People seek happiness. Some people may think that earning lots of money is the only way to achieve happiness. Of course it's BS. However, statistics show that average wealth and happiness are positively correalted, so there is a link between them in modern society at least.
Statistics? There are statistics correlating wealth and happiness? Of course wealth can be measured in some quantifiable way, but happiness? What did they do, call people up and ask them if they were happy, and then how much they made? Smells rather fishy to me, a reference to back up this assertion would be appreciated.
Furthermore, all it means to be "positively correlated" is that for datapoints {X} and {Y}, plotted on the x and y axes, respectively, a linear approximation for the data has a positive slope.
You understand, of course, that it is possible to come up with a linear approximant to any data set, without saying anything about how far the data deviates from the approximation.
Put another way, two completely unrelated sets of data -- for example, the phase of the moon on a particular day and the degree that my balls itch that day -- can be graphed against each other and an approximation can be found; logically, this function must have either a positive slope, a negative slope, or a slope equal to zero.
The chances of a zero valued slope are next to nil, for reasons that should be clear. Positive or negative slopes imply positive or negative correlations, respectively.
It should be relatively clear that correlation, therefore, in no way implies causality, or even relation.
The reason I'm pointing all this out is because "to say something is positively correlated" as evidence of the validity of an argument is, in absence of other data, basically a worthless statement, intended to confuse those who back away when numbers are waved around (which sadly includes a large portion of society).
I'm not closed to your point, mind you -- it's entirely possible that happiness and money are positively correlated in a meaningful way -- but I'd really like to see the data so that I can come to my own conclusion. My personal experience has been that most everyone, regardless of income level, finds something to complain about.
You're right, if you're tracking debian (or whatever) directly. But in a corporate environment, it doesn't work that way. IT maintains a test system (possibly several) that reflect the default installs of the machines that the company has on people's desks. So for example, all the pencil-pushers have a system with word processing and spreadsheet software, the engineers CAD design software, or whatever. These are just examples.
Then, when it comes time to update, apply a patch, or what have you, they carefully test each package's install on the test systems, before deploying them. Once they've ensured that there are no obvious problems with the approved setups, they upload the packages their repository server -- and it is this server that the drone machines track, not http.us.debian.org or whatever.
In this situation, the cron job ensures that the users' end machines are automagically updated, whether it be for security patches or software upgrades.
With this sort of setup, IT maintains (for a moderately large company) perhaps 5 machines, and as payback for that anal work, the whole system scales to essentially as many machines as you have bandwidth to support -- on your LAN.
But wait, it can be even better! Don't actually let everyone have their own machine, I mean, why bother? Run a RAID'd fileserver with a ton of space that keeps users' files, and nfs mount them on a thin client. With gigabit ethernet, running X applications over the network is pretty low latency, even for a massive corporation.
Hell, you could even just run X terminals, and put only an LCD display, keyboard and small network enabled terminal box connected to a cluster in IT! Then you can setup consolidated backup solutions, manage security, and just generally keep an eye on employee productivity, all while saving god knows how much in desktops.
This kind of setup also ensures that any employee has the ability to log in to any computer and use it as if he were at his desk, no problems.
This is why Linux will eventually rock the corporate world. It can be centrally maintained in a way that Windows simply cannot be, and it is easily locked down. Employees can continue to work as if they were using their own desktop machine, but in actuality, they are running on a centrally managed cluster that redundantly backs up their data and intelligently allocates CPU/disk quotas. They can work effectively from anywhere on the corporate campus.
It's utopia, absolutely. It's not there yet, but it will be... it's simply too attractive, and ultimately too easy and cheap to do, to not do it. Especially in large corps.
If you think about it, one of the primary differences between the GPL and BSD is whose freedom the license intends to protect. It's a subtle thing, but true nonetheless.
The BSD license intends to protect the freedom of the programmer, whereas the GPL intends to protect the freedom of the program.
The GPL is not concerned about developer's rights, unless the developer's core values vis-a-vis the freedom of the program closely follow the ideology of the GPL. For example, I (as a Free Software advocate) feel that the GPL protects my rights, but that's mainly because I don't consider the right to close a program to be one that is socially beneficial, rather the way I don't consider, say, theft to be socially beneficial.
The BSD license, on the other hand, ensures that the person who has the program may do whatever they want with it, including relicense it under virtually any license they feel like. So in this case, the developer's rights to do what he wants are protected, at the expense of the rights of the program.
It may seem strange to think of a program, essentially a piece of mathematics that is by nature abstract, as being an entity deserving rights, but if you actually read RMS you'll realize that's very much how he views the world.
So it really isn't a matter of one being more free than the other, in my personal opinion -- rather, it's a matter of whose freedom we are protecting. If you are concerned about the program being Free, BSD is a poor choice for a license, because there's a good chance large portions of the program will be co-opted (enslaved, if you will, in keeping with the "freedom" analogy) into a derivative work that is not itself free. The GPL will ensure that the program (and all its derivatives) will ever be free, but you as the developer must accept certain restrictions in order to ensure that freedom.
For what it's worth, I don't think either view is necessarily wrong, but they have different goals -- and therefore different means when it comes to reaching those goals.
If you value the freedom of an individual, BSD is very much for you. Very libertarian in nature. If you value freedom for the program, which essentially translates to guaranteed freedom for the community, then the GPL is for you (which is perhaps a much more socialist view). I generally fall into the latter category, but it hasn't stopped me from extensively using BSD (OBSD in particular).
religion - The persuit of superprofits is the religion of the capitalist.
party - The one party, the glorious party, our party, the Communist Party.
Lord almighty are you full of shit.
I agree with what you're trying to say, though, even if your "examples" are made-up politicized crap based on total ignorance about the state of the world.
Honestly, these China trolls are really starting to get to me. For yourself, for those around you, and yes, for me, please, for godsake, try, just try to become a little more worldly. Actually going to China might be a good start.
This kind of argumentation is really pretty childish. "Once you get rid of the shallow fluff, you get down from 1,000,000 to about 500,000." This is interesting. You've been counting, I presume? I see you've managed to narrow it down to 50,000, even, after removing some "endless lists" and "articles copied from elsewhere."
Of course, none of this is true, rather like the guy who makes up statistics to prove his point. Always be suspicious of numbers randomly inserted into an argument. But then, it doesn't seem like you're intent on making much of an argument, just bashing Wikipedia.
Then, we have this gem: "Wikipedia is much like the rest of the 'net, a waste wasteland with a few bright spots. It's equally true that Wikipedia boosters can't discern the truth because of the blinding glare of their zealotry."
I mean, where did you learn to debate? First you pull some numbers out of your backside, then you claim anyone that doesn't agree with your stance on Wikipedia is a zealot that can't see the truth because they're blinded by their views. Nothing like mud-slinging to cover up holes in one's argument.
Honestly. If you have actual reasons for your personal dislike of Wikipedia, then share them. If you have actual, verifiable data that supports your wild claims about the number of quality articles, cite them.
But if you're just going to make shit up and use ad homniem arguments to discredit people that might see fit to disagree with you, well... I guess I really don't know what to say.
Hardly. Theo wouldn't give a free software award to RMS, perhaps, because he considers GPL licensed code to be less than Free, but RMS considers BSD-licensed code to be Free, and he's the one giving the award.
Despite their differing views on what constitutes Free Software, though, both men are largely motivated by ideology. Consider Theo's reaction to the ipf debacle, his response to the XFree86 license change, and his appeal to the community to help fight the good fight against wlan cards that require non-freely redistributable binary firmware to function. This man is every bit as committed to software freedom as RMS is.
Linus, on the other hand, has stated publically on many occasions that he sees nothing wrong with proprietary software, and uses BitKeeper (a proprietary version control solution) to manage the Linux kernel tree (rather than say, CVS or Subversion) because, in his words, "it's better".
Without passing judgement, it is very clear that Linus values convenience above principle. This is part of the reason so many Slashbots like him: he is, in their minds, "refreshingly" a-political.
Whatever their differences, RMS and Theo are both idealistic. They are primarily motivated by their desire for Freedom, not because they want to produce the best system ever (although that may be true as well).
To me, RMS giving TdR this award is absolutely appropriate, and while I didn't expect it, I'm very pleased. I would be very surprised if Linus were named, and to be honest, I would be a little disappointed.
Not that I have anything against Linus, mind you -- he's a brilliant guy -- but at the core, he's an engineer, and so awarding him for his commitment to the ideology of Free Software would go rather against the grain, imho.
I'm American, AC. Whatsmore, if you'd bothered to read the editorial, they were not insulting Google -- they were calling on their own government to get its rear in gear and do the same thing (digitize French literature) lest the internet be inundated by only written works from English speaking cultures. Google was in no way slighted. This was Slashdot sensationalism at its best.
Asians are, on a whole, much less confrontational than Europeans are. Japanese, Koreans and Chinese are all very polite outwardly, but they have a way of passive aggressively insulting you that's quite difficult to pick up on if you don't speak the language well.
My understanding of Japanese is very basic, and I do not speak Korean at all, although I know something about it. I speak Mandarin fluently, though. The thing to consider here is that in a language like say, Korean, which has 7 (!) different grammatically distinguished degrees of politeness, a non-Korean would be hard-pressed to detect if the wrong one had been used to address him, but other Koreans would be very aware of the slight. Further, the non-Korean in question would lose face because he did not realize he was being insulted.
The Chinese are very similar, although their language lacks the grammatically enforced politeness that Korean or Japanese do. It is considered bad form in all these cultures to be directly insulting and/or aggressive, even when you have been insulted yourself (there are limits, of course). You can, however, make the other person look bad. It's all a face game, and the reason foreigners don't realize it's going on is because they aren't on the right wavelength.
Conversely, an American will think a French person is being rude when in fact he is being polite, within the bounds of his cultural norms. This is because we project our own cultural norms onto other cultures, which is normal. So you see smiling and friendly Japanese people and presume they are being polite, when in fact their definition of politeness is so subtle and has so many levels that you would likely be unaware if you were being insulted; and you go to France and think everyone is rude, when in fact they're being normal (or even polite). You incur their ire because your response to their perceived rudeness is rude, and you think justifiably so, but they have no idea you took it that way. You lose face in Japan because you were insulted and didn't realize it.
Cultural differences are what make the world interesting, but they can also be difficult. A few months exposure is really never enough -- I'm not sure 20 years would be enough, if the culture were different enough from your own.
Still, it's something to think about next time you travel.
French people smoke a lot. The notion of smoking/non-smoking isn't as defined there. That said, he and his friend should have gone to the smoking section, but in general, if someone asks you if they can smoke, it's a rhetorical politeness, and saying no -- especially in the way you did it -- is somewhat rude. Because he is most likely very aware that he is in the non-smoking section, or he wouldn't have asked. Your response, even in English, translates to, "What are you, a retard? Where are we sitting? Asshole."
If you absolutely couldn't deal with it, a better response probably would have been an explanation of why you would rather he didn't. Of course, in that situation, you might embarass your friend by making her out to be the reason... it's kind of a weird situation, really. You could have said that you were trying to quit or something, I dunno.
Probably the easiest thing would just have been to say you didn't mind, even if you did:)
One thing that I think bites Americans in the ass is the assumption that French culture is relatively similar to American culture. There is, in fact, a relatively large cultural difference, especially with respect to politeness norms.
The French speak very directly and do not appreciate undue familiarity from people they don't know. French, like most European languages other than English, has an active T-V distinction (they have two forms of you, one of which is formal) and they rely heavily on this and other niceties in speech to indicate politeness. Americans, and to a lesser extent the English, depend greatly on tone and facial features to communicate politeness. That is, Americans think they're being polite if they're being friendly.
I'll give you a concrete example. I was in at CDG airport in Paris and I needed to fill out an immigration form. I realized that I didn't have a pen. I went over to the airport security office that was right there and asked if I might borrow one. What I said was exactly what I might say in English, although I used vous (polite) rather than tu (impolite). I said, "Excuse me, but do you have a pen I might use?" I said it with a smile and in a friendly way.
The lady responded, very curtly, also with vous: "Sir, you might consider saying please." She was older than I was. I realized that I had been away from France too long; I had committed a cultural faux pas. To an American, her response was rude. In France, a woman the age of my mother (who works with the police to boot) chastising me for my lack of politesse is absolutely kosher, and I was in the wrong. But had I been more American, I would have certainly bristled at her perceived rudeness. Instead, I appologized, said please, and got the pen.
It's important to realize that neither way of interfacing with people is wrong, per se. Rather, it's a question of norms. The problem is that the French care about different things than Americans do. They care a lot less about your tone and whether you smile or not, and a lot more about whether you address them correctly (Monsieur, Madame, never a first name), greet them properly when you meet them, use vous where appropriate, etc.
It's especially important if you're dealing with people older than yourself. People your own age are likely to be much more friendly and relaxed, adding to the confusion -- age is a big factor in determining how polite you need to be.
If you think France is bad, try Japan, or even worse, Korea.
Maybe Jeanneney wants it instead to be a unipolar worldview dominated by the French language and French culture.
Maybe. Or maybe he just wants to ensure that his culture, which is rich and has been around a long time, doesn't get destroyed because access to another country's culture is more convenient due to its ubiquity on the internet. He doesn't say. I think my view is somewhat more likely, though -- you pretty much never hear French people telling Americans how they should behave in their own country (or anyone in their own country, for that matter). The same is not necessarily true of us; think about that.
They still seem to think they're a world power for some reason.
Hm, well, I'm going to go ahead and say it: they are a world power. Fact: no one is in the same league as the United States militarily or economically. That means that we can rightly claim to be the world's only current superpower. But the world's only power? That's going a little too far, I think. France wields considerable international influence, both politically and militarily. While they may not be strong enough to act unilaterally, their stated refusal to say, back us in Iraq certainly gave strength to other nations to do the same.
I think claiming they aren't a world power is a little silly. If all you wanted was to french-bash, then ok. But if accuracy was what you wanted...
If his country came up with Google, then sure it's a case, but sorry they didn't. The best thing he can do is ignore it and not use it.
Not too sure what you mean by this. As countless others have already noted, in the French editorial he published, he does not attack Google. Rather, he states that the internet has become a vehicle for dissemination of culture, and that Google's move to digitize English language books will only increase Americanization. He argues that France and the EU must do the same with their considerable number of literary works, to offset this effect. Not at all a bad idea.
Of course he cannot force France and the EU to stop using Google, as that would violate their rights of freedom, which is somewhat more flexible than the United State's Bill of Rights lately.
Well, it depends on what you mean of course. Their stance of software patents is (at least for the moment) much more forward thinking than ours, to be sure, but with respect to speech freedoms, my opinion is that they (France especially) lag behind somewhat...
But again, their country, their culture, their laws, etc. We have to stop thinking we can enforce our world view on everyone.
I think you'd better stick to reading articles in the original language, and not count on machine translation to communicate something as subtle as indirect criticism. If you can't speak the original language, then maybe you ought to take your cues from someone who can.
I speak French, and I didn't get that impression from the article at all. He conjures the spectre of Americanization as a motivator, because increasing economic and cultural domination by America is a concern for many French people. Ultimately, he wants France (and Europe in general) to take greater steps to ensure that the culture of the world does not end up being uniquely Anglo-Saxon.
Google is as popular a search engine there as it is here (and I say here not knowing where you are, because Google is basically the most popular search engine anywhere). I don't think he or anyone in France is surprised that an American corporation would work to digitize English works. His point is that French/EU corps and governments need to follow suit, and I agree wholeheartedly.
You're being sort of silly. French is most certainly not dying -- it is, if I recall correctly, the 11th most natively spoken language in the world, and ranks 5th or 6th when people who speak it as a second language are considered (primarily because this includes most of North Africa).
It isn't about language, it's about culture. It isn't that the French see no value in American culture, it's that they see value in their own culture. Furthermore, they most definitely are not keeping it static -- it continues to evolve in interesting ways.
I can't comment on Canada, as I've never lived there. But France is a very interesting country, and their policy of cultural protectionism is not "enforced". The truth is that the French people care deeply about their language, their culture, etc, and they support taking active steps to protect it from an increasingly ubiquitous American cultural influence.
Frankly, it shows. When you're in France, you can hear a lot of French music on the radio, there's a lot of French literature, and just a general feeling of pride in their culture. Across the border in Germany, radios play mostly American/English music, local bands often sing in English (despite being German) because it's considered "cool", and people seem a bit embarassed by things that are German. Sweden is even worse. My impression, as an outsider, is that French culture is vibrant, and the rest of Europe is being Americanized.
And I think this fact is not lost on the French, who understand that preventing American corporate interests (ie, the RIAA and MPAA, for example) from culturally subverting them by, say, forcing some percentage of music played on the radio to be in French, by promoting French films, etc, has had a net positive effect. Young people in France are much more "French", it seems -- in the sense that they are connected to the culture of their country -- than people from Germany or say, England are.
Which is not to say that other European countries are not considerably different from America or anything. Just that the French, as a people, care more about their culture, and take steps to protect it.
...but all the stereotypes of geeks being socially inept have Aspbergers at their root.
This is what I would call a load of crap.
I mean, I realize it feels good to be able to explain away social ineptitude with some magical neurological hand-waving (oh, I'm sorry I'm a dick, it's just that I have Aspergers -- most geeks have it to some degree), but when it comes straight down to it, it just ain't so.
I have worked with autistic kids before; my first girlfriend and my college roommate both specialized in autism and working with such people was/is their profession. It seems to me that some of the self-described autistic people on Slashdot are so high-functioning that describing their state as autism essentially takes the meaning from the word.
The truth is, people have different skills and talents. My brother is exceptionally good at video games, for example, while I lack the attention span and motor skills to effectively play them. I'm better with people than he is. We all have our strengths and weaknesses, because we are not all alike. Serial insensitivity to other people's emotional state and a predilection for consistancy are symptoms of autism, but possession of symptoms is not sufficient for diagnosis.
While I have met at least one person that is actually a bona-fide sufferer of Asperger's -- ie, he was diagnosed as such by someone other than himself or a well-meaning school counselor or "psychologist" who said something like, "Well, you might have a mild-form of Asperger's..." when trying to explain to a confused kid with no social skills and an unsual love of math why he doesn't fit in -- the truth is, the impression I have of most "Asperger's" sufferers is that they're mostly just normal geeks that would rather believe that there is something chemical that prevents them from engaging socially rather than just plain not being good at it.
I mean, when someone isn't good at Math, we don't start saying, "Well, maybe you have a mild form of mental retardation." After all, retards aren't usually good at math! Heck, maybe it's true! Why don't we say this? Because we understand that some people just aren't as good at math as others. This is true of all skills.
I hate to say this, but all this "I have a mild form of Asperger's" or "geek behaviour is a manifestation of Asperger's syndrome" is what I would call, plainly, a load of crap. Pop-psychology at its worst.
So why do we accept it? Why do people keep up this charade? Because we want to believe that there's some more exotic reason for our shortcomings than them being just that -- shortcomings.
Believe it or not, for 99% of us, social ability is something that is well within our reach. All we need to do is work hard at being better at it, practice, and want to get better. It annoys us that frat-boy John that we've always resented and that we privately think beneath us can so easily master a skill that seems beyond us; fearing failure, we find a thousand reasons we shouldn't even try to play his game. But were we to actual set our minds to it, we could overcome these barriers, because despite our fantasies of neurophysiological differences that neatly explain our lack of social skills, we are able to learn these things. We just never bother trying.
It would simply be too embarassing to fail at something that people we discount as morons do everyday with ease. It's painful.
Painful, but possible.
That's the difference, you see. People who are actually suffering from Asperger's are blind, in a way. They can honestly not perceive things like sarcasm, emotional stress, etc. There is a part of the world they cannot perceive. This is not the same as the geek who is frustrated by his dating difficulties. This is a real, bona-fide disability, which is relatively rare and quite difficult to overcome.
I don't have a lot of respect for all the people out there who write off their "inability to be socially adept" as a mild form of Aspergers. I've worked in IT most of my life; most of my friends have been geeks. And while 99% of them are hopeless socially, autistic they most definitely are not.
Just like people who suck at math aren't retarded.
Lots of other people have already attacked the validity of this study, called it FUD, etc, so I won't bother.
My impression, as an administrator, is that security is very much a function of the administrator. While I don't use Windows myself, my impression is that someone who knows a lot about the system -- which does not include me -- would be able to secure it very efficiently. I've known some Windows guys, and they definitely seem to be able to lock their systems down.
Of course, a stupid admin -- which includes your average user -- will have his box rooted immediately. What I'm pointing out (and many people have pointed it out before) is that security is very much a function of administration.
Having said that, though, not all OSs are created equal.
If I'm in charge of UNIX security, and I'm working with a competent Windows admin, I have the utmost faith that he'll be able to keep his systems as secure as mine. But because his vendor doesn't practice full disclosure, he will always have less to work with than I will. Whereas I will know about a vulnerability within days of it being discovered, and will have the option to shut off the relevant service and hopefully (quickly) patch the relevant files, he is essentially at the mercy of the vendor.
Even if the vulnerability is exposed, he is stuck because he must wait for the vendor to get off their butts and supply a patch. This may take quite some time. When he gets the patch, it is (necessarily) a binary patch, and he cannot examine it to make sure it doesn't break his existing setup. This is not a Windows-specific problem; it is a problem of closed source operating systems.
I'll end this with an anecdote. In my professional opinion, the most secure OS that anyone is likely to deploy today is OpenBSD. Ironically, of all the myriad OSs I have had the pleasure of running, the only time I have ever been rooted was on OpenBSD.
I was in university at the time, and I had setup a NAT-type home setup for my housemates and I to share our DSL line. I had obtained a 486 on the cheap and ran OpenBSD on it as a firewall... I believe it was 3.0. I was on IRC and had to go to class, so I left. Around that time, the SSH vulnerability was announced and someone (I presume) fished my IP off of IRC and wacked me. I had the SSH port open because I often logged in from the computer lab at school to check my e-mail.
Now, he didn't do any damage -- he changed my root password and tried his best to attack the other computers on my network. Thankfully, my roommates' WinME boxes were turned off, so all he found was Solaris 8 on SPARC and OpenVMS on Alpha, the latter being my primary machine. He attempted an x86 attack on my Sun, which obviously failed, and I very much doubt he had any idea what to do about the VMS box.
Despite this experience, I still see OpenBSD as a tremendously secure platform. I was just lax, as an administrator, and I hadn't heard about the SSH vuln.
It's always amused me, though. When people ask what they should run if they care about security, I never hesitate to point them to OBSD. But it's the only machine I've ever had broken into.
Just goes to show, no amount of work on the vendor's part can make up for a lazy admin.
You know, I had a similar experience when the G5 came out. All that 64-bit goodness, so powerful, PPC to boot -- and a pretty case -- and Mac OS X -- and I just started thinking about buying one for my next computer.
And I thought about it, long and hard, and I realized that I'd just end up installing Debian on it. Because when it comes right down to it, OS X is one of those interfaces that, while pretty, suits people that don't want to tweak it. It's not Free; I can't hack the source code. Lots of people on here say things like, "You don't need it to be open source, it's not like you ever look at the source code anyway", but that's not true. I do look at the source code when I want to know how something works.
My gf has a Titanium Powerbook with OS X and she loves it. I think it's a great match for her -- she doesn't know much about computers and she doesn't want to hack around on it, she just wants to write word documents and basically use it the way the average consumer uses a Windows box.
A while ago, there was a great post (modded troll, of course) that pretty much phrased my thoughts on OS X exactly (albeit in a somewhat more vitriolic way). The basic truth is that Linux/BSD offer you freedom, and OS X doesn't.
The people that don't care about that, well... I guess, at some level, I just don't care about what they use. If they migrate to Apple, well, good for them... and good for us.
Re:Someone set us up the bomb
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SHA-1 Broken
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What surprises me is that they're from Shandong. Who'd have thought that Shandong would have good cryptoanalysts? I thought all Shandong people were good at was drinking and speaking excessively bad Mandarin.
While I would like little more than a Slashdot producing validating CSS/XHTML, with better accessibility features, etc, etc, the truth is that this bug has nothing to do with "bad" HTML, as has been mentioned many times in this thread.
In fact, on the bugzilla bug (which I would link to, but bugzilla doesn't accept Slashdot referers) there is a small piece of html which reproduces the race condition every time and IIRC it is not invalid HTML.
This is a gecko problem, and it is fixed in CVS; if you don't want to run a nightly, you'll get it in 1.1.
You make a good point -- why trust the ravings of a lunatic mass murderer -- but at the same time, given his reason and Bush's reason, which seems closer to the truth?
Leaving the issue of whether he actually is a lunatic mass murderer or not alone for the moment, which seems more likely: the digested sound-bite propaganda (hates our freedom) or the one that suggests that he might have had an actual reason based on things the US has actually done that he didn't like?
Partisan raving aside, the problem with the whole "hates our freedom" thing is that it is clearly designed to be wartime propaganda. Look at it. It takes the one thing that every American values -- our freedom -- and makes it out to be something that Osama hates.
The other takes things that, while certainly not warranting something like the WTC attacks, are considered bad by a great number of people nowhere near as crazy as Osama: namely, support for Israel in the face of its flagrant disregard for UN resolutions and support of the theocratic regime in Saudi Arabia.
See, no one is going to come away from "he hates our freedom" thinking that Osama, for all his lunacy, might actually have a point or a reason worth considering for his hatred of the US. It's a great way to make sure everyone is behind you, everyone supports you. Osama's reasons are a little bit more of gray area. I don't think anyone would say, "Damn, Osama has a point, I guess we should do what he says and not kill him slowly like we'd planned," but people might say, "After we kill him slowly, maybe we should evaluate how our actions in the middle east are affecting the way the US is viewed there, and how we can help stabilize the region by not generally coming off as total dicks."
I believe it was Sun Tzu who said, "If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle."
We are in a situation here where, by way of wartime propaganda, we are being encouraged to not consider the motivations of the enemy. This, from a strategic perspective, is very dangerous. There was a documentary about Robert S. Macnamara a while ago, called "The Fog of War"; did you see it? (I recommend it, it was very interesting.) Robert S. Macnamara was Secretary of Defense under JFK and Lyndon Johnson. He was around for the Bay of Pigs fiasco, and Vietnam was called "Macnamara's war" back in the day. The guy was one of the west's primary strategists during the cold war; it's very interesting hearing his perspective now, years later, as an old man.
He comments on how he saw the North Vietnamese versus how they saw themselves, and it's really quite insightful. He says that at the time, he saw the North Vietnamese as being puppets for the Soviets and the Chinese, attempting to spread communism into South East Asia. Much later, he talked with his equivalent on the Vietnamese side and was told that from their perspective, the Americans were imperialists who wanted nothing more than to colonize where the French had failed. When presented with the idea that they were in fact acting as proxy for war with the PRC and USSR, his Vietnamese counterpart absolutely scoffed. "Vietnam was occupied by China before it was occupied by the French," he said (I'm paraphrasing). "We had never been our own country; we were fighting for our independance. No matter how many tanks or military personnel you had sent, we would have won, because we were not invaders -- we were fighting for our freedom."
While we Americans may laugh at the Vietnamese view of freedom, it's pretty apparent that he was absolutely right. They handed us our asses in Vietnam; they then did the same to the Chinese in 1979. It was a classic case of not knowing your enemy, and Robert Macnamara makes a point of using this and other examples from his life to illustr
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Shouldn't that be, "In no space at all, you'll be generating double slits in time" ?
Statistics? There are statistics correlating wealth and happiness? Of course wealth can be measured in some quantifiable way, but happiness? What did they do, call people up and ask them if they were happy, and then how much they made? Smells rather fishy to me, a reference to back up this assertion would be appreciated.
Furthermore, all it means to be "positively correlated" is that for datapoints {X} and {Y}, plotted on the x and y axes, respectively, a linear approximation for the data has a positive slope.
You understand, of course, that it is possible to come up with a linear approximant to any data set, without saying anything about how far the data deviates from the approximation.
Put another way, two completely unrelated sets of data -- for example, the phase of the moon on a particular day and the degree that my balls itch that day -- can be graphed against each other and an approximation can be found; logically, this function must have either a positive slope, a negative slope, or a slope equal to zero.
The chances of a zero valued slope are next to nil, for reasons that should be clear. Positive or negative slopes imply positive or negative correlations, respectively.
It should be relatively clear that correlation, therefore, in no way implies causality, or even relation.
The reason I'm pointing all this out is because "to say something is positively correlated" as evidence of the validity of an argument is, in absence of other data, basically a worthless statement, intended to confuse those who back away when numbers are waved around (which sadly includes a large portion of society).
I'm not closed to your point, mind you -- it's entirely possible that happiness and money are positively correlated in a meaningful way -- but I'd really like to see the data so that I can come to my own conclusion. My personal experience has been that most everyone, regardless of income level, finds something to complain about.
You're right, if you're tracking debian (or whatever) directly. But in a corporate environment, it doesn't work that way. IT maintains a test system (possibly several) that reflect the default installs of the machines that the company has on people's desks. So for example, all the pencil-pushers have a system with word processing and spreadsheet software, the engineers CAD design software, or whatever. These are just examples.
... it's simply too attractive, and ultimately too easy and cheap to do, to not do it. Especially in large corps.
Then, when it comes time to update, apply a patch, or what have you, they carefully test each package's install on the test systems, before deploying them. Once they've ensured that there are no obvious problems with the approved setups, they upload the packages their repository server -- and it is this server that the drone machines track, not http.us.debian.org or whatever.
In this situation, the cron job ensures that the users' end machines are automagically updated, whether it be for security patches or software upgrades.
With this sort of setup, IT maintains (for a moderately large company) perhaps 5 machines, and as payback for that anal work, the whole system scales to essentially as many machines as you have bandwidth to support -- on your LAN.
But wait, it can be even better! Don't actually let everyone have their own machine, I mean, why bother? Run a RAID'd fileserver with a ton of space that keeps users' files, and nfs mount them on a thin client. With gigabit ethernet, running X applications over the network is pretty low latency, even for a massive corporation.
Hell, you could even just run X terminals, and put only an LCD display, keyboard and small network enabled terminal box connected to a cluster in IT! Then you can setup consolidated backup solutions, manage security, and just generally keep an eye on employee productivity, all while saving god knows how much in desktops.
This kind of setup also ensures that any employee has the ability to log in to any computer and use it as if he were at his desk, no problems.
This is why Linux will eventually rock the corporate world. It can be centrally maintained in a way that Windows simply cannot be, and it is easily locked down. Employees can continue to work as if they were using their own desktop machine, but in actuality, they are running on a centrally managed cluster that redundantly backs up their data and intelligently allocates CPU/disk quotas. They can work effectively from anywhere on the corporate campus.
It's utopia, absolutely. It's not there yet, but it will be
If you think about it, one of the primary differences between the GPL and BSD is whose freedom the license intends to protect. It's a subtle thing, but true nonetheless.
The BSD license intends to protect the freedom of the programmer, whereas the GPL intends to protect the freedom of the program.
The GPL is not concerned about developer's rights, unless the developer's core values vis-a-vis the freedom of the program closely follow the ideology of the GPL. For example, I (as a Free Software advocate) feel that the GPL protects my rights, but that's mainly because I don't consider the right to close a program to be one that is socially beneficial, rather the way I don't consider, say, theft to be socially beneficial.
The BSD license, on the other hand, ensures that the person who has the program may do whatever they want with it, including relicense it under virtually any license they feel like. So in this case, the developer's rights to do what he wants are protected, at the expense of the rights of the program.
It may seem strange to think of a program, essentially a piece of mathematics that is by nature abstract, as being an entity deserving rights, but if you actually read RMS you'll realize that's very much how he views the world.
So it really isn't a matter of one being more free than the other, in my personal opinion -- rather, it's a matter of whose freedom we are protecting. If you are concerned about the program being Free, BSD is a poor choice for a license, because there's a good chance large portions of the program will be co-opted (enslaved, if you will, in keeping with the "freedom" analogy) into a derivative work that is not itself free. The GPL will ensure that the program (and all its derivatives) will ever be free, but you as the developer must accept certain restrictions in order to ensure that freedom.
For what it's worth, I don't think either view is necessarily wrong, but they have different goals -- and therefore different means when it comes to reaching those goals.
If you value the freedom of an individual, BSD is very much for you. Very libertarian in nature. If you value freedom for the program, which essentially translates to guaranteed freedom for the community, then the GPL is for you (which is perhaps a much more socialist view). I generally fall into the latter category, but it hasn't stopped me from extensively using BSD (OBSD in particular).
Not to mention that it is often implied that before the flood, humans had much, much longer lifespans.
These sorts of Bible-based calculations always seemed strange to me.
Lord almighty are you full of shit.
I agree with what you're trying to say, though, even if your "examples" are made-up politicized crap based on total ignorance about the state of the world.
Honestly, these China trolls are really starting to get to me. For yourself, for those around you, and yes, for me, please, for godsake, try, just try to become a little more worldly. Actually going to China might be a good start.
This kind of argumentation is really pretty childish. "Once you get rid of the shallow fluff, you get down from 1,000,000 to about 500,000." This is interesting. You've been counting, I presume? I see you've managed to narrow it down to 50,000, even, after removing some "endless lists" and "articles copied from elsewhere."
Of course, none of this is true, rather like the guy who makes up statistics to prove his point. Always be suspicious of numbers randomly inserted into an argument. But then, it doesn't seem like you're intent on making much of an argument, just bashing Wikipedia.
Then, we have this gem: "Wikipedia is much like the rest of the 'net, a waste wasteland with a few bright spots. It's equally true that Wikipedia boosters can't discern the truth because of the blinding glare of their zealotry."
I mean, where did you learn to debate? First you pull some numbers out of your backside, then you claim anyone that doesn't agree with your stance on Wikipedia is a zealot that can't see the truth because they're blinded by their views. Nothing like mud-slinging to cover up holes in one's argument.
Honestly. If you have actual reasons for your personal dislike of Wikipedia, then share them. If you have actual, verifiable data that supports your wild claims about the number of quality articles, cite them.
But if you're just going to make shit up and use ad homniem arguments to discredit people that might see fit to disagree with you, well... I guess I really don't know what to say.
Hardly. Theo wouldn't give a free software award to RMS, perhaps, because he considers GPL licensed code to be less than Free, but RMS considers BSD-licensed code to be Free, and he's the one giving the award.
Despite their differing views on what constitutes Free Software, though, both men are largely motivated by ideology. Consider Theo's reaction to the ipf debacle, his response to the XFree86 license change, and his appeal to the community to help fight the good fight against wlan cards that require non-freely redistributable binary firmware to function. This man is every bit as committed to software freedom as RMS is.
Linus, on the other hand, has stated publically on many occasions that he sees nothing wrong with proprietary software, and uses BitKeeper (a proprietary version control solution) to manage the Linux kernel tree (rather than say, CVS or Subversion) because, in his words, "it's better".
Without passing judgement, it is very clear that Linus values convenience above principle. This is part of the reason so many Slashbots like him: he is, in their minds, "refreshingly" a-political.
Whatever their differences, RMS and Theo are both idealistic. They are primarily motivated by their desire for Freedom, not because they want to produce the best system ever (although that may be true as well).
To me, RMS giving TdR this award is absolutely appropriate, and while I didn't expect it, I'm very pleased. I would be very surprised if Linus were named, and to be honest, I would be a little disappointed.
Not that I have anything against Linus, mind you -- he's a brilliant guy -- but at the core, he's an engineer, and so awarding him for his commitment to the ideology of Free Software would go rather against the grain, imho.
I'm American, AC. Whatsmore, if you'd bothered to read the editorial, they were not insulting Google -- they were calling on their own government to get its rear in gear and do the same thing (digitize French literature) lest the internet be inundated by only written works from English speaking cultures. Google was in no way slighted. This was Slashdot sensationalism at its best.
Asians are, on a whole, much less confrontational than Europeans are. Japanese, Koreans and Chinese are all very polite outwardly, but they have a way of passive aggressively insulting you that's quite difficult to pick up on if you don't speak the language well.
My understanding of Japanese is very basic, and I do not speak Korean at all, although I know something about it. I speak Mandarin fluently, though. The thing to consider here is that in a language like say, Korean, which has 7 (!) different grammatically distinguished degrees of politeness, a non-Korean would be hard-pressed to detect if the wrong one had been used to address him, but other Koreans would be very aware of the slight. Further, the non-Korean in question would lose face because he did not realize he was being insulted.
The Chinese are very similar, although their language lacks the grammatically enforced politeness that Korean or Japanese do. It is considered bad form in all these cultures to be directly insulting and/or aggressive, even when you have been insulted yourself (there are limits, of course). You can, however, make the other person look bad. It's all a face game, and the reason foreigners don't realize it's going on is because they aren't on the right wavelength.
Conversely, an American will think a French person is being rude when in fact he is being polite, within the bounds of his cultural norms. This is because we project our own cultural norms onto other cultures, which is normal. So you see smiling and friendly Japanese people and presume they are being polite, when in fact their definition of politeness is so subtle and has so many levels that you would likely be unaware if you were being insulted; and you go to France and think everyone is rude, when in fact they're being normal (or even polite). You incur their ire because your response to their perceived rudeness is rude, and you think justifiably so, but they have no idea you took it that way. You lose face in Japan because you were insulted and didn't realize it.
Cultural differences are what make the world interesting, but they can also be difficult. A few months exposure is really never enough -- I'm not sure 20 years would be enough, if the culture were different enough from your own.
Still, it's something to think about next time you travel.
French people smoke a lot. The notion of smoking/non-smoking isn't as defined there. That said, he and his friend should have gone to the smoking section, but in general, if someone asks you if they can smoke, it's a rhetorical politeness, and saying no -- especially in the way you did it -- is somewhat rude. Because he is most likely very aware that he is in the non-smoking section, or he wouldn't have asked. Your response, even in English, translates to, "What are you, a retard? Where are we sitting? Asshole."
:)
If you absolutely couldn't deal with it, a better response probably would have been an explanation of why you would rather he didn't. Of course, in that situation, you might embarass your friend by making her out to be the reason... it's kind of a weird situation, really. You could have said that you were trying to quit or something, I dunno.
Probably the easiest thing would just have been to say you didn't mind, even if you did
One thing that I think bites Americans in the ass is the assumption that French culture is relatively similar to American culture. There is, in fact, a relatively large cultural difference, especially with respect to politeness norms.
The French speak very directly and do not appreciate undue familiarity from people they don't know. French, like most European languages other than English, has an active T-V distinction (they have two forms of you, one of which is formal) and they rely heavily on this and other niceties in speech to indicate politeness. Americans, and to a lesser extent the English, depend greatly on tone and facial features to communicate politeness. That is, Americans think they're being polite if they're being friendly.
I'll give you a concrete example. I was in at CDG airport in Paris and I needed to fill out an immigration form. I realized that I didn't have a pen. I went over to the airport security office that was right there and asked if I might borrow one. What I said was exactly what I might say in English, although I used vous (polite) rather than tu (impolite). I said, "Excuse me, but do you have a pen I might use?" I said it with a smile and in a friendly way.
The lady responded, very curtly, also with vous: "Sir, you might consider saying please." She was older than I was. I realized that I had been away from France too long; I had committed a cultural faux pas. To an American, her response was rude. In France, a woman the age of my mother (who works with the police to boot) chastising me for my lack of politesse is absolutely kosher, and I was in the wrong. But had I been more American, I would have certainly bristled at her perceived rudeness. Instead, I appologized, said please, and got the pen.
It's important to realize that neither way of interfacing with people is wrong, per se. Rather, it's a question of norms. The problem is that the French care about different things than Americans do. They care a lot less about your tone and whether you smile or not, and a lot more about whether you address them correctly (Monsieur, Madame, never a first name), greet them properly when you meet them, use vous where appropriate, etc.
It's especially important if you're dealing with people older than yourself. People your own age are likely to be much more friendly and relaxed, adding to the confusion -- age is a big factor in determining how polite you need to be.
If you think France is bad, try Japan, or even worse, Korea.
Maybe. Or maybe he just wants to ensure that his culture, which is rich and has been around a long time, doesn't get destroyed because access to another country's culture is more convenient due to its ubiquity on the internet. He doesn't say. I think my view is somewhat more likely, though -- you pretty much never hear French people telling Americans how they should behave in their own country (or anyone in their own country, for that matter). The same is not necessarily true of us; think about that.
Hm, well, I'm going to go ahead and say it: they are a world power. Fact: no one is in the same league as the United States militarily or economically. That means that we can rightly claim to be the world's only current superpower. But the world's only power? That's going a little too far, I think. France wields considerable international influence, both politically and militarily. While they may not be strong enough to act unilaterally, their stated refusal to say, back us in Iraq certainly gave strength to other nations to do the same.
I think claiming they aren't a world power is a little silly. If all you wanted was to french-bash, then ok. But if accuracy was what you wanted...
Not too sure what you mean by this. As countless others have already noted, in the French editorial he published, he does not attack Google. Rather, he states that the internet has become a vehicle for dissemination of culture, and that Google's move to digitize English language books will only increase Americanization. He argues that France and the EU must do the same with their considerable number of literary works, to offset this effect. Not at all a bad idea.
Well, it depends on what you mean of course. Their stance of software patents is (at least for the moment) much more forward thinking than ours, to be sure, but with respect to speech freedoms, my opinion is that they (France especially) lag behind somewhat...
But again, their country, their culture, their laws, etc. We have to stop thinking we can enforce our world view on everyone.
I think you'd better stick to reading articles in the original language, and not count on machine translation to communicate something as subtle as indirect criticism. If you can't speak the original language, then maybe you ought to take your cues from someone who can.
I speak French, and I didn't get that impression from the article at all. He conjures the spectre of Americanization as a motivator, because increasing economic and cultural domination by America is a concern for many French people. Ultimately, he wants France (and Europe in general) to take greater steps to ensure that the culture of the world does not end up being uniquely Anglo-Saxon.
Google is as popular a search engine there as it is here (and I say here not knowing where you are, because Google is basically the most popular search engine anywhere). I don't think he or anyone in France is surprised that an American corporation would work to digitize English works. His point is that French/EU corps and governments need to follow suit, and I agree wholeheartedly.
You're being sort of silly. French is most certainly not dying -- it is, if I recall correctly, the 11th most natively spoken language in the world, and ranks 5th or 6th when people who speak it as a second language are considered (primarily because this includes most of North Africa).
It isn't about language, it's about culture. It isn't that the French see no value in American culture, it's that they see value in their own culture. Furthermore, they most definitely are not keeping it static -- it continues to evolve in interesting ways.
I can't comment on Canada, as I've never lived there. But France is a very interesting country, and their policy of cultural protectionism is not "enforced". The truth is that the French people care deeply about their language, their culture, etc, and they support taking active steps to protect it from an increasingly ubiquitous American cultural influence.
Frankly, it shows. When you're in France, you can hear a lot of French music on the radio, there's a lot of French literature, and just a general feeling of pride in their culture. Across the border in Germany, radios play mostly American/English music, local bands often sing in English (despite being German) because it's considered "cool", and people seem a bit embarassed by things that are German. Sweden is even worse. My impression, as an outsider, is that French culture is vibrant, and the rest of Europe is being Americanized.
And I think this fact is not lost on the French, who understand that preventing American corporate interests (ie, the RIAA and MPAA, for example) from culturally subverting them by, say, forcing some percentage of music played on the radio to be in French, by promoting French films, etc, has had a net positive effect. Young people in France are much more "French", it seems -- in the sense that they are connected to the culture of their country -- than people from Germany or say, England are.
Which is not to say that other European countries are not considerably different from America or anything. Just that the French, as a people, care more about their culture, and take steps to protect it.
And it seems to be working.
Anyway, with respect to this article, the title was mistranslated.
Korean dog hot pot is delicious.
Unless you've tried dog, don't knock it. You might not eat it for personal reasons, but that doesn't mean it doesn't taste great.
Or should I say, Benoit von Mueller?
Great Mueller!
This is what I would call a load of crap.
I mean, I realize it feels good to be able to explain away social ineptitude with some magical neurological hand-waving (oh, I'm sorry I'm a dick, it's just that I have Aspergers -- most geeks have it to some degree), but when it comes straight down to it, it just ain't so.
I have worked with autistic kids before; my first girlfriend and my college roommate both specialized in autism and working with such people was/is their profession. It seems to me that some of the self-described autistic people on Slashdot are so high-functioning that describing their state as autism essentially takes the meaning from the word.
The truth is, people have different skills and talents. My brother is exceptionally good at video games, for example, while I lack the attention span and motor skills to effectively play them. I'm better with people than he is. We all have our strengths and weaknesses, because we are not all alike. Serial insensitivity to other people's emotional state and a predilection for consistancy are symptoms of autism, but possession of symptoms is not sufficient for diagnosis.
While I have met at least one person that is actually a bona-fide sufferer of Asperger's -- ie, he was diagnosed as such by someone other than himself or a well-meaning school counselor or "psychologist" who said something like, "Well, you might have a mild-form of Asperger's..." when trying to explain to a confused kid with no social skills and an unsual love of math why he doesn't fit in -- the truth is, the impression I have of most "Asperger's" sufferers is that they're mostly just normal geeks that would rather believe that there is something chemical that prevents them from engaging socially rather than just plain not being good at it.
I mean, when someone isn't good at Math, we don't start saying, "Well, maybe you have a mild form of mental retardation." After all, retards aren't usually good at math! Heck, maybe it's true! Why don't we say this? Because we understand that some people just aren't as good at math as others. This is true of all skills.
I hate to say this, but all this "I have a mild form of Asperger's" or "geek behaviour is a manifestation of Asperger's syndrome" is what I would call, plainly, a load of crap. Pop-psychology at its worst.
So why do we accept it? Why do people keep up this charade? Because we want to believe that there's some more exotic reason for our shortcomings than them being just that -- shortcomings.
Believe it or not, for 99% of us, social ability is something that is well within our reach. All we need to do is work hard at being better at it, practice, and want to get better. It annoys us that frat-boy John that we've always resented and that we privately think beneath us can so easily master a skill that seems beyond us; fearing failure, we find a thousand reasons we shouldn't even try to play his game. But were we to actual set our minds to it, we could overcome these barriers, because despite our fantasies of neurophysiological differences that neatly explain our lack of social skills, we are able to learn these things. We just never bother trying.
It would simply be too embarassing to fail at something that people we discount as morons do everyday with ease. It's painful.
Painful, but possible.
That's the difference, you see. People who are actually suffering from Asperger's are blind, in a way. They can honestly not perceive things like sarcasm, emotional stress, etc. There is a part of the world they cannot perceive. This is not the same as the geek who is frustrated by his dating difficulties. This is a real, bona-fide disability, which is relatively rare and quite difficult to overcome.
I don't have a lot of respect for all the people out there who write off their "inability to be socially adept" as a mild form of Aspergers. I've worked in IT most of my life; most of my friends have been geeks. And while 99% of them are hopeless socially, autistic they most definitely are not.
Just like people who suck at math aren't retarded.
Lots of other people have already attacked the validity of this study, called it FUD, etc, so I won't bother.
My impression, as an administrator, is that security is very much a function of the administrator. While I don't use Windows myself, my impression is that someone who knows a lot about the system -- which does not include me -- would be able to secure it very efficiently. I've known some Windows guys, and they definitely seem to be able to lock their systems down.
Of course, a stupid admin -- which includes your average user -- will have his box rooted immediately. What I'm pointing out (and many people have pointed it out before) is that security is very much a function of administration.
Having said that, though, not all OSs are created equal.
If I'm in charge of UNIX security, and I'm working with a competent Windows admin, I have the utmost faith that he'll be able to keep his systems as secure as mine. But because his vendor doesn't practice full disclosure, he will always have less to work with than I will. Whereas I will know about a vulnerability within days of it being discovered, and will have the option to shut off the relevant service and hopefully (quickly) patch the relevant files, he is essentially at the mercy of the vendor.
Even if the vulnerability is exposed, he is stuck because he must wait for the vendor to get off their butts and supply a patch. This may take quite some time. When he gets the patch, it is (necessarily) a binary patch, and he cannot examine it to make sure it doesn't break his existing setup. This is not a Windows-specific problem; it is a problem of closed source operating systems.
I'll end this with an anecdote. In my professional opinion, the most secure OS that anyone is likely to deploy today is OpenBSD. Ironically, of all the myriad OSs I have had the pleasure of running, the only time I have ever been rooted was on OpenBSD.
I was in university at the time, and I had setup a NAT-type home setup for my housemates and I to share our DSL line. I had obtained a 486 on the cheap and ran OpenBSD on it as a firewall... I believe it was 3.0. I was on IRC and had to go to class, so I left. Around that time, the SSH vulnerability was announced and someone (I presume) fished my IP off of IRC and wacked me. I had the SSH port open because I often logged in from the computer lab at school to check my e-mail.
Now, he didn't do any damage -- he changed my root password and tried his best to attack the other computers on my network. Thankfully, my roommates' WinME boxes were turned off, so all he found was Solaris 8 on SPARC and OpenVMS on Alpha, the latter being my primary machine. He attempted an x86 attack on my Sun, which obviously failed, and I very much doubt he had any idea what to do about the VMS box.
Despite this experience, I still see OpenBSD as a tremendously secure platform. I was just lax, as an administrator, and I hadn't heard about the SSH vuln.
It's always amused me, though. When people ask what they should run if they care about security, I never hesitate to point them to OBSD. But it's the only machine I've ever had broken into.
Just goes to show, no amount of work on the vendor's part can make up for a lazy admin.
It might be more gracious to say that he's misinformed, rather than "full of crap".
It isn't like xkb is a paragon of usability. It isn't even (really) documented.
Having said that, there is nothing special about a so-called "modifier" key, and you're absolutely right.
You know, I had a similar experience when the G5 came out. All that 64-bit goodness, so powerful, PPC to boot -- and a pretty case -- and Mac OS X -- and I just started thinking about buying one for my next computer.
... and good for us.
And I thought about it, long and hard, and I realized that I'd just end up installing Debian on it. Because when it comes right down to it, OS X is one of those interfaces that, while pretty, suits people that don't want to tweak it. It's not Free; I can't hack the source code. Lots of people on here say things like, "You don't need it to be open source, it's not like you ever look at the source code anyway", but that's not true. I do look at the source code when I want to know how something works.
My gf has a Titanium Powerbook with OS X and she loves it. I think it's a great match for her -- she doesn't know much about computers and she doesn't want to hack around on it, she just wants to write word documents and basically use it the way the average consumer uses a Windows box.
A while ago, there was a great post (modded troll, of course) that pretty much phrased my thoughts on OS X exactly (albeit in a somewhat more vitriolic way). The basic truth is that Linux/BSD offer you freedom, and OS X doesn't.
The people that don't care about that, well... I guess, at some level, I just don't care about what they use. If they migrate to Apple, well, good for them
What surprises me is that they're from Shandong. Who'd have thought that Shandong would have good cryptoanalysts? I thought all Shandong people were good at was drinking and speaking excessively bad Mandarin.
While I would like little more than a Slashdot producing validating CSS/XHTML, with better accessibility features, etc, etc, the truth is that this bug has nothing to do with "bad" HTML, as has been mentioned many times in this thread.
In fact, on the bugzilla bug (which I would link to, but bugzilla doesn't accept Slashdot referers) there is a small piece of html which reproduces the race condition every time and IIRC it is not invalid HTML.
This is a gecko problem, and it is fixed in CVS; if you don't want to run a nightly, you'll get it in 1.1.
You may not be aware of this, but America is a pretty cosmopolitan place, and is mostly populated by immigrants.
That's part of what makes it a neat country.
You make a good point -- why trust the ravings of a lunatic mass murderer -- but at the same time, given his reason and Bush's reason, which seems closer to the truth?
Leaving the issue of whether he actually is a lunatic mass murderer or not alone for the moment, which seems more likely: the digested sound-bite propaganda (hates our freedom) or the one that suggests that he might have had an actual reason based on things the US has actually done that he didn't like?
Partisan raving aside, the problem with the whole "hates our freedom" thing is that it is clearly designed to be wartime propaganda. Look at it. It takes the one thing that every American values -- our freedom -- and makes it out to be something that Osama hates.
The other takes things that, while certainly not warranting something like the WTC attacks, are considered bad by a great number of people nowhere near as crazy as Osama: namely, support for Israel in the face of its flagrant disregard for UN resolutions and support of the theocratic regime in Saudi Arabia.
See, no one is going to come away from "he hates our freedom" thinking that Osama, for all his lunacy, might actually have a point or a reason worth considering for his hatred of the US. It's a great way to make sure everyone is behind you, everyone supports you. Osama's reasons are a little bit more of gray area. I don't think anyone would say, "Damn, Osama has a point, I guess we should do what he says and not kill him slowly like we'd planned," but people might say, "After we kill him slowly, maybe we should evaluate how our actions in the middle east are affecting the way the US is viewed there, and how we can help stabilize the region by not generally coming off as total dicks."
I believe it was Sun Tzu who said, "If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle."
We are in a situation here where, by way of wartime propaganda, we are being encouraged to not consider the motivations of the enemy. This, from a strategic perspective, is very dangerous. There was a documentary about Robert S. Macnamara a while ago, called "The Fog of War"; did you see it? (I recommend it, it was very interesting.) Robert S. Macnamara was Secretary of Defense under JFK and Lyndon Johnson. He was around for the Bay of Pigs fiasco, and Vietnam was called "Macnamara's war" back in the day. The guy was one of the west's primary strategists during the cold war; it's very interesting hearing his perspective now, years later, as an old man.
He comments on how he saw the North Vietnamese versus how they saw themselves, and it's really quite insightful. He says that at the time, he saw the North Vietnamese as being puppets for the Soviets and the Chinese, attempting to spread communism into South East Asia. Much later, he talked with his equivalent on the Vietnamese side and was told that from their perspective, the Americans were imperialists who wanted nothing more than to colonize where the French had failed. When presented with the idea that they were in fact acting as proxy for war with the PRC and USSR, his Vietnamese counterpart absolutely scoffed. "Vietnam was occupied by China before it was occupied by the French," he said (I'm paraphrasing). "We had never been our own country; we were fighting for our independance. No matter how many tanks or military personnel you had sent, we would have won, because we were not invaders -- we were fighting for our freedom."
While we Americans may laugh at the Vietnamese view of freedom, it's pretty apparent that he was absolutely right. They handed us our asses in Vietnam; they then did the same to the Chinese in 1979. It was a classic case of not knowing your enemy, and Robert Macnamara makes a point of using this and other examples from his life to illustr