Bacteria are not a threat to politicians. A Kurtz's radicalism is.
What makes referenced Patriot Act section extremely practical for political reuse is simple fact, that any chemical or biological substance could be considered as toxic, either in certain condition or in certain quantity.
Expired yoghurt? Molded bread? Can of meat forgotten on sunlight? Either of that is highly biologically dangerous material...
Some time ago, I had exactly the same problem with microsoft ads on czech pro-linux website www.root.cz. The Microsoft Czech corporation ads were about linux TCO of a database server and arguments were totally stupid.
I wrote to editors about I am not happy with that and from now, I am blocking all their ads in my mozilla. Probably was not alone, since I got response from the site owner. He wrote me something as "Linux users are not idiots. No one of them will believe those ads. If Microsoft wants to spend money on site dedicated to Linux and it helps to pay server costs, I am happy of that."
Certainly, this man has no honor. But on other side, his site is quite usefull for linux beginners. And, by it's action, even Microsoft is signalling they take Linux very seriously.
The situation with Linux Today is exactly the same.
For market analysts that means "Linux is serious because Microsoft are afraid of it". Should we wish more?
Technically, there is no need for BIOS today. Some people experiment with using stripped ROMmed linux kernel as a boot loader. It's already pretty configurable, supports wide sortiment of hardware devices and operates on many cpu platforms. Why to reinvent an edged wheel just for x86-64?
Yes, python. Consider it's interactive feature, you have an immediate feedback in teaching code fragments or typical algorithms. This quality made basic a learnig tool for decades, but basic is inferior in it's expressiveness.
Of course, some people will never understand the paradigm of computing. My mother calls any and all of dozens of computers I have or ever had "that silly thing" for forty years. As an accountant, she used a mechanical calculator for whole life. Her current boyfriend (both are aged over their 70's) was a nuclear scientist in his carrier, and he never touched the computer nor calculator. He did all his computing manually on logarithmic ruler.
Wow! Looking at the pictures of the machine, I recognize it is actually built from parts of the czech gadget construction kit known for decades as "Merkur".
I used to play with this kit as child, some 35 years ago. This kit has a quite a renaissance in toy shops now here. It was designed in early sixties.
At age of 9, I actually built a four wheeled electro powered and bowden controlled flamethrower carriage with integrated candle (flame source) and hair spray (very good flammable these days).
I called it proudly a flame "tank", and it was fully operational at range of 40cm flame with all the consequences, if you know what I mean...
Even later, I used the kit to prototype some computer home made peripherals back in 8-bit era, for example a punch tape reader for "tapes" made from used 35mm perforated camera films. The device was dismissed at the moment I could afford a cassette tape recorder...
One does not need to be a professional historian to understand a pattern of totalitarian government. Personal life experience is sufficient. Currently, only nation without historic experience with totality are americans, but this is rapidly changing.
2) Can you actualy read Antique Chinness Caligraphy Which Survived WWII?
Problem is, even antique chinese documents contain imperial propaganda. As an example, in middle age century (by western time measure), a chinese ambassadors (many generations of them) in tibetan capital Lhasa called themselves a governor of Tibet in his diplomatic letters, while dalailamas was in fact sovereign ruler and persistently insisted of titling them as ambassadors.
These ancient propaganda documents are now reused by chinese. Fortunately, some tibetan documents survived too.
3) Do you actualy have these documents?
Bibliography of a single book, "Tibet, a political history" from Tsepon W.D. Shakabpa has 20 pages of references to the both ancient and modern historic documents.
No technology could replace an individual responsibility.
Locks, passwords and fences are just helpers, providing a percievable obstacles, or barriers to unitiated, making territorial fragmentation of influence spheres. A willing, knowledgable individual could bypass anything. So, it is about morality much more than about technology or psychology.
A way to combat spam is to go to the host that the spam is stored on. That happens to be in China at the moment.
I am sorry but I do not believe that. A way to go is to combat no spammers, but spam contractors. That means to go after the guys operating sites whose urls are mentioned in the spam anchors. Or phone numbers. Or fax numbers.
The only tool needed to find by urls them is a DNS resolution. Guess, which country these sites are mostly sitting in... BTW, all phone and faxes are american.
Actually, I installed the plug (plague?) just because those silly anoying dialogs from latest mozilla for nonexistent plugin, which cannot be suppressed. Imagine viewing a news page with 4-5 flashes on it is a real pain clicking [cancel].
Yes, I know real geeks will turn away in disgust just as with any other binary pollution. But I need an equivalent of Infernet Exploder with flash on linux just because my bank does not support anything other.
So I bear no geek pride and no geek prejudices. Now, I will disassemble that libflashplayer.so. I wonder what kind of surprise may lurk down in the code. And no, I will not share THAT knowledge with you, sorry. I'll keep it for myself. Let me begin
Even if it comes through Poland or China, it is american spam.
Yes, all spam I receive here (eu) is for american drugs, american health care, american sex sites, american housing, american education and american career.
I don't need any of this, really.
Anyway, those americans are clever. First they sent dozens of millions backdoored windows to China, then blame the chinese for spam.
I mean that continent, which is drawn on our geographic maps for no longer than 512 years up to day, sorry if it hurts your pride some way.
is there any instance where a technically acceptable patch was rejected based on political ideology?
As you can reread, I wrote "I don't say it currently is, but in future it *may* be". To pinpoint on a dangerous possibility.
*********** To your question, I have an answer: YES. You cannot find a tibetan language localisation, nor nls tables in the linux kernel, because of political oposition of chinese government. Because of their denial of existence of tibetan nation and language at all. Same happend in Unicode project, as I remember. ***********
Of course, I can foresee both negative and positive politisation of contributions.
In linux kernel, there is a Cryptographic API buried. According valid laws in some countries, pure presence of cryptography routines makes linux technically illegal for civilian use in France, Russia, China. While these laws are silently ignored now, it may change in the future. Also it is just this API making any linux distro unexportable from USA to Iran.
Imagine some government agency would be wanting a kernel patch to provide a back door to that cryptography api. It may even be forced by law in that country. I can easy imagine USA and China will be the first ones, exactly in that order.
So kernel maintainers may reject such a "contribution" but they probably will be manipulated to accept it. Just like cell phone makers, just like Microsoft, just like WiFi hardware makers, just like many other producers of controlled technology from other industries.
Linux is dangerous to any political establishment because currently they can't control it, because nobody can. It's unlike any other technology. So, for the first establishment wants to centralize (done) and de-anonymize the decisioning about linux with hope they could take it over later. Software patenting falls in that category too.
Then, anything may happen, if the idea of freedom, joy and voluntarism will be replaced by legality, bussiness and politics. I expect repressions. Because current changes in information technology are so revolutionary, that they can cause some shifts in power in the future. One big "danger" percieved by the current political establishment all over the world is the free information technology enables direct democracy, as oposing to deputy-representative based oligocracy.
All contributors are called upon to "sign off" on a submission before it may be considered for inclusion in the kernel.
I don't say it currently is, but in future it *may* be a step towards elitarian class establishment, as well as political control tool for technology. How well-defined should be an identity of a GPL project contributor?
When signing on will be obligatory for contribution, a simple rejection to sign on a person for some "external" reason may have such political consequences. For the first, I believe it is in direct contradiction to the spirit of GPL.
Example: what about potential kernel developpers from countries politically inacceptable in United States?
Currently, it is not possible for major distro releasers from the new continent to export a linux technology to the Iran, Lybia or Northern Korea. Does the U.S. government violate the GPL license? Yes, it does.
What if some kernel contributors will actually become from these countries? Should be all farsi and arabic localisation contributors to the any of the sourceforge projects be perlustrated for not actually being an al-Quaeda operatives?
Using a 1.6 for some time, I just sucked 1.8. And guess what, all Slashdot fonts goes totally crazy. My system is Mandrake 10 cooker. And I am beginning to hate gtk crapware.
Unfortunately, while Konqueror looks very nice, has a crappy html engine. Not able to render a Slashdot personal page for ages.
So I have a perfect browser within primitive-looking (and behaving) app framework and nice one with eye candies showing scrambled pages.
Looking at the replies, some people got sex for antivirus or box repair or even some coding. Once upon a time, I got a perfect sex just for teaching her how to play Lemmings. I tried it again a week later with Warcraft (1) and succeded again.
Even if the "Left" isn't fully aware of the urgency of the world's energy problems, it seems like Slashdot is."
In other news: By the "Right" means of total information awareness on all it's readers, Slashdot makes urgently an evolution advance to self-consciousness.
Windows 2k has tendency to screw linux partitions by forcing dynamic discs on certain conditions, such as hardware change. Windows can render your linux unbootable just by adding another ide controller.
Sometimes, forcing lba solves the problem when bios geometry and reported native ide geometry differs. People with this problem should try bios autodetection feature before forcing LBA.
Grub is much less technologically advanced than lilo, because it does not care about many different bios bugs. For example, it is not possible to place grub on the zip drive media or flash card, becuase grub does not "recognise" bios drive number. I guess grub can have geometry problem on very large disks too, which may be symptomatic to article author. Lilo is much friendly to windows than grub, at least it is tweakable to be friendly.
There are several board bios/controllers bios hard drive limits, by the age of technology: 2.4G, 8G, 32G, 128G, 1000G. Often, flashing new bios will help, but I would not recommend that to lamers. If your bios shall boot from bigger drive then limit is, WHOLE boot partition must reside in the limited area of the disk. So make sure you have a little/boot partition for any linux(es) at the beginning of your disc. Put Windows partion behind it and all others systems partitions behind windows.
I would not recommend to have both linux and windows 2k/XP on the same drive, because of dynamic discs partition change may emerge from windows at any time. This is insidious from Microsoft. I would also recommend to keep/home on separate drive, which allows to change distros, format, upgrade, reorganize system partions and so on, also keeps your home safe from windows, if you disable that drive in them.
If machine becomes unbootable to linux, it's easy to boot a linux CD (I have a pocket-size lnx-bbc 2.1/i386 cd within my portfeille), then mount a partition, then remount existing dev tree under it, then chroot to it, then rerun lilo. Last week I did that repair in just 40 seconds, and it was very impressive to bystanders.
Just for case, I keep lilo on beginning of every hard drive (6 hard drives on my desktop+2 other ide devices), with complete menu available to boot almost anything from any drive), so it is possible to swap my drives at will on their interfaces. It is also possible to boot from bios on another drive (bios C, D, E, F) if something goes wrong, then select correct system in lilo menu.
And last, but not least: keep your machine well cooling if you have lot of hard drives.
Autoconf is ok, but it should be designed with it's own versioning schema on mind. To avoid nasty incompatible hacks in future. That future is now. But in software, everything is fixable, just someone must care about it. Anybody volunteers instead of slashdot ranting? Yes, I can hear you: you just don't like this m4 stuff, sorry.
Slashdot Mirror
Bacteria are not a threat to politicians. A Kurtz's radicalism is.
What makes referenced Patriot Act section extremely practical for political reuse is simple fact, that any chemical or biological substance could be considered as toxic, either in certain condition or in certain quantity.
Expired yoghurt? Molded bread? Can of meat forgotten on sunlight? Either of that is highly biologically dangerous material...
20% of all U.S. web traffic is categorized as 'adult'
Considering majority of porn sites are totally blocking any google references this number is telling something...
Some time ago, I had exactly the same problem with microsoft ads on czech pro-linux website www.root.cz. The Microsoft Czech corporation ads were about linux TCO of a database server and arguments were totally stupid.
I wrote to editors about I am not happy with that and from now, I am blocking all their ads in my mozilla. Probably was not alone, since I got response from the site owner. He wrote me something as "Linux users are not idiots. No one of them will believe those ads. If Microsoft wants to spend money on site dedicated to Linux and it helps to pay server costs, I am happy of that."
Certainly, this man has no honor. But on other side, his site is quite usefull for linux beginners. And, by it's action, even Microsoft is signalling they take Linux very seriously.
The situation with Linux Today is exactly the same.
For market analysts that means "Linux is serious because Microsoft are afraid of it". Should we wish more?
Technically, there is no need for BIOS today. Some people experiment with using stripped ROMmed linux kernel as a boot loader. It's already pretty configurable, supports wide sortiment of hardware devices and operates on many cpu platforms. Why to reinvent an edged wheel just for x86-64?
In space operations, money is not at the first place. I prefer our technologic independence from USA in that matter.
Yes, python. Consider it's interactive feature, you have an immediate feedback in teaching code fragments or typical algorithms. This quality made basic a learnig tool for decades, but basic is inferior in it's expressiveness.
Of course, some people will never understand the paradigm of computing. My mother calls any and all of dozens of computers I have or ever had "that silly thing" for forty years. As an accountant, she used a mechanical calculator for whole life. Her current boyfriend (both are aged over their 70's) was a nuclear scientist in his carrier, and he never touched the computer nor calculator. He did all his computing manually on logarithmic ruler.
Wow! Looking at the pictures of the machine, I recognize it is actually built from parts of the czech gadget construction kit known for decades as "Merkur".
I used to play with this kit as child, some 35 years ago. This kit has a quite a renaissance in toy shops now here. It was designed in early sixties.
At age of 9, I actually built a four wheeled electro powered and bowden controlled flamethrower carriage with integrated candle (flame source) and hair spray (very good flammable these days).
I called it proudly a flame "tank", and it was fully operational at range of 40cm flame with all the consequences, if you know what I mean...
Even later, I used the kit to prototype some computer home made peripherals back in 8-bit era, for example a punch tape reader for "tapes" made from used 35mm perforated camera films. The device was dismissed at the moment I could afford a cassette tape recorder...
1) Are you all historians?
One does not need to be a professional historian to understand a pattern of totalitarian government. Personal life experience is sufficient. Currently, only nation without historic experience with totality are americans, but this is rapidly changing.
2) Can you actualy read Antique Chinness Caligraphy Which Survived WWII?
Problem is, even antique chinese documents contain imperial propaganda. As an example, in middle age century (by western time measure), a chinese ambassadors (many generations of them) in tibetan capital Lhasa called themselves a governor of Tibet in his diplomatic letters, while dalailamas was in fact sovereign ruler and persistently insisted of titling them as ambassadors.
These ancient propaganda documents are now reused by chinese. Fortunately, some tibetan documents survived too.
3) Do you actualy have these documents?
Bibliography of a single book, "Tibet, a political history" from Tsepon W.D. Shakabpa has 20 pages of references to the both ancient and modern historic documents.
No technology could replace an individual responsibility.
Locks, passwords and fences are just helpers, providing a percievable obstacles, or barriers to unitiated, making territorial fragmentation of influence spheres. A willing, knowledgable individual could bypass anything. So, it is about morality much more than about technology or psychology.
Now you can bring your entire porn collection with you with just one card!
Hardly. I would need at least 13 pieces of 12G flash cards. For THAT money, I could buy a tiny bordello...
Considering relatively very slow write speed of current flash memories technology, 12G CF is simply not worth any price.
And yes, I use CF cards with PDA, notebook and desktop machine.
A way to combat spam is to go to the host that the spam is stored on. That happens to be in China at the moment.
I am sorry but I do not believe that. A way to go is to combat no spammers, but spam contractors. That means to go after the guys operating sites whose urls are mentioned in the spam anchors. Or phone numbers. Or fax numbers.
The only tool needed to find by urls them is a DNS resolution. Guess, which country these sites are mostly sitting in... BTW, all phone and faxes are american.
Actually, I installed the plug (plague?) just because those silly anoying dialogs from latest mozilla for nonexistent plugin, which cannot be suppressed. Imagine viewing a news page with 4-5 flashes on it is a real pain clicking [cancel].
Yes, I know real geeks will turn away in disgust just as with any other binary pollution. But I need an equivalent of Infernet Exploder with flash on linux just because my bank does not support anything other.
So I bear no geek pride and no geek prejudices. Now, I will disassemble that libflashplayer.so. I wonder what kind of surprise may lurk down in the code. And no, I will not share THAT knowledge with you, sorry. I'll keep it for myself. Let me begin yes it's mozilla plugin interface, so
Better to make some coffee...
Even if it comes through Poland or China, it is american spam.
Yes, all spam I receive here (eu) is for american drugs, american health care, american sex sites, american housing, american education and american career.
I don't need any of this, really.
Anyway, those americans are clever. First they sent dozens of millions backdoored windows to China, then blame the chinese for spam.
what is this "new continent" you speak of?
I mean that continent, which is drawn on our geographic maps for no longer than 512 years up to day, sorry if it hurts your pride some way.
is there any instance where a technically acceptable patch was rejected based on political ideology?
As you can reread, I wrote "I don't say it currently is, but in future it *may* be". To pinpoint on a dangerous possibility.
***********
To your question, I have an answer: YES. You cannot find a tibetan language localisation, nor nls tables in the linux kernel, because of political oposition of chinese government. Because of their denial of existence of tibetan nation and language at all. Same happend in Unicode project, as I remember.
***********
Of course, I can foresee both negative and positive politisation of contributions.
In linux kernel, there is a Cryptographic API buried. According valid laws in some countries, pure presence of cryptography routines makes linux technically illegal for civilian use in France, Russia, China. While these laws are silently ignored now, it may change in the future. Also it is just this API making any linux distro unexportable from USA to Iran.
Imagine some government agency would be wanting a kernel patch to provide a back door to that cryptography api. It may even be forced by law in that country. I can easy imagine USA and China will be the first ones, exactly in that order.
So kernel maintainers may reject such a "contribution" but they probably will be manipulated to accept it. Just like cell phone makers, just like Microsoft, just like WiFi hardware makers, just like many other producers of controlled technology from other industries.
Linux is dangerous to any political establishment because currently they can't control it, because nobody can. It's unlike any other technology.
So, for the first establishment wants to centralize (done) and de-anonymize the decisioning about linux with hope they could take it over later. Software patenting falls in that category too.
Then, anything may happen, if the idea of freedom, joy and voluntarism will be replaced by legality, bussiness and politics. I expect repressions. Because current changes in information technology are so revolutionary, that they can cause some shifts in power in the future. One big "danger" percieved by the current political establishment all over the world is the free information technology enables direct democracy, as oposing to deputy-representative based oligocracy.
So, a denial of technology is a political tool.
All contributors are called upon to "sign off" on a submission before it may be considered for inclusion in the kernel.
I don't say it currently is, but in future it *may* be a step towards elitarian class establishment, as well as political control tool for technology. How well-defined should be an identity of a GPL project contributor?
When signing on will be obligatory for contribution, a simple rejection to sign on a person for some "external" reason may have such political consequences. For the first, I believe it is in direct contradiction to the spirit of GPL.
Example: what about potential kernel developpers from countries politically inacceptable in United States?
Currently, it is not possible for major distro releasers from the new continent to export a linux technology to the Iran, Lybia or Northern Korea. Does the U.S. government violate the GPL license? Yes, it does.
What if some kernel contributors will actually become from these countries? Should be all farsi and arabic localisation contributors to the any of the sourceforge projects be perlustrated for not actually being an al-Quaeda operatives?
Using a 1.6 for some time, I just sucked 1.8. And guess what, all Slashdot fonts goes totally crazy. My system is Mandrake 10 cooker. And I am beginning to hate gtk crapware.
Unfortunately, while Konqueror looks very nice, has a crappy html engine. Not able to render a Slashdot personal page for ages.
So I have a perfect browser within primitive-looking (and behaving) app framework and nice one with eye candies showing scrambled pages.
Why not put mozilla engine into KDE framework?
WHY NOT PUT MOZILLA ENGINE INTO KDE FRAMEWORK???
Sorry for a flamebait.
So where is the expected flood of "Imagine beowulf cluster of that" slashdot comments?
Looking at the replies, some people got sex for antivirus or box repair or even some coding. Once upon a time, I got a perfect sex just for teaching her how to play Lemmings. I tried it again a week later with Warcraft (1) and succeded again.
1kg of fusion fuel would produce the same amount of energy as 10,000,000kg of fossil fuels
Does it mean we could speed up global warming by a factor of 10,000,000?
Even if the "Left" isn't fully aware of the urgency of the world's energy problems, it seems like Slashdot is."
In other news:
By the "Right" means of total information awareness on all it's readers, Slashdot makes urgently an evolution advance to self-consciousness.
Windows 2k has tendency to screw linux partitions by forcing dynamic discs on certain conditions, such as hardware change. Windows can render your linux unbootable just by adding another ide controller.
/boot partition for any linux(es) at the beginning of your disc. Put Windows partion behind it and all others systems partitions behind windows.
/home on separate drive, which allows to change distros, format, upgrade, reorganize system partions and so on, also keeps your home safe from windows, if you disable that drive in them.
Sometimes, forcing lba solves the problem when bios geometry and reported native ide geometry differs. People with this problem should try bios autodetection feature before forcing LBA.
Grub is much less technologically advanced than lilo, because it does not care about many different bios bugs. For example, it is not possible to place grub on the zip drive media or flash card, becuase grub does not "recognise" bios drive number. I guess grub can have geometry problem on very large disks too, which may be symptomatic to article author.
Lilo is much friendly to windows than grub, at least it is tweakable to be friendly.
There are several board bios/controllers bios hard drive limits, by the age of technology: 2.4G, 8G, 32G, 128G, 1000G.
Often, flashing new bios will help, but I would not recommend that to lamers.
If your bios shall boot from bigger drive then limit is, WHOLE boot partition must reside in the limited area of the disk. So make sure you have a little
I would not recommend to have both linux and windows 2k/XP on the same drive, because of dynamic discs partition change may emerge from windows at any time. This is insidious from Microsoft. I would also recommend to keep
If machine becomes unbootable to linux, it's easy to boot a linux CD (I have a pocket-size lnx-bbc 2.1/i386 cd within my portfeille), then mount a partition, then remount existing dev tree under it, then chroot to it, then rerun lilo. Last week I did that repair in just 40 seconds, and it was very impressive to bystanders.
Just for case, I keep lilo on beginning of every hard drive (6 hard drives on my desktop+2 other ide devices), with complete menu available to boot almost anything from any drive), so it is possible to swap my drives at will on their interfaces. It is also possible to boot from bios on another drive (bios C, D, E, F) if something goes wrong, then select correct system in lilo menu.
And last, but not least: keep your machine well cooling if you have lot of hard drives.
Perhaps it would be cheaper and faster if you'd replace that 5$ fan yourself.
Autoconf is ok, but it should be designed with it's own versioning schema on mind. To avoid nasty incompatible hacks in future. That future is now. But in software, everything is fixable, just someone must care about it. Anybody volunteers instead of slashdot ranting? Yes, I can hear you: you just don't like this m4 stuff, sorry.