Ah, well, if it's legitimacy we talk of, then it is a personal moral opinion. Enjoy yours!
I would take some issue with your points though:
1) a)the efficacy of a course of action is irrelevant as to it's legitimacy as a morally acceptible course of action. I cannot poop gold; but this is of no bearing to a discussion of whether I should or not.
1) b)the fact that the US federal and state governments constantly try to get round the constitution's limits on their powers does not invalidate the legitimacy of that document. I have no doubt that any attempt to overthrow the US government from within would be met with crushing force. This is largely the point of the ammendment: to try and prevent the Govt. from supressing legitimate dissent with force. It has probably now failed. The Republic is probably now an Empire. What can you do?
2) a)Most people in the world accept the principle that sometimes it is legitimate to use deadly force to act for the greater good. I think the Mahatma put it best when he said "I do believe that where there is a choice only between cowardice and violence, I would advise violence. Thus when my eldest son asked me what he should have done had he been present when I was almost fatally assaulted in 1908, whether he should have run away and seen me killed or whether he should have used his physical force which he could and wanted to use, and defend me, I told him it was his duty to defend me even by using violence." Obviously, he prefered when possible the third way, of non-violence, but he accepted that sometimes violence was, regretably, necessary.
If you disagree with him, and do not believe that the use of force against other humans is ever legitimate, no matter how many Jews they gas, then indeed, guns are probably not legitimate. What did Monty Python say again? "Blessed are the meek! Oh, that's nice, isn't it? I'm glad they're getting something, 'cause they have a hell of a time."
2) b)If it is acceptable for the police to have weapons to defend themselves, how much more so is it for the people to have weapons to defend themselves? Particularly since the police are under no legal obligation to do anything to protect the people. You seem to have accidentally suggested another legitimate reason, whoops!
I'd never heard of Centos, so I looked it up. It's an interesting idea.
They take the source code for RHEL, build it, and put it on an ISO.
Sounds interesting, I imagine if I were to try and sell my bosses on a Linux system for work they'd want something like RHEL, and this is a way to get hold of it and try it without buying a license. you could get a full prototype going and not need to spend any money until you wanted a real copy with a support contract.
One example is the one that the framers were thinking of when put in the ammendment, which is to overthrow the government by force. One of the many excellent checks and balances in the US constitution....
As another example of how guns clearly have uses which are not illegal, you might note how policemen often seem to have them about their person...
A quick google (disclaimer: GINAL) suggests carry of folders is allowed if you have a good reason and are discrete; automatics are banned; customs can take anything they decide is "dangerous" from you as you enter.
I don't take tools with me when I travel by plane any more. Instead, at each office I work in, I go out and buy a few cheap, basic tools - a Stanley Knife (what do americans call these? Box cutter?), a couple of screwdrivers, pair of pliers etc.
I put em in a cardboard box and hide them in the server room. Cheap and nasty but they'll open a PC or a packing case, or strip a wire.
I cannot emphasise enough the importance of checking local law. In the UK, for example:
Automatic knives (opened by springs or gravity) and balisongs are illegal to make, carry or sell. Anything with a fixed blade, a locking folding blade or a non-locking folding blade more than 3 inches long is illegal to carry in public.
(In public includes your car and your workplace.)
Now, there is a defence in law for the illegal to carry category that you need it to do your job, but I'm not going to risk it.
This is entirely to be expected. If you plan to use a tool at sea, then you need one designed for marine use.
All these tools will be made out of Carbon Steel, which is the best material to make tools out of. A marine tool will use stainless instead, making it less good a tool but corrosion resistant.
Well, of course, Annie helps kill billions, wipes out the Jedi, but then decides that he won't kill his own son, and he gets forgiven, so let's cut Bill a little slack. He might install Red Hat one day.
Another aspect to it that they don't point out is that this does is make things invisible, not transparent. We all think of transparency when we think of invisibility, but if something is invisible - no light from it strikes our eyes - then we can deduce it's presence from the black blob moving about in the front room.
Which, since it only works on things too small to see, is not actually that big a deal I suppose...
P.S. you've inspired me to a new trend; I'm going to mark anyone who actually reads the article as a friend...
Well, firstly, as you yourself dimly realise, this does nothing to make airlines safer.
You are more likely to die from being run over on the way to the airport than from a terrorist attack.
The TSA are comparing the list to a pile of names that various bad people may in the past have used at one time. So, if Osama uses a new alias every time he flies, he beats the system. That was easy, wasn't it? Not that he's flying though. Boats are nice and restful, and the sea air will do him good after all that time in a cave.
Oh, and Osama's ID will be very good, just like the 9/11 people's was, just like the Madrid bomber's was.
Anyhow, no terrorist is going to hijack a plane ever again. That tactic stopped working on 9/11 itself, once the people on the 4th plane realised what was happenning. If, next time I am on a plane (this Friday as it hapens), someone tries to hijack it, then I know that we are all probably going to die, so guess what? I am going to beat the fucker to death, and so is everyone else.
Checking everyone for id is actually worse than nothing at all. Reading everyones id is a boring mechanical job; how many days of doing that would it be before you stropped caring about it? I'd sooner have a rel policeman looking for nervous people in the terminal. You'd catch more that way.
You wanna know why airport ID checking is no good? Because when the db flagged up Ted Kennedy, no-one arrested him. If the thing could find terrorists, they would arrest them, wouldn't they?
Checking ID is not the step before the camps. But, as Gilmore himself points out, the US Govt. used the US Census data to find people of Japanese heritage 60 years ago so they could put them into camps.
Well, it's an interesting link, the trouble is that the person at the other end is wrong.
A balance is a device that compares two forces to see if they are equal. It tells you nothing about masses directly.
I suppose that, if both forces are being generated by a mass proportional force field acting on two masses, one on each pan, then you could use it to deduce that the two objects are of equal mass, but so what? Deducing something is not measuring it.
The very fact that the link points out, that you can distort the results of the device with the butcher's thumb, is itself a demonstration that the device is measuring force, not mass.
What if I took a balance into zero G and applied a strong electrical field to it. Oh look! now it's not "measuring mass", it's "measuring charge".
Actually the page is about confusion over what pound is a unit of. Physicists have no confusion about it at all; mass is in kg, force in newtons, sweeties from the corner shop in quarters of a pound. Easy!
Because no-one is reading the article, and I can't stand it, here is my understanding of what Dvorak is suggesting.
Suppose Bill produces a new product called MS-Linux. This is just a distribution of Linux that Microsoft sell in a box. He can do that, same as anyone can, right? Right. And he can undercut every other Distro, because MS have billions of dollars.
What Bill does that is sneaky is that he includes in the box a binary-only proprietary product called Microsoft WDM for Linux. He can include non-GPLed stuff in the distribution, right? Of course he can. Lots of other distros do this.
WDM for Linux is a bit of software that lets Linux use Windows drivers. This might be hard to do, but it is possible, right? It's kind of like doing at the bottom what WINE does at the top - interfacing between windows software and Linux. Right.
What Bill does now is wait for MS-Linux to gain market share.
Poor old Biglig comes along. He's downloaded 50 distributions, and has never gotten the soundcard or modem on his thinkpad to work. Ah, he thinks, $25 for MS Linux and I get Linux, with my soundcard and modem working.
Granny Maud decides to buy a new Dell with Linux on, and it comes with - surprise - MS Linux - because Bill lets them buy their Windows licenses cheap if they buy their Linux from him too.
PHB decides to roll out Linux. "Never heard of Suse" he says "but Microsoft rings a bell"
Sooner or later, Bill owns a big share of the Linux market.
How does Bill use this to kill Linux? Ah, this is the problem. Dvorak doesn't really say. In Slashdot speak:
1. Make Linux a MS product 2. ???? 3. Profit
Dvorak vaguely supposes that Bill could drive all the good hackers away into the Apple/BSD/HURD camps, and then slow Linux development down, so Windows catches up. I think this isn't possible, since everything those hackers write on Apple/BSD/Hurd/BeOS will still be open source and so will come back into Linux without too much effort.
He wants to have the equipment available to people who have authenticated themselves.
If the people abuse it after that, it's a seperate problem.
By your theory, we should secure our boxes by delting all the accounts, since if you have an account a bad person might log in and do something bad to our box!
Minion:"Here's the new ipod advert, Steve" Steve:"Hmmm. If I spend a gajillion dollars getting U2 in an advert, why would I want not to be able to freakin' well tell who they are?" Minion:"Errrr..." Steve:"Throw him in the aligator pits!"
Though, of course, as an ethical businessman, he'd never make it a condition of the deal with Sony (or whoever has the most money) to replace Disney as the distributor of new Pixar films that they put all their back and future catalogue on iFilms...
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, well, if it's legitimacy we talk of, then it is a personal moral opinion. Enjoy yours!
I would take some issue with your points though:
1) a)the efficacy of a course of action is irrelevant as to it's legitimacy as a morally acceptible course of action. I cannot poop gold; but this is of no bearing to a discussion of whether I should or not.
1) b)the fact that the US federal and state governments constantly try to get round the constitution's limits on their powers does not invalidate the legitimacy of that document. I have no doubt that any attempt to overthrow the US government from within would be met with crushing force. This is largely the point of the ammendment: to try and prevent the Govt. from supressing legitimate dissent with force. It has probably now failed. The Republic is probably now an Empire. What can you do?
2) a)Most people in the world accept the principle that sometimes it is legitimate to use deadly force to act for the greater good. I think the Mahatma put it best when he said "I do believe that where there is a choice only between cowardice and violence, I would advise violence. Thus when my eldest son asked me what he should have done had he been present when I was almost fatally assaulted in 1908, whether he should have run away and seen me killed or whether he should have used his physical force which he could and wanted to use, and defend me, I told him it was his duty to defend me even by using violence." Obviously, he prefered when possible the third way, of non-violence, but he accepted that sometimes violence was, regretably, necessary.
If you disagree with him, and do not believe that the use of force against other humans is ever legitimate, no matter how many Jews they gas, then indeed, guns are probably not legitimate. What did Monty Python say again? "Blessed are the meek! Oh, that's nice, isn't it? I'm glad they're getting something, 'cause they have a hell of a time."
2) b)If it is acceptable for the police to have weapons to defend themselves, how much more so is it for the people to have weapons to defend themselves? Particularly since the police are under no legal obligation to do anything to protect the people. You seem to have accidentally suggested another legitimate reason, whoops!
I'd never heard of Centos, so I looked it up. It's an interesting idea.
They take the source code for RHEL, build it, and put it on an ISO.
Sounds interesting, I imagine if I were to try and sell my bosses on a Linux system for work they'd want something like RHEL, and this is a way to get hold of it and try it without buying a license. you could get a full prototype going and not need to spend any money until you wanted a real copy with a support contract.
I can't actually think of any reason why facial recognition in a phone handset would be useful to anyone, ever.
I mean, as an authentication system for the phone lock, why would anyone want this over a keylock?
To recognize people so you can phone them? The flaw in that plan seems slightly obvious.
Any ideas? Anyone? I mean, the "recognize a street corner and text you a map" thing was pretty impractical, but this... I've got nothing.
Guns have a various legitimate uses.
One example is the one that the framers were thinking of when put in the ammendment, which is to overthrow the government by force. One of the many excellent checks and balances in the US constitution....
As another example of how guns clearly have uses which are not illegal, you might note how policemen often seem to have them about their person...
Er... doesn't Linus use Mac hardware?
A quick google (disclaimer: GINAL) suggests carry of folders is allowed if you have a good reason and are discrete; automatics are banned; customs can take anything they decide is "dangerous" from you as you enter.
I don't take tools with me when I travel by plane any more. Instead, at each office I work in, I go out and buy a few cheap, basic tools - a Stanley Knife (what do americans call these? Box cutter?), a couple of screwdrivers, pair of pliers etc.
I put em in a cardboard box and hide them in the server room. Cheap and nasty but they'll open a PC or a packing case, or strip a wire.
I cannot emphasise enough the importance of checking local law. In the UK, for example:
Automatic knives (opened by springs or gravity) and balisongs are illegal to make, carry or sell.
Anything with a fixed blade, a locking folding blade or a non-locking folding blade more than 3 inches long is illegal to carry in public.
(In public includes your car and your workplace.)
Now, there is a defence in law for the illegal to carry category that you need it to do your job, but I'm not going to risk it.
This is entirely to be expected. If you plan to use a tool at sea, then you need one designed for marine use.
All these tools will be made out of Carbon Steel, which is the best material to make tools out of. A marine tool will use stainless instead, making it less good a tool but corrosion resistant.
Switching to firefox has helped increase my productivity, simply by not rendering slashdot properly...
There is software that detects taps on the trackpad in different corners as different buttons being clicked, if that helps...
Well, of course, Annie helps kill billions, wipes out the Jedi, but then decides that he won't kill his own son, and he gets forgiven, so let's cut Bill a little slack. He might install Red Hat one day.
Ah, that's what we need more of of Slashdot, people presenting their arguments and backing them up with references to authoritative sources.
Another aspect to it that they don't point out is that this does is make things invisible, not transparent. We all think of transparency when we think of invisibility, but if something is invisible - no light from it strikes our eyes - then we can deduce it's presence from the black blob moving about in the front room.
Which, since it only works on things too small to see, is not actually that big a deal I suppose...
P.S. you've inspired me to a new trend; I'm going to mark anyone who actually reads the article as a friend...
Well, firstly, as you yourself dimly realise, this does nothing to make airlines safer.
You are more likely to die from being run over on the way to the airport than from a terrorist attack.
The TSA are comparing the list to a pile of names that various bad people may in the past have used at one time. So, if Osama uses a new alias every time he flies, he beats the system. That was easy, wasn't it? Not that he's flying though. Boats are nice and restful, and the sea air will do him good after all that time in a cave.
Oh, and Osama's ID will be very good, just like the 9/11 people's was, just like the Madrid bomber's was.
Anyhow, no terrorist is going to hijack a plane ever again. That tactic stopped working on 9/11 itself, once the people on the 4th plane realised what was happenning. If, next time I am on a plane (this Friday as it hapens), someone tries to hijack it, then I know that we are all probably going to die, so guess what? I am going to beat the fucker to death, and so is everyone else.
Checking everyone for id is actually worse than nothing at all. Reading everyones id is a boring mechanical job; how many days of doing that would it be before you stropped caring about it? I'd sooner have a rel policeman looking for nervous people in the terminal. You'd catch more that way.
You wanna know why airport ID checking is no good? Because when the db flagged up Ted Kennedy, no-one arrested him. If the thing could find terrorists, they would arrest them, wouldn't they?
Checking ID is not the step before the camps. But, as Gilmore himself points out, the US Govt. used the US Census data to find people of Japanese heritage 60 years ago so they could put them into camps.
Sure, he can walk. But could he walk to, say, Washington, to appear before the Supreme Court?
And he could buy a plane, but I couldn't.
And as he points out, he can neither rent nor drive a car without ID.
And hitchhiking is illegal in a lot of states.
The right to assemble freely and anonymously sounds like it might be important, what do you think?
Well, it's an interesting link, the trouble is that the person at the other end is wrong.
A balance is a device that compares two forces to see if they are equal. It tells you nothing about masses directly.
I suppose that, if both forces are being generated by a mass proportional force field acting on two masses, one on each pan, then you could use it to deduce that the two objects are of equal mass, but so what? Deducing something is not measuring it.
The very fact that the link points out, that you can distort the results of the device with the butcher's thumb, is itself a demonstration that the device is measuring force, not mass.
What if I took a balance into zero G and applied a strong electrical field to it. Oh look! now it's not "measuring mass", it's "measuring charge".
Actually the page is about confusion over what pound is a unit of. Physicists have no confusion about it at all; mass is in kg, force in newtons, sweeties from the corner shop in quarters of a pound. Easy!
Er, if you're using a scale then you're measuring force, though.
God, this is so pedantic, and I'm just making it worse...
Because no-one is reading the article, and I can't stand it, here is my understanding of what Dvorak is suggesting.
Suppose Bill produces a new product called MS-Linux. This is just a distribution of Linux that Microsoft sell in a box. He can do that, same as anyone can, right? Right. And he can undercut every other Distro, because MS have billions of dollars.
What Bill does that is sneaky is that he includes in the box a binary-only proprietary product called Microsoft WDM for Linux. He can include non-GPLed stuff in the distribution, right? Of course he can. Lots of other distros do this.
WDM for Linux is a bit of software that lets Linux use Windows drivers. This might be hard to do, but it is possible, right? It's kind of like doing at the bottom what WINE does at the top - interfacing between windows software and Linux. Right.
What Bill does now is wait for MS-Linux to gain market share.
Poor old Biglig comes along. He's downloaded 50 distributions, and has never gotten the soundcard or modem on his thinkpad to work. Ah, he thinks, $25 for MS Linux and I get Linux, with my soundcard and modem working.
Granny Maud decides to buy a new Dell with Linux on, and it comes with - surprise - MS Linux - because Bill lets them buy their Windows licenses cheap if they buy their Linux from him too.
PHB decides to roll out Linux. "Never heard of Suse" he says "but Microsoft rings a bell"
Sooner or later, Bill owns a big share of the Linux market.
How does Bill use this to kill Linux? Ah, this is the problem. Dvorak doesn't really say. In Slashdot speak:
1. Make Linux a MS product
2. ????
3. Profit
Dvorak vaguely supposes that Bill could drive all the good hackers away into the Apple/BSD/HURD camps, and then slow Linux development down, so Windows catches up. I think this isn't possible, since everything those hackers write on Apple/BSD/Hurd/BeOS will still be open source and so will come back into Linux without too much effort.
Did you read what he was asking at all?
He wants to have the equipment available to people who have authenticated themselves.
If the people abuse it after that, it's a seperate problem.
By your theory, we should secure our boxes by delting all the accounts, since if you have an account a bad person might log in and do something bad to our box!
This story is actually painful for me to look at...
could be. Or maybe it went:
"Who wants this sack of money? Huh? Sack of monoey, what do you say? Not sure? OK, two sacks! Two sacks of money. Each."
Or is this the more likely scenario:
Minion:"Here's the new ipod advert, Steve"
Steve:"Hmmm. If I spend a gajillion dollars getting U2 in an advert, why would I want not to be able to freakin' well tell who they are?"
Minion:"Errrr..."
Steve:"Throw him in the aligator pits!"
Hey, if they were going to do that they'd have launched a tiny, cheap, quiet Mac that outputs to HDTVs... oh.
Though, of course, as an ethical businessman, he'd never make it a condition of the deal with Sony (or whoever has the most money) to replace Disney as the distributor of new Pixar films that they put all their back and future catalogue on iFilms...