Except he's advertising that his suit can resist BULLETS now. There's a big difference between being bear-proof and bulletproof. I'll be extremely surprised if it can actually provide protection against standard high velocity FMJ rounds, let alone armor piercing rounds. As someone else has already noted, an elephant gun does NOT fire high-velocity rounds. Given that no one has yet mentioned or linked to hard evidence that the suit has actually been tested vs. modern military firearms, combined with the guy's crackpot "God/Angel light" claims, I'd say that extreme skepticism is indeed warranted when it comes to claims that the suit would be ideal for military use.
Potential riot control, animal control, and bomb squad applications is another matter entirely. There is videotaped proof that his suit can withstand blunt force trauma rather well--there is NOT proof (that I'm aware of) that it can withstand modern, high powered firearms.
Even if I accept that argument entirely (which I don't, but then like I said I'm not a fan of Western society's ideas regarding the "perfect" body) , it still makes sense for the photographer to do the work (lighting, makeup, etc.) than it does to purposefully use a lower-resolution display.
The point wasn't homophobia; the point was that a large mass of hair isn't inherently feminine--both sexes have it. I think that the vulva--which is pretty much inarguably the most feminine (external) body part of all--is much sexier than mere hair. Hair doesn't turn me off; it's just a barrier to being able to see and touch the good stuff.
What's with the massive anti-HD sentiment regarding porn? What happened when you guys see a woman in real life? Do you go "EWWWWWWW! She's so hi-def! I can see her pores!" Christ, if detail really turns you off that much why not just confine yourself to viewing hentai?
I think that just as most people (of the appropriate gender and orientation) prefer to see a naked woman in real life vs.a naked woman on DVD, so too would most people prefer to see a high-resolution picture of a naked woman vs. a picture which is so low-rez that you can actually see the individual pixels fairly clearly from 10 feet away (I can, at least.) Now don't get me wrong, that's not enough to make me want to rush out and buy an overpriced, over-DRM'ed piece of shit AND a new TV to use it with, but saying that HD is the TV equivalent of a microscope is just dumb. My laptop has a WUXGA (1920x1200) screen, and you'd have to be smoking some amazing crack to say that it makes naked women look uglier. It most certainly does NOT. It makes pictures--ALL pictures, regardless of whether or not they involve naked women--look vibrant and real in a way that makes owners of XGA-resolution laptops weep with envy. I suppose I COULD stare with my eyeball an inch from the screen and scream "AHHHHHHHH! I SEE A PIMPLE!" but... why? Just why would you do such a thing? Not to imply that imperfections bother me that much--on the contrary, I find that the plastic, 'pancake makeup' look to be pretty unappealing... I'm just saying, why would you go out of your way to look for such things?
HD isn't a microscope; it's simply a MUCH NICER PICTURE TO LOOK AT.
How about 5-10 years after public publication? "Private publication" would exclude any mass media (or any distribution at all not targeted at specific individuals, e.g. your publisher, book critics, etc.) and any for-profit distribution. Prior to public distribution, copyright would last a very long time--30+ years is fine. After public distribution has begun, I don't see any justification for paying someone for work they did DECADES ago. If your book is still selling *significant* quantities 10 years later, then you are (almost certainly) already a millionare and the benefits for society as a whole far outweigh your "right" to become even more obscenely rich.
Where have you been? Much of Windows' source code was leaked years ago. I'd wager that major code leaks would be inevitable in ANY sizable company. And even if they manage to stamp out most leaks using draconian security measures, what's to stop the OSS crowd from using a combination of source code, binaries (remember, they'd be public domain too!), and leaked APIs?
60 years is WAY too long. Can you imagine a piece of 60-year-old software that would be even remotely relevant anymore? Actually, I think that software should be dealt with seperately--perhaps a 5-10 year term--but general (artistic) copyright shouldn't last more than 15-20. There's just no reason for it; 15 years from now, the little guys will NOT be selling significant quantities of their novels/CDs/movies. Only the biggest fish in the pond stand to benefit (the ones who've already made millions of dollars) so what's your justification for letting them continue their monopoly for decades more?
Metallica isn't starving on the streets... neither is Microsoft. Joe Artist (or Coder) Sixpack is either cranking out the little hits, or he's long since moved on to his fallback career--he's not going to care if he missed out on the handful of sales he sees every year from his decade-old work. Considering how much the public stands to GAIN (just imagine, free online copies of EVERYTHING written before 1991. Windows 95 in the public domain...), I just don't see the point in letting the rich become even richer without lifting a finger.
IANAL, either, but I was always under the impression that you're never allowed to keep stolen property, full stop. The fact that you made (what you thought was) a legitimate purchase doesn't change the fact that the seller did not have the right to sell the item in question.
For example, there have been a couple cases of people being conned into "buying" public property (most famously the Brooklyn Bridge.) Yes, these people were EXTREMELY gullible, so it probably wouldn't pass your "reasonable expectation" test, but let's take a step back for a moment and imagine a scenario where the person was not extraordinarily gullible, but rather was duped through nigh-superhuman effort on the part of the con artist. Let's say that the fraudster knew that the target would have a keen interested in buying the Brooklyn Bridge, if it was ever actually for sale, so he cooked up a scheme involving buying off the subject's friends and acquaintances, slipping him fake newspapers, hiring actors to play all the appropriate officials, figured out a halfway plausible reason for the sale (they're building a replacement, perhaps) etc. and in the end, he actually succeeds in convincing his target that the Brooklyn Bridge was, indeed, for sale, and the target "buys" it from the criminal. Does that now mean that the target legally owns the Brooklyn Bridge? Of course, the only sane answer is a resounding "NO!" The government did not agree to sell him anything.
I believe that the "reasonable expectation" concept you speak of pertains more to criminal culpability--the buyer be held criminally responsible, for example, if he buys the Mona Lisa (a few months after it was stolen) because it's not reasonable for him to claim that he didn't know it was stolen.
I'm not 100% sure on this, but it just makes sense--if ownership of the stolen property was actually legally transfered to the buyer, it would be utter chaos. You could steal the hope diamond, trade it to your friend for a candy bar (technically, this is a valid transaction) telling him it's worthless glass, and as long as you could prove that your friend really did think it was fake, it would become his legal property and the original owners would be SOL. Somehow, I really doubt that it works that way...
You're right in that firearms on planes aren't a brilliant idea, but you're smoking some pretty strong shit to say that a handful of terrorists could have killed dozens or hundreds of passengers. After the initial shock of the attack wore off, maybe a half dozen or so passengers would be shot, but then several dozen (or so) of the braver nearby passengers more would charge them. Just for fun, let's assume that the terrorists all have guns but the passengers don't. "Superior combat training" WILL NOT SAVE YOU from being overrun by vastly superior numbers of people fighting for their lives. Do you think that when you just shoot someone, that they just fall down and instantly lose all motor function? (This only happens if you get a good head shot.) If 5 people charge you, at close range, then it doesn't matter how awesome your gun is--2 or 3 of them WILL get through, they WILL tackle you and beat the living shit out of you and (unless you landed head shots) there's a good chance that the guys you did shoot will probably beat the shit out of you as well. I hardly need to explain what happens when someone with a gun gets shot at by 5 other people with guns.
The terrorists on Flight 93 had melee weapons and were in a tactically superior position (presumably, they had the cockpit door barricaded) and they were still forced to crash the plane to prevent the passengers from taking over. Don't get me wrong, a small force can annihilate a larger one, but it's virtually impossible to pull off in a cramped plane cabin when you are outnumbered 10:1.
Regardless of whether or not the kids viewing it is an illegal act (and I don't think this is true--usually, only the act of giving a minor pornographic material is outlawed, not the act of the minor viewing it) the porn itself remains legal. By analogy, cigarettes don't suddenly become illegal if a careless parent leaves them lying around for minors to find. The school owns the internet connection, thus it is the school's responsibility alone to manage how minors access it. The legality (nor even the social responsibilities) of an internet site don't magically change just because the school decides to give their students net access.
they would then REQUIRE any and all illicit sexual content on the web to use.xxx and ENFORCE it...school administrator's jobs of content filtering would get a thousand times easier...
What do you mean by "illicit"? Last time I checked, most types of porn are perfectly legal in this country. It's not the government's job to force perfectly legal websites to change their TDL just because YOU think that there's something wrong with the human body or sex in general.
The GP's supporting argument might not have been entirely sound, but I'd still like to see the research that proves (or strongly suggests) that sodium causes hypertension where none previously existed. I know it's only anecdotal, but I eat *way* more salt than most people I know (they always complain that my food is too salty) but my blood pressure is actually well below normal.
This is an slanderous and discriminatory statement, breathtaking in its scope that, quite frankly, any normal person should find deeply offensive.
I've had several English/Creative Writing teachers that have freely admitted that they wouldn't be teaching if they could make money off of their writing. Do I think that all people who can "do" and people who can't, teach? No. I've had a handful of truly wonderful teachers/profs... but, then, I've also had a ton of mediocre ones and a few who were aboslutely atrocious. I do think that there are more incompetents teaching than doing, and I don't think saying that makes me a bigot--just an aware observer. Teachers in this country (USA) get paid crap money. Some people put up with the low pay because they LOVE to teach, and these are the good teachers, the ones I deeply respect. But there simply aren't that many altruistic people who love to teach, so to fill in the gap they wind up hiring people for whom teaching was a fallback option. I've seen way too many teachers (even profs) just going through the motions, not bothering to read your essay but simply putting a large red check at the top. My 8th grade social studies teacher told us up front that she didn't like kids and this was just a temporary thing for her (and it was an HONORS class, I shit you not.) Too many history teachers don't care that the kids never seem to learn ANYTHING that happened after World War 2. Even the best science teachers I had neglected to tell us about the most important scientific revolutions of all time: Maxwell's vs. Newton's equasions, the Michelson-Morley experiment, Special Relativity... 102 years have past since Einstein's paper was published and STILL your average joe has no clue that time dilation is an observed FACT, not some kooky unproven theory. Yeah, it's a *little* complicated, but I GUARANTEE you kids will listen if you present time dilation as a FACT and tell them that they could get on a spaceship tomorrow (built with today's tech), fly around for, say, one year and come back and here on Earth three years will have passed. And Relativity's math isn't really beyond high school algebra...
But I digress. The point is, it's not slanderous or discriminatory to imply that--at least in this country's current environment--teaching attracts the unmotivated and incompetent. It also attracts the brilliant and altruistic, but, sadly, I think they are outweighed (because even the brilliant and altruistic are tempted by the *bucketloads* money they could make if they did something else.)
Ok nevermind, I must be going blind... read that as merely "try thousands." Yeah, hundreds of thousands is a good, realistic number to convey the kind of devastation we've wrought.
Try tens of thousands of CONFIRMED civilian casualties. Total Iraqi deaths (civilians and non-civilians) has climbed to well over 600,000, according to the Lancet Survey of Mortality (this takes into account *increased* death rates due to increased lawlessness, degraded infrastructure, poor healthcare--any factor that was directly caused by the war.)
Don't forget Xubuntu (XFCE Desktop Environment)--I use it exclusively now. The default look and feel is nearly identical to Ubuntu, but it's got a smaller memory footprint and its default applications are lighter weight than Gnome's. The desktop (as in, the area visible when all other apps are minimized) works a little different and the GUI system setting managers aren't the same (but they're just as easy to figure out and use); other than that the user interface is pretty much identical to (g)Ubuntu's--just be sure to substitute "mousepad" wherever "gedit" is referred to on the forums. Thunar (XFCE's file manager) is actually pretty similar to Nautilus.
If you're using a machine with only 256 (or, heaven forbid, 128) megs of RAM, you should really consider Xubuntu instead of Ubuntu or Kubuntu. The UI is extremely similar, compatibility is maintained, and (at least on lower-end machines) the performance gain is significant.
I tested those distros over the course of a year or two, I think. From the first distro to the last (Ubuntu) my main box had changed somewhat, but the motherboard/cpu and network card were the same. Out of curiosity, I have re-tried a few of those distros using their current versions, with mixed results. Most do make it through installation (with the exception of Red Hat--CentOS--which still inexplicably hangs), but as I recall most of them had sound issues and several had network issues.
Have I done a scientific study to determine whether Ubuntu really is the most robust? No. This is just an anecdote. However, given that so many other people appear to have similar anecdotes--and given that Ubuntu is the most popular Linux distribution and has been for some time--I do feel reasonably comfortable asserting that they simply do a better job at "just works!" than the rest.
Before Ubuntu, I tried Red Hat (this was pre-Fedora), SuSE, Debian, Knoppix, Gentoo (with the help of a friend who knew what he was doing), and Mandrake (as it was then known.) All of them had serious issues--mostly unrecognized hardware, but a couple couldn't even make it through installation (for example, Knoppix would hang no matter what I did.) I was a newbie, but I wasn't utterly helpless... I knew my way around a shell. With each distro, I spent several days troubleshooting the problem and got nowhere. I *wanted* to use Linux, but I simply couldn't afford to invest so much time making the basics work. There's a huge difference between a little tinkering in my spare time (which I was looking forward to) and trying to live without a functional network card.
And then, along came Ubuntu and EVERYTHING JUST WORKED. Obviously, your millage my vary (some people say that Ubuntu has given them nothing but headaches yet e.g. MEPIS is a dream) and I'm sure Ubuntu's improvements have since been incorporated in all of those other distros I tried, but Ubuntu's philosophy and their large community of helpful users has me sold. Virtually every single niggling little problem I had in 5.04 (the first Ubuntu release) has been resolved. I've installed Xubuntu on my mom's old laptop and she loves it (and unlike Windows, it's virtually maintainance-free.)
If you do encounter problems after installing Ubuntu, just check out ubuntuforums.org--I've installed it in half a dozen computers now, and virtually every problem I've ever encountered has been easily solved by following a step-by-step guide some kind soul has posted.
Sorry, but if you don't actually catch them committing a crime then you have no right to punish them, full stop. CRASBOs aren't so bad, but a non crime-related ASBO is simply fascism.
I'm too lazy to hunt down a link, but it was actually from a slashdot conversation. The first line is from the end of someone's post, and it was answered by another poster. The truth and implications of his single-word reply hit me like a freight train... I do believe I said "FUCK" out loud.
Slashdot Mirror
Except he's advertising that his suit can resist BULLETS now. There's a big difference between being bear-proof and bulletproof. I'll be extremely surprised if it can actually provide protection against standard high velocity FMJ rounds, let alone armor piercing rounds. As someone else has already noted, an elephant gun does NOT fire high-velocity rounds. Given that no one has yet mentioned or linked to hard evidence that the suit has actually been tested vs. modern military firearms, combined with the guy's crackpot "God/Angel light" claims, I'd say that extreme skepticism is indeed warranted when it comes to claims that the suit would be ideal for military use.
Potential riot control, animal control, and bomb squad applications is another matter entirely. There is videotaped proof that his suit can withstand blunt force trauma rather well--there is NOT proof (that I'm aware of) that it can withstand modern, high powered firearms.
Even if I accept that argument entirely (which I don't, but then like I said I'm not a fan of Western society's ideas regarding the "perfect" body) , it still makes sense for the photographer to do the work (lighting, makeup, etc.) than it does to purposefully use a lower-resolution display.
The point wasn't homophobia; the point was that a large mass of hair isn't inherently feminine--both sexes have it. I think that the vulva--which is pretty much inarguably the most feminine (external) body part of all--is much sexier than mere hair. Hair doesn't turn me off; it's just a barrier to being able to see and touch the good stuff.
And if your girl tells you that she's perfectly satisfied after 15 minutes, she's lying to you for your ego. :-p
Things don't really get interesting until she's come for the third time.
Try going down on a girl for 45+ minutes, and suddenly the shaven thing makes a lot more sense.
Plus, you gotta admit that wet lips just look hella sexier than an indistinct patch of hair under which could be hiding, well, anything.
I still don't get it. Do you guys ever see a stripper and scream "OH MY GOD, YOU HAVE A PIMPLE ON YOUR FOREHEAD!!!" ?
Stripper > porn DVD, because it's more "real."
HD porn DVD > SDTV porn DVD > porn VHS tape for the exact same reason.
What's with the massive anti-HD sentiment regarding porn? What happened when you guys see a woman in real life? Do you go "EWWWWWWW! She's so hi-def! I can see her pores!" Christ, if detail really turns you off that much why not just confine yourself to viewing hentai?
I think that just as most people (of the appropriate gender and orientation) prefer to see a naked woman in real life vs.a naked woman on DVD, so too would most people prefer to see a high-resolution picture of a naked woman vs. a picture which is so low-rez that you can actually see the individual pixels fairly clearly from 10 feet away (I can, at least.) Now don't get me wrong, that's not enough to make me want to rush out and buy an overpriced, over-DRM'ed piece of shit AND a new TV to use it with, but saying that HD is the TV equivalent of a microscope is just dumb. My laptop has a WUXGA (1920x1200) screen, and you'd have to be smoking some amazing crack to say that it makes naked women look uglier. It most certainly does NOT. It makes pictures--ALL pictures, regardless of whether or not they involve naked women--look vibrant and real in a way that makes owners of XGA-resolution laptops weep with envy. I suppose I COULD stare with my eyeball an inch from the screen and scream "AHHHHHHHH! I SEE A PIMPLE!" but... why? Just why would you do such a thing? Not to imply that imperfections bother me that much--on the contrary, I find that the plastic, 'pancake makeup' look to be pretty unappealing... I'm just saying, why would you go out of your way to look for such things?
HD isn't a microscope; it's simply a MUCH NICER PICTURE TO LOOK AT.
How about 5-10 years after public publication? "Private publication" would exclude any mass media (or any distribution at all not targeted at specific individuals, e.g. your publisher, book critics, etc.) and any for-profit distribution. Prior to public distribution, copyright would last a very long time--30+ years is fine. After public distribution has begun, I don't see any justification for paying someone for work they did DECADES ago. If your book is still selling *significant* quantities 10 years later, then you are (almost certainly) already a millionare and the benefits for society as a whole far outweigh your "right" to become even more obscenely rich.
Where have you been? Much of Windows' source code was leaked years ago. I'd wager that major code leaks would be inevitable in ANY sizable company. And even if they manage to stamp out most leaks using draconian security measures, what's to stop the OSS crowd from using a combination of source code, binaries (remember, they'd be public domain too!), and leaked APIs?
60 years is WAY too long. Can you imagine a piece of 60-year-old software that would be even remotely relevant anymore? Actually, I think that software should be dealt with seperately--perhaps a 5-10 year term--but general (artistic) copyright shouldn't last more than 15-20. There's just no reason for it; 15 years from now, the little guys will NOT be selling significant quantities of their novels/CDs/movies. Only the biggest fish in the pond stand to benefit (the ones who've already made millions of dollars) so what's your justification for letting them continue their monopoly for decades more?
Metallica isn't starving on the streets... neither is Microsoft. Joe Artist (or Coder) Sixpack is either cranking out the little hits, or he's long since moved on to his fallback career--he's not going to care if he missed out on the handful of sales he sees every year from his decade-old work. Considering how much the public stands to GAIN (just imagine, free online copies of EVERYTHING written before 1991. Windows 95 in the public domain...), I just don't see the point in letting the rich become even richer without lifting a finger.
IANAL, either, but I was always under the impression that you're never allowed to keep stolen property, full stop. The fact that you made (what you thought was) a legitimate purchase doesn't change the fact that the seller did not have the right to sell the item in question.
For example, there have been a couple cases of people being conned into "buying" public property (most famously the Brooklyn Bridge.) Yes, these people were EXTREMELY gullible, so it probably wouldn't pass your "reasonable expectation" test, but let's take a step back for a moment and imagine a scenario where the person was not extraordinarily gullible, but rather was duped through nigh-superhuman effort on the part of the con artist. Let's say that the fraudster knew that the target would have a keen interested in buying the Brooklyn Bridge, if it was ever actually for sale, so he cooked up a scheme involving buying off the subject's friends and acquaintances, slipping him fake newspapers, hiring actors to play all the appropriate officials, figured out a halfway plausible reason for the sale (they're building a replacement, perhaps) etc. and in the end, he actually succeeds in convincing his target that the Brooklyn Bridge was, indeed, for sale, and the target "buys" it from the criminal. Does that now mean that the target legally owns the Brooklyn Bridge? Of course, the only sane answer is a resounding "NO!" The government did not agree to sell him anything.
I believe that the "reasonable expectation" concept you speak of pertains more to criminal culpability--the buyer be held criminally responsible, for example, if he buys the Mona Lisa (a few months after it was stolen) because it's not reasonable for him to claim that he didn't know it was stolen.
I'm not 100% sure on this, but it just makes sense--if ownership of the stolen property was actually legally transfered to the buyer, it would be utter chaos. You could steal the hope diamond, trade it to your friend for a candy bar (technically, this is a valid transaction) telling him it's worthless glass, and as long as you could prove that your friend really did think it was fake, it would become his legal property and the original owners would be SOL. Somehow, I really doubt that it works that way...
You're right in that firearms on planes aren't a brilliant idea, but you're smoking some pretty strong shit to say that a handful of terrorists could have killed dozens or hundreds of passengers. After the initial shock of the attack wore off, maybe a half dozen or so passengers would be shot, but then several dozen (or so) of the braver nearby passengers more would charge them. Just for fun, let's assume that the terrorists all have guns but the passengers don't. "Superior combat training" WILL NOT SAVE YOU from being overrun by vastly superior numbers of people fighting for their lives. Do you think that when you just shoot someone, that they just fall down and instantly lose all motor function? (This only happens if you get a good head shot.) If 5 people charge you, at close range, then it doesn't matter how awesome your gun is--2 or 3 of them WILL get through, they WILL tackle you and beat the living shit out of you and (unless you landed head shots) there's a good chance that the guys you did shoot will probably beat the shit out of you as well. I hardly need to explain what happens when someone with a gun gets shot at by 5 other people with guns.
The terrorists on Flight 93 had melee weapons and were in a tactically superior position (presumably, they had the cockpit door barricaded) and they were still forced to crash the plane to prevent the passengers from taking over. Don't get me wrong, a small force can annihilate a larger one, but it's virtually impossible to pull off in a cramped plane cabin when you are outnumbered 10:1.
Regardless of whether or not the kids viewing it is an illegal act (and I don't think this is true--usually, only the act of giving a minor pornographic material is outlawed, not the act of the minor viewing it) the porn itself remains legal. By analogy, cigarettes don't suddenly become illegal if a careless parent leaves them lying around for minors to find. The school owns the internet connection, thus it is the school's responsibility alone to manage how minors access it. The legality (nor even the social responsibilities) of an internet site don't magically change just because the school decides to give their students net access.
they would then REQUIRE any and all illicit sexual content on the web to use .xxx and ENFORCE it...school administrator's jobs of content filtering would get a thousand times easier...
What do you mean by "illicit"? Last time I checked, most types of porn are perfectly legal in this country. It's not the government's job to force perfectly legal websites to change their TDL just because YOU think that there's something wrong with the human body or sex in general.
The GP's supporting argument might not have been entirely sound, but I'd still like to see the research that proves (or strongly suggests) that sodium causes hypertension where none previously existed. I know it's only anecdotal, but I eat *way* more salt than most people I know (they always complain that my food is too salty) but my blood pressure is actually well below normal.
That little fifty cent packet
$0.50 for a single packet of ramen? You got ripped off, dude.
This is an slanderous and discriminatory statement, breathtaking in its scope that, quite frankly, any normal person should find deeply offensive.
I've had several English/Creative Writing teachers that have freely admitted that they wouldn't be teaching if they could make money off of their writing. Do I think that all people who can "do" and people who can't, teach? No. I've had a handful of truly wonderful teachers/profs... but, then, I've also had a ton of mediocre ones and a few who were aboslutely atrocious. I do think that there are more incompetents teaching than doing, and I don't think saying that makes me a bigot--just an aware observer. Teachers in this country (USA) get paid crap money. Some people put up with the low pay because they LOVE to teach, and these are the good teachers, the ones I deeply respect. But there simply aren't that many altruistic people who love to teach, so to fill in the gap they wind up hiring people for whom teaching was a fallback option. I've seen way too many teachers (even profs) just going through the motions, not bothering to read your essay but simply putting a large red check at the top. My 8th grade social studies teacher told us up front that she didn't like kids and this was just a temporary thing for her (and it was an HONORS class, I shit you not.) Too many history teachers don't care that the kids never seem to learn ANYTHING that happened after World War 2. Even the best science teachers I had neglected to tell us about the most important scientific revolutions of all time: Maxwell's vs. Newton's equasions, the Michelson-Morley experiment, Special Relativity... 102 years have past since Einstein's paper was published and STILL your average joe has no clue that time dilation is an observed FACT, not some kooky unproven theory. Yeah, it's a *little* complicated, but I GUARANTEE you kids will listen if you present time dilation as a FACT and tell them that they could get on a spaceship tomorrow (built with today's tech), fly around for, say, one year and come back and here on Earth three years will have passed. And Relativity's math isn't really beyond high school algebra...
But I digress. The point is, it's not slanderous or discriminatory to imply that--at least in this country's current environment--teaching attracts the unmotivated and incompetent. It also attracts the brilliant and altruistic, but, sadly, I think they are outweighed (because even the brilliant and altruistic are tempted by the *bucketloads* money they could make if they did something else.)
Indiana Jones and the Craftmatic Adjustable Bed.
Ok nevermind, I must be going blind... read that as merely "try thousands." Yeah, hundreds of thousands is a good, realistic number to convey the kind of devastation we've wrought.
Try tens of thousands of CONFIRMED civilian casualties. Total Iraqi deaths (civilians and non-civilians) has climbed to well over 600,000, according to the Lancet Survey of Mortality (this takes into account *increased* death rates due to increased lawlessness, degraded infrastructure, poor healthcare--any factor that was directly caused by the war.)
Don't forget Xubuntu (XFCE Desktop Environment)--I use it exclusively now. The default look and feel is nearly identical to Ubuntu, but it's got a smaller memory footprint and its default applications are lighter weight than Gnome's. The desktop (as in, the area visible when all other apps are minimized) works a little different and the GUI system setting managers aren't the same (but they're just as easy to figure out and use); other than that the user interface is pretty much identical to (g)Ubuntu's--just be sure to substitute "mousepad" wherever "gedit" is referred to on the forums. Thunar (XFCE's file manager) is actually pretty similar to Nautilus.
If you're using a machine with only 256 (or, heaven forbid, 128) megs of RAM, you should really consider Xubuntu instead of Ubuntu or Kubuntu. The UI is extremely similar, compatibility is maintained, and (at least on lower-end machines) the performance gain is significant.
I tested those distros over the course of a year or two, I think. From the first distro to the last (Ubuntu) my main box had changed somewhat, but the motherboard/cpu and network card were the same. Out of curiosity, I have re-tried a few of those distros using their current versions, with mixed results. Most do make it through installation (with the exception of Red Hat--CentOS--which still inexplicably hangs), but as I recall most of them had sound issues and several had network issues.
Have I done a scientific study to determine whether Ubuntu really is the most robust? No. This is just an anecdote. However, given that so many other people appear to have similar anecdotes--and given that Ubuntu is the most popular Linux distribution and has been for some time--I do feel reasonably comfortable asserting that they simply do a better job at "just works!" than the rest.
Before Ubuntu, I tried Red Hat (this was pre-Fedora), SuSE, Debian, Knoppix, Gentoo (with the help of a friend who knew what he was doing), and Mandrake (as it was then known.) All of them had serious issues--mostly unrecognized hardware, but a couple couldn't even make it through installation (for example, Knoppix would hang no matter what I did.) I was a newbie, but I wasn't utterly helpless... I knew my way around a shell. With each distro, I spent several days troubleshooting the problem and got nowhere. I *wanted* to use Linux, but I simply couldn't afford to invest so much time making the basics work. There's a huge difference between a little tinkering in my spare time (which I was looking forward to) and trying to live without a functional network card.
And then, along came Ubuntu and EVERYTHING JUST WORKED. Obviously, your millage my vary (some people say that Ubuntu has given them nothing but headaches yet e.g. MEPIS is a dream) and I'm sure Ubuntu's improvements have since been incorporated in all of those other distros I tried, but Ubuntu's philosophy and their large community of helpful users has me sold. Virtually every single niggling little problem I had in 5.04 (the first Ubuntu release) has been resolved. I've installed Xubuntu on my mom's old laptop and she loves it (and unlike Windows, it's virtually maintainance-free.)
If you do encounter problems after installing Ubuntu, just check out ubuntuforums.org--I've installed it in half a dozen computers now, and virtually every problem I've ever encountered has been easily solved by following a step-by-step guide some kind soul has posted.
Ubuntu really is "Linux for Human Beings."
Sorry, but if you don't actually catch them committing a crime then you have no right to punish them, full stop. CRASBOs aren't so bad, but a non crime-related ASBO is simply fascism.
I'm too lazy to hunt down a link, but it was actually from a slashdot conversation. The first line is from the end of someone's post, and it was answered by another poster. The truth and implications of his single-word reply hit me like a freight train... I do believe I said "FUCK" out loud.