"Mac Heads" term is racist and inflamatory. We prefer the term "The imminent owners of the Fastest 64-bit Personal Computer in the World"
To be pendantic you should also note that they are 'imminent owners of the slowest 64-bit Personal Computer in the World', with the understanding that it is the only 64-bit Personal Computer in the World (at least until the AMD chips start showing up on PC's.)
I do think that it is cool that Apple gets to claim the crown for a while, even if only for a couple of months. On the other hand, how important 64-bit computing will be for the PC market remains to be seen.
If it were either invasive or destructive I'd have more respect for this Judge
and his ruling. Despite arguments to the contrary, altering the flow of bits
through a computer that you own doesn't invade anyone, and the notion that bits
can be destroyed is laughable. The Judge needs to reissue his ruling without
resorting to terms don't mean squat in the virtual world.
To the moderators: Look, this isn't off topic (it is News from an alternative source, which is after all the discussion topic), and it isn't flamebait (flamebait draws flames; no flames here, just comments.) Cutting down a post because you don't agree with it is bull.
The story on Salon was a collection of foreign news reports, each shortened to four or five paragraphs. Curiously enough that particular story has been removed and replaced with one from the United Arab Emirates which is considerably more volatile. Also from the list is Der Spiegel's opinion piece on US Imperialism (roughly summarized as the bigger they are, the harder they fall.)
I grabbed it off of Salon. No idea why it got scored down as offtopic though -- the whole question of the original post was about alternate news sources. Unbiased coverage of this war is unlikely to be found. The best I hope for is to understand what bias a reporter comes with.
The new totalitarian regime prevailing in America and taking hold in its satellites around the world has learned important lessons from the failed experiments of the past. The first of these lessons is that the greatest liability to the survival of a regime is a strong and erratic leader...
Thus without Hitler's deranged ambitions, the Third Reich might really have lasted a thousand years. Similarly, if Stalin had kept his genocidal ambitions in check, the Soviet Union might have continued to enjoy its initial popularity among sections of the West and at home.
With these examples in mind, the leader has been eliminated as a factor in U.S. politics. George W. Bush's very nullity as a politician throws into relief the fact that the United States has long been governed, not by its people, but by interests that are happy to remain largely anonymous, do not rely on individuals for their hold on power, and are recognizable in public mainly by a soothing corporate blue.
Americans often seem baffled that others fail to admire their system of government. They know after all that in the United States there exists a lively culture of debate, where the whole lunatic spectrum of opinion can find a platform of one kind or another (though at the same time the difference between the political parties it is actually possible to elect is vanishingly small)...
They have a vibrant and largely unchecked artistic community. They have the First Amendment...
The reason for all this is that the new totalitarianism has learned a second lesson from its heavy-handed predecessors. If artists and intellectuals were able to do precisely nothing about Hitler or Stalin or any of the legion of tin-pot dictators around the world, it follows that you might as well have freedom of expression.
In the new totalitarian system, people can say whatever they like, and it makes absolutely no difference.
The impending war on Iraq is only one example among many of a supposedly sovereign public completely powerless in the face of a government bent on a course of action...
The most important lesson to the new totalitarianism, then, comes from ancient Rome, and is simply that people sufficiently supplied with bread and games will put up with anything.
Now that folks are beating you over the head with sensible arguments, you want to revise what that debate is.
No actually, I was not trying to revise what the debate is, but to
bring up what it was always about. I say this purely as an impartial
observer who watched the original argument over first Lignux, then
GNU/Linux as it happened. My own views fall pretty evenly on both sides of the debate; I think that the name GNU/Linux is stupid (having gone so far as to delete the 'GNU/' from all of the pages I sometimes maintain on Wikipedia except for one reference to the controversy), but I think that Stallman is basically standing on strong ethical ground as regards software.
Paraphrased, Stallman says that if you can share something of
great benefit to your neighbor at no significant cost to yourself,
then you are morally obliged to do so, and that laws and systems
that prevent you from giving that aid are morally repugnant.
There is a point where you have to say "this is stupid." Not to go Kafka on you, but WHO CARES??? You might as well be having a pissing fight with Stallman about why he only uses his father's last name as his last name, and not include his mother's.
I believe it is precisely to find out 'who cares' that was the
core reason that Stallman pushed the GNU/Linux and Free Software
controversy.
Salad dressings.... I don't know about you, but I would never trust chemically engineered food.
In this case the dissolved gases were removed by sucessive freezing and thawing of the water, pumping off the gases released at each freeze. Not the sort of chemical process I would worry about personally.
Stallman has an ego problem. GNU is NOT an essential part of the Linux operating system. All GNU components could be replaced with BSD, or even propeitary versions, and it would still be Linux. How does he know that everyone using the Linux kernel is using the GNU tools?
To dismiss the GNU from GNU/Linux as a clash of egos is to misunderstand the whole debate. Stallman doesn't have a problem with ego, he has a problem with ethics: specificially he doesn't think that Linux by itself promotes the right set of ethics. In particular, bashing Stallman for belaboring GNU is like bashing the pope for being religious. Stallman has been preaching the ethics of software and source code ever since he wrote the first Emacs source license.
And in my opinion the whole Linux versus GNU/Linux thing is a red herring anyway -- the real point is to make people aware of the ethical
values of GNU. And arguing about the name in public is as good or better a way to do that than everyone agreeing to change the name wholesale.
So if you want to argue about the name, then cool. But don't assign the whole debate to Stallman's ego when the real debate is over how society should handle software.
Frankly I found Ranma boring and juvenile -- it was inflicted on me by an arrested adolescent nephew -- and if you're wanting to suggest something better about it you've got an uphill struggle. It played like an elaborate daydream by a fourth-grader who was starting to think about girls for the first time, and that's about it.
I've heard people make similar statements about Monty Python. The problem is that if you don't have any exposure to the culture that produced the story, then you can't see any of the irony, so all you come away with is the juvenile or sophomoric jokes.
If you are interested in Japanese culture, then Anime can provide surprising insights. Look for the depictions of Americans, Japanese,
and Chinese, and contrast them with one another. To the Japanese who in some ways mix aspects of Victorian prudishness with a pre suffrage view of women's role in society, Ranma's irony may be as strong in Japan as Woolf's Orlando was to the sensibilities of western culture in the 1930's.
Please do same for mine.Very well. As imperialism denies citizens of a country their right to
self-determination through some form of domination, neo-imperialism would have the same effect though through different means.
As I see it, historically empires were defined by the extent to which they had placed other countries under their rule, while not affording their inhabitants the rights of citizenship.
Today American subjugation of foreign powers is as pervasive and as interfering as any of the empires of old, even though the American 'empire' is not for the most part founded on occupation or military domination. During its rule of India, Britain extracted gold, spice, and tea from the subjugated nation.
As I understand your argument, the US involvement with foreign powers is an interaction of equals. Sovereign nations have the right to negotiate what ever trade pacts they wish, and most elect of their own will to trade with the US.
My argument is a difference of degree. The Sherman Anti-Trust act defines (in US law) certain behaviors as anti-competitive, but only when done by a company which enjoys a monopoly position in the marketplace. For companies which are not monopolies those same activities can simply be the tools of competition.
I would place the US in the same position as Microsoft. As the preeminent force in international trade, other countries have no real choice other than to abide by US law. India may complain that US companies have secured patents on the smell of Basmati rice, but they really can't do anything about it, including selling Basmati rice to Europe, to the US, or to any country which has collateral agreements to respect US patents. In essence India has lost one of its assets,
to the benefit of the US -- is that so different from British occupation of India in the last century?
Bluntly, I think the rule of the world right now is: either you are friends with the US or you will fail. If you are friends with the US then you must abide by what the US considers fair, where 'fairness' is always tilted in favor of US interests. If you are not friends with the US then we will embargo you, or we will prop up your enemies, or hunt you down, or make war on you.
This new type empire of which I write exists in every rule for which we benefit at the expense of another nation, and in which they have no real choice to do better. Farmers from Spain may protest that the US refuses to import their tangerines while California develops a competing crop. The French perenially complain that the US levies 400% tarrifs on cheeses imported from that country. But all of them do business with the US only at our sufferance, however much they plead, or complain, or petition. We do not hold ourselves accountable to International law, to the United Nations, or to the Geneva conventions. And if we do not do so, then there is no one else who can.
Yes these are things that sovereign nations have done for centuries, but it is our position as the dominant player that
makes them unfair.
Neo-imperialism? WTF? That's a new one, did you just make that up?
Ah, I see that you are only interested in being argumentative, not in sharing ideas. Neo as a prefix has a well understood meaning when applied to a historical movement or social system, as I am certain you must know. Your demonstrated unwillingness to even attempt to understand anything but your own narrow viewpoint makes it unlikely in my opinion that you have any substantive ideas to offer. I might be wrong in this of course, you might be a very well read and well thought individual who never the less has no ability to communicate your ideas with even minimal grace, but my experience is that engaging in discussions with people who are determined to be argumentative is only very rarely worthwhile.
Carter was a complete failure as President. Many of the problems we had with OPEC at that time were because he (and Ford) couldn't handle the office much like the problems we have now are because Clinton and Bush can't handle it.
What imperialism? You surely don't mean the US, I hope. We do not have an empire, or even imperialistic ambitions. In fact, throughout our history, we've been instrumental in the downfall and destruction of every remaining empire.
Feel free to substitute neo-imperialism for imperialism if that makes you feel better. Quibbling over semantics is boring, so I won't stand on the word.
Conceptually the US holds most of the world's nations in thrall. US law supercedes the laws of Guam and the US Virgin Islands even though those nations have no vote in the US. US law reaches into most of the world's countries -- from countries that would fail without being propped up by US military support, to indictment of foreign citizens who have no business interactions with the US over violations of US law, to coercion through fear and threats of force to stances on foreign policy, the US interferes with other countries sovereignty. In the sense that empires remove from their occupied countries the right to self determination, there are very few countries in the world that aren't subjugated to US neo-imperialism.
If I call that imperialism, rather than neo-imperialism, then it is only because the latter is more difficult to write.
Hmmm. I still think I'd take odd-even days and stag-flation over
imperialism. (Then again, I drive an NGV for commuting so gasoline lines wouldn't really effect me anyway.)
Somehow though I find it easier to blame GW for his foreign policy, than to blame Jimmy Carter for his national policy. Maybe if I were more hawkish I would rationalize the other way though -- we could have started bombing OPEC members for example, until they agreed to lower their oil prices.
Since when did the FSF become the bastion of all that is good and pure? Since when did making money become a crime? I don't think I want to label any company as purely good or evil, and particularly not any action so general as making money! Too many of us here are simply zealots, blindly spewing doctrine based on some twisted free-software/open-source/unix-rules/fsck-the-gove rnment/take-your-pick dogma. Following the popular anti-whatever rhetoric gets you karma or a nice troll. I can say that because when I was first introduced to the concepts of free software and open source, I swallowed the whole philosphy. Reading slashdot and other open source forums have allowed me to look in the mirror enough to realize how stupid it can sometimes sound.
The FSF has been fighting from a moral stance on copyright since its inception. They have been a bastion of good since people started accepting those morals as good morals.
It has been the fashion now for twenty or more years never to refer to anyone as purely good or evil. Our culture has prevailed upon us to believe that all (or at least most) morality is relative to the culture it is a part of. In the past two years US culture has been moving away from being non-judgemental. Many sets of conflicting moral values are coming into conflict, and the morals of the FSF are only one of those. Contrast the arguments over property rights,
freedom of expression, and freedom to share with the much more violent
conflicts over family planning, abortion, and globalization.
So you see, I agree with you in a sense. There certainly isn't
one global set of morals that we can all agree with. On the other
hand I think the moral relativism mindset is doomed for the near future -- eventually you'll have to decide what you believe in or
people will label you as a bullshit hypocrite, not as one who is tolerant.
Since AMI appears to be taking the side of those vendors who feel they cannot trust their customers, why should we as customers trust AMI to create products that do not infringe upon our rights as customers? Why should we not take our business to vendors who are willing to trust that we will not do anything illegal with their products, instead of assuming up front that all customers have some sort of illegal intent?
I'm frankly amazed that anyone can make the baldfaced claim that Palladium is only about security for the users and expect to be believed. The applications for limiting user control of computing devices are inherent in the technology, just as security is not. Take a couple of hours to compare Palladium's feature set against last year's
CERT and Security Focus alerts, and count how many of them would have been averted by Palladium.
Buffer overflows? No help from Palladium. Scripting abuse? No help from Palladium. Distributed denial of service attacks? No help from Palladium. Exploitation of bugs in web applications? No help from Palladium. Burying trojan horse code in the build scripts of popular security programs? No help from Palladium.
Just what is this supposed security platform supposed to be secure against?
My own most recent automobile purchase was a Honda Civic GX, a natural gas vehicle. With about three times the range of an EV and a fair number of filling stations here in the SF Bay Area, (plus the benefit of being able to put a 'No war for foreign oil' sticker next to my CNG sticker) makes it reasonably convenient to use.
And natural gas is primarily methane, so if we run out of other supplies, we can start piping cows. Actually if I recall correctly, the farm that we lived next to when I was in germany collected cow manure and fermented it below ground before spraying it back on the fields (and what a delightful smell that was.) I wonder if they also collected the methane being produced in the swill.
The hardware checker is just to automate answering questions about the
type of hardware you have, presumably so that they can distribute
the public beta over a wide array of hardware.
The other option is to answer the questions by hand, which I did.
I think answering the 'Operating System' question with 'Other: Linux'
probably puts me out of the running however. Oh well, back to IRC (on the rare occasions that I chat at all.)
Those don't look out of line to me. With 35 or 40 people on staff it wouldn't be unusual pay at all; they need artists, web designers, programmers, sys admins, and most importantly writers and editors. Throw in a CEO, a CTO, and two or three managers (operations, content, marketing) and you'll get to $9M very quickly.
The sales figures are slightly disappointing actually. Ideally you would like to see sales and marketing costs increasing year over year since a majority of those costs probably stem from paid commissions. The implication is that they lost more than half of their sales revenues last year.
The real purpose is customer tracking. The only reason stores are going to spend money on this kind of stuff is to better seperate customers from their money. If they can profile customers they can better market towards them.
That may be the only reason that has any real importance, but most of that information could be inferred from the checkout records. In any case, I tend to avoid stores that try to optimize for customer spending; Pack N Save, and Toys R Us spring immediately to mind, with their forced traipse through aisle of garbage before you are permitted to walk to the aisle that has what you really came in for.
Actually my recent buying has been through online boutiques. The kids toys, clothing, etcetera that you can find in little online web pages goes way beyond the trash posing as products available in Babies R Us.
Did you actually do anything to this guy? Weren't you tempted to log on to IRC and chat with him? Or else start distributing his passwords of him and his friends to other people on IRC?
Oops, forgot to answer that. I did log on to IRC and tracked down a couple of the users listed in the eggdrop config files. The original channel was no longer active, but there were a few people with the same IDs logged in on another channel; but the channel content was so spooky that it kind of freaked me out at the time. For about five minutes the only thing in the channel were various people sending messages like 'CCs', or 'eggable accts'. Then suddenly some guy posted a message saying approximately: 'so and so is a lousy copier', then 'I may as well give this out as a freebie since I don't want him to get all the use of it', followed by some guy's name, address, SSN, phone, and credit card numbers.
At that point I decided I was in the middle of things I didn't want to be in. I did call the person to let them know that his credit card information had been stolen, and to watch his receipts, but basically dropped it there. As far as I know the FBI only cares about computer hacking if there has been at least $1k of damage. I had about a day to rebuild my server (before replacing it a month later with the Rebel), but nothing close to $1k; no deleted files or anything.
I did track down the person's Nick which basically turned into a Google search, but since he'd been using that Nick for a long time and in many different places, it was very easy to do. The Nick seemed to belong to a student at UCB, previously a student in Singapore, but the evidence was pretty loose, and in any case I doubt I could have done more than make a few legal threats. Ultimately I decided to chalk it all down as a learning experience and let it go (but I still have the backup tapes of the hacked machine if I ever need them.)
Handing out other peoples passwords wouldn't have been possible. Eggdrop stores them in encrypted form so even with the contents of the password file there wasn't anything I could do to retrieve their plain text passwords.
I got r00ted earlier this year. Serves me right for running a severly underpatched box I suppose. Probably not too much of a problem since I was on dialup thou. Did you actually do anything to this guy? Weren't you tempted to log on to IRC and chat with him? Or else start distributing his passwords of him and his friends to other people on IRC? Just wondering:)
Yeah... my servers front end my home network, so they are turned on 24/7 and right now are connected through redundant DSL connections to the Internet. So mine make a somewhat attractive target.
Since I am basically a lazy sysadmin, my approach had been to use really obscure hardware for my server. To accomplish that I bought a Rebel Netwinder on the theory that any exploit out for x86 would probably take months to be ported to the StrongARM (the StrongARM instruction set is both restrictively small, and completely anal about non-aligned memory accesses, so hand-coded assembly is a pain to write if you are trying to take advantage of a stack overflow of some kind.)
Recently I've swapped the rebel box for another Intel server, this time running RH7.3, and I bought a subscription to RHN to keep it up to date. Since RHN manages all of the security updates and dependencies, all I have to do is log on once a week or so and request the updates. So now I get to be lazy in two regards; first it is much easier to add new software (StrongARM porting being not my cup of tea), and secondly RHN takes care of the security updates.
I imagine that Debian users would argue likewise for apt-get.
Slashdot Mirror
To be pendantic you should also note that they are 'imminent owners of the slowest 64-bit Personal Computer in the World', with the understanding that it is the only 64-bit Personal Computer in the World (at least until the AMD chips start showing up on PC's.)
I do think that it is cool that Apple gets to claim the crown for a while, even if only for a couple of months. On the other hand, how important 64-bit computing will be for the PC market remains to be seen.
If it were either invasive or destructive I'd have more respect for this Judge and his ruling. Despite arguments to the contrary, altering the flow of bits through a computer that you own doesn't invade anyone, and the notion that bits can be destroyed is laughable. The Judge needs to reissue his ruling without resorting to terms don't mean squat in the virtual world.
To the moderators: Look, this isn't off topic (it is News from an alternative source, which is after all the discussion topic), and it isn't flamebait (flamebait draws flames; no flames here, just comments.) Cutting down a post because you don't agree with it is bull.
The story on Salon was a collection of foreign news reports, each shortened to four or five paragraphs. Curiously enough that particular story has been removed and replaced with one from the United Arab Emirates which is considerably more volatile. Also from the list is Der Spiegel's opinion piece on US Imperialism (roughly summarized as the bigger they are, the harder they fall.)
I grabbed it off of Salon. No idea why it got scored down as offtopic though -- the whole question of the original post was about alternate news sources. Unbiased coverage of this war is unlikely to be found. The best I hope for is to understand what bias a reporter comes with.
Thus without Hitler's deranged ambitions, the Third Reich might really have lasted a thousand years. Similarly, if Stalin had kept his genocidal ambitions in check, the Soviet Union might have continued to enjoy its initial popularity among sections of the West and at home.
With these examples in mind, the leader has been eliminated as a factor in U.S. politics. George W. Bush's very nullity as a politician throws into relief the fact that the United States has long been governed, not by its people, but by interests that are happy to remain largely anonymous, do not rely on individuals for their hold on power, and are recognizable in public mainly by a soothing corporate blue.
Americans often seem baffled that others fail to admire their system of government. They know after all that in the United States there exists a lively culture of debate, where the whole lunatic spectrum of opinion can find a platform of one kind or another (though at the same time the difference between the political parties it is actually possible to elect is vanishingly small) ...
They have a vibrant and largely unchecked artistic community. They have the First Amendment ...
The reason for all this is that the new totalitarianism has learned a second lesson from its heavy-handed predecessors. If artists and intellectuals were able to do precisely nothing about Hitler or Stalin or any of the legion of tin-pot dictators around the world, it follows that you might as well have freedom of expression.
In the new totalitarian system, people can say whatever they like, and it makes absolutely no difference.
The impending war on Iraq is only one example among many of a supposedly sovereign public completely powerless in the face of a government bent on a course of action ...
The most important lesson to the new totalitarianism, then, comes from ancient Rome, and is simply that people sufficiently supplied with bread and games will put up with anything.
No actually, I was not trying to revise what the debate is, but to bring up what it was always about. I say this purely as an impartial observer who watched the original argument over first Lignux, then GNU/Linux as it happened. My own views fall pretty evenly on both sides of the debate; I think that the name GNU/Linux is stupid (having gone so far as to delete the 'GNU/' from all of the pages I sometimes maintain on Wikipedia except for one reference to the controversy), but I think that Stallman is basically standing on strong ethical ground as regards software.
Paraphrased, Stallman says that if you can share something of great benefit to your neighbor at no significant cost to yourself, then you are morally obliged to do so, and that laws and systems that prevent you from giving that aid are morally repugnant.
There is a point where you have to say "this is stupid." Not to go Kafka on you, but WHO CARES??? You might as well be having a pissing fight with Stallman about why he only uses his father's last name as his last name, and not include his mother's.
I believe it is precisely to find out 'who cares' that was the core reason that Stallman pushed the GNU/Linux and Free Software controversy.
In this case the dissolved gases were removed by sucessive freezing and thawing of the water, pumping off the gases released at each freeze. Not the sort of chemical process I would worry about personally.
To dismiss the GNU from GNU/Linux as a clash of egos is to misunderstand the whole debate. Stallman doesn't have a problem with ego, he has a problem with ethics: specificially he doesn't think that Linux by itself promotes the right set of ethics. In particular, bashing Stallman for belaboring GNU is like bashing the pope for being religious. Stallman has been preaching the ethics of software and source code ever since he wrote the first Emacs source license.
And in my opinion the whole Linux versus GNU/Linux thing is a red herring anyway -- the real point is to make people aware of the ethical values of GNU. And arguing about the name in public is as good or better a way to do that than everyone agreeing to change the name wholesale.
So if you want to argue about the name, then cool. But don't assign the whole debate to Stallman's ego when the real debate is over how society should handle software.
I've heard people make similar statements about Monty Python. The problem is that if you don't have any exposure to the culture that produced the story, then you can't see any of the irony, so all you come away with is the juvenile or sophomoric jokes.
If you are interested in Japanese culture, then Anime can provide surprising insights. Look for the depictions of Americans, Japanese, and Chinese, and contrast them with one another. To the Japanese who in some ways mix aspects of Victorian prudishness with a pre suffrage view of women's role in society, Ranma's irony may be as strong in Japan as Woolf's Orlando was to the sensibilities of western culture in the 1930's.
Oops. Messed up the inclusion of the quotation... the first two sentences of my reply should have been credited to you.
Please do same for mine.Very well. As imperialism denies citizens of a country their right to self-determination through some form of domination, neo-imperialism would have the same effect though through different means.
As I see it, historically empires were defined by the extent to which they had placed other countries under their rule, while not affording their inhabitants the rights of citizenship.
Today American subjugation of foreign powers is as pervasive and as interfering as any of the empires of old, even though the American 'empire' is not for the most part founded on occupation or military domination. During its rule of India, Britain extracted gold, spice, and tea from the subjugated nation.
As I understand your argument, the US involvement with foreign powers is an interaction of equals. Sovereign nations have the right to negotiate what ever trade pacts they wish, and most elect of their own will to trade with the US.
My argument is a difference of degree. The Sherman Anti-Trust act defines (in US law) certain behaviors as anti-competitive, but only when done by a company which enjoys a monopoly position in the marketplace. For companies which are not monopolies those same activities can simply be the tools of competition.
I would place the US in the same position as Microsoft. As the preeminent force in international trade, other countries have no real choice other than to abide by US law. India may complain that US companies have secured patents on the smell of Basmati rice, but they really can't do anything about it, including selling Basmati rice to Europe, to the US, or to any country which has collateral agreements to respect US patents. In essence India has lost one of its assets, to the benefit of the US -- is that so different from British occupation of India in the last century?
Bluntly, I think the rule of the world right now is: either you are friends with the US or you will fail. If you are friends with the US then you must abide by what the US considers fair, where 'fairness' is always tilted in favor of US interests. If you are not friends with the US then we will embargo you, or we will prop up your enemies, or hunt you down, or make war on you.
This new type empire of which I write exists in every rule for which we benefit at the expense of another nation, and in which they have no real choice to do better. Farmers from Spain may protest that the US refuses to import their tangerines while California develops a competing crop. The French perenially complain that the US levies 400% tarrifs on cheeses imported from that country. But all of them do business with the US only at our sufferance, however much they plead, or complain, or petition. We do not hold ourselves accountable to International law, to the United Nations, or to the Geneva conventions. And if we do not do so, then there is no one else who can.
Yes these are things that sovereign nations have done for centuries, but it is our position as the dominant player that makes them unfair.
Ah, I see that you are only interested in being argumentative, not in sharing ideas. Neo as a prefix has a well understood meaning when applied to a historical movement or social system, as I am certain you must know. Your demonstrated unwillingness to even attempt to understand anything but your own narrow viewpoint makes it unlikely in my opinion that you have any substantive ideas to offer. I might be wrong in this of course, you might be a very well read and well thought individual who never the less has no ability to communicate your ideas with even minimal grace, but my experience is that engaging in discussions with people who are determined to be argumentative is only very rarely worthwhile.
Q. E. D.
Feel free to substitute neo-imperialism for imperialism if that makes you feel better. Quibbling over semantics is boring, so I won't stand on the word.
Conceptually the US holds most of the world's nations in thrall. US law supercedes the laws of Guam and the US Virgin Islands even though those nations have no vote in the US. US law reaches into most of the world's countries -- from countries that would fail without being propped up by US military support, to indictment of foreign citizens who have no business interactions with the US over violations of US law, to coercion through fear and threats of force to stances on foreign policy, the US interferes with other countries sovereignty. In the sense that empires remove from their occupied countries the right to self determination, there are very few countries in the world that aren't subjugated to US neo-imperialism.
If I call that imperialism, rather than neo-imperialism, then it is only because the latter is more difficult to write.
Somehow though I find it easier to blame GW for his foreign policy, than to blame Jimmy Carter for his national policy. Maybe if I were more hawkish I would rationalize the other way though -- we could have started bombing OPEC members for example, until they agreed to lower their oil prices.
The FSF has been fighting from a moral stance on copyright since its inception. They have been a bastion of good since people started accepting those morals as good morals.
It has been the fashion now for twenty or more years never to refer to anyone as purely good or evil. Our culture has prevailed upon us to believe that all (or at least most) morality is relative to the culture it is a part of. In the past two years US culture has been moving away from being non-judgemental. Many sets of conflicting moral values are coming into conflict, and the morals of the FSF are only one of those. Contrast the arguments over property rights, freedom of expression, and freedom to share with the much more violent conflicts over family planning, abortion, and globalization.
So you see, I agree with you in a sense. There certainly isn't one global set of morals that we can all agree with. On the other hand I think the moral relativism mindset is doomed for the near future -- eventually you'll have to decide what you believe in or people will label you as a bullshit hypocrite, not as one who is tolerant.
I'm frankly amazed that anyone can make the baldfaced claim that Palladium is only about security for the users and expect to be believed. The applications for limiting user control of computing devices are inherent in the technology, just as security is not. Take a couple of hours to compare Palladium's feature set against last year's CERT and Security Focus alerts, and count how many of them would have been averted by Palladium.
Buffer overflows? No help from Palladium. Scripting abuse? No help from Palladium. Distributed denial of service attacks? No help from Palladium. Exploitation of bugs in web applications? No help from Palladium. Burying trojan horse code in the build scripts of popular security programs? No help from Palladium.
Just what is this supposed security platform supposed to be secure against?
Excellent suggestion. Thanks for the tip.
And natural gas is primarily methane, so if we run out of other supplies, we can start piping cows. Actually if I recall correctly, the farm that we lived next to when I was in germany collected cow manure and fermented it below ground before spraying it back on the fields (and what a delightful smell that was.) I wonder if they also collected the methane being produced in the swill.
The other option is to answer the questions by hand, which I did. I think answering the 'Operating System' question with 'Other: Linux' probably puts me out of the running however. Oh well, back to IRC (on the rare occasions that I chat at all.)
The sales figures are slightly disappointing actually. Ideally you would like to see sales and marketing costs increasing year over year since a majority of those costs probably stem from paid commissions. The implication is that they lost more than half of their sales revenues last year.
That may be the only reason that has any real importance, but most of that information could be inferred from the checkout records. In any case, I tend to avoid stores that try to optimize for customer spending; Pack N Save, and Toys R Us spring immediately to mind, with their forced traipse through aisle of garbage before you are permitted to walk to the aisle that has what you really came in for.
Actually my recent buying has been through online boutiques. The kids toys, clothing, etcetera that you can find in little online web pages goes way beyond the trash posing as products available in Babies R Us.
Oops, forgot to answer that. I did log on to IRC and tracked down a couple of the users listed in the eggdrop config files. The original channel was no longer active, but there were a few people with the same IDs logged in on another channel; but the channel content was so spooky that it kind of freaked me out at the time. For about five minutes the only thing in the channel were various people sending messages like 'CCs', or 'eggable accts'. Then suddenly some guy posted a message saying approximately: 'so and so is a lousy copier', then 'I may as well give this out as a freebie since I don't want him to get all the use of it', followed by some guy's name, address, SSN, phone, and credit card numbers.
At that point I decided I was in the middle of things I didn't want to be in. I did call the person to let them know that his credit card information had been stolen, and to watch his receipts, but basically dropped it there. As far as I know the FBI only cares about computer hacking if there has been at least $1k of damage. I had about a day to rebuild my server (before replacing it a month later with the Rebel), but nothing close to $1k; no deleted files or anything.
I did track down the person's Nick which basically turned into a Google search, but since he'd been using that Nick for a long time and in many different places, it was very easy to do. The Nick seemed to belong to a student at UCB, previously a student in Singapore, but the evidence was pretty loose, and in any case I doubt I could have done more than make a few legal threats. Ultimately I decided to chalk it all down as a learning experience and let it go (but I still have the backup tapes of the hacked machine if I ever need them.)
Handing out other peoples passwords wouldn't have been possible. Eggdrop stores them in encrypted form so even with the contents of the password file there wasn't anything I could do to retrieve their plain text passwords.
Yeah... my servers front end my home network, so they are turned on 24/7 and right now are connected through redundant DSL connections to the Internet. So mine make a somewhat attractive target.
Since I am basically a lazy sysadmin, my approach had been to use really obscure hardware for my server. To accomplish that I bought a Rebel Netwinder on the theory that any exploit out for x86 would probably take months to be ported to the StrongARM (the StrongARM instruction set is both restrictively small, and completely anal about non-aligned memory accesses, so hand-coded assembly is a pain to write if you are trying to take advantage of a stack overflow of some kind.)
Recently I've swapped the rebel box for another Intel server, this time running RH7.3, and I bought a subscription to RHN to keep it up to date. Since RHN manages all of the security updates and dependencies, all I have to do is log on once a week or so and request the updates. So now I get to be lazy in two regards; first it is much easier to add new software (StrongARM porting being not my cup of tea), and secondly RHN takes care of the security updates.
I imagine that Debian users would argue likewise for apt-get.