Oh, they can... have you ever heard of homesteading? Of course, that simply means you have to live on your plot of land for a specific period of time, protecting it yourself against rival claimants.
Of course, considering this is an airless, waterless, lifeless chunk of rock in space... I'd love to see the people selling lunar real estate do the due dilligence and live in the land they claim they own... for homesteading purposes, of course.
*chuckle* Funny part is, the same (to a lesser extent) also applies to the Linux from Scratch distribution.
On the one hand, you did have to compile and install all the programs by hand.
However, like Gentoo, all the scripts, device files, configuration files, and so on, are all included in an all-in-one file provided for convenience, and the LFS book did not go into detail as to how those various scripts, config files, and so on actually worked with the system. *shrug*
Perhaps. However, Links isn't much for myself, whose primary timewasting entertainment is looking over webcomics and playing the occasional game of Frozen Bubble. And browsing is like FPS games: Without a mouse, it just doesn't feel right.;)
Which is why I used Knoppix itself to do the level 1 install. Hey, it works.;)
No, they're there... standards like integration and ease-of-use. You know... the kind of standards that make Windows what it is today...... a target for viruses, spyware, and vandalism.
"It is the common fate of the indolent to see their rights become a prey to the active. The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance; which condition if he break, servitude is at once the consequence of his crime and the punishment of his guilt."
--John Philpot Curran: Speech upon the Right of Election, 1790.
To be peaceful does not mean to be passive. It just means that one won't fight without a good reason. I'm sure whether that was a good reason is up for debate, but let's not equate "strong" with "peaceless." Sometimes you need to fight to find peace.
Re:Debian can be thought of as 3 parts...
on
Updates From Debian
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· Score: 3, Informative
Actually, you have that reversed...
"Stable" is correct; it's the tried-and-true system that is designed to just work.
"Testing" means "This will be the next stable, please test it so we can squash out the bugs."
"Unstable" is the bleeding edge.
Currently, Stable is Woody, Testing is Sarge, and Unstable is (always) Sid. These names are from Toy Story apparently, Sid is named because he's the kid who likes to torture and destroy toys... pretty apt name for an unstable distribution, eh?
And I've remembered some fun times in unstable. On average, it can be pretty stable, but if there's a major change (such as the time that X11 was being repackaged in a different way a few years ago; it was three days before my X server would even start up), it will be VERY difficult to manage until the changes are complete.
What really gets me is the Slashdot response. If Microsoft had released similar search feature, it would be one more nail in the coffin of poor security, no matter what user advisories they had given. When Google does it, we all jump to say that Google expressly warned against using this on a multi-user box.
The difference being, Google doesn't have any control over the operating system software the GDS is running on. Microsoft does. And if MS is going to make such search functions, it had better make certain that the search stays out of the dirty laundry.
Maybe Google just needs to make the warning a bit more obvious, like a hug "WARNING: Google desktop allows you to search all files on this computer" or something.
Warning? Wasn't that the whole point of the program in the first place?
Perhaps not, but it DOES have a link to what information you see in your dashboard. I don't want to be pulled over because a glitch in the software decided I was going 15 MPH less than I was, nor do I want to run out of gas because the gas gauge was showing I have four gallons more than I have.
There's also probably hundreds of other "little" things that software has control of that could pose a massive problem in a software crash; engine timing, fuel/air mixture, hundreds of sensors throughout the engine... I'm no brain where cars are concerned, but last year, one sensor's failure caused my car to stop running entirely. ONE SENSOR!!!
Believe me, there's a lot more inside a car controlled by computer than is not.
A quick skim over the subject had me thinking that the "satellite" was the moon, and it was being pulled 6 inches closer to the earth by a twist in the fabric of space..
Instead, I go to an article, and end up feeling like the aforementioned twist is in the space between my ears.
Yes, encryption if I'm not mistaken. However, if hacking-type software was a 2nd-Amendment issue, then ALL hacking-type software would fall under export restrictions, including some classic staples as Perl, EMACS, bash, various network analysis tools, and, of course, the Linux kernel.
Actually, the full text of the amendment is: "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."
http://www.house.gov/Constitution/Amend.html
However, I don't like the idea of considering software as fitting under the 2nd amendment rights, because then software would likely fall under export restrictions.
ACTUALLY, Communism is simply a method of socialism, where everything produced is pooled, and handed out according to who needs it.
Capitalism simply means you keep what you produce, and can trade what you have for what you don't.
I don't know the guy down the street, and I don't care about him; he's got his own problems and solutions, and it would be arrogant of me to assume that I 1: know what his problems are, and 2: that I would have the solution to them. I'd probably irritate the fellow if I were to provide him with my "answers."
Now, even worse is the person who might be able to solve his own problems, except for the fact that I provide him a "safety net" to keep him safe. His needs are met without any particular action of his own. As per human nature, he is not pushed to support himself, and he becomes more complacent, depending on the "help" I provide.
Now, helping others of our own free will is not a bad thing; it's a good thing to do. But mandating the helping of other turns charity into a twisted form of tyranny. Particularly for those who need the money to keep their small businesses alive.
The American Dream as is known is based in the third basic right: The pursuit of happiness. Note, PURSUIT, not GUARANTEE. I should be free to pursue my dreams without any governmental intervention, so long as I respect the three basic rights of everyone else.
As of right now, we don't have a true capitalist society, as evidenced by the labrynthian maze of laws surrounding all kinds of things, and including such socialist tendencies as medicare and welfare, and fascist tendencies like corporate non-liability.
Actually, solutions are to services as custom-made products are to assembly-line products.
Instead of offering a service that a customer will decide whether or not they need it, a solution offers everything to achieve the list of goals a client requires.
If each byte of data were the size of a grain of sand, the LOC archive would be roughly the size of Laguna Beach!
Assumptions:
one byte of data is exactly one letter, number, or character in text, one dot in a b/w image, and 1/4th of a dot in a CMYK color image.
All images would be 150 dots per inch (comfortable medium between high-quality printing and short downloading time).
A typical grain of sand measures.25 millimeters, meaning that it would take 101.6 grains of sand to make an inch.
The average book size is 1000 (8.5"x11") pages, with 1/2-inch margins and 10-point text, a quarter of which would be pictures, of which another quarter would be color. (I'm extrapolating an ultimate average, so this is DEFINITELY subject to interpretation)
And I will round the KB and MB calculations to the nearest whole number; only the bytes matter for our calculations. ----- Now, as such, we first determine how much space on those 1000 pages is actually written on. half-inch margins mean an overall 1 inch reduction both horizontally and vertically.
Now, we have reduced the printable area to 7.5x10
Next, we determine the data density of pictures, which would take up the mass of file sizes. A quarter of 1000 pages is 250 pages, of which another quarter would result in 62.5 color pages, leaving 187.5 pages as black and white.
Now, applying the following formula, we can deduce how much space a page of pictures would take:
Black and White: 150(7.5*10) Color: 4(150(7.5*10))
So, a B&W image page would be 11250 Bytes, or approximately 11 KB.
A color image page would then be the above result, but multiplied by four, because a CMYK image has four colors to combine, Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and blacK. So we come up with 45000 bytes, or 44 KB.
Now, if we multiply those figures by the assumed number of pages, we come up with 2109375 bytes(2059KB, or roughly 2MB) of data for the black and white images, and 2812500 bytes(2746KB, or roughly 2MB) of data for color images.
The result so far would be roughly 4 Megabytes of information in a single book in images.
Onto the text. The average number of characters per line in a page ranges somewhere from 70-80. So, I will use an average of 75 for now.
The number of lines is pretty static; letters can take up more or less space, depending on the letter; an l takes up less space than a w does. However, all letters function on a baseline principle; meaning that the baseline of one line will be exactly the same distance from the previous as the next.
To determine the number of lines, we multiply the height of a page's writeable space with the points-per-inch measurement to come up with the total number of points vertically. Note that I'm using the Postscript points definition for simplicity's sake.
To get page hight in points: 72(10)
So, a page is 720 points from top margin to bottom margin. We're single-spacing this document, so we're using a 12-point spacing system, 10 for the letter, and 2 for the "leading," or empty space between lines.
To determine number of lines: 720/12
Ultimately, we come up with 60 lines of 75 characters.
One thing to note, this does not include spaces, so we assume an average of 6-letter words, and add one space per word.
Total number of bytes: 60*(75+(75/6))
Total number of bytes for a single page is 5250, or 5 KB
Now, multiply this by all pages: 5250*750
Total for all the pages comes out to 3937500 Bytes, or 3845 KB, or roughly 4 MB.
ow, to combine the single book, we have 4MB (text) plus 4MB (images), bringing up the total size of a single average book to 8MB
Bring that size into basic bytes, and we end up with: (11250*187.5)+(45000*62.5)+(5250*750)
Total book size in bytes: 8859375 Bytes, or 8651 Kilobytes, or 8 MB.
Now, I recall the article stating that there are approximately 26 million books.
This maneuver just gives the "authentic" parties an excuse to dismiss the third party as a collective of extremist wackos.
Tell me, what's so difficult about consulting a lawyer, and finding the legal loopholes that would have the desired result? I hear enough whining about corporations and "Rich People" doing just that. Why can't that method be used by the "Good Guys?"
Unfortunately, this stunt just lowered my opinion of Badnarik pretty considerably.
Libertarians believe in the essential freedoms. This includes freedom to possess and protect property. So why did Michael violate that freedom? Did he own the land in question, or was it public property?
Judging from the charge of "trespass," I would say no to both.
2) Unless you really spend a lot of time writing it, it's easily diagnosed and fixed because the user base of Linux right now are mostly tech-savvy. The majority of the Windows user base is not tech-savvy.
Of course, there is a lot of tech-savvy people using Windows. The difference is that there's only so much tech to be savvy to... the rest is hidden behind NDAs, copyright, and just plain obfuscation... never mind the percentage which is shareware and commercial software.
The same cannot be said about Linux or the BSDs, or even Mac OS X, where the information to the inner workings are available.
3) People aren't going to write these things for Linux because I think most of the virii writers are pro-Linux and they don't want to create bad PR for Linux, they want to create bad PR for Windows.
I didn't want to make the point myself, but since you made it for me, I'll thank you.;)
Last time I checked, the need to use shells were the biggest fear of your typical user..bashrc is out.
On a side note, there is the possibility of an executable being placed in the home directory and session parameters being changed to autoload the appropriate executable on login.
However, since there are a goodly number of different desktops, each of which has it's following, and it's own method of autoloading processes at login, the writers would have a particularly... interesting task ahead of them.
Add to this the fact that if such things appear, there's likely to be at least one forum, newsgroup post, website, or knowledgebase that will show a user how to use top to find the offending program and kill it.
This also doesn't change the fact that the majority of spyware doesn't install through user error, but through ActiveX controls on the web browser, often completely invisible to the user. Since there are also several available browsers in a single distribution, that's another point of effort that a spyware writer would have to work around. Between Mozilla, Opera, Epipheny, Konqueror, and Netscape, distributed over three different full desktop systems (GNOME, KDE, and XFCE), applying to various OSes (Linux isn't the only OS that has the above software products)...
Well, it would take a considerable amount of work to manage to write spyware, and find a way to install it invisibly.
As for bad user habits, that's not Windows' fault, and not (directly) the spyware writers' faults, either.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, they can... have you ever heard of homesteading? Of course, that simply means you have to live on your plot of land for a specific period of time, protecting it yourself against rival claimants.
Of course, considering this is an airless, waterless, lifeless chunk of rock in space... I'd love to see the people selling lunar real estate do the due dilligence and live in the land they claim they own... for homesteading purposes, of course.
*chuckle* Funny part is, the same (to a lesser extent) also applies to the Linux from Scratch distribution.
On the one hand, you did have to compile and install all the programs by hand.
However, like Gentoo, all the scripts, device files, configuration files, and so on, are all included in an all-in-one file provided for convenience, and the LFS book did not go into detail as to how those various scripts, config files, and so on actually worked with the system. *shrug*
Perhaps. However, Links isn't much for myself, whose primary timewasting entertainment is looking over webcomics and playing the occasional game of Frozen Bubble. And browsing is like FPS games: Without a mouse, it just doesn't feel right. ;)
;)
Which is why I used Knoppix itself to do the level 1 install. Hey, it works.
No, they're there... standards like integration and ease-of-use. You know... the kind of standards that make Windows what it is today... ... a target for viruses, spyware, and vandalism.
2. Would they make good slaves?
;)
I dunno... ask "Sharky."
"It is the common fate of the indolent to see their rights become a prey to the active. The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance; which condition if he break, servitude is at once the consequence of his crime and the punishment of his guilt."
--John Philpot Curran: Speech upon the Right of Election, 1790.
To be peaceful does not mean to be passive. It just means that one won't fight without a good reason. I'm sure whether that was a good reason is up for debate, but let's not equate "strong" with "peaceless." Sometimes you need to fight to find peace.
Actually, you have that reversed...
"Stable" is correct; it's the tried-and-true system that is designed to just work.
"Testing" means "This will be the next stable, please test it so we can squash out the bugs."
"Unstable" is the bleeding edge.
Currently, Stable is Woody, Testing is Sarge, and Unstable is (always) Sid. These names are from Toy Story apparently, Sid is named because he's the kid who likes to torture and destroy toys... pretty apt name for an unstable distribution, eh?
And I've remembered some fun times in unstable. On average, it can be pretty stable, but if there's a major change (such as the time that X11 was being repackaged in a different way a few years ago; it was three days before my X server would even start up), it will be VERY difficult to manage until the changes are complete.
Ah, I see. No problem. Goodnight. :)
Sorry, you lost me on that one...
What really gets me is the Slashdot response. If Microsoft had released similar search feature, it would be one more nail in the coffin of poor security, no matter what user advisories they had given. When Google does it, we all jump to say that Google expressly warned against using this on a multi-user box.
The difference being, Google doesn't have any control over the operating system software the GDS is running on. Microsoft does. And if MS is going to make such search functions, it had better make certain that the search stays out of the dirty laundry.
Maybe Google just needs to make the warning a bit more obvious, like a hug "WARNING: Google desktop allows you to search all files on this computer" or something.
Warning? Wasn't that the whole point of the program in the first place?
*looks at the windshield; sees the top*
AACK! It's STARTING ALREADY!!!
Perhaps not, but it DOES have a link to what information you see in your dashboard. I don't want to be pulled over because a glitch in the software decided I was going 15 MPH less than I was, nor do I want to run out of gas because the gas gauge was showing I have four gallons more than I have.
There's also probably hundreds of other "little" things that software has control of that could pose a massive problem in a software crash; engine timing, fuel/air mixture, hundreds of sensors throughout the engine... I'm no brain where cars are concerned, but last year, one sensor's failure caused my car to stop running entirely. ONE SENSOR!!!
Believe me, there's a lot more inside a car controlled by computer than is not.
A quick skim over the subject had me thinking that the "satellite" was the moon, and it was being pulled 6 inches closer to the earth by a twist in the fabric of space..
Instead, I go to an article, and end up feeling like the aforementioned twist is in the space between my ears.
I gotta go grab me some tylenol now...
Otherworld, by Tad Williams, comes to mind when reading this one...
Yes, encryption if I'm not mistaken. However, if hacking-type software was a 2nd-Amendment issue, then ALL hacking-type software would fall under export restrictions, including some classic staples as Perl, EMACS, bash, various network analysis tools, and, of course, the Linux kernel.
Actually, the full text of the amendment is: "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."
http://www.house.gov/Constitution/Amend.html
However, I don't like the idea of considering software as fitting under the 2nd amendment rights, because then software would likely fall under export restrictions.
ACTUALLY, Communism is simply a method of socialism, where everything produced is pooled, and handed out according to who needs it.
Capitalism simply means you keep what you produce, and can trade what you have for what you don't.
I don't know the guy down the street, and I don't care about him; he's got his own problems and solutions, and it would be arrogant of me to assume that I 1: know what his problems are, and 2: that I would have the solution to them. I'd probably irritate the fellow if I were to provide him with my "answers."
Now, even worse is the person who might be able to solve his own problems, except for the fact that I provide him a "safety net" to keep him safe. His needs are met without any particular action of his own. As per human nature, he is not pushed to support himself, and he becomes more complacent, depending on the "help" I provide.
Now, helping others of our own free will is not a bad thing; it's a good thing to do. But mandating the helping of other turns charity into a twisted form of tyranny. Particularly for those who need the money to keep their small businesses alive.
The American Dream as is known is based in the third basic right: The pursuit of happiness. Note, PURSUIT, not GUARANTEE. I should be free to pursue my dreams without any governmental intervention, so long as I respect the three basic rights of everyone else.
As of right now, we don't have a true capitalist society, as evidenced by the labrynthian maze of laws surrounding all kinds of things, and including such socialist tendencies as medicare and welfare, and fascist tendencies like corporate non-liability.
Actually, solutions are to services as custom-made products are to assembly-line products.
Instead of offering a service that a customer will decide whether or not they need it, a solution offers everything to achieve the list of goals a client requires.
If each byte of data were the size of a grain of sand, the LOC archive would be roughly the size of Laguna Beach!
.25 millimeters, meaning that it would take 101.6 grains of sand to make an inch.
Assumptions:
one byte of data is exactly one letter, number, or character in text, one dot in a b/w image, and 1/4th of a dot in a CMYK color image.
All images would be 150 dots per inch (comfortable medium between high-quality printing and short downloading time).
A typical grain of sand measures
The average book size is 1000 (8.5"x11") pages, with 1/2-inch margins and 10-point text, a quarter of which would be pictures, of which another quarter would be color. (I'm extrapolating an ultimate average, so this is DEFINITELY subject to interpretation)
And I will round the KB and MB calculations to the nearest whole number; only the bytes matter for our calculations.
-----
Now, as such, we first determine how much space on those 1000 pages is actually written on. half-inch margins mean an overall 1 inch reduction both horizontally and vertically.
Now, we have reduced the printable area to 7.5x10
Next, we determine the data density of pictures, which would take up the mass of file sizes. A quarter of 1000 pages is 250 pages, of which another quarter would result in 62.5 color pages, leaving 187.5 pages as black and white.
Now, applying the following formula, we can deduce how much space a page of pictures would take:
Black and White: 150(7.5*10)
Color: 4(150(7.5*10))
So, a B&W image page would be 11250 Bytes, or approximately 11 KB.
A color image page would then be the above result, but multiplied by four, because a CMYK image has four colors to combine, Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and blacK. So we come up with 45000 bytes, or 44 KB.
Now, if we multiply those figures by the assumed number of pages, we come up with 2109375 bytes(2059KB, or roughly 2MB) of data for the black and white images, and 2812500 bytes(2746KB, or roughly 2MB) of data for color images.
The result so far would be roughly 4 Megabytes of information in a single book in images.
Onto the text. The average number of characters per line in a page ranges somewhere from 70-80. So, I will use an average of 75 for now.
The number of lines is pretty static; letters can take up more or less space, depending on the letter; an l takes up less space than a w does. However, all letters function on a baseline principle; meaning that the baseline of one line will be exactly the same distance from the previous as the next.
To determine the number of lines, we multiply the height of a page's writeable space with the points-per-inch measurement to come up with the total number of points vertically. Note that I'm using the Postscript points definition for simplicity's sake.
To get page hight in points: 72(10)
So, a page is 720 points from top margin to bottom margin. We're single-spacing this document, so we're using a 12-point spacing system, 10 for the letter, and 2 for the "leading," or empty space between lines.
To determine number of lines: 720/12
Ultimately, we come up with 60 lines of 75 characters.
One thing to note, this does not include spaces, so we assume an average of 6-letter words, and add one space per word.
Total number of bytes: 60*(75+(75/6))
Total number of bytes for a single page is 5250, or 5 KB
Now, multiply this by all pages: 5250*750
Total for all the pages comes out to 3937500 Bytes, or 3845 KB, or roughly 4 MB.
ow, to combine the single book, we have 4MB (text) plus 4MB (images), bringing up the total size of a single average book to 8MB
Bring that size into basic bytes, and we end up with: (11250*187.5)+(45000*62.5)+(5250*750)
Total book size in bytes: 8859375 Bytes, or 8651 Kilobytes, or 8 MB.
Now, I recall the article stating that there are approximately 26 million books.
This maneuver just gives the "authentic" parties an excuse to dismiss the third party as a collective of extremist wackos.
Tell me, what's so difficult about consulting a lawyer, and finding the legal loopholes that would have the desired result? I hear enough whining about corporations and "Rich People" doing just that. Why can't that method be used by the "Good Guys?"
Unfortunately, this stunt just lowered my opinion of Badnarik pretty considerably.
Libertarians believe in the essential freedoms. This includes freedom to possess and protect property. So why did Michael violate that freedom? Did he own the land in question, or was it public property?
Judging from the charge of "trespass," I would say no to both.
You're no geek, you're a politician.
You mean, there's a difference?
Of course, there is a lot of tech-savvy people using Windows. The difference is that there's only so much tech to be savvy to... the rest is hidden behind NDAs, copyright, and just plain obfuscation... never mind the percentage which is shareware and commercial software.
The same cannot be said about Linux or the BSDs, or even Mac OS X, where the information to the inner workings are available.
3) People aren't going to write these things for Linux because I think most of the virii writers are pro-Linux and they don't want to create bad PR for Linux, they want to create bad PR for Windows.
I didn't want to make the point myself, but since you made it for me, I'll thank you.
Last time I checked, the need to use shells were the biggest fear of your typical user. .bashrc is out.
On a side note, there is the possibility of an executable being placed in the home directory and session parameters being changed to autoload the appropriate executable on login.
However, since there are a goodly number of different desktops, each of which has it's following, and it's own method of autoloading processes at login, the writers would have a particularly... interesting task ahead of them.
Add to this the fact that if such things appear, there's likely to be at least one forum, newsgroup post, website, or knowledgebase that will show a user how to use top to find the offending program and kill it.
This also doesn't change the fact that the majority of spyware doesn't install through user error, but through ActiveX controls on the web browser, often completely invisible to the user. Since there are also several available browsers in a single distribution, that's another point of effort that a spyware writer would have to work around. Between Mozilla, Opera, Epipheny, Konqueror, and Netscape, distributed over three different full desktop systems (GNOME, KDE, and XFCE), applying to various OSes (Linux isn't the only OS that has the above software products)...
Well, it would take a considerable amount of work to manage to write spyware, and find a way to install it invisibly.
As for bad user habits, that's not Windows' fault, and not (directly) the spyware writers' faults, either.