But see, interestingly Iran is going closer to a true democracy every day, on it's own term, and would have gone there quicker possibly had the US not sponsored a war with its neighbour.
I remember exactly why it was done and at the time I thought (unless my memory is now playing tricks) that sponsoring Iraq to invade Iran would strengthen Iran, not weaken it. I believe this is what happened.
The invasion and occupation of Japan and Germany was justified because together they had launched a world war against everybody else. They lost and changed their way. Now the foundation for invading Iraq
I hear, but I may be wrong, that lots of Americans are in fact uninsured and are not poor enough to benefit from medicare.
Wasn't one of the failures of the first Clinton government the inability to provide affordable health insurance for every American?
Even with insurance it's reputedly easy to blow the cap of the cover and end up having to pay tens of thousands of dollars because the hospital made a mistake and kept you there too long? It actually happened to one of my close friends and she had to sue to avoid becoming bankrupt. It happened in the middle of college, so she would have lost her education too.
What if you lose your job and your insurance package with it?
Believe it or not but in most western societies this does not happen. You do not lose your cover when you lose your job and unless you go in for elective surgery in a private hospital you do not end up having to pay tens of thousands of dollars no matter what and the quality of the care itself is not believed to be inferior.
It is not irrelevant, the whole premisse for urgent invasion was that Saddam Hussein had these huge caches of weapons he was ready to unleash on the world at 40 minutes notice. Have you read the British dossier? it has been basically completely debunked now, don't you read the news? The whole debate is now whether Tony Blair simply lied to the British people or believed inconclusive intelligence.
For most of the 12 years he had weapons inspectors on his back which were doing an OK, if not brilliant work, in spite of what GWB was saying. So much so that the CIA believed in 1998 or so that Saddam Hussein had been so thoroughly declawed that it was safe to invade Iraq should anyone want to.
So you are saying that maybe he had them and gave them away to terrorist groups as the US army was marching down on him. That would be great, right?
Of course maybe Saddam Hussein was so clever that hid them so well and he is now hiding with them and will resurface in June when the US goes home. Do you believe that too?
No, the reality is simpler. Saddam Hussein never had as many WMDs as the CIA pretended he had, that's all. You've been decieved.
Personally I don't have a problem with the US removing dictators and trying to install democracy somewhere, provided this is objective. The US famously did that to Europe and Japan and were really born as a super-power there and then.
I do however, and I think a lot of the world do to, have a huge problem with the US installing and supporting dictators everywhere, including for example Saddam Hussein.
Now turning around and removing dictators that were installed previously by the same country is called hypocrisy in my book. SH is by no means the only one BTW, the list is very very long.
I believe that it would be in the US's advantage both political and policital to proactively support true democracy everywhere, not just when it suits them in the short term.
Also in most countries manual counting is a public event. Ordinary member of the public come to count and witness the counting. It is very hard to cheat under these circumstances.
> Another absurd statement; health care in the > USA is the best in the world
If so, explain why the average life expectancy in the US is one of the worst of OECD countries. It sits on part with that of Puerto Rico.
Read this WHO report. It offers some explanation as to why US is not faring that well too.
Gore Vidal is not concerned about the availability of health care. If you are very rich in any country you can afford the best health care as well. People routinely fly into the US or other countries such as the UK for tricky operations.
What he is saying is that the average American's access to health care is not that great, and this is well supported by evidence.
American influence on French politics mostly came from the Alexis de Tocqueville essay "Democracy in America", which is still occasionally studied in schools today in France.
Maybe the lesson was that in spite of stupendous military might and easy victory against regular troops, the US is finding it hard to fight a guerilla.
Bush et al. knew they would have no trouble against SH, maybe they expected to find a liberated Iraq grateful and happy like Europe at the end of WWII, however this is not what is happening now. Somehow a lot of Iraqi seem to think that GWB's reasons to invade all sounded a bit dubious.
I think it's fine to fight when one is attacked, but the justification for attacking in Iraq are more tenuous. Maybe you would care to point to some WMDs? The justification for toppling SH is fine and dandy, however if the US pull out too early and a Iran-style theocratic regime is installed, what will the people of Iraq have gained? How long are the US voters going to want to stay in Iraq? 10 years?
The lesson is that war is highly uncertain even if you are sure to win it. You have to win the peace afterwards. This is a lesson the Europeans have learned to their detriment after centuries of colonialism.
Well, the climate seems to be warming (although the cause is disputed, large ice shelves have begun to break up in the last few years), there is definitely a hole in the ozone layer over Antarctica, don't your read your newspapers?, and no one is putting oil back into the ground, so how exactly are they lies?
Described in Linux Journal months ago
on
Home Directory In CVS
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
This is innovative but not new, the LJ article is dated September 2002.
No no, I've had this experience with win2k too, but I blame it on poor installers, not really on Microsoft. Usually the only cure is an O/S reinstall though - A lot of windows users swear this is a good thing to do from time to time, but I'm not so sure. I don't know if things are better with winXP.
You can upgrade from RH9 to FC1 in the exact same way you would have upgraded from RH8 to RH9. The installer for FC1 finds out you have RH9 (or any previous version, at least from RH7.x) and upgrades the relevant packages. End of story.
Then you have an apt-enabled (and yum-enabled) system that looks and feel like a RH machine. If you know RH it's a time saver. If you liked RH before you might still like FC1, it feels exactly the same.
But as you learn apt/yum more and more, you might be pulled towards the Debian end of things, it depends on how well the Fedora community handles the variety and consistency of packages.
I think there is room for a middle-of-the road distribution that is easy to install, looks reasonably good, comes with a reasonable selection of packages on a relatively small set of CDs (3 is really a maximum) and is fully updatable and upgradable. FC could well fit that nice, but then again it might fail horribly. RH had this crutial critical mass of people who knew and trusted them. Will that translate to FC? not sure.
The good things RH did appart from the looks (which is a matter of taste) was 1- the kernel support (thanks to Alan Cox sterling work. Remember the 2.4.10+ bad days with horrible VM performance? none of that with the RH kernels) and 2- the security focus and the updates: timely and easy. Will Fedora continue on that trend?
I installed FC1 last night on my home machine, I'm keeping RH9 at work, we'll see.
The problem with Debian is that you really have to know what you are doing when you maintain that distribution and you have to actively remember to look for what needs to be updated. That little RH icon in your folder and the email reminders that keep telling you when (and why) you need to update your distribution is what made such a huge difference for me and my co-workers.
For example Fedora 1.0 was released yesterday. If it had been a RedHat release (10?), everybody would be falling over themselves to review it, comment on it, dissect its features, etc. Do a search on Google for "fedora core 1.0 review" and look for yourself: nothing (as of the time of writing). My Australian mirror still doesn't have the distribution!
Instead people are getting the message that RedHat has gotten proprietary and if you want to run it you have to fork $180 per seat per year. No thank you.
Fedora looks good on paper, but fewer people are bothering. I'm pretty sure Fedora will be far less popular than RedHat ever was.
If you are a sysadmin and have a Debian or Slackware box at home why would you recommend RHEL to your PHB? It's not very different but why bother with the small irritating differences, the "inferior" package system and the marketing crap? Get Debian with a support contract, you already know how it works and it might be cheaper.
Note: I've been running RH since version 3, and at first I thought that this move might hold some promise, but thanks to the few confusing messages from RH and the PR disaster (run Windows at home, says RH CEO!), I'm now less sure that this move will be positive.
In fact the Microsoft strategy hasn't changed very much over the years. IE on mac is no longer supported (5.2 or something is the last version), and Office is different enough and incompatible enough to make integration in a windows environment a pain. Sometimes Office documents from Macs just don't open at all in Windows, Word being the worst offender.
In short Macs are still a pain to sysadmins and company don't like them unless they run close to 100% macs. It used to be exactly the same in the late 80s and early 90s with MS-Word.
I reckon that's pretty clever of MS. Give the illusion of support and the impression of Mac inferiority with respect to Office documents.
Actually for a while NeXT had hardware-accelerated DPS for its cubes, via a graphics board called NeXT-dimension. At the time (1990) it was simply amazing. This board did accelerated Display Postscript at something like 1080x960 in 32-bit colour and even had video capture (PAL or NTSC). It sounds like not much right now, but there was nothing like it at that price range at the time.
The monotonically increasing curve in the graph (not the spiky one) shows the average concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere. If Pinatubo had released any significant amount it would have showed on this graph. Instead the CO2 content in the atmosphere continues to increase at exactly the same rate as a result of man's activity I presume.
The articles that you cite are again somewhat incorrect. Eruptions generate HCL (hydrochloric acid) which have an effect on the ozone layer and acid rains, but it is a short-lived effect, see this link.
The US throw out relatively little SO2 now, compared with some developing countries thanks to more stringent emission regulations, so comparing with the US emission is not very interesting. I don't have the figure for the whole world, sorry.
Sure, Man `only' generates a few puny billion tonnes of C02 compared with the oceans and forest, but both forest and oceans are `carbon neutral'. Both absorb again the exact same quantity by making new trees and new plancton. Man on the other hand releases CO2 over a short time that had been trapped in geological layers aeons ago over a very long period. This carbon cannot be absorbed again at a sufficient rate.
Most scientists agree that it is industrialization which is the root cause of CO2 rate increase in the atmosphere. What they disagree upon is whether this is having a warming effect or not, and over which timescale.
All the best (I would give more references but I have to go now, pick up my daughter, please continue this discussion if you are interested).
I know some people support Pinochet, but you have to have a pretty dry heart or a very selective and short memory to do that. In particular you have not to mind torture and assassination as means of government.
I've met a young Chilean who said exactly the same thing as you quote. To me this proves that propaganda works really well. S. Allende was not bringing Chile down the path of Cuba, in fact Chile was the most prosperous South American country when the coup took place. Allende was not communist, but he did have a democrat socialist agenda (like many European countries do now). Moreover Allende had been democratically elected. Yes Allende was not particularly or at least not sufficiently pro-US. This does prove my point that America is not particularly pro-democracy abroad.
Then I asked the same young Chilean if he thought the Chileans in exile had a similar opinion to his, particularly the families of those that the Pinochet government tortured in Chile and assassinated in various countries, he had no reply.
A few years ago Pinochet was arrested in England after Spain laid charges against him for political assassinations of Spanish citizens *in Spain*. There assassinated people were ex-Chileans in exile that Pinochet took great pain to kill. Unfortunately he got off on health grounds, but it would have been interesting to follow his trial, because a lot of very dirty secrets would probably have been revealed.
I can't believe anyone with any sense of humanity would defend such a man as Pinochet.
> plus they have 10-100x the level of useful > software packed on them.
I'd like most of the Gnome-KDE little applications crap done away with, that would be great, but the big appplications on Linux are tremendously useful: Xemacs, LaTeX, development suites and libraries, multimedia.
What commercial stuff do you find on "other commercial OSes" that you can't find an equivalent of on Linux? Please list them, and you'll have a new series of OSS projects.
Slashdot Mirror
But see, interestingly Iran is going closer to a true democracy every day, on it's own term, and would have gone there quicker possibly had the US not sponsored a war with its neighbour.
I remember exactly why it was done and at the time I thought (unless my memory is now playing tricks) that sponsoring Iraq to invade Iran would strengthen Iran, not weaken it. I believe this is what happened.
The invasion and occupation of Japan and Germany was justified because together they had launched a world war against everybody else. They lost and changed their way. Now the foundation for invading Iraq
I hear, but I may be wrong, that lots of Americans are in fact uninsured and are not poor enough to benefit from medicare.
Wasn't one of the failures of the first Clinton government the inability to provide affordable health insurance for every American?
Even with insurance it's reputedly easy to blow the cap of the cover and end up having to pay tens of thousands of dollars because the hospital made a mistake and kept you there too long? It actually happened to one of my close friends and she had to sue to avoid becoming bankrupt. It happened in the middle of college, so she would have lost her education too.
What if you lose your job and your insurance package with it?
Believe it or not but in most western societies this does not happen. You do not lose your cover when you lose your job and unless you go in for elective surgery in a private hospital you do not end up having to pay tens of thousands of dollars no matter what and the quality of the care itself is not believed to be inferior.
It is not irrelevant, the whole premisse for urgent invasion was that Saddam Hussein had these huge caches of weapons he was ready to unleash on the world at 40 minutes notice. Have you read the British dossier? it has been basically completely debunked now, don't you read the news? The whole debate is now whether Tony Blair simply lied to the British people or believed inconclusive intelligence.
For most of the 12 years he had weapons inspectors on his back which were doing an OK, if not brilliant work, in spite of what GWB was saying. So much so that the CIA believed in 1998 or so that Saddam Hussein had been so thoroughly declawed that it was safe to invade Iraq should anyone want to.
So you are saying that maybe he had them and gave them away to terrorist groups as the US army was marching down on him. That would be great, right?
Of course maybe Saddam Hussein was so clever that hid them so well and he is now hiding with them and will resurface in June when the US goes home. Do you believe that too?
No, the reality is simpler. Saddam Hussein never had as many WMDs as the CIA pretended he had, that's all. You've been decieved.
Personally I don't have a problem with the US removing dictators and trying to install democracy somewhere, provided this is objective. The US famously did that to Europe and Japan and were really born as a super-power there and then.
I do however, and I think a lot of the world do to, have a huge problem with the US installing and supporting dictators everywhere, including for example Saddam Hussein.
Now turning around and removing dictators that were installed previously by the same country is called hypocrisy in my book. SH is by no means the only one BTW, the list is very very long.
I believe that it would be in the US's advantage both political and policital to proactively support true democracy everywhere, not just when it suits them in the short term.
Also in most countries manual counting is a public event. Ordinary member of the public come to count and witness the counting. It is very hard to cheat under these circumstances.
> Another absurd statement; health care in the
> USA is the best in the world
If so, explain why the average life expectancy in the US is one of the worst of OECD countries. It sits on part with that of Puerto Rico.
Read this WHO report. It offers some explanation as to why US is not faring that well too.
Gore Vidal is not concerned about the availability of health care. If you are very rich in any country you can afford the best health care as well. People routinely fly into the US or other countries such as the UK for tricky operations.
What he is saying is that the average American's access to health care is not that great, and this is well supported by evidence.
American influence on French politics mostly came from the Alexis de Tocqueville essay "Democracy in America", which is still occasionally studied in schools today in France.
The Left in the US is pretty much what everybody calls center-right in other democratic nations.
Except the illegal weapons haven't been found yet.
Maybe the lesson was that in spite of stupendous military might and easy victory against regular troops, the US is finding it hard to fight a guerilla.
Bush et al. knew they would have no trouble against SH, maybe they expected to find a liberated Iraq grateful and happy like Europe at the end of WWII, however this is not what is happening now. Somehow a lot of Iraqi seem to think that GWB's reasons to invade all sounded a bit dubious.
I think it's fine to fight when one is attacked, but the justification for attacking in Iraq are more tenuous. Maybe you would care to point to some WMDs? The justification for toppling SH is fine and dandy, however if the US pull out too early and a Iran-style theocratic regime is installed, what will the people of Iraq have gained? How long are the US voters going to want to stay in Iraq? 10 years?
The lesson is that war is highly uncertain even if you are sure to win it. You have to win the peace afterwards. This is a lesson the Europeans have learned to their detriment after centuries of colonialism.
My take on it anyway.
Have you not played NetHack (I recommend it if you have some spare time)?
A fedora is a hat with a wide brim, just like Indiana Jone's.
Sorry, English is not my first language.
Well, the climate seems to be warming (although the cause is disputed, large ice shelves have begun to break up in the last few years), there is definitely a hole in the ozone layer over Antarctica, don't your read your newspapers?, and no one is putting oil back into the ground, so how exactly are they lies?
This is innovative but not new, the LJ article is dated September 2002.
Waky, waky editors?
No no, I've had this experience with win2k too, but I blame it on poor installers, not really on Microsoft. Usually the only cure is an O/S reinstall though - A lot of windows users swear this is a good thing to do from time to time, but I'm not so sure.
I don't know if things are better with winXP.
You can upgrade from RH9 to FC1 in the exact same way you would have upgraded from RH8 to RH9. The installer for FC1 finds out you have RH9 (or any previous version, at least from RH7.x) and upgrades the relevant packages. End of story.
Then you have an apt-enabled (and yum-enabled) system that looks and feel like a RH machine. If you know RH it's a time saver. If you liked RH before you might still like FC1, it feels exactly the same.
But as you learn apt/yum more and more, you might be pulled towards the Debian end of things, it depends on how well the Fedora community handles the variety and consistency of packages.
I think there is room for a middle-of-the road distribution that is easy to install, looks reasonably good, comes with a reasonable selection of packages on a relatively small set of CDs (3 is really a maximum) and is fully updatable and upgradable. FC could well fit that nice, but then again it might fail horribly. RH had this crutial critical mass of people who knew and trusted them. Will that translate to FC? not sure.
The good things RH did appart from the looks (which is a matter of taste) was 1- the kernel support (thanks to Alan Cox sterling work. Remember the 2.4.10+ bad days with horrible VM performance? none of that with the RH kernels) and 2- the security focus and the updates: timely and easy. Will Fedora continue on that trend?
I installed FC1 last night on my home machine, I'm keeping RH9 at work, we'll see.
The problem with Debian is that you really have to know what you are doing when you maintain that distribution and you have to actively remember to look for what needs to be updated. That little RH icon in your folder and the email reminders that keep telling you when (and why) you need to update your distribution is what made such a huge difference for me and my co-workers.
How about drink-driving? Here in Australia it's a crime.
But it won't work on my work-supplied stupid DELL or any new sub $500 computer.
Tip is already in Darwin/OSX and has been since the beginning. It was in NextSTep too, since at least 1993.
Sorry no I'n not trolling, I'm serious.
For example Fedora 1.0 was released yesterday. If it had been a RedHat release (10?), everybody would be falling over themselves to review it, comment on it, dissect its features, etc. Do a search on Google for
"fedora core 1.0 review" and look for yourself: nothing (as of the time of writing). My Australian mirror still doesn't have the distribution!
Instead people are getting the message that RedHat has gotten proprietary and if you want to run it you have to fork $180 per seat per year. No thank you.
Fedora looks good on paper, but fewer people are bothering. I'm pretty sure Fedora will be far less popular than RedHat ever was.
If you are a sysadmin and have a Debian or Slackware box at home why would you recommend RHEL to your PHB? It's not very different but why bother with the small irritating differences, the "inferior" package system and the marketing crap? Get Debian with a support contract, you already know how it works and it might be cheaper.
Note: I've been running RH since version 3, and at first I thought that this move might hold some promise, but thanks to the few confusing messages from RH and the PR disaster (run Windows at home, says RH CEO!), I'm now less sure that this move will be positive.
In fact the Microsoft strategy hasn't changed very much over the years. IE on mac is no longer supported (5.2 or something is the last version), and Office is different enough and incompatible enough to make integration in a windows environment a pain. Sometimes Office documents from Macs just don't open at all in Windows, Word being the worst offender.
In short Macs are still a pain to sysadmins and company don't like them unless they run close to 100% macs. It used to be exactly the same in the late 80s and early 90s with MS-Word.
I reckon that's pretty clever of MS. Give the illusion of support and the impression of Mac inferiority with respect to Office documents.
Actually for a while NeXT had hardware-accelerated DPS for its cubes, via a graphics board called NeXT-dimension. At the time (1990) it was simply amazing. This board did accelerated Display Postscript at something like 1080x960 in 32-bit colour and even had video capture (PAL or NTSC). It sounds like not much right now, but there was nothing like it at that price range at the time.
See other reference in other response.
The monotonically increasing curve in the graph (not the spiky one) shows the average concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere. If Pinatubo had released any significant amount it would have showed on this graph. Instead the CO2 content in the atmosphere continues to increase at exactly the same rate as a result of man's activity I presume.
The articles that you cite are again somewhat incorrect. Eruptions generate HCL (hydrochloric acid) which have an effect on the ozone layer and acid rains, but it is a short-lived effect, see this link.
The US throw out relatively little SO2 now, compared with some developing countries thanks to more stringent emission regulations, so comparing with the US emission is not very interesting. I don't have the figure for the whole world, sorry.
Sure, Man `only' generates a few puny billion tonnes of C02 compared with the oceans and forest, but both forest and oceans are `carbon neutral'. Both absorb again the exact same quantity by making new trees and new plancton. Man on the other hand releases CO2 over a short time that had been trapped in geological layers aeons ago over a very long period. This carbon cannot be absorbed again at a sufficient rate.
Most scientists agree that it is industrialization which is the root cause of CO2 rate increase in the atmosphere. What they disagree upon is whether this is having a warming effect or not, and over which timescale.
All the best (I would give more references but I have to go now, pick up my daughter, please continue this discussion if you are interested).
I know some people support Pinochet, but you have to have a pretty dry heart or a very selective and short memory to do that. In particular you have not to mind torture and assassination as means of government.
I've met a young Chilean who said exactly the same thing as you quote. To me this proves that propaganda works really well. S. Allende was not bringing Chile down the path of Cuba, in fact Chile was the most prosperous South American country when the coup took place. Allende was not communist, but he did have a democrat socialist agenda (like many European countries do now). Moreover Allende had been democratically elected. Yes Allende was not particularly or at least not sufficiently pro-US. This does prove my point that America is not particularly pro-democracy abroad.
Then I asked the same young Chilean if he thought the Chileans in exile had a similar opinion to his, particularly the families of those that the Pinochet government tortured in Chile and assassinated in various countries, he had no reply.
A few years ago Pinochet was arrested in England after Spain laid charges against him for political assassinations of Spanish citizens *in Spain*. There assassinated people were ex-Chileans in exile that Pinochet took great pain to kill. Unfortunately he got off on health grounds, but it would have been interesting to follow his trial, because a lot of very dirty secrets would probably have been revealed.
I can't believe anyone with any sense of humanity would defend such a man as Pinochet.
You can read this if you want.
> plus they have 10-100x the level of useful
> software packed on them.
I'd like most of the Gnome-KDE little applications crap done away with, that would be great, but the big appplications on Linux are tremendously useful:
Xemacs, LaTeX, development suites and libraries, multimedia.
What commercial stuff do you find on "other commercial OSes" that you can't find an equivalent of on Linux? Please list them, and you'll have a new series of OSS projects.