> Although I am clearly biased on this point, I just dont see any other need for a tech-union, perhaps someone else can enlighten me on
> this issue.
Simple. Consider for a moment that having ``elite" status means that you are one of the top 5% or 10% in your work bracket. Employers fall all over themselves to give you want you want.
But what if you just don't make that bracket. You're in the 10% bracket right below yours. Or you look funny. Or you decide you want to only work 40 hours a week.
Or say you lose out on a raise because your PHB decides to give it instead to one of those slackers who just happens to offer something on the side that the PHB likes. (And it's not always nookie.)
Sure, if that happened to you right now, you could walk off the job & get a better-paying one tomorrow. But recessions happen, & all of the clued bosses who would hire you in a heartbeat have hiring freezes. Or you get into a car accident, sure it's the other guy's fault but he's a deadbeat & your insurance doesn't cover it, AND you are out for six months. Can't code, can't work, can't do anything but count the holes in the ceiling thru a medication haze. And you find your employer laid you off while you were out, & no one wants to hire you.
Don't say this couldn't happen to you. For generations people have been giving loyalty & their strong backs to employers, then something happens & you discover how your boss repays all that loyalty. All it takes is one PHB, one bad break, & your career can get toasted.
And that's why unions get started. Because you can't always trust your boss.
And be glad that there's an interest in unionizing high tech. You'll never see a union at a place like McDonald's or 7-11 (which need unions worse than the high tech industry) because you need some kind of stable workforce that'll be around for at least a couple months at the job. You need jobs that are worth fighting for, that are worth having.
> There was a system in place to recycle the fuel after it was used, but President Carter freaked out and killed it... it's called
> reprocessing.
And how is this different from fussion technology?
No, this is not a sarcastic comeback or an ad hominem attack. Educate me -- & everyone else reading this topic.
(For those unfamiliar with my language, fussion was this promised goal where -- in a nutshell -- running a nuclear plant in a certain way would result with more fuel coming out than went in.)
Last I heard about fussion technology was that it just didn't work. Heinlein's observation that ``there is no such thing as a free lunch" held up for even nuclear physics. I can believe that politics might kill the best solution to a problem. But I can also believe that reality would do the same thing -- only more efficiently.
> Nuclear waste lasts 100,000 years, but toxic
> waste from coal-burning lasts forever.
> It doesn't decay, ever.
Call for citations. Medieval Britain burned a lot of coal & I haven't seen any evidence that it damaged the ecology of the islands there.
[snip]
> So which would you rather have:
>
> 1) an enviromental disaster of a coal plant,
> which causes 1.4M tons worth of mining
> (often strip mining) and produces hundreds of
> thousands of tons of toxic waste, much of
> which is toxic forever and not for 100k years
> only
Ever hear of hard rock mining? (Hint: that's what the adults were doing in the movie ``October Sky".)
> OR
> 2) A nuclear power plant, which doesn't require
> the mining of 1.4M tons of raw materials,
> and doesn't produce 200k tons of toxic waste,
> but rather *15* tons of high level waste,
> *35* tons of mid-level waste, and *100* tons
> of low-level waste.
How many people die in mining that? Oh, & be sure to ask around the Navaho & Hopi reservations -- I hear a lot of folks living there died due to years of mining uranium.
> WORRYING ABOUT NUCLEAR WASTE WHILE CONTINUING
> TO BURN COAL FOR POWER IS UTTERLY MORONIC.
>
Elaborate. Or would *you* be accusing me of an ad hominem attack? Sorry, but I get these responses confused. I've been having a lot of senior moments lately, even though I'm far from 50.
> You also bring up Three Mile Island and Chernobyl.
> Did anyone even *die* in TMI? No. How many
> people die every year from breathing in all
> the toxic waste from burning fossil fuels?
>
How many people could have died? Would you like to live next to a nuclear power plant?
I didn't bring the topic up for two reasons:
first is that I doubt most people on/. were alive when the topic of nuclear power was first debated -- & I would have to spend days to research enough to educate them about the issues (well, we could think about the fact Homer Simpson works at a nuclear power plant, & wonder just how many workers are different from that example; I think people would be amazed);
second is that the ability to recreate safe nuclear reactors is now a lost art (e.g. I have been told that the division of Westinghouse that builds the boilers for nuclear power plants has been closed & the expertise scattered decades ago)
> And as for Chernobyl, we're not stupid enough
> in this country to use flammable graphite to
> moderate the reactor core. *our* worst
> nuclear accident killed no one and didn't even
> *injure* anyone.
So we've been told. And the US government spent millions of dollars & untold manpower to keep _The_Progressive_ magazine from reporting negative details about nuclear power. Do you think that we've heard about all of the near misses, or can trust that the PTB learned from these mistakes?
> How many COAL MINERS die *every* year?
>
> WORRYING ABOUT THE SAFETY OF NUCLEAR POWER PLANTS
> IS MORONIC WHILE WE'RE STILL MINING AND
> BURNING COAL.
A lot less than die as police officers.
How many people would die from mining uranium, if we used it as amply as coal?
> MORONIC.
Excuse me. Are you talking to me? Or to people who share in your delusion?
>> You can't use nuclear fission because no one has figured out what to do with the spent radioactive waste.
>
> You could just bury it. The proposal to store waste in Nevada was killed for political reasons, not scientific ones.
Yep. That's what I would assume one could do with it. Or rocket it into the sun. The PTB said it would be safe down there. However, not all of the experts agreed. They said there was some chance that the geological formations would move & compromise the seal on the deposits.
>> And we haven't even touched on whether nuclear fission can be safely used to generate power. (Hints: Three Mile Island. Chernobel.
>> How well we have dealt with less toxic materials & avoided environmental damage.)
> [Blatant Plug for Canada]The Candu reactor design is pretty damn safe. If the core overheats, your moderator (heavy water) boils
> off, and the reaction stops.[/Blatant Plug]
Hey, I got an idea: let's buy a bunch of those kind of reactors from our neighbors from up north. And when the US has created a bunch of radioactive waste, our neighbors to the north can take it off our hands & store it somewhere in the Canadian Shield. After all, we're talking about geological formations that have not changed significantly in a couple BILLION years. They ought to be happy over the prospect of trading a lot of waste land for millenia of millenia of maintenance payments. Which ought to cover much of their national debt for generations -- & then some.
> Ad hominem attacks are often the last resort of those without a good argument. Try to be more civil, please.
You mean like your colleague a few posts below?
Would it be an ad hominem attack to suggest you couldn't convince the nation of Canada that accepting the nuclear wastes of the US? (And for the sake of our discussion, I'm happy to admit you up there have the ability.)
If I were a citizen of Canada, I would shed no tears to tell us to clean up our own mess. But then, maybe you see a way to make money from our own foolishness. If so, please fix it.
> This is what happens when you can't use nuclear fission to produce most of your power, thanks to the pseudo-environmentalists and
> NIMBYists and their shortsighted anti-everything stance.
Wrong. Thanks for playing, though.
You can't use nuclear fission because no one has figured out what to do with the spent radioactive waste. Nevada doesn't want it. Neither does South Carolina. Nor does Washington. Seems that although lots of states would like to have nuclear scientists within their borders so they can tax them & claim how advanced their state is, they don't want to deal with a problem that isn't about to go away for at least 100,000 years.
Think about it, techno-boy. One hundred thousand years. More than twenty times the length of recorded history. That's the stumbling block -- not some alleged nancy-boy, pinkish inability to
do the right thing for the greater common good.
And we haven't even touched on whether nuclear fission can be safely used to generate power. (Hints: Three Mile Island. Chernobel. How well we have dealt with less toxic materials & avoided environmental damage.)
Bottom line: you don't know what you're talking about. When you have figured out the answers to these questions, & how they can be implemented in a cost-efficient manner, you can come back & play with the grown ups. But until then, stay in lurk mode.
Geoff
> No, you make sure your site is secure by locking down ports 21 and 23 for starters (telnet and mail). I know this because I just tried to telnet into
> them to see if they were open. So if security-through-obscurity is so darned good, why do you need to take the additional step of locking down
> your ports?
Since you mention those two ports, out of curiosity, did the prompt identify the software running on those ports? (e.g., sendmail, postfix or exchange on port 23?)
Another simple step to take is to make sure that your web server always returns a 404 error if someone looks for non-existent pages. (You'd be surprised how many web servers don't do this, & cheerfully identify the software running instead.)
The reason I mention this is that I've seen it mentioned in several different places to disable self-identification of server software -- it's trivial to do for most of these applications, & it makes a cracker's job a bit more difficult.
No, if you take these measures you can't unsubscribe from your favorite security mailling list & still sleep soundly at night. These steps will only slow down the determined cracker -- maybe enough so that you can catch the miscreant in action & foil him.
> Please, why give these jokers any
> kind of exposure? The only place I want to see the name "LinuxOne" is in the FuckedCompany Hall of Fame.
Well, I'd say all of those jokers probably agree with you 110%. Right now, the last thing anyone connected with LinuxOne wants is for someone to remember that stupid company: each of one of their corporate officers are trying hard to find a new job in a softening high-tech economy in order to pay the rent & buy groceries.
It's one thing to work for a company like Microsoft & not understand what Free Source Software is about (``Okay, I screwed up -- but I know where my next paycheck is coming from"), & another to try to make money off of Free Source Software, but not know what it's about (``Okay, I screwed up -- but lots of technically savvy people remember I made a fool of myself, won't hire me, & I don't know where my next paycheck is coming from.")
Pilot-link is under active development as a GPL project, & not only supports UNIX & UNIX-like OSes, but I believe is also supported for OS/2 & Win32 operating systems. (But those ports need volunteers.)
See http://www.gnu-designs.com/pilot-link/ for further details.
Developing SyncML compliance would be a Very Good Thing.
> I am willing to take bets that in 5 or 10 years, only 2 distros will exist
I thought the same thing 3 or 4 years ago: at the time only Red Hat, Caldera, SuSe, Debian & Slackware appeared to be left; all of the others had vanished due to lack of time, or lack of audience. And Slackware looked like it would be the next one to vanish.
Now TurboLinux & Mandrake are branching their own distributions; look at www.lwn.net for news of distributions, & there are dozens of new ones being created because . . . well, because someone thought it would be cool, & offers a new way to get under the hood & learns how Linux works.
None of the distributions have a lock on the Linux community; they all have their own problems, & each problem is an invitation to someone to fix & create her or his own distribution. Which may become the flagship distro, as Slackware once was, & Red Hat appears to be today. And some of the current distros will fall out of use, to become entries in Linux Trivia Pursuit.
As long as we have the source, this waning & waxing of numbers of distros will continue. It is a sign that the Linux community is continuing.
Saving money for a rainy day is a noble idea. But sometimes it just don't happen like you plan.
Take my situation. I worked for a corporation called GST Telecom, a CLEC or Competitive Local Exchange Carrier in Vancouver, WA, which declared chapter 11 bankrupcy back in April, roughly a month after I had just put almost $1000-- into the employee purchase plan for some stock.
So, being the cautious type, I started looking for another job, & managed to get a new one by the end of June. However, when I left, I lost 24 hours of accrued leave (the acting CEO forbade everyone from taking more than 2 consecutive days of time off in a month), & lost several hundred dollars when I rolled my 401(k) over into an IRA. But since I was making a good deal more money, I decided not to whine about it.
A few weeks ago, my wife & I noticed that her retirement accounts had taken a $9000-- hit since September, so I started taking a closer look at her investments. And the annual report for one bond fund came in the mail yesterday. The fund manager admits that the fund lost money due to investments in the telecommunications field. And guess which telecom corporation was singled out for mention?
Right now I can see the humor in this, but I wonder when GST will take another bite out of my earnings & savings.
I first heard of them 4 or 5 years ago, complaining that they had a patent on the EMBED tag, & that Sun's Java was infringing on their patent. This might be the same patent.
Has Eolas actually created any useful products & sold them to anyone? Or are they a perpetual startup, stuffed with IP of dubious value? In other words, a bush-leagure version of Rambus?
Well, Frank Lloyd Wright talked about ``Usonian" culture, so I guess you could call us Usonians. And I know one Canadian who posts on/. who calls us Yanks, so I guess that would work.
As for me, I describe myself as an Oregonian. But that's a personal preference.
If I only had some points, I'd mod this post up. And one a few posts below simply for the line:
> To the moderators : I already have a crappy plastic singing fish. Please don't humiliate me even more by modding me down:)
But noooooo, I wasn't picked to moderate today. And I bet all of the moderators are busy in the battle royale flamefest a few topics over about how much the USA sucks.
And seriously, don't mod my post up unless you mod the parent post up first. I'm still embarassed over the last time this happened.
> Americans might be under attack from colossal corporations who have the politicians bought and paid for. But in Canada we get to be under attack
> from our own government, who, exept for one day every 3-5 years, gets to impose their socialist policies without any fear of opposition.
Hrm. It's been a while since I was north of Washington State, but last time I checked, I thought Canada was located *in* America. You know, the continent America. The country to the south of you is called the USA. (We're a bit like the old Austrian-Hungarian Empire: a nation without a clearly identifiable name.)
What did you lot do? Dig a canal from Puget Sound to the Atlantic & give the land north of that ditch a new name? All so we could call ourselves ``Americans" without confusing those Europeans & Japanese? (Who, truth to be told, would prefer to ignore the USA & go back to looking down on each other.) What a nice thing to do: you truly are a civilized folk.
> PAM has NOTHING to do with xrw style permissions, this is something else, called ACLs (Access Control Lists).
Well, having only the last 5-10 days to read the documentation, I was left with the impression that it could be used quite nicely to implement ACL.
And the point of my original post was that I'm not qualified to add more the FAQ about PAM than to nicely ask the FAQ maintainer to add a section about it.
Another oversight in ths FAQ is that there is absolutely nothing about PAM -- good, bad or indifferent.
I'd offer to write the section myself, but beyond saying ``It appears to offer a finer granularity over file & executable permissions than UNIX's traditional xrw, the documentation included with the package appears to be fairly comprehensive, & it comes enabled by default in the RedHat distribution."
Give me a few months with PAM, & I may be able to delete the qualifiers.
> 2008: Richard Stallman uses his Microsoft riches to buy five Supreme Court justices and thus the Presidency. Renaming the
> country the "GNUnited States of America"
Wrong, this is a discussion. You post your opinion, you get a response. If you don't want to hear a different opinion, close your ISP account & get off the Internet.
Or at least don't write crap in your posts to/. like the following if you want people to think about what you write:
>> that said, i honestly think that the whole case and associted discussions should be marked 'redundant'. the government was too late, too slow, too
>> assuming and the whole affair is [score 0, flamebait] at best.
> Throughout your post you shred my statements and try to bend them as proof that I'm defending M$, when all I'm
> trying to do, is adding a different perspective to the rather one-sided views that are usually posted with a firm anti-M$ undertone.
That's a surprise to me. You're the one who repeated the inaccurate statement that Microsoft standardized the computer interface, or that MS software runs better than Open Source.
> I'm not pro M$ nor am I anti O/S. Bothe of which you seem to take for granted. But as you are taking my sentences apart and
> assuming that I'm trying to make M$'s case, I'll return the favour on a few selected items.
Quoting you out of context? I did drop the last sentence to your post, but everything else appeared exactly word-for-word in the order you wrote it. I guess my quoting one of your paragraphs, then responding to that paragraph took things horribly out of context.
But since you're only gong to respond to a selected few points of mine, you won't howl too loudly if I miss responding to a few points fo yours, will you?
> When talking about 'support' I didn't mean what the software supports, but that M$ is responsible for whatever support they give
> users.
Oh yes. I don't know what country you live in, but does MS do more than contract support to some sweatshop like Stream who hires any warm body off of the street at $11 an hour to repeat ``restart, reboot, reinstall, upgrade"?
You pay extra for support from Sun or Oracle, but at least the people there actually know something about computers, & have an inkling about how the software works. Most of the people at Microsoft have to consult third-party resources just to understand how their softwar actually works. (Andrew Schulman was surpised at how many Microsofties read his _Undocumented_DOS_ book.)
> You are gonna point out thousands of newsgroups etc, I'm siure. But who is responsible for the info they are giving? Our Linux
> people here spend hours after getting a 'tip' only to find out that it was non-sense.
And how are you going to be sure that the said low-wage phone jockey is going to give you the right answer? At least the people on the newsgroups & maillists have seen the software before. Microsoft fired all of their in-house front line support people in 1995 in order to increase the corporate profit margin.
> DOS was the standard not Windows, you say. Hey, the context of my Windows is the standard claim was clearly in regards to the
> end-user. How many companies did send their word processing people to DOS training courses?
DOS is entirely an end-user program. Almost no Sysadmins were ever injured in it's use.
Q: How many sysadmins does it take to run a computer running MS-DOS?
A: Five. One to do the work, four to keep him from formatting the hard drive & installing a real operating system.
Numerous GUIs were written to run over MS-DOS in the late 1980s & early 1990s. The success of Windows 3.1 has been attributed as much to the fact MS required it preinstalled on every computer that shipped DOS 5.0+ as to all the other causes combined.
> Warranties: long before the US came up with fancy laws, there was something like guild code back in Europe. People had pride in
> any 1970 models Mercedes on the road lately?].
Actually, I see lots of older cars out here. Pre-1970 Mustangs, for example. I was driving behind a late-1970's Camero today. We don't use salt on our roads here, so older cars can last for decades.
> It is a definite MUST for the industry to
> produce products with shorter life spans to sustain it's existence. If everyone would last longer then it would be a matter of time until
> markets are saturated and producers are out of busniness.
This is a stupid argument. ``We can't afford to have pride in our work, so we're going to make shoddy products" is what you are saying. And all along I thought Europeans had pride in their work.
> One of the main reasons I post at/. is simply because I got a business major and am paid rather well to consult organizations on
> questions of practicality and workability, rather than coolness and cyber-rebellion. So, I'm trying to show different points of view to
> tech-heavy mindsets.
Oh. Well, that explains it. Pointy Haired Boss types are the same, the world around.
> Unfortunately, you seem to have taken me as someone on M$'s payroll.
Funny thing is, every ex-Microsoftie or Microsoftie-wannabe I've spoken to has said the same thing you have. No waffling about ``well, we gotta do it this way because of politics" as I have heard from insiders in other companies. And it's clear where they're coming from: one ex-MS employee I was winning an argument with ended up defending his former employer by saying, ``Microsoft makes money. Unlike other companies, like Symantec."
A MS employee ended a conversation with Edward Yourdon in his Rise & Resurrestion of the American Programmer about the resources MS spent creating a version of one of their products by stating that the software made MS hundred of millions of dollars -- who cares about metrics? It's only only one short step from not caring about metrics to not caring about bugs.
So MS employees have their hearts & minds on the bottom line. Not on creating reliable, robust software. Which is what we need.
> I'm also not Libertarian as you seem to presume. Heck, I'm not even American [PTL] nor am I in the U.S.
Well, I'm not a citizen of Germany but I did vote Green Party last national election. So which country do you hail from? One of those whose hineys we saved in the last World War? Or one of those whose hineys we kicked in the same conflict?
(If those last three sentences were too subtle for you, then parse them this way: You've demonstrated that you're a luser. Go away.)
> Additionally the moment someone thinks "Music today is all noise and boom boom boom" is the moment their ego has gotten
> ahead of rationale.
Actually this is true. 90% of music today is crap. But 90% of music at any given time is crap. (With a nod to Theodore Sturgeon.)
> Yes you define good music. Your tastes define all and are the final say. The world should stop and solidify at your tastes.
T.S. Eliot once wrote that taste is not something you get born with, you develop. People who like music that is ``pop" tend to be people who really don't listen to music, just have it playing in the background while they do something else. if you actually listen to music, you develop taste.
Case in point: many years ago, I listened to The Bangles, & liked them (to be honest) mostly because this all-girl band were killer in miniskirts. Several years later, after listening to bands like The Posies, Pond, & Afghan Whigs (none of whom I have ever heard on the radio, BTW), I happened to listen tot hem again. And I was surpised that they still pretty good to listen to.
For the record, my taste in music may be dated, but is somewhat eclectic: I prefer The Posies & Screaming Trees to Nirvana, like Astor Piazzola, & wish I had bought some Schwester S tapes while I was over in Germany.
Slashdot Mirror
> WE WERE HERE FIRST, SO FUCK OFF!
No no, now ask any lawyer, & it/he/she will tell you, ``possession is 9 points of the law."
eToys tried to take possession away from etoy, & failed.
eToys now has little or no money. They're facing creditors. Time for etoy to hire a lawyer & win the war.
After all, etoy still has possession.
Geoff
Yes, I know, it's all just a matter of time . . .
Geoff
> Although I am clearly biased on this point, I just dont see any other need for a tech-union, perhaps someone else can enlighten me on
> this issue.
Simple. Consider for a moment that having ``elite" status means that you are one of the top 5% or 10% in your work bracket. Employers fall all over themselves to give you want you want.
But what if you just don't make that bracket. You're in the 10% bracket right below yours. Or you look funny. Or you decide you want to only work 40 hours a week.
Or say you lose out on a raise because your PHB decides to give it instead to one of those slackers who just happens to offer something on the side that the PHB likes. (And it's not always nookie.)
Sure, if that happened to you right now, you could walk off the job & get a better-paying one tomorrow. But recessions happen, & all of the clued bosses who would hire you in a heartbeat have hiring freezes. Or you get into a car accident, sure it's the other guy's fault but he's a deadbeat & your insurance doesn't cover it, AND you are out for six months. Can't code, can't work, can't do anything but count the holes in the ceiling thru a medication haze. And you find your employer laid you off while you were out, & no one wants to hire you.
Don't say this couldn't happen to you. For generations people have been giving loyalty & their strong backs to employers, then something happens & you discover how your boss repays all that loyalty. All it takes is one PHB, one bad break, & your career can get toasted.
And that's why unions get started. Because you can't always trust your boss.
And be glad that there's an interest in unionizing high tech. You'll never see a union at a place like McDonald's or 7-11 (which need unions worse than the high tech industry) because you need some kind of stable workforce that'll be around for at least a couple months at the job. You need jobs that are worth fighting for, that are worth having.
Geoff
> One or two more options, and we have the next /. poll!
But is it worth CowboyNeal?
Okay, I'll just be grabbing my coat . . .
Geoff
> There was a system in place to recycle the fuel after it was used, but President Carter freaked out and killed it... it's called
> reprocessing.
And how is this different from fussion technology?
No, this is not a sarcastic comeback or an ad hominem attack. Educate me -- & everyone else reading this topic.
(For those unfamiliar with my language, fussion was this promised goal where -- in a nutshell -- running a nuclear plant in a certain way would result with more fuel coming out than went in.)
Last I heard about fussion technology was that it just didn't work. Heinlein's observation that ``there is no such thing as a free lunch" held up for even nuclear physics. I can believe that politics might kill the best solution to a problem. But I can also believe that reality would do the same thing -- only more efficiently.
Geoff
> Nuclear waste lasts 100,000 years, but toxic
/. were alive when the topic of nuclear power was first debated -- & I would have to spend days to research enough to educate them about the issues (well, we could think about the fact Homer Simpson works at a nuclear power plant, & wonder just how many workers are different from that example; I think people would be amazed);
> waste from coal-burning lasts forever.
> It doesn't decay, ever.
Call for citations. Medieval Britain burned a lot of coal & I haven't seen any evidence that it damaged the ecology of the islands there.
[snip]
> So which would you rather have:
>
> 1) an enviromental disaster of a coal plant,
> which causes 1.4M tons worth of mining
> (often strip mining) and produces hundreds of
> thousands of tons of toxic waste, much of
> which is toxic forever and not for 100k years
> only
Ever hear of hard rock mining? (Hint: that's what the adults were doing in the movie ``October Sky".)
> OR
> 2) A nuclear power plant, which doesn't require
> the mining of 1.4M tons of raw materials,
> and doesn't produce 200k tons of toxic waste,
> but rather *15* tons of high level waste,
> *35* tons of mid-level waste, and *100* tons
> of low-level waste.
How many people die in mining that? Oh, & be sure to ask around the Navaho & Hopi reservations -- I hear a lot of folks living there died due to years of mining uranium.
> WORRYING ABOUT NUCLEAR WASTE WHILE CONTINUING
> TO BURN COAL FOR POWER IS UTTERLY MORONIC.
>
Elaborate. Or would *you* be accusing me of an ad hominem attack? Sorry, but I get these responses confused. I've been having a lot of senior moments lately, even though I'm far from 50.
> You also bring up Three Mile Island and Chernobyl.
> Did anyone even *die* in TMI? No. How many
> people die every year from breathing in all
> the toxic waste from burning fossil fuels?
>
How many people could have died? Would you like to live next to a nuclear power plant?
I didn't bring the topic up for two reasons:
first is that I doubt most people on
second is that the ability to recreate safe nuclear reactors is now a lost art (e.g. I have been told that the division of Westinghouse that builds the boilers for nuclear power plants has been closed & the expertise scattered decades ago)
> And as for Chernobyl, we're not stupid enough
> in this country to use flammable graphite to
> moderate the reactor core. *our* worst
> nuclear accident killed no one and didn't even
> *injure* anyone.
So we've been told. And the US government spent millions of dollars & untold manpower to keep _The_Progressive_ magazine from reporting negative details about nuclear power. Do you think that we've heard about all of the near misses, or can trust that the PTB learned from these mistakes?
> How many COAL MINERS die *every* year?
>
> WORRYING ABOUT THE SAFETY OF NUCLEAR POWER PLANTS
> IS MORONIC WHILE WE'RE STILL MINING AND
> BURNING COAL.
A lot less than die as police officers.
How many people would die from mining uranium, if we used it as amply as coal?
> MORONIC.
Excuse me. Are you talking to me? Or to people who share in your delusion?
Geoff
>> You can't use nuclear fission because no one has figured out what to do with the spent radioactive waste.
>
> You could just bury it. The proposal to store waste in Nevada was killed for political reasons, not scientific ones.
Yep. That's what I would assume one could do with it. Or rocket it into the sun. The PTB said it would be safe down there. However, not all of the experts agreed. They said there was some chance that the geological formations would move & compromise the seal on the deposits.
>> And we haven't even touched on whether nuclear fission can be safely used to generate power. (Hints: Three Mile Island. Chernobel.
>> How well we have dealt with less toxic materials & avoided environmental damage.)
> [Blatant Plug for Canada]The Candu reactor design is pretty damn safe. If the core overheats, your moderator (heavy water) boils
> off, and the reaction stops.[/Blatant Plug]
Hey, I got an idea: let's buy a bunch of those kind of reactors from our neighbors from up north. And when the US has created a bunch of radioactive waste, our neighbors to the north can take it off our hands & store it somewhere in the Canadian Shield. After all, we're talking about geological formations that have not changed significantly in a couple BILLION years. They ought to be happy over the prospect of trading a lot of waste land for millenia of millenia of maintenance payments. Which ought to cover much of their national debt for generations -- & then some.
> Ad hominem attacks are often the last resort of those without a good argument. Try to be more civil, please.
You mean like your colleague a few posts below?
Would it be an ad hominem attack to suggest you couldn't convince the nation of Canada that accepting the nuclear wastes of the US? (And for the sake of our discussion, I'm happy to admit you up there have the ability.)
If I were a citizen of Canada, I would shed no tears to tell us to clean up our own mess. But then, maybe you see a way to make money from our own foolishness. If so, please fix it.
Geoff
> This is what happens when you can't use nuclear fission to produce most of your power, thanks to the pseudo-environmentalists and > NIMBYists and their shortsighted anti-everything stance. Wrong. Thanks for playing, though. You can't use nuclear fission because no one has figured out what to do with the spent radioactive waste. Nevada doesn't want it. Neither does South Carolina. Nor does Washington. Seems that although lots of states would like to have nuclear scientists within their borders so they can tax them & claim how advanced their state is, they don't want to deal with a problem that isn't about to go away for at least 100,000 years. Think about it, techno-boy. One hundred thousand years. More than twenty times the length of recorded history. That's the stumbling block -- not some alleged nancy-boy, pinkish inability to do the right thing for the greater common good. And we haven't even touched on whether nuclear fission can be safely used to generate power. (Hints: Three Mile Island. Chernobel. How well we have dealt with less toxic materials & avoided environmental damage.) Bottom line: you don't know what you're talking about. When you have figured out the answers to these questions, & how they can be implemented in a cost-efficient manner, you can come back & play with the grown ups. But until then, stay in lurk mode. Geoff
> No, you make sure your site is secure by locking down ports 21 and 23 for starters (telnet and mail). I know this because I just tried to telnet into
> them to see if they were open. So if security-through-obscurity is so darned good, why do you need to take the additional step of locking down
> your ports?
Since you mention those two ports, out of curiosity, did the prompt identify the software running on those ports? (e.g., sendmail, postfix or exchange on port 23?)
Another simple step to take is to make sure that your web server always returns a 404 error if someone looks for non-existent pages. (You'd be surprised how many web servers don't do this, & cheerfully identify the software running instead.)
The reason I mention this is that I've seen it mentioned in several different places to disable self-identification of server software -- it's trivial to do for most of these applications, & it makes a cracker's job a bit more difficult.
No, if you take these measures you can't unsubscribe from your favorite security mailling list & still sleep soundly at night. These steps will only slow down the determined cracker -- maybe enough so that you can catch the miscreant in action & foil him.
Geoff
> Please, why give these jokers any
> kind of exposure? The only place I want to see the name "LinuxOne" is in the FuckedCompany Hall of Fame.
Well, I'd say all of those jokers probably agree with you 110%. Right now, the last thing anyone connected with LinuxOne wants is for someone to remember that stupid company: each of one of their corporate officers are trying hard to find a new job in a softening high-tech economy in order to pay the rent & buy groceries.
It's one thing to work for a company like Microsoft & not understand what Free Source Software is about (``Okay, I screwed up -- but I know where my next paycheck is coming from"), & another to try to make money off of Free Source Software, but not know what it's about (``Okay, I screwed up -- but lots of technically savvy people remember I made a fool of myself, won't hire me, & I don't know where my next paycheck is coming from.")
Geoff
Pilot-link is under active development as a GPL project, & not only supports UNIX & UNIX-like OSes, but I believe is also supported for OS/2 & Win32 operating systems. (But those ports need volunteers.)
See http://www.gnu-designs.com/pilot-link/ for further details.
Developing SyncML compliance would be a Very Good Thing.
Geoff
> I am willing to take bets that in 5 or 10 years, only 2 distros will exist
I thought the same thing 3 or 4 years ago: at the time only Red Hat, Caldera, SuSe, Debian & Slackware appeared to be left; all of the others had vanished due to lack of time, or lack of audience. And Slackware looked like it would be the next one to vanish.
Now TurboLinux & Mandrake are branching their own distributions; look at www.lwn.net for news of distributions, & there are dozens of new ones being created because . . . well, because someone thought it would be cool, & offers a new way to get under the hood & learns how Linux works.
None of the distributions have a lock on the Linux community; they all have their own problems, & each problem is an invitation to someone to fix & create her or his own distribution. Which may become the flagship distro, as Slackware once was, & Red Hat appears to be today. And some of the current distros will fall out of use, to become entries in Linux Trivia Pursuit.
As long as we have the source, this waning & waxing of numbers of distros will continue. It is a sign that the Linux community is continuing.
Geoff
Take a look at
http://snopes2.com/business/genius/spacepen.htm
Geoff
Saving money for a rainy day is a noble idea. But sometimes it just don't happen like you plan.
Take my situation. I worked for a corporation called GST Telecom, a CLEC or Competitive Local Exchange Carrier in Vancouver, WA, which declared chapter 11 bankrupcy back in April, roughly a month after I had just put almost $1000-- into the employee purchase plan for some stock.
So, being the cautious type, I started looking for another job, & managed to get a new one by the end of June. However, when I left, I lost 24 hours of accrued leave (the acting CEO forbade everyone from taking more than 2 consecutive days of time off in a month), & lost several hundred dollars when I rolled my 401(k) over into an IRA. But since I was making a good deal more money, I decided not to whine about it.
A few weeks ago, my wife & I noticed that her retirement accounts had taken a $9000-- hit since September, so I started taking a closer look at her investments. And the annual report for one bond fund came in the mail yesterday. The fund manager admits that the fund lost money due to investments in the telecommunications field. And guess which telecom corporation was singled out for mention?
Right now I can see the humor in this, but I wonder when GST will take another bite out of my earnings & savings.
Geoff
Wow. That company is still around?
I first heard of them 4 or 5 years ago, complaining that they had a patent on the EMBED tag, & that Sun's Java was infringing on their patent. This might be the same patent.
Has Eolas actually created any useful products & sold them to anyone? Or are they a perpetual startup, stuffed with IP of dubious value? In other words, a bush-leagure version of Rambus?
Geoff
Well, Frank Lloyd Wright talked about ``Usonian" culture, so I guess you could call us Usonians. And I know one Canadian who posts on /. who calls us Yanks, so I guess that would work.
As for me, I describe myself as an Oregonian. But that's a personal preference.
Geoff
If I only had some points, I'd mod this post up. And one a few posts below simply for the line:
:)
> To the moderators : I already have a crappy plastic singing fish. Please don't humiliate me even more by modding me down
But noooooo, I wasn't picked to moderate today. And I bet all of the moderators are busy in the battle royale flamefest a few topics over about how much the USA sucks.
And seriously, don't mod my post up unless you mod the parent post up first. I'm still embarassed over the last time this happened.
Geoff
> Americans might be under attack from colossal corporations who have the politicians bought and paid for. But in Canada we get to be under attack
> from our own government, who, exept for one day every 3-5 years, gets to impose their socialist policies without any fear of opposition.
Hrm. It's been a while since I was north of Washington State, but last time I checked, I thought Canada was located *in* America. You know, the continent America. The country to the south of you is called the USA. (We're a bit like the old Austrian-Hungarian Empire: a nation without a clearly identifiable name.)
What did you lot do? Dig a canal from Puget Sound to the Atlantic & give the land north of that ditch a new name? All so we could call ourselves ``Americans" without confusing those Europeans & Japanese? (Who, truth to be told, would prefer to ignore the USA & go back to looking down on each other.) What a nice thing to do: you truly are a civilized folk.
Geoff
> [Nixon] Watergate aside, wasn't all that bad of a president...
That's like saying ``Except for kidnapping & killing all those women, Ted Bundy wasn't all that bad of a person."
Sheesh!
Geoff
> PAM has NOTHING to do with xrw style permissions, this is something else, called ACLs (Access Control Lists).
Well, having only the last 5-10 days to read the documentation, I was left with the impression that it could be used quite nicely to implement ACL.
And the point of my original post was that I'm not qualified to add more the FAQ about PAM than to nicely ask the FAQ maintainer to add a section about it.
Geoff
Another oversight in ths FAQ is that there is absolutely nothing about PAM -- good, bad or indifferent.
I'd offer to write the section myself, but beyond saying ``It appears to offer a finer granularity over file & executable permissions than UNIX's traditional xrw, the documentation included with the package appears to be fairly comprehensive, & it comes enabled by default in the RedHat distribution."
Give me a few months with PAM, & I may be able to delete the qualifiers.
Geoff
> 2008: Richard Stallman uses his Microsoft riches to buy five Supreme Court justices and thus the Presidency. Renaming the
> country the "GNUnited States of America"
By ``GNUnited" do you mean ``GNU is Not United"?
Geoff
> Wonder if I can get a patent on first posting at slashdot.
Naw, do mankind a favor: patent the blink tag. Or the marquee tag. That'll clean up the Internet in a way to surprise everyone.
Geoff
> This is weird.
/. like the following if you want people to think about what you write:
/. is simply because I got a business major and am paid rather well to consult organizations on
Wrong, this is a discussion. You post your opinion, you get a response. If you don't want to hear a different opinion, close your ISP account & get off the Internet.
Or at least don't write crap in your posts to
>> that said, i honestly think that the whole case and associted discussions should be marked 'redundant'. the government was too late, too slow, too
>> assuming and the whole affair is [score 0, flamebait] at best.
> Throughout your post you shred my statements and try to bend them as proof that I'm defending M$, when all I'm
> trying to do, is adding a different perspective to the rather one-sided views that are usually posted with a firm anti-M$ undertone.
That's a surprise to me. You're the one who repeated the inaccurate statement that Microsoft standardized the computer interface, or that MS software runs better than Open Source.
> I'm not pro M$ nor am I anti O/S. Bothe of which you seem to take for granted. But as you are taking my sentences apart and
> assuming that I'm trying to make M$'s case, I'll return the favour on a few selected items.
Quoting you out of context? I did drop the last sentence to your post, but everything else appeared exactly word-for-word in the order you wrote it. I guess my quoting one of your paragraphs, then responding to that paragraph took things horribly out of context.
But since you're only gong to respond to a selected few points of mine, you won't howl too loudly if I miss responding to a few points fo yours, will you?
> When talking about 'support' I didn't mean what the software supports, but that M$ is responsible for whatever support they give
> users.
Oh yes. I don't know what country you live in, but does MS do more than contract support to some sweatshop like Stream who hires any warm body off of the street at $11 an hour to repeat ``restart, reboot, reinstall, upgrade"?
You pay extra for support from Sun or Oracle, but at least the people there actually know something about computers, & have an inkling about how the software works. Most of the people at Microsoft have to consult third-party resources just to understand how their softwar actually works. (Andrew Schulman was surpised at how many Microsofties read his _Undocumented_DOS_ book.)
> You are gonna point out thousands of newsgroups etc, I'm siure. But who is responsible for the info they are giving? Our Linux
> people here spend hours after getting a 'tip' only to find out that it was non-sense.
And how are you going to be sure that the said low-wage phone jockey is going to give you the right answer? At least the people on the newsgroups & maillists have seen the software before. Microsoft fired all of their in-house front line support people in 1995 in order to increase the corporate profit margin.
> DOS was the standard not Windows, you say. Hey, the context of my Windows is the standard claim was clearly in regards to the
> end-user. How many companies did send their word processing people to DOS training courses?
DOS is entirely an end-user program. Almost no Sysadmins were ever injured in it's use.
Q: How many sysadmins does it take to run a computer running MS-DOS?
A: Five. One to do the work, four to keep him from formatting the hard drive & installing a real operating system.
Numerous GUIs were written to run over MS-DOS in the late 1980s & early 1990s. The success of Windows 3.1 has been attributed as much to the fact MS required it preinstalled on every computer that shipped DOS 5.0+ as to all the other causes combined.
> Warranties: long before the US came up with fancy laws, there was something like guild code back in Europe. People had pride in
> any 1970 models Mercedes on the road lately?].
Actually, I see lots of older cars out here. Pre-1970 Mustangs, for example. I was driving behind a late-1970's Camero today. We don't use salt on our roads here, so older cars can last for decades.
> It is a definite MUST for the industry to
> produce products with shorter life spans to sustain it's existence. If everyone would last longer then it would be a matter of time until
> markets are saturated and producers are out of busniness.
This is a stupid argument. ``We can't afford to have pride in our work, so we're going to make shoddy products" is what you are saying. And all along I thought Europeans had pride in their work.
> One of the main reasons I post at
> questions of practicality and workability, rather than coolness and cyber-rebellion. So, I'm trying to show different points of view to
> tech-heavy mindsets.
Oh. Well, that explains it. Pointy Haired Boss types are the same, the world around.
> Unfortunately, you seem to have taken me as someone on M$'s payroll.
Funny thing is, every ex-Microsoftie or Microsoftie-wannabe I've spoken to has said the same thing you have. No waffling about ``well, we gotta do it this way because of politics" as I have heard from insiders in other companies. And it's clear where they're coming from: one ex-MS employee I was winning an argument with ended up defending his former employer by saying, ``Microsoft makes money. Unlike other companies, like Symantec."
A MS employee ended a conversation with Edward Yourdon in his Rise & Resurrestion of the American Programmer about the resources MS spent creating a version of one of their products by stating that the software made MS hundred of millions of dollars -- who cares about metrics? It's only only one short step from not caring about metrics to not caring about bugs.
So MS employees have their hearts & minds on the bottom line. Not on creating reliable, robust software. Which is what we need.
> I'm also not Libertarian as you seem to presume. Heck, I'm not even American [PTL] nor am I in the U.S.
Well, I'm not a citizen of Germany but I did vote Green Party last national election. So which country do you hail from? One of those whose hineys we saved in the last World War? Or one of those whose hineys we kicked in the same conflict?
(If those last three sentences were too subtle for you, then parse them this way: You've demonstrated that you're a luser. Go away.)
Geoff
> Additionally the moment someone thinks "Music today is all noise and boom boom boom" is the moment their ego has gotten
> ahead of rationale.
Actually this is true. 90% of music today is crap. But 90% of music at any given time is crap. (With a nod to Theodore Sturgeon.)
> Yes you define good music. Your tastes define all and are the final say. The world should stop and solidify at your tastes.
T.S. Eliot once wrote that taste is not something you get born with, you develop. People who like music that is ``pop" tend to be people who really don't listen to music, just have it playing in the background while they do something else. if you actually listen to music, you develop taste.
Case in point: many years ago, I listened to The Bangles, & liked them (to be honest) mostly because this all-girl band were killer in miniskirts. Several years later, after listening to bands like The Posies, Pond, & Afghan Whigs (none of whom I have ever heard on the radio, BTW), I happened to listen tot hem again. And I was surpised that they still pretty good to listen to.
For the record, my taste in music may be dated, but is somewhat eclectic: I prefer The Posies & Screaming Trees to Nirvana, like Astor Piazzola, & wish I had bought some Schwester S tapes while I was over in Germany.
Geoff