) are tracking users and obviously a few other things aswell.
Any future reports from me of spyware on *nix are to be viewed with scepticism and should be modded accordingly.
There sure is. I just posted to freebsd-chat:
Date: Tue, 8 Feb 2005 18:15:32 +0000
Subject: Spyware on FreeBSD!?
Cc: FreeBSD chat
Bad news, looks like my machine has been infected with some Spyware.
I noticed that on surfing to: http://news.bbc.co.uk/ or anything under that domain, I was getting some outgoing activity and Firefox was after a URL (as shown by the status bar) somewhere under the domain:
http://bbcnewscouk.112.2o7.net/
A quick Google on 2o7.net confirmed my worst fears: spyware!
and a 2o7.net cookie planted on my machine.
I cached some pages in my proxy :
Looks like some sort of perl script which returns a 2x2 gif, whilst harvesting your browsing habits (and screen & windowsize - by calling Javascript functions in Firefox?)
I wonder if they use different sub-domains to collect stats on different sites. This particular variant seems to be only activated by a visit to BBC news.
I had a grovel in the source of the BBC news homepage but found no reference to 2o7.net (For a minute I thought the BBC had turned evil on me!)
I'm going to do a little bit more investigation on it - I tried removal by obliterating my Firefox profile but no joy. The only thing I saved was my bookmarks file, which looks sound.
Spyware on a unix machine? Tell me it's not so! :(
BTW:
FreeBSD 4.11-PRERELEASEfirefox-1.0.r1,1
I know the latter has some vulnerabilities and I'll update it in due course (and the OS).
I think I'm going to build Links/Lynx with SSL and use that for my banking from now on (if I can).
Anybody aware of other reports of spyware infecting Unix machines?
Anyway, I'm gutted. I feel like I've been violated and humiliated. In short, I feel like a Windows user does everyday!!
The truth: I feel a bit pissed off but I urge people to take no action against 2o7.net like DOS or cracking their webserver and trashing it.....I'll do that myself ;)
Further information: it uses Javascript and I'm guessing it came with an XPI I installed. I'll try and determine which one and post back to freebsd-chat. To disable: turn off Javascript & firewall off 207.net both outgoing and incoming.
I'll also post back here when this story gets duped in a few days time ;)
> I call it "The Unofficial Revised Slackware Book Project". Stop by and take a look, I think you'll enjoy it.
I'm sorry to break the bad news to you but your project has miserably failed the criteria of having an acceptable and pronounceable acronym.
Suggested improvement:
Free Administrators Guide to Slackware
> Can someone tell me what is humourous about human beings being raped and sodomized ?
It's a variant of the banana skin joke. It's funny when something dangerous happens to somebody else but not when it happens to you. Read: Vilayanur S. Ramachandran's Reith lecture to learn about some of the neuroscience behind it.
I'm probably in a similar position to many in that I find the rape gags funny (I'd argue that it's inhuman not to) but I deplore the male rape that goes on in American prisons.
Remember that geeks like Dimitry Skylarov get thrown into American prisons and people wonder why Alan Cox refuses to go to the States!
It's just one of many reasons I refuse to go to the States...Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib are just different aspects of the same culture of abuse within American prisons.
"Land of the Free", where "Free" includes a large tool jammed up your backside....it's funny because it's true :(
Is the state of Massachusetts stupid enough to drop the long term benefits of open standards and open formats for an indeterminate, short term gain?
Since with proprietary software there is always kickbacks involved, you just have to stir that up with a few politicians and my money is on the state going for the MS "solution".
I'm cynical because I've seen a lot of governments (esp. UK) talk a lot about open formats but it just doesn't happen. Hence, UK govt sites being littered with .doc's :(
A tidal surge of 6 feet doesn't mean that the entire ocean rose 6 feet all around the island. This surge is essentially a large swell coming from one direction.
The wave would have had a very long amplitude because of the deepwater to the east.It the case of Diego Garcia, it came from the east. Most of the development on DG is on the west side. The tidal surge was essentially deflected/absorbed by the east side of the U shaped land mass (see map [ntlworld.com]) and likely resulted in little more than a slight rise in water height in the central lagoon, and little if any flooding on the west side.
I'll point you to a map of the Maldives.
The Maldives are interesting because there was extensive damage, flooding & loss of life. Yet the islands of the Maldives are exactly what Diego Garcia are: coral atolls perched on the eastern edge of the Chagos plateau with deepwater to the east. In those circumstances my belief is that DG must have suffered extensive flooding (it wasn't just the eastern Maldives that copped the flooding E.g Look at Faafu - 18 boats lost on one atoll).
I might have bought the story that there was only "some damage" but no damage? No loss of life? (Don't the servicemen go down to the beach?)
BTW, my newspaper asserted shortly after the tsunami that Diego Garcia was "forewarned of the approaching tsunami" and hence spared....who told them that and why was it then after dropped?
I'd also point out that the epicentre of the quake was north of east of DG.
> I am part of the University of central Florida Amateur Radio Club...
Perhaps you could tell us what you know about Diego Garcia? The military have put up a BS report saying all is well due to a freak geological anomaly that protected the island and there was only a tidal surge of 6ft anyway.
But DG is on average only 4ft above sea level.....so by my calculations they were on average covered in 2ft of water (assuming the BS report bares any resemblance to the truth), which doesn't quite equate with things being "alright".
There was a bit of inconclusive chat on rec.radio.shortwave
If you can't reply to this, I'd understand :)
Me? I'll just sit and wait for the black helicopters to turn up....but somebody has to bear the bad news to the American people that their most important military asset (bar their carrier group - where was that?) in the Indian Ocean has been wiped out.
After all, they have to pay for it to be repaired (or abandoned?). Do the right thing, abandon it and give it back to the Diego Garcians rather than using it to bomb foreigners from. The story of how the Diego Garcians were treated is shameful. (Somebody else can link to that).
> Asteroids this small, if they were to enter the atmosphere, would
> break up and the pieces would burn up on entry. Little or none of it
> would reach the ground in any form you could recover it.
I think your assertion is somewhat sweeping.
It's got to depend on what velocity the asteroid has, it's composition and it's shape. I'd also point to Skylab (it was bigger than the asteroid but less dense), significant chunks of which still fell on Western Australia.
> An End User License covers whatever in the hell the licenseor wants. It covers usage, etc.
Why is commercial software virtually alone (AFAIK) in demanding that you abide by a lengthy EULA written in legalese which demands your firstborn if you use the product?
If I buy a drill from Bosch they don't get me to abide by a EULA which stops me from using the drill for certain purposes, or performance testing the drill against competitors and publishing the results.
The worst thing about these EULAs is that they attempt to infringe your rights as a consumer.
When I get a EULA the first thing I do with it is throw it in the bin. There's a limit (and it's quite limited) as to what demands you can make of a customer who purchases your product (at least over here in Europe).
As far as I'm concerned, as long as I don't make copies of the software to distribute, then I'll do what I like with my copy.
I also hold an entitlement in law to return a product which is "not fit for purpose". My opinion is that XP falls into that category - certainly without SP2 (hook up to 'net and get owned in minutes). Irrespective of the MS EULA saying that the software may not be "fit for purpose" and you have to accept it "as is", I hold an inalienable right in British consumer law to return stuff to a supplier if it's not.
The MS EULA as it stands is an unfair contract and it would get struck down in a British court if they tried to enforce the unreasonable parts. The shameful thing is that these EULAs give consumers the impression that they have no rights once they've "agreed" to the EULA. That's misleading bordering on the criminal IMHO.
One question: Why don't the FSF make a legal attack on these EULAs which do so much to infringe customers rights?
> Of course, I've heard from some military buffs I know that the US economy
> needs a major military deployment every two years in order to survive.
So true. Why exactly do we still need NATO? And what's more a NATO which bombs European civilians? (Yugoslavia) Anything to do with the arms business being huge in all western countries perchance?
Once these organisations are established, whether they be the military or the commercial software establishment, they have a life of their own.
And what sustains them? Money.
Whilst there's a pile of money sloshing around (and more money the better), the people involved are happy with the status quo because there are kickbacks and skim-offs to be had.
You're naive if you don't think that commercial software producers are above bribing civil servants, ministers etc.... just look at the arms business - it's like pigs gathering around a swill bucket.
Perversely, I think OSS will get more traction in the commercial sphere. Shareholders will hold their companies to account if they blow millions on commercial software. Whereas an electorate have little interest in what software their government buys :(
Even if Tony Blair decided that the UK govt should go all OSS tomorrow, I still wouldn't vote for him.
> What kind of idiot buys Craftsman expecting professional-grade tools? > The craftsman line is clearly marketed to the weekend do-it-yourself crowd.
Agreed. From my experience, I think the DIYers would be better off buying quality tools though.
For example, my neighbour bought a jigsaw for 20 quid. Got it home and one of the allen bolts that needed loosening to put in a blade "rounded" out because it's a POS. It's a 15 mile drive to take it back and what is it going to be replaced with? Another POS that will probably require another journey.
Factor in cost of petrol/gas (expensive here) plus time and the 100 quid Makita starts to represent a bargain.
I have bought cheap tools before.....never again, they're inevitably a false economy even if your ambition is limited to sticking a shelf up.
> And if you think drivers don't make an impact, look at the differences
> between teammates. Each F1 team has two drivers, and often you'll see
> one driver consistently outperform the other. Examples: Michael
> Schumacher, Mark Webber, Fernando Alonso, Juan-Pablo Montoya, Jason Button.
Hiring drivers in F1 is baroque. Yes, the outstanding drivers in the junior formulas get snapped up (eg. Schumacher) but the guys who make up the numbers are often hired on the basis of how much sponsorship they will bring with them to the team.
Hence, a lot of the drivers are from rich families where daddy provided sponsorship in the junior formulas.
So you a hire a guy who can't drive and is seconds slower than everybody else because he brings a couple of million sponsorship to your team....then you build a supercomputer at vast expense to knock off a few tenths from his slow times.
No. It doesn't make sense to me either but it indicates how much money has got to do with winning in F1 and how little everything else has.
Wild guess: If you did the numbers, you'd probably find that performance of a car corresponds quite closely to the budget of the team.....with some exceptions.
> Very satisfied with their lifetime deal. They didn't even ask for a receipt,
> because you can't really buy Craftsman tools anywhere else.
Search rec.woodworking for Crapsman and you get an idea of what the pro's think of Craftsman's tools.
A lifetime guarantee is worthless to me if the tool is going to let me down on a job; I don't earn money taking defective kit back to the store. Top tip: buy Makita tools and they'll work out cheaper than Craftsmen in the long run even though the inital outlay is much more.
If I want to buy kit, then I check usenet and mailing lists to get real life reviews, or post and ask for a recommendation.
As for computer kit, benchmarks to me are worthless; firstly because they're "cooked" and secondly Moore's law tells me that 6 months down the road, the benchmarks and performance will suck.
Anyway, that's my excuse for buying cheap computer kit :)
> And there is a distinct whiff of one of the most vile of odors: marketing.
I have to agree.
Everything I hear about this Ken Jennings makes me dislike him.
Why didn't he use his position as "unchallenged uber-geek" to do something for the general public good rather than flogging some crumb-ridden piece of crap?
String 'im up with cat5 is what I say! He's made us geeks look like a bunch of tuppeny whores.
--
Buy me an iPod NOW!
> All you need is a Gillette Venus for Women razor, which is similar to
> the Mach 3 you may already use on your face but tweaked for shaving
> larger areas. Just take the razor and shave the part of the pubic hair
> from the base of the penis straight up to the navel. More exposed skin
> in a straight line with the penis creates an illusion of more penis.
It's not often I complain about the moderators but shouldn't this be +5 Informative? Are the mods all women or something? or on crack?
Anyway, damn them all to hell! I'm off down to my supermarket tomorrow to clean them out of Gillette Venus for Women. Expect me back under a new /.username....possibly "Errol Flynn".
Have Gillette created the best product of all time?
The time & money it will save me from replying to all those spam mails...
The C/C++/C#/Java debate is a complete red-herring.
The FA's author's analysis:
software monoculture + network + "unsafe" languages = security problemsis overly simplistic to my mind.
Imagine a world where OpenBSD (written in C) was the predominant OS, is he really saying that we would have the same problems?
My opinion is that there is no economic incentive for MS to produce an OS or applications that are robust and secure. After all we're dealing with a monopoly here which doesn't have to compete on the desktop space.
If they did, where would the "upgrade income" come from? The "upgrade income" comes from people who need more features but more importantly need the promised stability of MS's latest platform.
We were promised that the NT based XP would deliver us from the evils of the DOS based Windows (yet things have got worse), now we are promised that Longhorn will do that (I'll lay money on it that it wont).
If they produced a platform as solid as OpenBSD securitywise, then people have all of a sudden lost a good deal of incentive to upgrade and fill the MS coffers.
It beggars belief that MS with their money, programming talent and a "safe" language can't produce a solid OS. Apple can with a lot less resources, so you have to ask yourself:
"Why don't Microsoft want to produce a solid platform?"
Their business model requires that their platform is always semi-broken and the answer to all the brokenness is the next MS platform round the corner (although it never is, of course).
If they didn't have a monopoly, then this business model would come crumbling down. Yet the articles author has nothing to say about the MS monopoly, the upgrade cycle (in the commercial software world) and how it impacts security.
> It seems to only be the US version of google that censored. Performing
> the same search on google.co.uk (for example) reveals no censorship.
I did a search on google.co.uk and none of the torture pictures show up. But on the first page a picture of happy, smiling Iraqis and American troops cutting a ribbon shows up courtesy of Centcom - I think that picture made me feel more nauseous than the torture pics.
A search for Lynndie England returns nothing.
Google have to come up with a pretty convincing explanation as to why these searches turn up nothing - an explanation that doesn't include censorship or technical incompetence or else I'm off to find me a better search engine.
If as others have suggested that they don't update their picture index for 6 months.....well that's pretty pathetic from the leading search engine if it's the case.
>
If they've crossed it with the "plant that yields up to four times more cocaine than existing plants and promises to revolutionise Colombia's drugs industry" which they came across this summer, then yes.
To quote:
A toxicologist, Camilo Uribe, who studied the coca, said: "The quality and percentage of hydrochloride from each leaf is much better, between 97 and 98 per cent. A normal plant does not get more than 25 per cent, meaning that more drugs and of a higher purity can be extracted."
Looks like the "War on Drugs"® has turned out to be about successful as the "War on Terror"®
But then the "War on Drugs" was never about drugs and the "War on Terror" was never about terror.
> This sounds terrible - but I've always thought that a guy who
> couldn't see wouldn't really be able to grasp the full privacy
> implications of any aspects of government policy.
My problem with a blindman being in charge of a large government
department is that he can't possibly assess all the data necessary to
come to a competent decision - he quite literally can't see what is
going on around him!
I am yet to see any sort of article in any sort of media about whether
Blunkett is fit to be a government minister. Something that needs
serious discussion....without accusations of prejudice being bandied about.
The national ID scheme will be a waste of money and bypassed by
villains. Even by Blunkett's best estimates only 99 out of 100 people
will likely have an ID card. If you are a terrorist you are not
going to get one and if you do it will be somebody elses. That defeats
any purpose the ID scheme may have.
I recommend Dr Ross Anderson's written submission to the Home Affairs commitee as further reading.
Choice quote:
There are good reasons why the typical citizen currently has a number
of cards, keys and other access tokens. Cramming more function into a
token makes it more liable to failure, more complex to maintain, a
more attractive target for forgers, and a greater threat to privacy.
> Ok, slashdot, let's see who can come up with the best off-the-wall
> looney conspiracy theories to twist this around as a malicious,
> underhanded tactic, and some kind of "proof" that Bush is evil incarnate!
Challenge accepted!
Obviously the site is aimed at Americans with a vote and by denying access to those abroad, the aim is obvious (to everyone accept you): the Republicans don't want Americans who are abroad to look at the site.
Now let's have a think as to which noticeable segment of the American electorate is abroad....
Well it may have escaped your notice Dave, but there are currently 120,000+ Yankee troops serving in Iraq, there are 10's of thousands others in Germany, Kosovo, Afghanistan and doing their worst in many other places aswell!
Let's see if we can now come up with a reason why the Republican's would not want those troops looking at their site....
How about this....
GWB (bless his cotton socks) does not want American troops reading a lot of gibberish about how he is going to pursue the "War on Terror"® because that means that they will be sent to other countries and then be shot at by unfriendly and ungrateful locals.
If they read the rabid nonsense on that site, then they will not vote for GWB. Remember that the last election came down to a handful of votes and by all accounts this one is going to be close too.
> Hell, within the last week, they had to start using Akamai! That
> alone should prove to a normal person that there are clearly traffic
> concerns at play.
Dave, I have to say this: you are exceptionally thick.
How much do you suppose that the Republicans are spending on the campaign? What proportion of that budget do you suppose would be spent on bandwidth if they allowed access to that site from abroad?
And don't tell me they can go through a proxy, we're talking about grunts here.
> While you're at it, explain to me how it's right for the Guardian to
> encourage its UK readers, i.e., not US citizens, to start a letter
> writing and email campaign to Ohioans encouraging them to vote for
> John Kerry, or, better yet, calling for the assassination of the
> sitting US president [mercurynews.com]! (Even as a "joke".)
>
> "In a regular column in The Guardian newspaper's Saturday TV listings
> magazine, Charlie Brooker described Bush in scathing terms, and
> concluded: "John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald, John Hinckley Jr.,
> where are you now that we need you?" "
I wrote to Charle Brooker about his tasteless joke and how it had upset a Slashdot reader who clearly thought that the American president was some sort of divine entity. He wrote back:
My apologies to the Slashdot reader with the humour deficit. What I meant to write (but was changed by a sub-ed) was:
"We Brits should string GWB up by his testicles and get a trained proctologist to examine him with a red hot poker"
I hope my post has cleared up a few misunderstandings for you.
> Except the problem is that due to the insane policies of the last
> Consevative goverment we now use large amounts of natural gas to
> generate electricity in the United Kingdom. Shear utter madness really.
on Russian gas over the past 7 years?
Answer: By doing nothing in it's most violent form.
But on to the problem of heat/electric in case of an outage. Do you
need your PCs as part of your business? If so, buy a generator. I
bought a generator this year from these people and so far I've
been very happy with it. Make sure you stick your UPS between
the generator and your computing kit, since it will supress any spikes in output.
For heat & light, I'd suggest you use a Vapalux M320.
They'll burn for over 6 hrs without a refill and will keep a room warm
aswell as providing light. (I use mine in Finland - just summer and Autumn though).
With those 2 bits of kit and the expenditure of £750 you will be
in good shape to survive pretty much anything.