What does IBM sell, if it's not big iron running virtual Linux boxen?
The reason I pointed this out in my original post is because IBM is actually running tons of instances of the Linux kernel virtually, with their own proprietary exokernel-like OS managing actual hardware interfacing. This is neat stuff, no doubt about it, and like a rock, I have no doubt.
There was this guy who was selling a hardened Windows 2000 server solution, in which he claimed no downtime. How did he accomplish this feat? He developed a network messaging system and ran four instances of WinNT on four different machines, redundantly. That way, if one BSODd, the other would take over while the dead one rebooted. It probably still wasn't "unbreakable", but it's easy to see that this configuration was in all likelyhood much more stable than the WinNT shipped default by other vendors.
Now, I ask you, is this proof of WinNT's stability? No. It isn't. Because he's cheating, in a sense.
Now, in IBM's case, they aren't just running Linux redundantly in case it crashes; there are other reasons too. But let's face it; in a system like the one IBM sells, a single instance of Linux crashing (or even many crashing) hardly affects the entire system. So the stability of these IBM mainframes does not really say much about Linux's stability, because even if they were only 95% stable, you'd still have a nearly 100% stable system.
I'm not saying Linux isn't stable, I'm just saying that IBM's Linux on big iron solutions aren't proof of its stability. Hopefully you understand what I mean.
What about SGI's Altix 3000 mainframes with
512 processors using numa (soon to be 1024 processors). If that's not big iron, I don't know
what is.
Indeed. A few other posters in this thread have pointed this out. I gave a fairly detailed response to this already; but the short answer is: this is great stuff, good going SGI, but it isn't mature enough to be a drop in replacement for production systems today. Therefore, while good stuff, it doesn't really support the argument that Linux could beat Solaris right now. If you have time I encourage you to check my full response to this.
No compilers, no editors (except for vi --- not vim, just vi), no real shells (Crappy SHell is a not real shell). Perl? Python? What are those?
How about Java, they're own language?
Well, this is pretty uninformed, sadly. It is true that Solaris 2.x no longer ships with the compiler (you can get Solaris for free, and you need to pay for the dev tools). But Sun's compiler is actually one of the best in the business; it produces very tight, fast code on UltraSPARC (surprise) and much, much better 64-bit code in particular than gcc (I know, I helped the gcc team develop the SPARCv9 compiler for the 3.x series).
Still, if you don't want to pay for dev tools (not often the case in production environments, but let's ignore that for the sake of discussion) gcc is freely available -- in fact it even ships with Solaris IIRC on the GNU tools CD.
For editors, well, the original vi was written by Bill Joy (who up until recently worked for Sun) so it isn't at all surprising that they would ship it default (I believe the POSIX spec requires it, anyway). Furthermore, they have ed. But seriously, why would Sun waste time writing editors? Should they develop their own version of emacs, when both GNU emacs and XEmacs run perfectly well on their system already?
As for shells, the SYSV-like Solaris 2.x has shipped with ksh (the Korn Shell) as its default shell for as long as I can remember. The csh is only default (afaik) on BSD systems for legacy reasons -- virtually no one I know uses the thing, even BSD hackers. Well, maybe Theo De Raadt.;p
Indeed, I've heard of SGI's efforts to run a single Linux kernel instance on multitudes of CPUs, and I applaud their efforts. There are a number of reasons that this point, while interesting, is currently irrelevant to the discussion.
One, the systems are experimental, and have not been running in high load production environments for the better part of a decade, like Solaris big iron machines have. This problem will be solved with time; as I said in my earlier post, I have no doubt that Linux will overtake Solaris (and indeed, all non-specialized OSs) eventually. (Unless Sun makes good on their OpenSolaris promise, which remains to be seen).
Two, SGI produces completely unworkable patches, and seems rather unwilling to clean them up and submit them in a way that makes review and analysis easy on the other kernel hackers. As a result, last I heard, SGI's changes, which are many, have not been integrated into the mainline kernel. I do not know whether they have updated their patches to work with 2.6 yet, either (last I heard they were working on a modified version of 2.4). Again, I have no doubt that these changes will be integrated eventually -- it is not in SGI's best interest to maintain messy patches.
This is why I said that your point is currently irrelevant. But it is not irrelevant in the long term, and I acknowledge that. Solaris will lose, because Sun cannot compete with the mindshare offered by open source, or the unprecedented level of GPL-enforced vendor cooperation that goes into the Linux kernel. While OpenSolaris may allay some of that, my guess is that companies like SGI, IBM, or whoever will be less willing to commit time and money to the Solaris kernel because that would be helping Sun, when improving Linux helps no one in particular (or everyone, if you prefer).
But lets not count our chickens before they hatch. Today, Linux is an inferior solution on big iron production systems. Admitting this is constructive criticism. Let's not all start sucking each other's dicks just yet.
Ouch. Sounds like you had some serious problems. I'll bow to your superior experiences; my experiences admining Solaris big iron machines don't approximate yours (in terms of load, anyway).
Of course, no tech worth his stuff will take any vendor's claim of unbreakability seriously. Even if the software is perfect, there can always be obscure hardware bugs (and generally are). And we all know that despite Solaris' strengths, it, like all software, has its share of bugs.
I personally find Linux to be quite a stable system -- I've been using and hacking on Linux since 1992 and I don't believe I've ever had a stable branch kernel crash -- but I attribute this to being lucky and not running it in incredibly demanding environments. Even if Linux were perfect as a system -- and its code is damn clean -- flaky x86 hardware would be its downfall in configurations like the one you describe. You'd need to run it on hardware that doesn't fail so much; at that point, you're buying a machine like an E10k anyway, and in that case you're probably better off running the OS that it was designed for (or that was designed for it, take your pick).
Another poster in this thread noted (and I agree with him) that if you want extreme stability, you shouldn't go with UNIX-like systems anyway. VMS is far more stable. But there is no perfect solution to any of these problems, unfortunately. As stable as even VMS is, I'm sure that if you throw enough crap at it fast enough it'll choke, eventually. This is unfortunately an administrative tautology, regardless of your configuration.
FWIW, I agree. Although VMS suffered some when they made the transition from VAX to AXP, and I imagine will suffer some when they make the transition to Itanium -- especially now that HP is at the wheel.
But yeah. Let's not forget, though, that VMS is a much more mature system than Solaris. But AFAIK, there is no reasonably complex multitasking OS that can beat VMS in terms of stability. Well, maybe MVS (but I think its primary feature is batch processing rather than multiprogramming, although of course it can do both). And DCL is the win, even if it doesn't do pipes:) I run OpenVMS on my alpha. Hobbyist licenses rule. I've unfortunately never had the chance to administer one in a production environment, but I hope to get the chance some day.
Anyway we were comparing Linux and Solaris, so this is kinda off topic.
I mean seriously. We have a debate about the relative merits of Solaris and Linux, and you come out and say, "LOL no context haX0rs@!!~ OMFG linux is so wei faster than Slowaris lol!"
I mean, did you even read his blog entry? I know, I know, this is Slashdot. But come on. He isn't comparing Linux and Solaris as gaming platforms. Yeah, your FPS for Doom 3 is probably faster on Linux (LOL d00d don't you know Doom 3 doeznt run on Slowaris haha you fail it!) but what he's talking about is no downtime, ever.
He's talking about kernel debug utilities. About hardware hotswapping. About being up 24x7x365 doing 1000s of database transactions per minute. We aren't talking about your mom's basement here, with your little network, or even the nice little RAID setup you have going at work that saved your employer a pretty penny. We're talking about big iron. Speed is not the issue here; reliability is. One of the reasons Solaris is slower than Linux is because it checks everything. It is one extremely anal system, and it never ever goes down.
Now, I'm a big Linux fan (typing this on my Debian box), but no one who has seriously admined Solaris boxes can say that the two are even remotely equal on big servers. No contest indeed; Solaris kicks the shit out of Linux.
I don't think this will be the case forever. Unlike the anal blogger referenced in the writeup, I think Linux is catching up faster than Solaris is improving. While he makes good points about Linux's lack of sysadmin accessible kernel debugging tools, traceability, etc, people attempting to sell Linux to big vendors will provide those tools.
But Linux isn't ready for the big iron machines Solaris dominates yet. Don't say IBM, please. IBM runs multitudes of instances of the Linux kernel in parallel on their machines, so that if one fails, it doesn't take the whole system down. Those big iron Sun machines run one kernel, baby. Just one.
I tell you, if they open source Solaris (yeah right) we're going to be looking at some pretty amazing code. Some of the best hackers ever have hacked that thing.
You're wasting your breath, friend. Anyone that suggests that not only is homosexuality not genetically predetermined, but in fact that there is evidence pointing to the contrary, has already made up his mind: you and I both know that there is a tremendous amount of conflicting evidence on this topic, and that most of the "evidence" against genetic predermination comes from sources with a vested interest.
They'll use whatever argument they can against it, but in the end, anti-gay types are just homophobic, plain and simple. It's a moral issue of some sort for them, whatever that means. I really think "but that's the out hole" is the core of the issue for them. Seriously.
I'm not gay, but many of my friends are, and I actually met a guy in college at our LGBT who had grown up in the midwest and been put through a religious "straightification" program by his parents, to cure him (I'm Californian). In the end he pretended to be "cured" to get out of it, I swear, it was like something out of But I'm a Cheerleader (great flick, if you haven't seen it). Thank god for the American tradition of sending your kids off to college, huh? Needless to say he went from being a depressed, fucked up kid to a well adjusted, well liked, happy guy overnight.
So what I'm saying is, regardless of what causes it (I think it's nature, but my dyke soc teacher was sure it was nurture, go figure;p), it certainly is pretty deeply engrained. I've never heard of anyone "turning gay" or "turning straight" -- everyone I know was pretty aware of their preference for as far back as they can remember, and that's good enough evidence for me.
And homophobia is just ignorance, anyway. I honestly don't know anyone that has actually dealt with openly gay people on a regular basis that has managed to remain homophobic. It's just impossible. In the rural midwest, everyone thinks they don't know anyone gay, but personally I absolutely believe the 1 in 10 stat. Hearing homophobes talk, they seem to think that gay men hit on anything with a penis! They must really think they're god's gift, or something.
The fact that we even need to debate this issue (gay marriage, gay rights, etc) just pisses me off.
Anyway, I hope you're living somewhere where you can live your lifestyle in peace. Seriously, fuck the closet.
Holy cow, that's like, 1 new person every 3 or 4 days! Where can I get some of that?
Seriously, I know you're trolling, but come on. No one could believe 100 partners per day, so this isn't subtle enough. To truly troll, pick something outlandish that some people might be able to believe, like 50 or 20, which would still be extravagant by anyone's measure (gay people included) but wouldn't set off the bullshit-o-meter so fast.
Anyway, for those of you that don't know, lots of gay people have long term, committed relationships (I personally know couples that have been together for 15 years). Not surprisingly, this kind of commitment is more common in the Castro district of SF (where you can hold hands walking down the street and people don't look at you funny, or worse, bash your head in, for acting your nature) then it is in Virginia. Relationships stressed by a need for secrecy and social pressure rarely last long, in any setting.
As the traumatized child of divorced parents, I can agree with your sentiment. But I think legislating it is the wrong move.
Your assumption that marriage (or civil unions, or whatever) are freely entered into is a big one. That may be true for many of the people in your social circle, but in some cultures (remember that ours is a nation of immigrants, and they bring their traditions with them), marriage is arranged or at least heavily influenced by parents. This sometimes happens very young.
Now, in the case of a religious marriage, a breaking with the faith can result in you not carring whether divorce is acceptable or not. So, if for example, I am Catholic and can't obtain an anullment, I'm always free to break with the faith.
But if I am, for example, a young indian guy or girl, born to recently immigrated parents, who at age 18 is married off to a childhood acquaintance of my parents' choosing, a country with no legal divorce leaves me very little in terms of wiggling room when I wake up, realize that I'm more American than Indian, that I don't love the girl/guy, and that I want a life of my own.
My point is that in some cultures, unions are not freely entered into.
Now, you did say that you would want them very difficult to obtain, rather than impossible to obtain, so perhaps you would provide exemptions for such exceptional examples. Probably you wanted to discourage people from having Vegas style weddings and divorcing the next day, thus making a mockery of the institution of marriage, which used to mean something and sadly no longer seems to. But the problem is, if you make it a law, you put the burden on the state (and the courts) to decide who has the right to get divorced and who doesn't. Frankly, I'd much rather them dealing with issues that are important to society and not just to those directly involved (you know, like crime and repealing the DMCA and stuff).
Frankly I think talking about plural marriage (as in polygamy) and single marriage (as in marriage as we know it today, be it between heterosexuals or homosexuals) as if they are at all similar is sort of an invocation of the Slippery Slope Fallacy, but I'll let it pass because I find that argument less interesting.
Does it really make sense that Polygamy be illegal? I mean, what's wrong with it, really? We aren't talking about anything non-consensual, are we? I suppose it would be possible for one man or woman to have many spouses secretly, ie, without the consent of his/her spouses; this probably shouldn't be allowed. But if everyone in question supports the idea, then what is wrong with it?
The truth is, the idea that marriage is between two people is a rather recent development in the US. 1862, actually, with the Morrill Act. It seems to have been passed primarily to selectively persecute members of the Mormon faith, a perceived cult that was growing rather rapidly in popularity, but was otherwise protected by the 1st amendment. As its defining characteristic was polygamy, it isn't surprising that they were indirectly prosecuted in this way. After all, polygamy ran contrary to the established morals of the predominantly Christian US of the time, and so was easy to pass into law (ignoring completely that marriage was, and remains, religiously defined -- legal marriage originated for bookkeeping purposes).
1862 is relatively recent. For almost half of the US's history as a nation, polygamy was not restricted by federal law (it was by state law in most places, but Utah was a territory at the time, not a state).
But in terms of enforcability, the Morrill act turned out to be a dud, because predictably, Mormons (who consensually were a part of the whole deal) refused to bear witness against their husbands and neighbors. So, shortly thereafter, Congress passed the Edmunds act in 1882, which made just bigamously cohabitating a misdemeanor. Proving a man was living with more than one woman wasn't hard, and so many Mormons were prosecuted.
Now, I'm not Mormon (or religious at all, actually), but to me, this is the government harrassing a religion whose practices they considered immoral by their (Christian) standards. While people who practice religions are generally happy to accept the morals prescribed by their faith over morals prescribed by others, in a nation that claims to protect the freedom to pursue ones religious faith without harassment, aren't we treading a thin line with marriage?
Frankly, I see no reason whatsoever that we should be legislating it at all. If I want to have a polygamous relationship, then I should be allowed to have it; and the government should dutifully record such an arrangement, as a) even without them calling it marriage I'll probably have it anyway and b) having it on record will make historical enquiries into the nature of my family easier for my descendents.
People often act like polygamy has been illegal in the US forever. That's a relatively recent addition to Federal Law, and I think it could stand to be repealed. I don't feel like marrying two women, but hell, if my neighbor does, and his wives don't care, why not?
Legislating morality is not the business of the government. Polygamy doesn't restrict anyone's freedom, so let's not pass laws against it, ok?
When I heard him talk about this, he side stepped it neatly. He said he was opposed to gay marriage, but for civil unions. He said he thought marriage was a religious thing, and because of that, the government should refrain from dealing with it.
Essentially, this breaks down to "we should stop dealing with marriage, and give civil unions only, and to any couple (straight or gay) that wants them". That's just legalizing gay marriage, and changing every instance of marriage (as defined by the law) to civil union.
So yes, he's against gay marriage, but against straight marriage too, if that makes sense. Unless he's flopped on this issue as well, I would say that makes him (carefully) pro-gay marriage.
While there is definitely some ambiguity here, with Bush there isn't any. So if gay marriage is your thing, Kerry's your man (although less so than he ought to be).
Oh, I see, you meant media directed at African Americans. Have you ever noticed how the MTV generation (taking races out of the picture here for a moment) is unduly influenced by the views/role models that appear on that channel and others like it? The phenomenon of hip, pop culture is a deciding one in the development of youth viewpoints everywhere, regardless of race.
Now, lots of white kids grew their hair long when they were 15 and listened to Motley Crue, Nirvana or Nine Inch Nails, depending on when they grew up. More recently, we have the "angry frat boy" thing (Limp Bizkit, etc). You hang out at a local high school and you see groups that aspire to be like the people they see on TV.
Luckily, they grow out of this, eventually. But they mostly grow out of it because real life comes knocking at their door; they get sent to college by their parents, they get an internship and a first apartment that teaches them the value of hard work and fiscal responsibility, etc.
But with African American kids that grow up in poor neighborhoods, life is rather different. Their parents don't send them to college, whether they want to go or not. If they go to college, they work their asses off for a scholarship, and if they're really lucky, they might get some help in the form of affirmative action or some other progressive measure to offset the steep hill they have to climb to even get close to the place that white suburban kids get for free from their folks. But, especially in public schools, this doesn't happen much anymore, thanks to lobbying by self-styled "non-racists" who want to "even the playing field".
For these kids, the thug life (which in most other demographics is just a phase) becomes reality as they feel increasingly disenfranchised with society. Whereas an angry LSD-dropping eyemakeup wearing Marilyn Manson listening white kid "gets over it" most of the time and dons a business suit and briefcase for his office job by the time he's in his middle twenties, most black kids, having not had the opportunity for higher education, are left in crime ridden neighborhoods to fend for themselves.
I won't deny that what you describe is very real: the "uncle tom", "oreo", "house nigger" label is one you'd best avoid if you're black in an African American social circle (unless it's the young republicans or something). There is a certain disdain for "the Man's education", too. But let's be frank. If you grew up in a society that domineered and oppressed you, and only emancipated your ancestors from slavery 140 years ago (that's about 5 generations back -- it's entirely likely that the grandmother of a middle aged african american today knew someone that was a slave. Her grandmother, perhaps.)
But but wait it gets worse. Not only did they not bother emancipating you from slavery until 1863 (and then not even everywhere), you didn't get the right to vote until much, much later, and in much of the US lived in a defacto state of apartheid until the 1960s. That was, umm, hmm, 40 some odd years ago. That's your parents. Today.
Because you had previously been slaves (work for no pay), emancipation gave your forefathers very little. So while you had your freedom (legally, anyway, although in many places not in practice) you had nothing to show for it. No money, no land. Not different from the white europeans arriving around the same period (the Irish, for example) on the face of it, except that in two generations, no one could tell an irish person was irish unless he chose to make an issue about it. But, well, being black stays with you a bit longer.
Of course this didn't stop lots of people from "trying to pass".
If you put all this together, I don't think it should be the least bit surprising that black kids are mistrustful of white people. Not fair, perhaps, to today's less-racist types, and certainly racist in its own right (judging a white person isn't any better th
The issue lies with a 1979 decision that states that students (temporary residents of a state) are allowed to register to vote in that state, without being permanent residents.
Unfortunately, this fact is not widely recognized by out-of-state students at universites, who believe that the only way they can vote is through the somewhat tedious process of absentee voting in their home state (or going back home to vote).
In order to encourage students to vote, the 1979 decision made it legal to vote in the state in which you are studying. From the article: In fact, despite a 1979 Supreme Court ruling affirming their right to vote where they attend school, students often encounter difficulties when they try to exercise that right.
As for the feminist attention whores thing, I'll presume you're just trolling.
Still, with a sig that paints you as rather unsupportive of ignorance, you'd think you'd at least check your facts.
Actually, ending slavery did not come as an added bonus. The Emancipation Proclamation only applied to states of the CSA, not those fighting for the union. There were two states fighting for the North that were slave states, and they were not required to abolish slavery.
This is because, obviously, Lincoln's main concern was holding the union together, not freeing slaves. He was concerned that forcing the border states to abolish slavery would encourage them to fight on the side of the CSA.
The main purpose of the Emancipation Proclamation was to encourage slaves in the south (who outnumbered their masters by a rather considerable margin) to revolt for their freedom. This was something that people in the South had been terrified of for a while -- there had been a few slave uprisings already.
Furthermore, there was genuine concern that Europe -- specifically France and England, the two most powerful countries on earth at that time -- would recognize the CSA's statehood. In order to prevent Northern racists and anti-abolishonists from further splintering the North, and to encourage seceding states to return the Union, Lincoln had been very, very reticent to declare an Emancipation Proclamation. He therefore continuously said that the war was not about Slaves. France and England, both vehemently anti-slavery by this time, therefore saw no difference in policy between the USA and the CSA and saw no reason not to recognize the latter. A weaker, splintered US would also have been politically beneficial for them, due to interests in Canada and the like.
When Lincoln declared the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, he forced the hand of the European powers -- they could no longer in good faith support the CSA, because it became an issue of slavery versus non-slavery. Lincoln did not emancipate the slaves in border states, or even in the regions of the south already controlled by the Union.
Your whole life could be described as "putting off the inevitable." As Bob Dylan said, "You're either busy being born or busy dying". What could you do for 10, 20, or 30 extra years? Ok, if you're living thanks to modern medicine, perhaps you can't go mountain climbing. But you could read a book, watch a movie, see your grandchildren grow up.
It'll be interesting to see how you feel about Libers saying that your medical care is just "putting off the inevitable" when you're old and gray.
There is no one "holding back the black man" today.
I agree with you about chauvinism, that is to say, the GP had no idea what the term meant. However, if you truly believe that there is no one holding back the black man today, you must not know very many black men. Oh, yes, I know, "You have several black friends". So does everyone who says this sort of stuff. I used to, too.
But then I actually went to college and got some real black friends. Not inner city gangster types, mind you. College kids. This in itself, statistically, makes them a tiny minority of the larger black population. They didn't conform to the steryotypes most racist whites have of black people. They didn't wear bling bling outfits or speak "ebonics" in class. I'm saying this because I want to make absolutely clear that the way they were treated could only have been because of their skin color. There was nothing else about them to find offensive.
Now, I went to university in California, a socially enlightened state by most definitions, and let me tell you something: racism most definitely is alive and well. I would go to the supermarket with my black girlfriend, and people treated her differently than they treated me. The white girl behind the checkout stand would, in her own subtle way, "not give her face", to borrow an Asian expression.
It wasn't calling her a nigger. It wasn't a lynchmob. These things, thankfully, are on the decline. But to think that just because, as a well to do white man, you don't see any racism or social inequity in our society, there simply isn't any, is pure folly.
To ward off these sorts of claims, people with your "racism is dead" view always point to all the black friends they allegedly have. To me, this is a lot like 15 year old virgin guys talking about how great having sex is. They may sound convincing to other virgin guys, but to someone who's actually had some nookie, they're pretty obvious frauds.
Luckily for you, the demographic on Slashdot is mostly white suburban guys who feel slighted by all the reverse racism inherent in affirmative action and the like. So you're preaching to the choir, and I'm not. But for the 4 years I was in school, essentially all of my friends were black. Not because I was in love with african american culture, hip hop, or wished I'd been born a gangsta -- but because, due to a housing shortage, my freshman year I was placed in an African American interest dorm.
There was reverse racism. It's to be expected that distrust should exist. I hated it, too. Being the token white suburban kid in a dorm filled with black kids, most of whom had busted their balls to scrape together enough support from friends and family in their respective communities in order to be there -- while my parents paid for my tuition -- wasn't easy, at all.
To make matters worse, I was just like you. A programmer. A registered Libertarian. A geek. I honestly believed there was no difference anymore, that civil rights was a struggle that had been won in the 1960s. Probably in my first week, I walked down into the TV room where a dormmate was watching BET. I asked him (earnestly) why black people insisted on speaking "like that" and so on, and went on a diatribe about how it was hurtful to black people's self-image. I honestly believed it, too. I guess I thought blacks would be better off if they acted white.
Thankfully, I understand how stupid that is now.
People say things like, "Lincoln freed the slaves in the 1860s! That was, what, 140 years ago? Why's it taking them so long to integrate? Why can't they flourish, like other immigrants did?" and they say it with a completely straight face.
I went home on break and heard my parents, whom I considered to be so open minded (and still consider to be open minded) say things that I probably at one point wouldn't have even noticed. Racist things. Not nigger or lynchmob
Well, granted, Kim Il Sung is dead, and he was perhaps the brains behind the operation, but North Korea fought the entire US war machine, which had just emerged from WW2 a triumphant nuclear power, to a complete and utter standstill. And the KWP was much less entrenched then, and their military far smaller and more primitive.
Proportionally, NK has the largest standing military in the world.
They have nuclear weapons.
They, like the US, are headed up by someone who feels no remorse in the real world application of his military power.
We Americans like to think that the only reason we aren't attacking NK is because we care about SK, or because we're worried about a retaliatory strike against Japan, or because of China's close ties with the regime.
These things hopefully do figure into our strategy. But even if they weren't issues, I very much doubt that we could take NK down. We'd be fighting a war on their home turf, which is mountainous and prone to extreme variations in temperature, with subarctic winters and horribly hot, humid summers, and which has been continuously fortified by the KWP war machine for the last 50 years. This is not a mostly flat desert we can just roll tanks through.
As far as Kim Jung Il is concerned, he is still at war with the US (this is the legal stance of the US, as well). And he has spent his whole life preparing for combat to resume. Don't make the mistake of thinking of him as another Saddam. If we send our troops in there, more than just South Koreans will die.
We would probably suffer the most heinous military losses in history.
Let's not and say we did, shall we? Containment is all that is required for NK. I live in China, and KJI has a weakness for technology. He wants economic reform in NK (probably not for the betterment of the lives of his people, but rather to help ensure his country's survival), but is unsure how to make Deng Xiao Ping style reforms jive with his father's Juche Ideal, which is practically a state religion in NK.
Careful, Asian-style diplomacy, combined with a heavy dose of Realpolitik, a strong desire for Korean Unification on the part of both governments, and a decreased US presence in the region (which is seen as inflammatory by all concerned) will lead to NK opening up, roughly in the same way that economic reforms have changed China.
Despite what you hear on CNN, very few of the South Koreans I know (and I know many, as there are many SK expats here in Shanghai) think that the massive military buildup on the border does anything but convince KJI that more military power is necessary. This exacerbates the situation. KJI would be insane to attack SK, even if there were no US presence there. We (Americans) could be there within hours anyway, and NK can't feed itself without economic support from its neighbors and the world. Not to mention that an invasion of SK would likely put the peace loving Japanese back on the warpath; NK wants nothing more than their destruction, after all. We've seen the Japanese on the warpath once before, and it wasn't pretty.
No, KJI isn't going to invade anyone. But as long as we maintain a massive military presence on his borders, and play "hardball" with him, he has to spend all his money on the military. His regime is corrupt, there's no doubt, but let's be honest here. It's easy to convince a starving populace that the imperialists are just waiting for you to slow down military development to invade when there's a massive US army presence right there on the border. Otherwise, it's a rather hard sell.
NK did at one point have expansionist policies; but at the time, they were backed militarily by the Soviets, and by China. Now they are backed by no one.
And anyway, if they move against SK, destroying them would be seen as universally justifiable.
You must be joking. In violation of Godwin's Law, I will respond to you. Let's see. First, Hitler killed 10 million people in a systematic way, mostly with gas chambers. Saddam has killed Kurds and others, yes. But not 10 million of them, not even close. While I agree with the general sentiment that murder in any form is wrong, there are times when scale does matter when making comparisons.
What Saddam has done amounts to mass murder. Bad, yes. What Hitler did was genocide. He attempted to systematically eliminate several entire peoples, most notably the Jews and Roma, from the areas he controlled. He did this ruthlessly and efficiently. What Saddam wanted was a secular, socialist state. He killed many people that would not bend to his will, or that would not conform to his brand of secularism.
But Jews under Hitler were slaughtered even when the last Jew (possibly not even practicing Jew) in their family was 5 generations back. He wasn't concerned with control. He had control. He was waging racial warfare. He considered the extermination of the Jewish people more important than winning World War II -- he devoted more resources to the holocaust than to the front -- because he believed that Jewish blood was contaminating Aryans.
I mean, let's be serious. Saddam was a bad guy, yes, and he tortured people, yes, but Hitler? That's just as ridiculous as comparing GWB to Hitler. Have we all just forgotten who Hitler was? How can we throw his name around so easily? What Saddam did doesn't even qualify as genocide, even minor genocide. We were responsible for more deaths in Iraq than he was, as a result of a decade of sanctions.
If we indirectly were able to kill that many people, we're not dealing with murder on a tremendous scale.
That having been said, the guy was a dick and I'm glad he's out of power. But for the average Iraqi, I'm not sure our regime is much better than his, even if we (mostly) don't torture them. Because under him, there was at least stability and security. And while Freedom is a lofty and honorable goal, it starts to look a little crappy if you can't walk outside without being blown up.
Why is "European" intervention so morally superior and ethical, legally defensible as opposed to our intervention.
Probably because European countries have for some time lacked the military prowess the US has, and therefore require the cooperation of other nations to back up their diplomacy with force.
You see, there is a sort of checks and balances system that arises when you lack power; you are forced to make alliances with others who similarly lack power in order to pass muster. This means that another sovreign nation, whose views, politics, and media are different from yours, must agree with your stance. Usually, just one isn't enough; usually, you need several.
America, on the other hand (and I say this as an American), no longer needs to do this. We are a power unto ourselves. This is a good thing, in a certain sense -- it means that we cannot easily be manipulated into a position we'd rather not be in by others whose interests are different from our own -- but with it comes an incredible responsibility.
It means that we must instill a system of checks and balances in our own political system to approximate the dissent and debate that a smaller country would need to take part in before, say, deciding to invade some other sovreign nation.
Lamentably, this has been rather difficult, because no matter how fair and balanced we try to be, America is not the whole world, and does not represent even a sizeable fraction of it. We are one of the richest most powerful countries on earth, with an incredibly high standard of living. We do not (and I say this honestly) understand the plight of the less fortunate, in the same way that the rich often fail to understand the struggles of the poor.
It should come as no surprise to us that our views regarding "what's best" for the poor and underpriveleged nations in the world is met with some disillusionment.
Furthermore, we have the misfortune to be saddled with an administration that seems bent on eroding the checks and balances in our government designed to keep our foreign and domestic policy as representative as possible. While I do dislike GWB the man, I'll be honest and admit that, what with 9/11, Al Gore probably would have acted in a very similar way. Terrorism breeds fear in people (hence its name) and a terrified populace will give up its rights easily -- it will in fact demand they be restricted, in the name of greater security, if it can be convinced that those rights were abused by ne'erdowells. So it isn't GWB's fault, per se, although I do dislike the way his administration appears to have benefited illictly from the situation.
No, it's out fault, as Americans. For letting it happen. For allowing those that want power -- this includes anyone running for public office, Democrat or Republican -- to erode our rights. Rights taken away are hard to get back.
While they were obviously fairly ignorant, it is nice that they thought to ask your permission. I'm a GPL-nut myself (everything I write, essentially, gets released under the GPL) but I have noticed that lots of BSD folks get upset when their code is relicensed by other free software projects. They'll always agree to it, if you ask (at least, they have in my experience, and anyway, they can't really say no, legally) but it's still the polite thing to do.
At the very least, it'll make the dev happy that someone out there thinks his code is worth copying.
PS. I think the reason that BSD types get upset over free software relicensing (rather than proprietary relicensing) is because they are "competing" as it were in the free software sphere. When someone takes BSD code proprietary, they're taking it out of the pool. The BSD dev doesn't know what happens to it after that and so it's hard to worry about it. Contrast this to a GPLification, where the GPL'd version might (for one reason or another) get more mindshare than the BSD version and eclipse the original, with valuable bugfixes and improvements in plain sight of the original dev and yet completely out of reach for legal reasons. That having been said, when I use BSD code, any changes I make to that code (in the form of bugfixes or whatever) I'll be happy to provide under the BSD to devs that would like them. But unfortunately many GPL-types aren't so nice.
My comment was poking fun at people that assume that UNIX systems are the end all be all of uptime, because the OP's clear implication was that something requiring high uptime should be on a UNIX system, not a Windows system. VMS still beats the pants of UNIX in terms of uptime. It was a joke, you know. Laugh.
Still, regardless of where the bug was in this particular case, the fact remains that servers handling mission critical applications (ie, where people's lives are at stake) should not, under any condition, be running Windows. In this case, the problem was with the application, but just because Windows wasn't the issue this time doesn't mean we should all wait around until it is.
What you're saying is like, "I know there are two gaping security holes in this setup, but the hacker that just took our system down only used one -- therefore, I'm just going to patch that one and be on my merry way."
Personally, I'd rather not trust my life to a computer in general, but I'll be really plain and say that if I had to choose a mature UNIX system versus a Windows system, I'd pick the former any day of the week. And if I had the choice of VMS thrown in there, well, all the better. Things can still go wrong at the application level, but the chances of a BSOD turning the whole airport into a carnage of burning crashed planes is that much reduced. And that, my friend, is a good thing.
PS. Saying that Windows works as well on the server as UNIX or VMS is like saying that mentally challenged kids are as capable as normal ones because they too run the special olympics. Windows may have versions aimed at the server, but until systems that need to be up for a decade under high load have actually been up for a decade under high load, I'm not going to trust it. VMS and Solaris are proven server solutions that really do work. A stable NT that doesn't crash is vaporware, as much as Windows nuts wish it weren't. I'm not saying Windows can never be as stable as UNIX/VMS/MVS/whatever, but the simple fact is that today it is not and we're talking about deploying it on mission-critical servers today, not a decade from now when MS gets its act together.
Latin's declension system may allow words to be ordered more flexibly within a clause, but they require that a noun follow each and every preposition directly. This is because in latin (and romance languages), a preposition is essentially an extension of the case system.
In Germanic languages, prepositions most often are connected to the verb -- in german this is particularly true, witness sentences like Er hat mich um gebracht which certainly has nothing to do with bringen. As a result, nouns do not need to follow a preposition, and in fact often should not.
The rule that poorly educated grammarians spout about prepositions being inappropriate at the end of an English sentence stems from an outdated belief in universal grammar -- linguists in the 19th century believed that Latin was a perfect grammar and that all languages necessarily were somehow "isomorphic" to it, if you will. As such, they took a Germanic language (English) and attempted to force latin-like rules onto it.
The apocryphal quote attributed to Churchill in this thread is a perfect example of how ridiculous this makes English sentences sound. English has a very different grammatical structure than Latin.
The fact that strong case marking in latin allows mixing up words in a sentence in no way implies that the seperation of a preposition from its noun is appropriate or legal.
Slashdot Mirror
Whoa, go easy on the enter key there, cowboy ;)
The reason I pointed this out in my original post is because IBM is actually running tons of instances of the Linux kernel virtually, with their own proprietary exokernel-like OS managing actual hardware interfacing. This is neat stuff, no doubt about it, and like a rock, I have no doubt.
There was this guy who was selling a hardened Windows 2000 server solution, in which he claimed no downtime. How did he accomplish this feat? He developed a network messaging system and ran four instances of WinNT on four different machines, redundantly. That way, if one BSODd, the other would take over while the dead one rebooted. It probably still wasn't "unbreakable", but it's easy to see that this configuration was in all likelyhood much more stable than the WinNT shipped default by other vendors.
Now, I ask you, is this proof of WinNT's stability? No. It isn't. Because he's cheating, in a sense.
Now, in IBM's case, they aren't just running Linux redundantly in case it crashes; there are other reasons too. But let's face it; in a system like the one IBM sells, a single instance of Linux crashing (or even many crashing) hardly affects the entire system. So the stability of these IBM mainframes does not really say much about Linux's stability, because even if they were only 95% stable, you'd still have a nearly 100% stable system.
I'm not saying Linux isn't stable, I'm just saying that IBM's Linux on big iron solutions aren't proof of its stability. Hopefully you understand what I mean.
Indeed. A few other posters in this thread have pointed this out. I gave a fairly detailed response to this already; but the short answer is: this is great stuff, good going SGI, but it isn't mature enough to be a drop in replacement for production systems today. Therefore, while good stuff, it doesn't really support the argument that Linux could beat Solaris right now. If you have time I encourage you to check my full response to this.
Well, this is pretty uninformed, sadly. It is true that Solaris 2.x no longer ships with the compiler (you can get Solaris for free, and you need to pay for the dev tools). But Sun's compiler is actually one of the best in the business; it produces very tight, fast code on UltraSPARC (surprise) and much, much better 64-bit code in particular than gcc (I know, I helped the gcc team develop the SPARCv9 compiler for the 3.x series).
Still, if you don't want to pay for dev tools (not often the case in production environments, but let's ignore that for the sake of discussion) gcc is freely available -- in fact it even ships with Solaris IIRC on the GNU tools CD.
For editors, well, the original vi was written by Bill Joy (who up until recently worked for Sun) so it isn't at all surprising that they would ship it default (I believe the POSIX spec requires it, anyway). Furthermore, they have ed. But seriously, why would Sun waste time writing editors? Should they develop their own version of emacs, when both GNU emacs and XEmacs run perfectly well on their system already?
As for shells, the SYSV-like Solaris 2.x has shipped with ksh (the Korn Shell) as its default shell for as long as I can remember. The csh is only default (afaik) on BSD systems for legacy reasons -- virtually no one I know uses the thing, even BSD hackers. Well, maybe Theo De Raadt. ;p
And again, bash is available (
Indeed, I've heard of SGI's efforts to run a single Linux kernel instance on multitudes of CPUs, and I applaud their efforts. There are a number of reasons that this point, while interesting, is currently irrelevant to the discussion.
One, the systems are experimental, and have not been running in high load production environments for the better part of a decade, like Solaris big iron machines have. This problem will be solved with time; as I said in my earlier post, I have no doubt that Linux will overtake Solaris (and indeed, all non-specialized OSs) eventually. (Unless Sun makes good on their OpenSolaris promise, which remains to be seen).
Two, SGI produces completely unworkable patches, and seems rather unwilling to clean them up and submit them in a way that makes review and analysis easy on the other kernel hackers. As a result, last I heard, SGI's changes, which are many, have not been integrated into the mainline kernel. I do not know whether they have updated their patches to work with 2.6 yet, either (last I heard they were working on a modified version of 2.4). Again, I have no doubt that these changes will be integrated eventually -- it is not in SGI's best interest to maintain messy patches.
This is why I said that your point is currently irrelevant. But it is not irrelevant in the long term, and I acknowledge that. Solaris will lose, because Sun cannot compete with the mindshare offered by open source, or the unprecedented level of GPL-enforced vendor cooperation that goes into the Linux kernel. While OpenSolaris may allay some of that, my guess is that companies like SGI, IBM, or whoever will be less willing to commit time and money to the Solaris kernel because that would be helping Sun, when improving Linux helps no one in particular (or everyone, if you prefer).
But lets not count our chickens before they hatch. Today, Linux is an inferior solution on big iron production systems. Admitting this is constructive criticism. Let's not all start sucking each other's dicks just yet.
Ouch. Sounds like you had some serious problems. I'll bow to your superior experiences; my experiences admining Solaris big iron machines don't approximate yours (in terms of load, anyway).
Of course, no tech worth his stuff will take any vendor's claim of unbreakability seriously. Even if the software is perfect, there can always be obscure hardware bugs (and generally are). And we all know that despite Solaris' strengths, it, like all software, has its share of bugs.
I personally find Linux to be quite a stable system -- I've been using and hacking on Linux since 1992 and I don't believe I've ever had a stable branch kernel crash -- but I attribute this to being lucky and not running it in incredibly demanding environments. Even if Linux were perfect as a system -- and its code is damn clean -- flaky x86 hardware would be its downfall in configurations like the one you describe. You'd need to run it on hardware that doesn't fail so much; at that point, you're buying a machine like an E10k anyway, and in that case you're probably better off running the OS that it was designed for (or that was designed for it, take your pick).
Another poster in this thread noted (and I agree with him) that if you want extreme stability, you shouldn't go with UNIX-like systems anyway. VMS is far more stable. But there is no perfect solution to any of these problems, unfortunately. As stable as even VMS is, I'm sure that if you throw enough crap at it fast enough it'll choke, eventually. This is unfortunately an administrative tautology, regardless of your configuration.
FWIW, I agree. Although VMS suffered some when they made the transition from VAX to AXP, and I imagine will suffer some when they make the transition to Itanium -- especially now that HP is at the wheel.
:) I run OpenVMS on my alpha. Hobbyist licenses rule. I've unfortunately never had the chance to administer one in a production environment, but I hope to get the chance some day.
But yeah. Let's not forget, though, that VMS is a much more mature system than Solaris. But AFAIK, there is no reasonably complex multitasking OS that can beat VMS in terms of stability. Well, maybe MVS (but I think its primary feature is batch processing rather than multiprogramming, although of course it can do both). And DCL is the win, even if it doesn't do pipes
Anyway we were comparing Linux and Solaris, so this is kinda off topic.
I mean seriously. We have a debate about the relative merits of Solaris and Linux, and you come out and say, "LOL no context haX0rs@!!~ OMFG linux is so wei faster than Slowaris lol!"
I mean, did you even read his blog entry? I know, I know, this is Slashdot. But come on. He isn't comparing Linux and Solaris as gaming platforms. Yeah, your FPS for Doom 3 is probably faster on Linux (LOL d00d don't you know Doom 3 doeznt run on Slowaris haha you fail it!) but what he's talking about is no downtime, ever.
He's talking about kernel debug utilities. About hardware hotswapping. About being up 24x7x365 doing 1000s of database transactions per minute. We aren't talking about your mom's basement here, with your little network, or even the nice little RAID setup you have going at work that saved your employer a pretty penny. We're talking about big iron. Speed is not the issue here; reliability is. One of the reasons Solaris is slower than Linux is because it checks everything. It is one extremely anal system, and it never ever goes down.
Now, I'm a big Linux fan (typing this on my Debian box), but no one who has seriously admined Solaris boxes can say that the two are even remotely equal on big servers. No contest indeed; Solaris kicks the shit out of Linux.
I don't think this will be the case forever. Unlike the anal blogger referenced in the writeup, I think Linux is catching up faster than Solaris is improving. While he makes good points about Linux's lack of sysadmin accessible kernel debugging tools, traceability, etc, people attempting to sell Linux to big vendors will provide those tools.
But Linux isn't ready for the big iron machines Solaris dominates yet. Don't say IBM, please. IBM runs multitudes of instances of the Linux kernel in parallel on their machines, so that if one fails, it doesn't take the whole system down. Those big iron Sun machines run one kernel, baby. Just one.
I tell you, if they open source Solaris (yeah right) we're going to be looking at some pretty amazing code. Some of the best hackers ever have hacked that thing.
You're wasting your breath, friend. Anyone that suggests that not only is homosexuality not genetically predetermined, but in fact that there is evidence pointing to the contrary, has already made up his mind: you and I both know that there is a tremendous amount of conflicting evidence on this topic, and that most of the "evidence" against genetic predermination comes from sources with a vested interest.
;p), it certainly is pretty deeply engrained. I've never heard of anyone "turning gay" or "turning straight" -- everyone I know was pretty aware of their preference for as far back as they can remember, and that's good enough evidence for me.
They'll use whatever argument they can against it, but in the end, anti-gay types are just homophobic, plain and simple. It's a moral issue of some sort for them, whatever that means. I really think "but that's the out hole" is the core of the issue for them. Seriously.
I'm not gay, but many of my friends are, and I actually met a guy in college at our LGBT who had grown up in the midwest and been put through a religious "straightification" program by his parents, to cure him (I'm Californian). In the end he pretended to be "cured" to get out of it, I swear, it was like something out of But I'm a Cheerleader (great flick, if you haven't seen it). Thank god for the American tradition of sending your kids off to college, huh? Needless to say he went from being a depressed, fucked up kid to a well adjusted, well liked, happy guy overnight.
So what I'm saying is, regardless of what causes it (I think it's nature, but my dyke soc teacher was sure it was nurture, go figure
And homophobia is just ignorance, anyway. I honestly don't know anyone that has actually dealt with openly gay people on a regular basis that has managed to remain homophobic. It's just impossible. In the rural midwest, everyone thinks they don't know anyone gay, but personally I absolutely believe the 1 in 10 stat. Hearing homophobes talk, they seem to think that gay men hit on anything with a penis! They must really think they're god's gift, or something.
The fact that we even need to debate this issue (gay marriage, gay rights, etc) just pisses me off.
Anyway, I hope you're living somewhere where you can live your lifestyle in peace. Seriously, fuck the closet.
100 partners a year?!
Holy cow, that's like, 1 new person every 3 or 4 days! Where can I get some of that?
Seriously, I know you're trolling, but come on. No one could believe 100 partners per day, so this isn't subtle enough. To truly troll, pick something outlandish that some people might be able to believe, like 50 or 20, which would still be extravagant by anyone's measure (gay people included) but wouldn't set off the bullshit-o-meter so fast.
Anyway, for those of you that don't know, lots of gay people have long term, committed relationships (I personally know couples that have been together for 15 years). Not surprisingly, this kind of commitment is more common in the Castro district of SF (where you can hold hands walking down the street and people don't look at you funny, or worse, bash your head in, for acting your nature) then it is in Virginia. Relationships stressed by a need for secrecy and social pressure rarely last long, in any setting.
As the traumatized child of divorced parents, I can agree with your sentiment. But I think legislating it is the wrong move.
Your assumption that marriage (or civil unions, or whatever) are freely entered into is a big one. That may be true for many of the people in your social circle, but in some cultures (remember that ours is a nation of immigrants, and they bring their traditions with them), marriage is arranged or at least heavily influenced by parents. This sometimes happens very young.
Now, in the case of a religious marriage, a breaking with the faith can result in you not carring whether divorce is acceptable or not. So, if for example, I am Catholic and can't obtain an anullment, I'm always free to break with the faith.
But if I am, for example, a young indian guy or girl, born to recently immigrated parents, who at age 18 is married off to a childhood acquaintance of my parents' choosing, a country with no legal divorce leaves me very little in terms of wiggling room when I wake up, realize that I'm more American than Indian, that I don't love the girl/guy, and that I want a life of my own.
My point is that in some cultures, unions are not freely entered into.
Now, you did say that you would want them very difficult to obtain, rather than impossible to obtain, so perhaps you would provide exemptions for such exceptional examples. Probably you wanted to discourage people from having Vegas style weddings and divorcing the next day, thus making a mockery of the institution of marriage, which used to mean something and sadly no longer seems to. But the problem is, if you make it a law, you put the burden on the state (and the courts) to decide who has the right to get divorced and who doesn't. Frankly, I'd much rather them dealing with issues that are important to society and not just to those directly involved (you know, like crime and repealing the DMCA and stuff).
Actually, you bring up an interesting issue.
Frankly I think talking about plural marriage (as in polygamy) and single marriage (as in marriage as we know it today, be it between heterosexuals or homosexuals) as if they are at all similar is sort of an invocation of the Slippery Slope Fallacy, but I'll let it pass because I find that argument less interesting.
Does it really make sense that Polygamy be illegal? I mean, what's wrong with it, really? We aren't talking about anything non-consensual, are we? I suppose it would be possible for one man or woman to have many spouses secretly, ie, without the consent of his/her spouses; this probably shouldn't be allowed. But if everyone in question supports the idea, then what is wrong with it?
The truth is, the idea that marriage is between two people is a rather recent development in the US. 1862, actually, with the Morrill Act. It seems to have been passed primarily to selectively persecute members of the Mormon faith, a perceived cult that was growing rather rapidly in popularity, but was otherwise protected by the 1st amendment. As its defining characteristic was polygamy, it isn't surprising that they were indirectly prosecuted in this way. After all, polygamy ran contrary to the established morals of the predominantly Christian US of the time, and so was easy to pass into law (ignoring completely that marriage was, and remains, religiously defined -- legal marriage originated for bookkeeping purposes).
1862 is relatively recent. For almost half of the US's history as a nation, polygamy was not restricted by federal law (it was by state law in most places, but Utah was a territory at the time, not a state).
But in terms of enforcability, the Morrill act turned out to be a dud, because predictably, Mormons (who consensually were a part of the whole deal) refused to bear witness against their husbands and neighbors. So, shortly thereafter, Congress passed the Edmunds act in 1882, which made just bigamously cohabitating a misdemeanor. Proving a man was living with more than one woman wasn't hard, and so many Mormons were prosecuted.
Now, I'm not Mormon (or religious at all, actually), but to me, this is the government harrassing a religion whose practices they considered immoral by their (Christian) standards. While people who practice religions are generally happy to accept the morals prescribed by their faith over morals prescribed by others, in a nation that claims to protect the freedom to pursue ones religious faith without harassment, aren't we treading a thin line with marriage?
Frankly, I see no reason whatsoever that we should be legislating it at all. If I want to have a polygamous relationship, then I should be allowed to have it; and the government should dutifully record such an arrangement, as a) even without them calling it marriage I'll probably have it anyway and b) having it on record will make historical enquiries into the nature of my family easier for my descendents.
People often act like polygamy has been illegal in the US forever. That's a relatively recent addition to Federal Law, and I think it could stand to be repealed. I don't feel like marrying two women, but hell, if my neighbor does, and his wives don't care, why not?
Legislating morality is not the business of the government. Polygamy doesn't restrict anyone's freedom, so let's not pass laws against it, ok?
When I heard him talk about this, he side stepped it neatly. He said he was opposed to gay marriage, but for civil unions. He said he thought marriage was a religious thing, and because of that, the government should refrain from dealing with it.
Essentially, this breaks down to "we should stop dealing with marriage, and give civil unions only, and to any couple (straight or gay) that wants them". That's just legalizing gay marriage, and changing every instance of marriage (as defined by the law) to civil union.
So yes, he's against gay marriage, but against straight marriage too, if that makes sense. Unless he's flopped on this issue as well, I would say that makes him (carefully) pro-gay marriage.
While there is definitely some ambiguity here, with Bush there isn't any. So if gay marriage is your thing, Kerry's your man (although less so than he ought to be).
African American media?
What African American media?
Oh, I see, you meant media directed at African Americans. Have you ever noticed how the MTV generation (taking races out of the picture here for a moment) is unduly influenced by the views/role models that appear on that channel and others like it? The phenomenon of hip, pop culture is a deciding one in the development of youth viewpoints everywhere, regardless of race.
Now, lots of white kids grew their hair long when they were 15 and listened to Motley Crue, Nirvana or Nine Inch Nails, depending on when they grew up. More recently, we have the "angry frat boy" thing (Limp Bizkit, etc). You hang out at a local high school and you see groups that aspire to be like the people they see on TV.
Luckily, they grow out of this, eventually. But they mostly grow out of it because real life comes knocking at their door; they get sent to college by their parents, they get an internship and a first apartment that teaches them the value of hard work and fiscal responsibility, etc.
But with African American kids that grow up in poor neighborhoods, life is rather different. Their parents don't send them to college, whether they want to go or not. If they go to college, they work their asses off for a scholarship, and if they're really lucky, they might get some help in the form of affirmative action or some other progressive measure to offset the steep hill they have to climb to even get close to the place that white suburban kids get for free from their folks. But, especially in public schools, this doesn't happen much anymore, thanks to lobbying by self-styled "non-racists" who want to "even the playing field".
For these kids, the thug life (which in most other demographics is just a phase) becomes reality as they feel increasingly disenfranchised with society. Whereas an angry LSD-dropping eyemakeup wearing Marilyn Manson listening white kid "gets over it" most of the time and dons a business suit and briefcase for his office job by the time he's in his middle twenties, most black kids, having not had the opportunity for higher education, are left in crime ridden neighborhoods to fend for themselves.
I won't deny that what you describe is very real: the "uncle tom", "oreo", "house nigger" label is one you'd best avoid if you're black in an African American social circle (unless it's the young republicans or something). There is a certain disdain for "the Man's education", too. But let's be frank. If you grew up in a society that domineered and oppressed you, and only emancipated your ancestors from slavery 140 years ago (that's about 5 generations back -- it's entirely likely that the grandmother of a middle aged african american today knew someone that was a slave. Her grandmother, perhaps.)
But but wait it gets worse. Not only did they not bother emancipating you from slavery until 1863 (and then not even everywhere), you didn't get the right to vote until much, much later, and in much of the US lived in a defacto state of apartheid until the 1960s. That was, umm, hmm, 40 some odd years ago. That's your parents. Today.
Because you had previously been slaves (work for no pay), emancipation gave your forefathers very little. So while you had your freedom (legally, anyway, although in many places not in practice) you had nothing to show for it. No money, no land. Not different from the white europeans arriving around the same period (the Irish, for example) on the face of it, except that in two generations, no one could tell an irish person was irish unless he chose to make an issue about it. But, well, being black stays with you a bit longer.
Of course this didn't stop lots of people from "trying to pass".
If you put all this together, I don't think it should be the least bit surprising that black kids are mistrustful of white people. Not fair, perhaps, to today's less-racist types, and certainly racist in its own right (judging a white person isn't any better th
I think you're the one who didn't read the link.
The issue lies with a 1979 decision that states that students (temporary residents of a state) are allowed to register to vote in that state, without being permanent residents.
Unfortunately, this fact is not widely recognized by out-of-state students at universites, who believe that the only way they can vote is through the somewhat tedious process of absentee voting in their home state (or going back home to vote).
In order to encourage students to vote, the 1979 decision made it legal to vote in the state in which you are studying. From the article: In fact, despite a 1979 Supreme Court ruling affirming their right to vote where they attend school, students often encounter difficulties when they try to exercise that right.
As for the feminist attention whores thing, I'll presume you're just trolling.
Still, with a sig that paints you as rather unsupportive of ignorance, you'd think you'd at least check your facts.
Actually, ending slavery did not come as an added bonus. The Emancipation Proclamation only applied to states of the CSA, not those fighting for the union. There were two states fighting for the North that were slave states, and they were not required to abolish slavery.
This is because, obviously, Lincoln's main concern was holding the union together, not freeing slaves. He was concerned that forcing the border states to abolish slavery would encourage them to fight on the side of the CSA.
The main purpose of the Emancipation Proclamation was to encourage slaves in the south (who outnumbered their masters by a rather considerable margin) to revolt for their freedom. This was something that people in the South had been terrified of for a while -- there had been a few slave uprisings already.
Furthermore, there was genuine concern that Europe -- specifically France and England, the two most powerful countries on earth at that time -- would recognize the CSA's statehood. In order to prevent Northern racists and anti-abolishonists from further splintering the North, and to encourage seceding states to return the Union, Lincoln had been very, very reticent to declare an Emancipation Proclamation. He therefore continuously said that the war was not about Slaves. France and England, both vehemently anti-slavery by this time, therefore saw no difference in policy between the USA and the CSA and saw no reason not to recognize the latter. A weaker, splintered US would also have been politically beneficial for them, due to interests in Canada and the like.
When Lincoln declared the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, he forced the hand of the European powers -- they could no longer in good faith support the CSA, because it became an issue of slavery versus non-slavery. Lincoln did not emancipate the slaves in border states, or even in the regions of the south already controlled by the Union.
Well, we do have nuclear weapons...
Sorry, nucular.
(It's a joke people, laugh.)
Your whole life could be described as "putting off the inevitable." As Bob Dylan said, "You're either busy being born or busy dying". What could you do for 10, 20, or 30 extra years? Ok, if you're living thanks to modern medicine, perhaps you can't go mountain climbing. But you could read a book, watch a movie, see your grandchildren grow up.
It'll be interesting to see how you feel about Libers saying that your medical care is just "putting off the inevitable" when you're old and gray.
I agree with you about chauvinism, that is to say, the GP had no idea what the term meant. However, if you truly believe that there is no one holding back the black man today, you must not know very many black men. Oh, yes, I know, "You have several black friends". So does everyone who says this sort of stuff. I used to, too.
But then I actually went to college and got some real black friends. Not inner city gangster types, mind you. College kids. This in itself, statistically, makes them a tiny minority of the larger black population. They didn't conform to the steryotypes most racist whites have of black people. They didn't wear bling bling outfits or speak "ebonics" in class. I'm saying this because I want to make absolutely clear that the way they were treated could only have been because of their skin color. There was nothing else about them to find offensive.
Now, I went to university in California, a socially enlightened state by most definitions, and let me tell you something: racism most definitely is alive and well. I would go to the supermarket with my black girlfriend, and people treated her differently than they treated me. The white girl behind the checkout stand would, in her own subtle way, "not give her face", to borrow an Asian expression.
It wasn't calling her a nigger. It wasn't a lynchmob. These things, thankfully, are on the decline. But to think that just because, as a well to do white man, you don't see any racism or social inequity in our society, there simply isn't any, is pure folly.
To ward off these sorts of claims, people with your "racism is dead" view always point to all the black friends they allegedly have. To me, this is a lot like 15 year old virgin guys talking about how great having sex is. They may sound convincing to other virgin guys, but to someone who's actually had some nookie, they're pretty obvious frauds.
Luckily for you, the demographic on Slashdot is mostly white suburban guys who feel slighted by all the reverse racism inherent in affirmative action and the like. So you're preaching to the choir, and I'm not. But for the 4 years I was in school, essentially all of my friends were black. Not because I was in love with african american culture, hip hop, or wished I'd been born a gangsta -- but because, due to a housing shortage, my freshman year I was placed in an African American interest dorm.
There was reverse racism. It's to be expected that distrust should exist. I hated it, too. Being the token white suburban kid in a dorm filled with black kids, most of whom had busted their balls to scrape together enough support from friends and family in their respective communities in order to be there -- while my parents paid for my tuition -- wasn't easy, at all.
To make matters worse, I was just like you. A programmer. A registered Libertarian. A geek. I honestly believed there was no difference anymore, that civil rights was a struggle that had been won in the 1960s. Probably in my first week, I walked down into the TV room where a dormmate was watching BET. I asked him (earnestly) why black people insisted on speaking "like that" and so on, and went on a diatribe about how it was hurtful to black people's self-image. I honestly believed it, too. I guess I thought blacks would be better off if they acted white.
Thankfully, I understand how stupid that is now.
People say things like, "Lincoln freed the slaves in the 1860s! That was, what, 140 years ago? Why's it taking them so long to integrate? Why can't they flourish, like other immigrants did?" and they say it with a completely straight face.
I went home on break and heard my parents, whom I considered to be so open minded (and still consider to be open minded) say things that I probably at one point wouldn't have even noticed. Racist things. Not nigger or lynchmob
Well, granted, Kim Il Sung is dead, and he was perhaps the brains behind the operation, but North Korea fought the entire US war machine, which had just emerged from WW2 a triumphant nuclear power, to a complete and utter standstill. And the KWP was much less entrenched then, and their military far smaller and more primitive.
Proportionally, NK has the largest standing military in the world.
They have nuclear weapons.
They, like the US, are headed up by someone who feels no remorse in the real world application of his military power.
We Americans like to think that the only reason we aren't attacking NK is because we care about SK, or because we're worried about a retaliatory strike against Japan, or because of China's close ties with the regime.
These things hopefully do figure into our strategy. But even if they weren't issues, I very much doubt that we could take NK down. We'd be fighting a war on their home turf, which is mountainous and prone to extreme variations in temperature, with subarctic winters and horribly hot, humid summers, and which has been continuously fortified by the KWP war machine for the last 50 years. This is not a mostly flat desert we can just roll tanks through.
As far as Kim Jung Il is concerned, he is still at war with the US (this is the legal stance of the US, as well). And he has spent his whole life preparing for combat to resume. Don't make the mistake of thinking of him as another Saddam. If we send our troops in there, more than just South Koreans will die.
We would probably suffer the most heinous military losses in history.
Let's not and say we did, shall we? Containment is all that is required for NK. I live in China, and KJI has a weakness for technology. He wants economic reform in NK (probably not for the betterment of the lives of his people, but rather to help ensure his country's survival), but is unsure how to make Deng Xiao Ping style reforms jive with his father's Juche Ideal, which is practically a state religion in NK.
Careful, Asian-style diplomacy, combined with a heavy dose of Realpolitik, a strong desire for Korean Unification on the part of both governments, and a decreased US presence in the region (which is seen as inflammatory by all concerned) will lead to NK opening up, roughly in the same way that economic reforms have changed China.
Despite what you hear on CNN, very few of the South Koreans I know (and I know many, as there are many SK expats here in Shanghai) think that the massive military buildup on the border does anything but convince KJI that more military power is necessary. This exacerbates the situation. KJI would be insane to attack SK, even if there were no US presence there. We (Americans) could be there within hours anyway, and NK can't feed itself without economic support from its neighbors and the world. Not to mention that an invasion of SK would likely put the peace loving Japanese back on the warpath; NK wants nothing more than their destruction, after all. We've seen the Japanese on the warpath once before, and it wasn't pretty.
No, KJI isn't going to invade anyone. But as long as we maintain a massive military presence on his borders, and play "hardball" with him, he has to spend all his money on the military. His regime is corrupt, there's no doubt, but let's be honest here. It's easy to convince a starving populace that the imperialists are just waiting for you to slow down military development to invade when there's a massive US army presence right there on the border. Otherwise, it's a rather hard sell.
NK did at one point have expansionist policies; but at the time, they were backed militarily by the Soviets, and by China. Now they are backed by no one.
And anyway, if they move against SK, destroying them would be seen as universally justifiable.
You must be joking. In violation of Godwin's Law, I will respond to you. Let's see. First, Hitler killed 10 million people in a systematic way, mostly with gas chambers. Saddam has killed Kurds and others, yes. But not 10 million of them, not even close. While I agree with the general sentiment that murder in any form is wrong, there are times when scale does matter when making comparisons.
What Saddam has done amounts to mass murder. Bad, yes. What Hitler did was genocide. He attempted to systematically eliminate several entire peoples, most notably the Jews and Roma, from the areas he controlled. He did this ruthlessly and efficiently. What Saddam wanted was a secular, socialist state. He killed many people that would not bend to his will, or that would not conform to his brand of secularism.
But Jews under Hitler were slaughtered even when the last Jew (possibly not even practicing Jew) in their family was 5 generations back. He wasn't concerned with control. He had control. He was waging racial warfare. He considered the extermination of the Jewish people more important than winning World War II -- he devoted more resources to the holocaust than to the front -- because he believed that Jewish blood was contaminating Aryans.
I mean, let's be serious. Saddam was a bad guy, yes, and he tortured people, yes, but Hitler? That's just as ridiculous as comparing GWB to Hitler. Have we all just forgotten who Hitler was? How can we throw his name around so easily? What Saddam did doesn't even qualify as genocide, even minor genocide. We were responsible for more deaths in Iraq than he was, as a result of a decade of sanctions.
If we indirectly were able to kill that many people, we're not dealing with murder on a tremendous scale.
That having been said, the guy was a dick and I'm glad he's out of power. But for the average Iraqi, I'm not sure our regime is much better than his, even if we (mostly) don't torture them. Because under him, there was at least stability and security. And while Freedom is a lofty and honorable goal, it starts to look a little crappy if you can't walk outside without being blown up.
Probably because European countries have for some time lacked the military prowess the US has, and therefore require the cooperation of other nations to back up their diplomacy with force.
You see, there is a sort of checks and balances system that arises when you lack power; you are forced to make alliances with others who similarly lack power in order to pass muster. This means that another sovreign nation, whose views, politics, and media are different from yours, must agree with your stance. Usually, just one isn't enough; usually, you need several.
America, on the other hand (and I say this as an American), no longer needs to do this. We are a power unto ourselves. This is a good thing, in a certain sense -- it means that we cannot easily be manipulated into a position we'd rather not be in by others whose interests are different from our own -- but with it comes an incredible responsibility.
It means that we must instill a system of checks and balances in our own political system to approximate the dissent and debate that a smaller country would need to take part in before, say, deciding to invade some other sovreign nation.
Lamentably, this has been rather difficult, because no matter how fair and balanced we try to be, America is not the whole world, and does not represent even a sizeable fraction of it. We are one of the richest most powerful countries on earth, with an incredibly high standard of living. We do not (and I say this honestly) understand the plight of the less fortunate, in the same way that the rich often fail to understand the struggles of the poor.
It should come as no surprise to us that our views regarding "what's best" for the poor and underpriveleged nations in the world is met with some disillusionment.
Furthermore, we have the misfortune to be saddled with an administration that seems bent on eroding the checks and balances in our government designed to keep our foreign and domestic policy as representative as possible. While I do dislike GWB the man, I'll be honest and admit that, what with 9/11, Al Gore probably would have acted in a very similar way. Terrorism breeds fear in people (hence its name) and a terrified populace will give up its rights easily -- it will in fact demand they be restricted, in the name of greater security, if it can be convinced that those rights were abused by ne'erdowells. So it isn't GWB's fault, per se, although I do dislike the way his administration appears to have benefited illictly from the situation.
No, it's out fault, as Americans. For letting it happen. For allowing those that want power -- this includes anyone running for public office, Democrat or Republican -- to erode our rights. Rights taken away are hard to get back.
That wasn't his point. He never said that we don't get to vote. He said we don't get to vote for the President.
We undeniably influence the outcome of the election; one could even say that we determine its outcome. But vote for the President? Nope.
"We the People" couldn't be trusted with that.
While they were obviously fairly ignorant, it is nice that they thought to ask your permission. I'm a GPL-nut myself (everything I write, essentially, gets released under the GPL) but I have noticed that lots of BSD folks get upset when their code is relicensed by other free software projects. They'll always agree to it, if you ask (at least, they have in my experience, and anyway, they can't really say no, legally) but it's still the polite thing to do.
At the very least, it'll make the dev happy that someone out there thinks his code is worth copying.
PS. I think the reason that BSD types get upset over free software relicensing (rather than proprietary relicensing) is because they are "competing" as it were in the free software sphere. When someone takes BSD code proprietary, they're taking it out of the pool. The BSD dev doesn't know what happens to it after that and so it's hard to worry about it. Contrast this to a GPLification, where the GPL'd version might (for one reason or another) get more mindshare than the BSD version and eclipse the original, with valuable bugfixes and improvements in plain sight of the original dev and yet completely out of reach for legal reasons. That having been said, when I use BSD code, any changes I make to that code (in the form of bugfixes or whatever) I'll be happy to provide under the BSD to devs that would like them. But unfortunately many GPL-types aren't so nice.
My comment was poking fun at people that assume that UNIX systems are the end all be all of uptime, because the OP's clear implication was that something requiring high uptime should be on a UNIX system, not a Windows system. VMS still beats the pants of UNIX in terms of uptime. It was a joke, you know. Laugh.
Still, regardless of where the bug was in this particular case, the fact remains that servers handling mission critical applications (ie, where people's lives are at stake) should not, under any condition, be running Windows. In this case, the problem was with the application, but just because Windows wasn't the issue this time doesn't mean we should all wait around until it is.
What you're saying is like, "I know there are two gaping security holes in this setup, but the hacker that just took our system down only used one -- therefore, I'm just going to patch that one and be on my merry way."
Personally, I'd rather not trust my life to a computer in general, but I'll be really plain and say that if I had to choose a mature UNIX system versus a Windows system, I'd pick the former any day of the week. And if I had the choice of VMS thrown in there, well, all the better. Things can still go wrong at the application level, but the chances of a BSOD turning the whole airport into a carnage of burning crashed planes is that much reduced. And that, my friend, is a good thing.
PS. Saying that Windows works as well on the server as UNIX or VMS is like saying that mentally challenged kids are as capable as normal ones because they too run the special olympics. Windows may have versions aimed at the server, but until systems that need to be up for a decade under high load have actually been up for a decade under high load, I'm not going to trust it. VMS and Solaris are proven server solutions that really do work. A stable NT that doesn't crash is vaporware, as much as Windows nuts wish it weren't. I'm not saying Windows can never be as stable as UNIX/VMS/MVS/whatever, but the simple fact is that today it is not and we're talking about deploying it on mission-critical servers today, not a decade from now when MS gets its act together.
Couldn't have said it better myself. System should have been running VMS.
Ah well.
Wow, thanks. German orthography has always gotten me down :)
You clearly do not speak latin.
Latin's declension system may allow words to be ordered more flexibly within a clause, but they require that a noun follow each and every preposition directly. This is because in latin (and romance languages), a preposition is essentially an extension of the case system.
In Germanic languages, prepositions most often are connected to the verb -- in german this is particularly true, witness sentences like Er hat mich um gebracht which certainly has nothing to do with bringen. As a result, nouns do not need to follow a preposition, and in fact often should not.
The rule that poorly educated grammarians spout about prepositions being inappropriate at the end of an English sentence stems from an outdated belief in universal grammar -- linguists in the 19th century believed that Latin was a perfect grammar and that all languages necessarily were somehow "isomorphic" to it, if you will. As such, they took a Germanic language (English) and attempted to force latin-like rules onto it.
The apocryphal quote attributed to Churchill in this thread is a perfect example of how ridiculous this makes English sentences sound. English has a very different grammatical structure than Latin.
The fact that strong case marking in latin allows mixing up words in a sentence in no way implies that the seperation of a preposition from its noun is appropriate or legal.
No soup for you.