Right. The thing is, they know that if held to the standards of a real court, they'd never win, because no panel of twelve ordinary yobs is ever going to put the screws to some poor guy whose only crime was being a week late updating his tags or forgetting his wallet at home and thus not having his license on him. And when it comes to things like running red lights or stop signs, same deal -- it comes down to your word over the cop's, and people may tend to side with the civilian.
So, the state figured out that they can call all this stuff an "administrative infraction" or some varient, thus neatly sidestepping all those pesky rules in the Constitution because, well, those only apply to criminal offenses, right?
It's interesting how these non-criminal, administrative infractions can still get you thrown into jail for extended periods of time, cost thousands of dollars in fines and legal fees, and otherwise screw up your life just as bad as if you were being prosecuted for a real criminal act, but the state still sits there insisting it's not a criminal act, merely an administrative problem.
If you want to run a distro thats similar to the bells and whistles of OSX or Win7 then youre going to have to use a similar amount of RAM. Youre not getting away with using 1/4 the ram without giving up gnome.
Right now I've got gnome, with compiz, running. I also have Firefox with five tabs, an IM client with several windows, four terminals, Audacious, Evolution, and gedit (with several tabs). In other words, the majority of my day-to-day stuff is running just fine, including the fancy bells and whistles of compiz, which to me are a hell of a lot nicer looking, and way more functional, than anything Win7 has to offer. 'free -m' shows I'm using 960 megs of RAM. This machine has been running for just over five days.
On my Windows 7 machine, I've got Firefox open, with one tab displaying a directory listing (no flash or anything). That's it. Task manager says it's using 894 megs of RAM, AND it has 884 megs paged for god-knows-what reason. This machine is just sitting there doing nothing, and I just restarted it like half an hour ago so it's not some weird memory leak nonsense.
No, Linux may not be magic, but when I see numbers like this, and compare them to what the machines are actually doing, it becomes clear that Linux is much less resource intensive than Windows.
I have an indoor cat. She's been an indoor cat all her life. A few years ago, though, she slipped out the door which my friend had accidently left ajar when he came over. Stuff like that happens all the time. My cat was missing for a month until some construction workers found her in the rafters of a basement two buildings over. If she'd had a GPS I could have found her much more quickly. Also, I consider it very lucky that she had the sense to find shelter and more or less stay put, which is why she was still alive after a month. Many cats would just wander off and get hit by a car, attacked by a dog, or something else, and wouldn't last a month. With a GPS, you could find your missing pet before anything bad happens.
That's not really true. Yeah, a lot of Windows problems come from idiots downloading and running stupid things, but there have been many exploits that don't (merely visiting a website, in some cases) or that are a result of operating under the Windows mindset.
By that, I mean that Windows is constantly, unendingly, eternally in your face with endless alerts and notifications and other idiotic garbage. Everything is always updating and connecting and scanning and detecting and it has to tell you all of this RIGHT NOW. Tons of those alerts don't go away unless you click on them.
The software developers for Windows make it even worse. They load everything into the systray and every program has to have its own little updater and alerter and everything is constantly reminding you about updates and restart this program and new virus definitions and watch out for snakes and blah blah blah.
Working in an environment like this, users are very quickly trained to just click away these messages. Then some dope gets the bright idea to make a popup that looks more or less like all the other inane notifications Windows spews, and surprise, the users click it -- unwittingly downloading and installing some sort of crapware.
You don't see that kind of thing in Linux under any DE or WM I've ever used. Just from that one simple difference, the probability of users mindlessly clicking things to dismiss them is drastically reduced.
Furthermore, in Windows, the expected means of getting new software is to search the web, download something from god-knows-where, and run an executable installer. That's completely normal in Windows, and users are thus trained to think that downloading and running stuff is okay. In Linux, you get some sort of package manager, where the software is vetted and verified, and downloading and running random executables from the web is very unusual. As such, Linux users are far less prone to the kind of crap Windows faces.
I agree but wish to elaborate. Zombies of the 60s, 70s, and 80s film era were very much a mirror of what the average American thought of the Soviet Union -- slow, mindless, and lumbering, but with huge numbers on their side. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, later zombie movies featured much quicker, agile zombies who, while they still frequently attack in large numbers, are just as frequently seen in small groups; perhaps a personification of the guerilla-type enemy America now faces instead of the old monolithic one.
So has Windows, even. Years ago, maybe mid 2004 or 2005ish, I lost my job and couldn't afford my internet connection. The neighbors had wireless but the signal was too weak to use in any part of my place except this one particular corner of the kitchen. I had an old 233mhz laptop running Windows 2000, so I placed it on the kitchen counter, plugged a wireless card into it, enabled ICS, and ran a cable from its ethernet jack to *my* wireless router. Then all my computers could get online.
Not the most elegant (or legal) of solutions, but it worked for two months until I got my act together.
Most of the security problems I've seen actually exploited are not a problem with asterisk as such, or even border control, but of retarded admins. For example, many IP phones expect to connect to a fileserver of some sort and download some xml files containing their SIP information. Admins will routinely just create an ftp account somewhere, using the default login and password of the phones, and dump the files there. They'll frequently allow that ftp user to have shell access too, or forget to disable directory listing on the ftp directory, or do anything else that resembles common sense and security.
It would be trivial to portscan far and wide, find some asterisk boxes, and exploit these terribly common mistakes made by clueless admins. I have demonstrated to clients how I was able to log into their server armed only with the knowledge of what the default ftp username and password is, then download all their users' config files containing all the information I'd need to fraudulently use their phone lines. Sometimes it takes a dramatic demonstration like that to make people wake up.
I'm tired of the "US is large" and "population density" arguments. Fine, I get it, the US has a huge amount of space and getting cellphone or broadband access out to Nowheresville, Wyoming is hard. But that doesn't explain why service, pricing, and general offerings are still so terrible in major American cities.
Saying "they have to deal with interference" is nonsense -- Japan and Europe manage fine, with, as everyone keeps pointing out, a higher population density. So, why can't we, in Atlanta, New York, San Francisco, Seattle, Chicago, or any other highly-populated city, get insanely fast and cheap internet access and cell networks that can handle anything we can throw at them?
To clarify, I am not suggesting that children, or mentally retarded people, etc, are not human. I am pointing out that there is a somewhat clear line that can be drawn in fetal development -- the neurons linking. Before that occurs, the necessary physical architecture of the human brain simply does not exist.
Obviously I am not saying that once that happens, the brain is suddenly filled with knowledge and experience and wisdom. But the physical foundation, and the capacity to learn those things later, is there.
"It's alive" is obviously a silly argument as we kill many things without calling it murder, and "it has a nervous system / heartbeat / lungs" is no better, for the same reason. "Souls" canot be proven and there are many philosophers and theologians who have argued that animals do have souls of a sort anyway, so that argument carries no weight.
But our brains are uniquely human, and we know enough about fetal development to be able to say "It has occured" or "It has not yet occured." I think that arguing about whether it's "murder" before it has anything like a functional human brain is rather silly.
I am a PhD student of Neurobiology and I consider abortion murder.
Since you think abortion is murder because the fetus has a nervous system, you must consider killing anything else with a nervous system -- including worms and insects -- to be morally equivalent to the killing of a human. Is that a stance you're willing to take, or would you like to adjust your criteria?
Maybe you should find a more compelling reason to call something "murder".
"Murder" is specifically the taking of a human life -- not an animal life, a plant life, the life of a fungus, or anything else. It must be human. Merely "being alive" affords you no special status on this planet, as we're perfectly content to slaughter all kinds of life wholesale. But we draw the line at humans.
There is only one thing that distinguishes humans from any other life form. Most of them are far superior to us in physical abilities; they can run faster, jump higher, shred with claws, cut with teeth, fly, breathe underwater, have a variety of senses and appendages we don't have, and so forth. But we have one thing no other life form seems to have -- our ability to rationalise, abstract, conceptualise.. in short, our ability to think. Other forms of life can certainly think to some degree but there is something unique about our abilities.
This one important, uniquely human feature requires a functional human brain.
If it does not have a functional human brain, whatever else it might be, it is not human.
A human brain requires billions or trillions of interconnected neurons in order to function.
Large-scale neuron linkup does not occur in humans until the sixth or seventh month of gestation.
A "nervous system" is utterly irrelevent -- we kill millions of living things with nervous systems daily, and whatever else that may be, we do not consider it to be murder. The hamburger you had for lunch came from an animal that had a nervous system, and one quite a bit more advanced than any week-old fetus anyway.
Nervous systems, heartbeats, lungs -- these things do not make one human. There is one, and only one thing that humans have that no other animal has. How can you consider a fetus to be fully human when it lacks the one basic characteristic of humanity?
Sometimes I'm pretty sure people like this are just grasping for rationalisation of their buyer's remorse. They paid 300 dollars for their godawful, bug-ridden, virus-prone, piece of trash Windows OS, but they can't admit to themselves that they made a poor purchasing decision. They then construct elaborate, if inane, theories and explanations about how the only things worth anything must have a pricetag, and there's no way that dirty liberal down the street has something better that he got for free.
Apple is a company that spends their time addressing these issues and making things easier for the user,
Apple is a company that spends time making things easier for one particular type of user. If you don't think the way Apple proclaims you should, their stuff is far from easy.
I don't want my music centrally organised by an application. I want my song files in a directory of my choosing, which can be read by any application I see fit. If I want to move those files around, that's my problem. If I want to make copies of them into other directories for various experiments, playlist uploads, or whatever else, that's my perogative, and I want to do it through the OS's file manager. I don't want some application stealing file associations, or insisting that it use its own particular garbage (Quicktime) for playing audio.
Even something as allegedly simple as iTunes took me forever to figure out the first time I used it. But then, after finally figuring it out and shelling out a dollar for a song, instead of a useful song I could burn to CD, I got some m4a crap that wouldn't play in any of my media players, wouldn't be read by my car stereo, and all I could do was transcode it with Audacity. Then I had to uninstall iTunes, uninstall the party favors it left behind, and fix all my file associations.
I was done with iTunes on that day. Apple may be "easier to use" for a certain type of person, but certainly not for me, and they delivered a terrible, unusable product. iTunes will never see my business again.
I fully grant that this was about three or four years ago and things may have changed, but they had their chance to make their first impression, and blew it. I have no delusions that Apple is hurting because I refuse to do business with them, but to act like they are some pinnacle of interface guidelines is simply ridiculous.
PS. If Apple products, including OSX, iPods, and iPhones, are so bloody easy to use, why are my family members calling me all the time to help them fix this or figure out that?
Honestly, it's rigodamndiculous how difficult it is to find, download, and install software on Linux. At least compared to the Windows/Mac platform.
I agree. For those who don't know the difference between the two platforms, I'll explain the process for each.
For Ubuntu, and pretty much any other apt-based system:
1. Click "System", "Administration", "Synaptic Package Manager".
2. Type a few keywords related to what you want. For example, "dvd player" or "spreadsheet".
3. Pick one from the selections that come up, and put a checkbox next to it.
4. Click "Install". Wait for twenty seconds.
5. New program is in easy-to-find, neatly categorised Applications menu. You're done!
This is insanely complicated. There's no way any normal, non-nerd human could do this. And the selection of over twenty-eight thousand packages, free for the taking, is completely insufficient for today's modern world.
For compaision, here is how to do it the easy way with Microsoft Windows:
1. Search Google for likely keywords.
2. Check the first two pages of results for things that might have what you want.
3. Spend some time going through the most likely results to find one that you don't have to pay for, isn't a crippled trial version, and doesn't seem to contain adware, spyware, or other bullshit. You can't really always tell, so you'll just have to guess sometimes.
4. Download the installer and run it. NOTE: Windows may warn you that installing this could set fire to a box of puppies. Ignore it.
5. Click "Yes" and "I agree" to various questions and EULAs you aren't reading.
6. Answer questions about where to install files you've never heard of. Sometimes the defaults will be okay, and other times it will want to install stuff in really wacky places.
7. Ignore lecture about how you need to close all other programs. The installer finishes.
8. Ignore lecture about how you need to reboot. NOTE: You may not get a choice.
9. Delete systray icons, desktop shortcuts, quicklaunch icons, startup items, additional prorgams it installed alongside, and other party favors.
10. Your new program is now somewhere in your three-column-wide start menu. It might be under the program's name, or the manufacturer's name, or perhaps under the umbrella corporation's name, or it might just be its own entry floating down at the bottom or top of the menu. There's no way to know and you'll just have to kind of remember where it is, or become obsessive about categorising this stuff by hand.
11. Pray it didn't come with any viruses or trojans. You're done!
Yes, indeed, this is a much better system. Easier, saner, and less prone to error. Everyone should use it!
Finally,
30 minutes on Google to figure out it is a problem with the libxml2 linking. Another hour to fix the damn thing. That's not going to pass the Granny Test.
Yeah! And Granny is really good at dealing with missing DLLs, corrupt registry entries, files that mysteriously become locked or read-only, and handling conflicts between programs trying to steal file associations. Granny never has problems with Windows. I never hear from Granny asking me to fix her computer.
For one thing, it's annoying because it's almost exactly the same as the mainframe-terminal model, which has been around for decades. Calling it a "cloud" in an effort to make it sound modern and sexy is just marketing drivel and makes it sound like it's something new and fresh, leading to really idiotic decisions from management who would snort at the notion of going back to mainframes but really, really want to be on top of this new "cloud" thing.
Also, it is not an important distinction for many of the applications for which it's proposed, specifically, things aimed at the end user. Johnny Punchclock and Suzie Timesheet barely understand what a computer is anyway -- do you think they care that their spreadsheet calculations are being performed at another location and then being updated on their screen, versus being performed on the mysterious blinking box on the floor under the desk? Do you think they know or care whether their documents are being saved on "the hard drive", which is another mysterious term to them, or being stored on some distributed, nebulous "cloud"?
They don't care, their managers are clueless, and so much cloud crap is just garbage. "The cloud" differs from the mainframes of yore in only one important aspect that I can determine -- its potential for scalability and near-instant rollout of additional "servers". But very few business or applications need or, indeed, can even take advantage of that.
It's an important distinction for the IT jockeys who will be administrating this stuff, but since when does anyone listen to us when we say "This is a bad idea"?
But what about Descent? It was released in 1995, before Quake, and unless I'm missing something, was fully 3D, including using polygons instead of sprites for enemies and stuff.
People who are opposed to same-sex marriage don't necessarily "hate on gays." They're just... opposed to same-sex marriage.
Other than pure spite, what possible incentive or reasoning would someone have for being opposed to gay marriage?
I've only seen a few arguments and they're all either hateful or just plain goofy.
One is "It doesn't fit with the tradition of marriage!" That goes into the "goofy" category; marriage was originally a way of joining two estates to secure more or better property rights in a family, or for bartering (your son can have my daughter's hand in marriage if you give me three goats and a cow). Children were raised by the mother, the father if he stuck around, and the community at large. We come from tribal hunter-gatherer ancestors, fellas -- they didn't have all this wedding-and-marriage stuff.
Many cultures have accepted, or continue to accept bigamy, arranged marriages, forced marriage ("shotgun wedding" type, or slavery type), and other things that we wouldn't consider "traditional". It is only in our fairly modern, WASPy world that we think "marriage is between one man, one woman, and for love only" -- but there is absolutely nothing "traditional" about that.
The other main argument always revolves around some aspect of "the gay agenda" or, less commonly, "the liberal agenda". Apparently all these gays only want to get married so they can adopt children, turn the children gay (probably using their mystic gay voodoo, passed gayly down from one gay generation to the next), and perpetuate their gayness. Or something. The "gay agenda" or "think of the children" argument is so left-field I can't even really figure out what the hell they're talking about, but it gets brought up every time.
If someone could come up with a rational reason why gays shouldn't get married, and it actually made sense, wasn't some bigoted crap, and wasn't off in the loony bin, then maybe there'd be some merit to saying "I don't hate gays but I oppose gay marriage." I, however, have yet to see a rational argument, so I ask again: Why would anyone be opposed to gays getting married, except for the sick pleasure of denying someone else a right that most others enjoy?
You know, sometimes it's just fun to go somewhere and spend a fool's ransom on things and engage part of culture. The absurdity of it all and insane prices are part of the fun. Loosen up!
1. It's not going to be "the owner" refusing you entry. It's going to be some teenager working there part-time and who is just doing what she was told. If you make a huge enough ruckus she'll go get her manager, who is not likely to be much older, and who, like her underling, gets paid whether you buy a ticket or not. The "owner" is either conveniently never there -- why would he be? -- or isn't an actual person but some nameless corporate entity.
2. The reality of most businesses is that, contrary to what you think, they can easily afford to lose your business. Your twenty dollars might have been nice but there are plenty more people in line behind you willing to take your seat and hit the concession stand.
Though this doesn't apply to most movie-theatre situations, some businesses WANT you to go away. Some customers become more trouble than they're worth, and cost more in wasted time complaining and making demands than they will ever pay, and the only sensible business decision to make is to cut 'em loose.
Now, I'm not defending the theatres or copyright whiners here -- I think it's idiotic to ban someone from brining a laptop into a theatre. I do it all the time because I refuse to leave my laptop in my car. But bitching at the 16 year old at the ticket stand, or his 20 year old manager taking orders from corporate, really isn't going to accomplish anything except making you look like a jerk.
You want results? Write a calm, brief letter -- no more than one page, including appropriate headers and salutations -- explaining what's wrong, why you think it's wrong, and that you will stop doing business with them if they continue. Send it to the actual owner, or the appropriate executive of the company.
That is the proper way to file a complaint, and one that has a shot at getting results -- not causing a scene.
Mexicans and Canadians US citizens are refereed to as "Americans".
Citation needed. Go to Canada and meet people and refer to them as "my new American friends". See how well they react to that.
Try it in Panama, Cuba, Brasil, Chile, Mexico, or Guam.
You clearly do not understand the languages of any other culture.
And two lines later you accuse me of arrogance? Sir, madam, or other, you know nothing of me or of my travels nor of the langauges I speak.
I can Guarantee that if you go to any non American nation they will refer to Mexican, Peruvians or Cubans as Americans as well.
Funny, they don't refer to themselves as American. In English I call a certain country "Germany" but that really has nothing to do with the actual designation of the country, now does it?
I posited a really simple question before: Are you, or are you not, seriously suggesting that there are people in this world who would be confused as to my nationality if I were to point at myself and say "American"?
need air to breathe, food to eat, clothes to wear, and a place to sleep at night.
Yes, that is true, that is all you need to "survive" in the strict hunter-gatherer, caveman sense of the word. To keep your heart beating, those are the only things you really need.
Here are some other things that you do not need in order to continue your metabolic processes, but are nevertheless considered rights in America and many other first-world nations:
The right to speak without fear of government oppressing you for the content of your speech
The right to worship whatever god you choose, however you decide, or not to worship at all
The right to vote
The right to a fair trial if accused of a crime
The right not to be subject to random police searches or interrogations
The right to protest
And many more!
You will "survive" just fine without any of these things. If I take away your right to free speech you will not instantly keel over and die. But I'm unclear on how you decided that the only rights people should have are the things they require in order to keep breathing.
As for the internet, it is becoming increasingly difficult to get along in today's first-world society without access to computers and the internet. Some old codgers get away with it because they're no longer part of the modern workforce, and there a few holdouts who have jobs that require absolutely no interaction with anything more complicated than a calculator, but for the vast, vast majority of citizens in developed nations, computers and net access are necessities to get, and to maintain, a job.
Beyond that, it is arguably very beneficial for society as a whole to have citizens that are connected not only to each other but to others around the world, and who have access to various news and information sites. A lot of the stuff out on the web is pure garbage, it's true, but so is a lot of the stuff you see and hear just outside your front door. I'd rather live in a society where everyone had access to the information the internet can provide, as opposed to the information they think they overheard some guy at the corner market say about something he read in the local paper last Tuesday.
This proves nothing, is a Canada not part of America? What about Mexico, Argentina, Cuba, Brazil, Columbia, Panama are the people of these nation's not Americans?
No, they are not "Americans" in the sense the word is understood across the entire globe. They are "Americans" in the sense that they live on one of the American continents, but do you really think any Canadian, Mexican, or Brasilian, when asked "So, where you from?" will answer "America"? Do any of them identify themselves as "American" at all?
You call it a colloqualism, but it's one that is almost universally understood by every human on the planet regardless of nationality, race, religion, or native language. Even if not strictly accurate by the most pedantic, technical standards, "American" is understood to mean "A citizen of the United States". There is absolutely zero confusion in anyone's mind, whatsoever, what the word "American" means. Across the globe.
Are you seriously suggesting that there are people who are somehow aware of the continents of North and South America, and who just won't understand the phrase "I am American" because they won't be able to pinpoint the speaker's nationality?
I guarantee that I can travel to Greece, France, Germany, China, Thailand, Canada, Scotland, or pretty much any other location you care to mention, point at myself, and say "American," and they'll instantly know from what nation I hail. If, however, I point at myself and say "Yewzian", or however the fuck you think "US-ian" is pronounced, they'll have no idea what the hell I'm talking about, and will likely consider me to be an idiot.
Okay, they'd probably consider me to be an idiot for being American in the first place, but the point stands. Though, that raises another point: Most people who are not from the United States would consider it insulting to be identified as American. Go to Brasil and refer to everyone you meet as "my new American friend", and see how long they stay friends with you.
Ergo, in conclusion, and to summarise: Shut up. Really.
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Right. The thing is, they know that if held to the standards of a real court, they'd never win, because no panel of twelve ordinary yobs is ever going to put the screws to some poor guy whose only crime was being a week late updating his tags or forgetting his wallet at home and thus not having his license on him. And when it comes to things like running red lights or stop signs, same deal -- it comes down to your word over the cop's, and people may tend to side with the civilian.
So, the state figured out that they can call all this stuff an "administrative infraction" or some varient, thus neatly sidestepping all those pesky rules in the Constitution because, well, those only apply to criminal offenses, right?
It's interesting how these non-criminal, administrative infractions can still get you thrown into jail for extended periods of time, cost thousands of dollars in fines and legal fees, and otherwise screw up your life just as bad as if you were being prosecuted for a real criminal act, but the state still sits there insisting it's not a criminal act, merely an administrative problem.
Whatever.
Burma Shave!
If you want to run a distro thats similar to the bells and whistles of OSX or Win7 then youre going to have to use a similar amount of RAM. Youre not getting away with using 1/4 the ram without giving up gnome.
Right now I've got gnome, with compiz, running. I also have Firefox with five tabs, an IM client with several windows, four terminals, Audacious, Evolution, and gedit (with several tabs). In other words, the majority of my day-to-day stuff is running just fine, including the fancy bells and whistles of compiz, which to me are a hell of a lot nicer looking, and way more functional, than anything Win7 has to offer. 'free -m' shows I'm using 960 megs of RAM. This machine has been running for just over five days.
On my Windows 7 machine, I've got Firefox open, with one tab displaying a directory listing (no flash or anything). That's it. Task manager says it's using 894 megs of RAM, AND it has 884 megs paged for god-knows-what reason. This machine is just sitting there doing nothing, and I just restarted it like half an hour ago so it's not some weird memory leak nonsense.
No, Linux may not be magic, but when I see numbers like this, and compare them to what the machines are actually doing, it becomes clear that Linux is much less resource intensive than Windows.
I have an indoor cat. She's been an indoor cat all her life. A few years ago, though, she slipped out the door which my friend had accidently left ajar when he came over. Stuff like that happens all the time. My cat was missing for a month until some construction workers found her in the rafters of a basement two buildings over. If she'd had a GPS I could have found her much more quickly. Also, I consider it very lucky that she had the sense to find shelter and more or less stay put, which is why she was still alive after a month. Many cats would just wander off and get hit by a car, attacked by a dog, or something else, and wouldn't last a month. With a GPS, you could find your missing pet before anything bad happens.
That's not really true. Yeah, a lot of Windows problems come from idiots downloading and running stupid things, but there have been many exploits that don't (merely visiting a website, in some cases) or that are a result of operating under the Windows mindset.
By that, I mean that Windows is constantly, unendingly, eternally in your face with endless alerts and notifications and other idiotic garbage. Everything is always updating and connecting and scanning and detecting and it has to tell you all of this RIGHT NOW. Tons of those alerts don't go away unless you click on them.
The software developers for Windows make it even worse. They load everything into the systray and every program has to have its own little updater and alerter and everything is constantly reminding you about updates and restart this program and new virus definitions and watch out for snakes and blah blah blah.
Working in an environment like this, users are very quickly trained to just click away these messages. Then some dope gets the bright idea to make a popup that looks more or less like all the other inane notifications Windows spews, and surprise, the users click it -- unwittingly downloading and installing some sort of crapware.
You don't see that kind of thing in Linux under any DE or WM I've ever used. Just from that one simple difference, the probability of users mindlessly clicking things to dismiss them is drastically reduced.
Furthermore, in Windows, the expected means of getting new software is to search the web, download something from god-knows-where, and run an executable installer. That's completely normal in Windows, and users are thus trained to think that downloading and running stuff is okay. In Linux, you get some sort of package manager, where the software is vetted and verified, and downloading and running random executables from the web is very unusual. As such, Linux users are far less prone to the kind of crap Windows faces.
I agree but wish to elaborate. Zombies of the 60s, 70s, and 80s film era were very much a mirror of what the average American thought of the Soviet Union -- slow, mindless, and lumbering, but with huge numbers on their side. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, later zombie movies featured much quicker, agile zombies who, while they still frequently attack in large numbers, are just as frequently seen in small groups; perhaps a personification of the guerilla-type enemy America now faces instead of the old monolithic one.
You purchase your girlfriends?
So has Windows, even. Years ago, maybe mid 2004 or 2005ish, I lost my job and couldn't afford my internet connection. The neighbors had wireless but the signal was too weak to use in any part of my place except this one particular corner of the kitchen. I had an old 233mhz laptop running Windows 2000, so I placed it on the kitchen counter, plugged a wireless card into it, enabled ICS, and ran a cable from its ethernet jack to *my* wireless router. Then all my computers could get online.
Not the most elegant (or legal) of solutions, but it worked for two months until I got my act together.
Most of the security problems I've seen actually exploited are not a problem with asterisk as such, or even border control, but of retarded admins. For example, many IP phones expect to connect to a fileserver of some sort and download some xml files containing their SIP information. Admins will routinely just create an ftp account somewhere, using the default login and password of the phones, and dump the files there. They'll frequently allow that ftp user to have shell access too, or forget to disable directory listing on the ftp directory, or do anything else that resembles common sense and security.
It would be trivial to portscan far and wide, find some asterisk boxes, and exploit these terribly common mistakes made by clueless admins. I have demonstrated to clients how I was able to log into their server armed only with the knowledge of what the default ftp username and password is, then download all their users' config files containing all the information I'd need to fraudulently use their phone lines. Sometimes it takes a dramatic demonstration like that to make people wake up.
I'm tired of the "US is large" and "population density" arguments. Fine, I get it, the US has a huge amount of space and getting cellphone or broadband access out to Nowheresville, Wyoming is hard. But that doesn't explain why service, pricing, and general offerings are still so terrible in major American cities.
Saying "they have to deal with interference" is nonsense -- Japan and Europe manage fine, with, as everyone keeps pointing out, a higher population density. So, why can't we, in Atlanta, New York, San Francisco, Seattle, Chicago, or any other highly-populated city, get insanely fast and cheap internet access and cell networks that can handle anything we can throw at them?
To clarify, I am not suggesting that children, or mentally retarded people, etc, are not human. I am pointing out that there is a somewhat clear line that can be drawn in fetal development -- the neurons linking. Before that occurs, the necessary physical architecture of the human brain simply does not exist.
Obviously I am not saying that once that happens, the brain is suddenly filled with knowledge and experience and wisdom. But the physical foundation, and the capacity to learn those things later, is there.
"It's alive" is obviously a silly argument as we kill many things without calling it murder, and "it has a nervous system / heartbeat / lungs" is no better, for the same reason. "Souls" canot be proven and there are many philosophers and theologians who have argued that animals do have souls of a sort anyway, so that argument carries no weight.
But our brains are uniquely human, and we know enough about fetal development to be able to say "It has occured" or "It has not yet occured." I think that arguing about whether it's "murder" before it has anything like a functional human brain is rather silly.
Since you think abortion is murder because the fetus has a nervous system, you must consider killing anything else with a nervous system -- including worms and insects -- to be morally equivalent to the killing of a human. Is that a stance you're willing to take, or would you like to adjust your criteria?
Maybe you should find a more compelling reason to call something "murder".
A "nervous system" is utterly irrelevent -- we kill millions of living things with nervous systems daily, and whatever else that may be, we do not consider it to be murder. The hamburger you had for lunch came from an animal that had a nervous system, and one quite a bit more advanced than any week-old fetus anyway.
Nervous systems, heartbeats, lungs -- these things do not make one human. There is one, and only one thing that humans have that no other animal has. How can you consider a fetus to be fully human when it lacks the one basic characteristic of humanity?
Sometimes I'm pretty sure people like this are just grasping for rationalisation of their buyer's remorse. They paid 300 dollars for their godawful, bug-ridden, virus-prone, piece of trash Windows OS, but they can't admit to themselves that they made a poor purchasing decision. They then construct elaborate, if inane, theories and explanations about how the only things worth anything must have a pricetag, and there's no way that dirty liberal down the street has something better that he got for free.
Apple is a company that spends their time addressing these issues and making things easier for the user,
Apple is a company that spends time making things easier for one particular type of user. If you don't think the way Apple proclaims you should, their stuff is far from easy.
I don't want my music centrally organised by an application. I want my song files in a directory of my choosing, which can be read by any application I see fit. If I want to move those files around, that's my problem. If I want to make copies of them into other directories for various experiments, playlist uploads, or whatever else, that's my perogative, and I want to do it through the OS's file manager. I don't want some application stealing file associations, or insisting that it use its own particular garbage (Quicktime) for playing audio.
Even something as allegedly simple as iTunes took me forever to figure out the first time I used it. But then, after finally figuring it out and shelling out a dollar for a song, instead of a useful song I could burn to CD, I got some m4a crap that wouldn't play in any of my media players, wouldn't be read by my car stereo, and all I could do was transcode it with Audacity. Then I had to uninstall iTunes, uninstall the party favors it left behind, and fix all my file associations.
I was done with iTunes on that day. Apple may be "easier to use" for a certain type of person, but certainly not for me, and they delivered a terrible, unusable product. iTunes will never see my business again.
I fully grant that this was about three or four years ago and things may have changed, but they had their chance to make their first impression, and blew it. I have no delusions that Apple is hurting because I refuse to do business with them, but to act like they are some pinnacle of interface guidelines is simply ridiculous.
PS. If Apple products, including OSX, iPods, and iPhones, are so bloody easy to use, why are my family members calling me all the time to help them fix this or figure out that?
Honestly, it's rigodamndiculous how difficult it is to find, download, and install software on Linux. At least compared to the Windows/Mac platform.
I agree. For those who don't know the difference between the two platforms, I'll explain the process for each.
For Ubuntu, and pretty much any other apt-based system:
1. Click "System", "Administration", "Synaptic Package Manager".
2. Type a few keywords related to what you want. For example, "dvd player" or "spreadsheet".
3. Pick one from the selections that come up, and put a checkbox next to it.
4. Click "Install". Wait for twenty seconds.
5. New program is in easy-to-find, neatly categorised Applications menu. You're done!
This is insanely complicated. There's no way any normal, non-nerd human could do this. And the selection of over twenty-eight thousand packages, free for the taking, is completely insufficient for today's modern world.
For compaision, here is how to do it the easy way with Microsoft Windows:
1. Search Google for likely keywords.
2. Check the first two pages of results for things that might have what you want.
3. Spend some time going through the most likely results to find one that you don't have to pay for, isn't a crippled trial version, and doesn't seem to contain adware, spyware, or other bullshit. You can't really always tell, so you'll just have to guess sometimes.
4. Download the installer and run it. NOTE: Windows may warn you that installing this could set fire to a box of puppies. Ignore it.
5. Click "Yes" and "I agree" to various questions and EULAs you aren't reading.
6. Answer questions about where to install files you've never heard of. Sometimes the defaults will be okay, and other times it will want to install stuff in really wacky places.
7. Ignore lecture about how you need to close all other programs. The installer finishes.
8. Ignore lecture about how you need to reboot. NOTE: You may not get a choice.
9. Delete systray icons, desktop shortcuts, quicklaunch icons, startup items, additional prorgams it installed alongside, and other party favors.
10. Your new program is now somewhere in your three-column-wide start menu. It might be under the program's name, or the manufacturer's name, or perhaps under the umbrella corporation's name, or it might just be its own entry floating down at the bottom or top of the menu. There's no way to know and you'll just have to kind of remember where it is, or become obsessive about categorising this stuff by hand.
11. Pray it didn't come with any viruses or trojans. You're done!
Yes, indeed, this is a much better system. Easier, saner, and less prone to error. Everyone should use it!
Finally,
30 minutes on Google to figure out it is a problem with the libxml2 linking. Another hour to fix the damn thing. That's not going to pass the Granny Test.
Yeah! And Granny is really good at dealing with missing DLLs, corrupt registry entries, files that mysteriously become locked or read-only, and handling conflicts between programs trying to steal file associations. Granny never has problems with Windows. I never hear from Granny asking me to fix her computer.
For one thing, it's annoying because it's almost exactly the same as the mainframe-terminal model, which has been around for decades. Calling it a "cloud" in an effort to make it sound modern and sexy is just marketing drivel and makes it sound like it's something new and fresh, leading to really idiotic decisions from management who would snort at the notion of going back to mainframes but really, really want to be on top of this new "cloud" thing.
Also, it is not an important distinction for many of the applications for which it's proposed, specifically, things aimed at the end user. Johnny Punchclock and Suzie Timesheet barely understand what a computer is anyway -- do you think they care that their spreadsheet calculations are being performed at another location and then being updated on their screen, versus being performed on the mysterious blinking box on the floor under the desk? Do you think they know or care whether their documents are being saved on "the hard drive", which is another mysterious term to them, or being stored on some distributed, nebulous "cloud"?
They don't care, their managers are clueless, and so much cloud crap is just garbage. "The cloud" differs from the mainframes of yore in only one important aspect that I can determine -- its potential for scalability and near-instant rollout of additional "servers". But very few business or applications need or, indeed, can even take advantage of that.
It's an important distinction for the IT jockeys who will be administrating this stuff, but since when does anyone listen to us when we say "This is a bad idea"?
But what about Descent? It was released in 1995, before Quake, and unless I'm missing something, was fully 3D, including using polygons instead of sprites for enemies and stuff.
People who are opposed to same-sex marriage don't necessarily "hate on gays." They're just... opposed to same-sex marriage.
Other than pure spite, what possible incentive or reasoning would someone have for being opposed to gay marriage?
I've only seen a few arguments and they're all either hateful or just plain goofy.
One is "It doesn't fit with the tradition of marriage!" That goes into the "goofy" category; marriage was originally a way of joining two estates to secure more or better property rights in a family, or for bartering (your son can have my daughter's hand in marriage if you give me three goats and a cow). Children were raised by the mother, the father if he stuck around, and the community at large. We come from tribal hunter-gatherer ancestors, fellas -- they didn't have all this wedding-and-marriage stuff.
Many cultures have accepted, or continue to accept bigamy, arranged marriages, forced marriage ("shotgun wedding" type, or slavery type), and other things that we wouldn't consider "traditional". It is only in our fairly modern, WASPy world that we think "marriage is between one man, one woman, and for love only" -- but there is absolutely nothing "traditional" about that.
The other main argument always revolves around some aspect of "the gay agenda" or, less commonly, "the liberal agenda". Apparently all these gays only want to get married so they can adopt children, turn the children gay (probably using their mystic gay voodoo, passed gayly down from one gay generation to the next), and perpetuate their gayness. Or something. The "gay agenda" or "think of the children" argument is so left-field I can't even really figure out what the hell they're talking about, but it gets brought up every time.
If someone could come up with a rational reason why gays shouldn't get married, and it actually made sense, wasn't some bigoted crap, and wasn't off in the loony bin, then maybe there'd be some merit to saying "I don't hate gays but I oppose gay marriage." I, however, have yet to see a rational argument, so I ask again: Why would anyone be opposed to gays getting married, except for the sick pleasure of denying someone else a right that most others enjoy?
He also had a comma splice for those who missed it.
You know, sometimes it's just fun to go somewhere and spend a fool's ransom on things and engage part of culture. The absurdity of it all and insane prices are part of the fun. Loosen up!
Except for a few things.
1. It's not going to be "the owner" refusing you entry. It's going to be some teenager working there part-time and who is just doing what she was told. If you make a huge enough ruckus she'll go get her manager, who is not likely to be much older, and who, like her underling, gets paid whether you buy a ticket or not. The "owner" is either conveniently never there -- why would he be? -- or isn't an actual person but some nameless corporate entity.
2. The reality of most businesses is that, contrary to what you think, they can easily afford to lose your business. Your twenty dollars might have been nice but there are plenty more people in line behind you willing to take your seat and hit the concession stand.
Though this doesn't apply to most movie-theatre situations, some businesses WANT you to go away. Some customers become more trouble than they're worth, and cost more in wasted time complaining and making demands than they will ever pay, and the only sensible business decision to make is to cut 'em loose.
Now, I'm not defending the theatres or copyright whiners here -- I think it's idiotic to ban someone from brining a laptop into a theatre. I do it all the time because I refuse to leave my laptop in my car. But bitching at the 16 year old at the ticket stand, or his 20 year old manager taking orders from corporate, really isn't going to accomplish anything except making you look like a jerk.
You want results? Write a calm, brief letter -- no more than one page, including appropriate headers and salutations -- explaining what's wrong, why you think it's wrong, and that you will stop doing business with them if they continue. Send it to the actual owner, or the appropriate executive of the company.
That is the proper way to file a complaint, and one that has a shot at getting results -- not causing a scene.
Well, you specifically asked them to get out the pitchforks, didn't you?
Mexicans and Canadians US citizens are refereed to as "Americans".
Citation needed. Go to Canada and meet people and refer to them as "my new American friends". See how well they react to that.
Try it in Panama, Cuba, Brasil, Chile, Mexico, or Guam.
You clearly do not understand the languages of any other culture.
And two lines later you accuse me of arrogance? Sir, madam, or other, you know nothing of me or of my travels nor of the langauges I speak.
I can Guarantee that if you go to any non American nation they will refer to Mexican, Peruvians or Cubans as Americans as well.
Funny, they don't refer to themselves as American. In English I call a certain country "Germany" but that really has nothing to do with the actual designation of the country, now does it?
I posited a really simple question before: Are you, or are you not, seriously suggesting that there are people in this world who would be confused as to my nationality if I were to point at myself and say "American"?
Yes, that is true, that is all you need to "survive" in the strict hunter-gatherer, caveman sense of the word. To keep your heart beating, those are the only things you really need.
Here are some other things that you do not need in order to continue your metabolic processes, but are nevertheless considered rights in America and many other first-world nations:
You will "survive" just fine without any of these things. If I take away your right to free speech you will not instantly keel over and die. But I'm unclear on how you decided that the only rights people should have are the things they require in order to keep breathing.
As for the internet, it is becoming increasingly difficult to get along in today's first-world society without access to computers and the internet. Some old codgers get away with it because they're no longer part of the modern workforce, and there a few holdouts who have jobs that require absolutely no interaction with anything more complicated than a calculator, but for the vast, vast majority of citizens in developed nations, computers and net access are necessities to get, and to maintain, a job.
Beyond that, it is arguably very beneficial for society as a whole to have citizens that are connected not only to each other but to others around the world, and who have access to various news and information sites. A lot of the stuff out on the web is pure garbage, it's true, but so is a lot of the stuff you see and hear just outside your front door. I'd rather live in a society where everyone had access to the information the internet can provide, as opposed to the information they think they overheard some guy at the corner market say about something he read in the local paper last Tuesday.
This proves nothing, is a Canada not part of America? What about Mexico, Argentina, Cuba, Brazil, Columbia, Panama are the people of these nation's not Americans?
No, they are not "Americans" in the sense the word is understood across the entire globe. They are "Americans" in the sense that they live on one of the American continents, but do you really think any Canadian, Mexican, or Brasilian, when asked "So, where you from?" will answer "America"? Do any of them identify themselves as "American" at all?
You call it a colloqualism, but it's one that is almost universally understood by every human on the planet regardless of nationality, race, religion, or native language. Even if not strictly accurate by the most pedantic, technical standards, "American" is understood to mean "A citizen of the United States". There is absolutely zero confusion in anyone's mind, whatsoever, what the word "American" means. Across the globe.
Are you seriously suggesting that there are people who are somehow aware of the continents of North and South America, and who just won't understand the phrase "I am American" because they won't be able to pinpoint the speaker's nationality?
I guarantee that I can travel to Greece, France, Germany, China, Thailand, Canada, Scotland, or pretty much any other location you care to mention, point at myself, and say "American," and they'll instantly know from what nation I hail. If, however, I point at myself and say "Yewzian", or however the fuck you think "US-ian" is pronounced, they'll have no idea what the hell I'm talking about, and will likely consider me to be an idiot.
Okay, they'd probably consider me to be an idiot for being American in the first place, but the point stands. Though, that raises another point: Most people who are not from the United States would consider it insulting to be identified as American. Go to Brasil and refer to everyone you meet as "my new American friend", and see how long they stay friends with you.
Ergo, in conclusion, and to summarise: Shut up. Really.