Funny thing... maybe we should outlaw caching. The way I see it, GeoCaching is an excellent training tool for terrorist cells and a far better recruitment technique than any I have seen to date.
1. Jump on www.geocaching.com and look for cachers with a high find rate.
2. recruit them into a subversive terrorist cell.
3. Terrorize society.
Cachers must routinely find hides that are in the open of public view without being noticed.
Yup, they're evil.
DISCLAIMER: I am a cacher as well, so please don't flame me for my statement unless you want me to point and laugh at you.
Too bad I can't seem to find a link to it from the site.
This, of course being the early stages, is like when Dell started offering Ubuntu on a few of their computers. One had to find the link WAAAYYY down on the left side that said something or other about open-source and buy that way... God forbid you mention in the hardware setup (when you're buying) that you have an OS option other than Windows.
Of course, Dell is still doing this today even though they have sold a decent number of Ubuntu computers.
Point to be made here: The only people who are going to end up buying this online are people who know what they're looking for specifically and the only people that are going to buy this in the store will be the same - plus a few who make a mistake.
Unlimited was intended for while the space between the keyboard and chair was occupied. I must have missed that part in my TOS agreement with RoadRunner. There are statements stating that I should not run any servers, should not attempt to bring down the network, SPAM, etc but nothing about 24/7 use of bandwidth promised to me.
A valiantly attempted argument, though.
orz
"Connecting a fire pump and using the fountain for flood irrigation because the water is "Free and Unlimited" is not OK regardless of the free and unlimited claim. Home unlimited accounts were never sold for 24X7 saturated connections."
I always find it amusing that people say things like this. My subscription (given, I'm on RoadRunner not ComCast) is for an unlimited 5Mb connection. If I was sold an unlimited 5Mb connection, why am I not allowed to use it? Your rationale is that if I went to McDonald's and was sold a double cheeseburger, I shouldn't be allowed to eat the whole thing.
ISP's have oversold their abilities and they are feeling the pinch. Instead of doing the right thing and putting more of their hard swindled money into their infrastructure, they go about their day whining about subscribers that are actually using what they pay for.
Try this: track your connection speeds for a month or two. Tell your ISP that you will pay them a percentage of your bill as compared to the percent of bandwidth you were able to reach. Wouldn't it be nice if we could be like the ISP's? They promise "up to" xMb connection. Have you ever tried to pay "up to" $x and keep your service? I've tried... it does't work.
In light of the advantages of Linux and FOSS in the area of science and mathematics, I want to convert from a Windows system to a dual-boot one with Linux.
Welcome to the world of Linux.
All of the methods for testing your system with Linux have their merits, and their drawbacks. Make sure that you consider each of them, and possibly try each of them in turn.
VMWare: While this is RAM intensive and will give you a good feel of the system itself, this method is, by no means, a good way of checking to see if your existing hardware will work with the particular distro that you've chosen. VMWare uses it's own magical way of connecting the guest OS to your hardware. In other words, you are not testing your wireless, sound, or anything else. The guest is connected via software to the host, which we assume works already. Snapshotting is available so if you hose your system you can just turn back the clock without needing to reinstall.
LiveCD: This will test out all of your hardware, though this is quite possibly the most RAM-intensive of the bunch. Everything is run from RAM with the CD being accessed only for new information. There really isn't, to my knowledge, a physical swap being used. Everything runs much slower than if it was installed and all of your work is lost once the machine is rebooted. That said, there are ways of making a persistent LiveCD by either using HDD space, a rewritable CD, or a USB drive. I've personally never gotten it to work, but have heard from people that it does work nicely.
Dual booting: With this you have full access to all of your hardware. The only real drawback comes with partitioning an existing system. (1) Make sure to fully defragment your Windows drive prior to partitioning or you risk losing all of your data. (2) Make sure if you are doing two new installs (Windows and Linux) that you install Windows first since it prefers to be the only OS on your system. (3) Separate HDD's are the way to go with this method.
Separate HDD's: This one is my personal favorite. I only use my laptop if I am dual-booting so I have two separate drives that I can swap out; one with Windows and one with Linux. The only drawback to this is being unable to share info between the two. For desktops, the method is similar in that you can have two separate HDD's installed for the different OS's. As mentioned previously, be sure to install Windows first or you will be unable to boot into Linux.
All of the different distributions mentioned, and the million others that haven't, all have their uses. I would suggest that you look at the community involvement (forums, tech support, etc) that comes with each one before commiting. My distro of choice is Ubuntu 6.10 with Gnome as the Windows Manager. It works perfectly with my old Micron GX2 (1GHz, 512MB RAM, 16MB ATI Radeon) and much faster than Windows 2K that came on it originally.
On to the meat of things. The Battle of Guadalcanal lasted approximately six months and had 6,509 Alllied deaths and probably an order of magnitude over that for wounded in action (WIA). The Battle of Tarawa lasted a mere four days and had 1,001 killed and 2,296 WIA for the U.S. alone. Finally, The Battle of Iwo Jima , which lasted from 19 February until 26 March (about 5 weeks) saw 7,000 dead and 26,000 WIA for the Americans. These three battles lasting a total of about seven months brought the Allied toll up to about 14,000 KIA and well over 29,000 WIA. SEVEN MONTHS!
Overall World War II saw 17 million military and 33 million civilian dead for the Allied powers. On the other side (the Axis) there were a mere 12 million dead.
I do agree with your heartfelt question of how many must die, though I do not agree with your end-state. Firstly, the human race can not look evil in the face and run. We must, as a race, face down those that would harm others needlessly, take away freedoms from entire populations, and subject others to wanton cruelty. We must be willing to pay whatever price is asked to ensure that all people are treated equally.
Secondly, to reach this end of equality, we must ensure that those who are not willing to pay the price are kept from positions of mamagement. If one is not willing to sacrifice themselves for the betterment of society as a whole, then they should be relegated to the lower spectrum of society (similar to Starship Troopers). We do not need a populace that does nothing but hold their hand out and ask for more. We need a populace that is willing to work for and defend their freedoms.
Some other interesting factoids for the masses: Bosnia and Herzegovina had between 100,000 and 110,000 military and civilians killed in ethnic cleansing and war, The Iran-Iraq War had over 875,000 military and civilians killed in their "war", and we're not even going to start discussing the deaths in various South American and African conflicts.
Seriously? How many soldiers do you have to lose before you declare a defeat?
Back to your original question: personally, I will never declare defeat. As long as someone is being oppressed, as long as there is evil in this world, I will not give up. I pray that our leaders feel the same way. As a United States Marine, I am willing and able to go forth into battle to defend those who can not or will not defend themselves. Hopefully more people feel the same way.
Hmmm, Korea was a stalemate, Vietnam was a fiasco due to the media messing with the morale of the American People, and I see Iraq going the same way as Vietnam.
- rape issues going on around a military base in Japan
And what about the city you live in? Are there incidents of rape or does everyone get along marvelously? There are people in every society, the US Military included, that will try to gain power over others in an amoral fashion.
any country, or citizen thereof likes being occupied by a foreign power pretending to be a friend?
Occupied? Pretending to be a friend? I would appreciate a little background on your training/education/experience that gives you the knowledge that any of these inflammatory statements are accurate.
From my experience having spent a year in Iraq, nine months in FYR Bosnia, and countless other deployments, we are not an occupational force nor are there any falsehoods of friendship being made by the troops in-country. I can not say that the same is true of the politicos as I do not have that experience, but the troops, in general, are there to help, not subjugate, the masses.
Look at Iraq what the "well equipped" US is up against. They can't stick their head out of the window without getting shot at. Good result for spending billions!
This is more of a change of tactics. The US Military hasn't been trained in defense from guerrila tactics in years. All that needs to be done is for us to return to our roots and become guerrilas ourselves. Anyone remember how this nation was able to defeat the British in the War for Independence?
Any polititian starting a war or increasing the military budget instead of reducing it should get fired on the spot because it shows stupidity and failure to get along with other countries population's representatives.
I agree - to a point. Politicians that start conflicts should be required to serve in said conflict either until its end or their attrition. However, the reduction of a military budget would be foolhearty in this day and age. Call me paranoid or call me overly cautious, but there are too many fronts on which we, as a nation, can be attacked. A continual reduction of the military budget would be similar to me taking the locks off all your doors, opening all your windowshades, and putting a sign out front advertising all your worldly possessions. It would be an invitation to those who despise our way of life to come and take it from us.
Just to clarify, I do not feel that we should be the world's police. We should, however, not bury our collective heads in the sand and ignore the mass injustices that take place in today's society. Should we focus more on the needs at home? Yes. Should we care about the world as a whole? Yes, but after we've taken care of ourselves.
She will be able to telecommute to work, she will be able to surf the internet, get email, do her taxes, edit he pictures from her camera and do it quickly, reliably, and with no hassle at all.
From my (limited) experience with Linux, this can all be done rather easily with a standard load (with the exception of taxes). No muss, no fuss, no "hassle".
My problem with Windows, in general, is the requirement to load each driver individually, reboot after each driver load (for my laptop), load service packs and updates, reboot after each service pack or update, etc. My latest distro (Ubuntu) worked 100% out of the box. I had to reboot one time after a kernel upgrade. Of course this is all for the non-preinstalled operating systems so it may not matter to the masses. It is, though, important to people who find themselves using an unsupported OS.
With a little caution towards security on the users part there is nothing it cant do for the average computer user.
I agree 100%. The weak link in any OS is the user and it will be this way regardless of which piece of software you use.
This is right up there with something like this (bear with me): your house gets robbed. You know exactly who did it, go to their house, break in, and retieve your stuff. Now, if the cops were to find out that you broke into someone's house and took only the stuff that was originally stolen from you, do you think that they'd pat you on the back and say "good job"? Hell no, you'd be going to jail as well as the dink that stole your trash. For anyone out there that is running an illegal MS OS and gets shut down, you are the original thief and MS is the thief that's trying to thief back his stuff. You broke the law, they broke the law, it's that simple. MS is not law enforcement. If they want to do something like this legally, then I say good deal. Go get a court order that makes them a law enforcement agency or get an agency to assist in bringing these horrible, horrible people to justice. Does MS have the right to be pissed off about their "property" being "stolen"? Yes, in my opinion. Do they have the right to come into my home and enforce the law? Nope.
On an aside, I just completed the migration of my most of my 4 computer household to Linux. My wife is still holding out with an old copy (legal) of Win2K. This is good timing for the rumor. It reminds me of yet another reason why I am getting away from MS.
Your real identity or someone who used your computer while they were over your house, or someone that borrowed your laptop?
This brings about the real question for those of us that are "computer gigalos": how do we go about registering each and every computer that we may use throughout the day/week/whatever? Being in the military and traveling often, I use a good number of different computers. Would it not be better to !GASP! use something akin to the CAC (Combined Access Card) that we in the services are being issued? Almost all in the service have CACs. We carry our CACs with us everywhere we go. We are able to use our CACs many times a day, but I digress. The main purpose of a CAC is to be able to (1) carry around your ID/military/medical/personal information with you and (2) be able to log on to computers or access secure areas by using ID as well as a password (two of the three requirements for any security).
It's not quite like getting the chip implanted in your skin, though some may see it that way, and it's a heck of a lot more forward-thinking than to expect everyone to use just one or two computers to do all of their work on the 'net.
Slashdot Mirror
Funny thing... maybe we should outlaw caching. The way I see it, GeoCaching is an excellent training tool for terrorist cells and a far better recruitment technique than any I have seen to date. 1. Jump on www.geocaching.com and look for cachers with a high find rate. 2. recruit them into a subversive terrorist cell. 3. Terrorize society. Cachers must routinely find hides that are in the open of public view without being noticed. Yup, they're evil. DISCLAIMER: I am a cacher as well, so please don't flame me for my statement unless you want me to point and laugh at you.
This, of course being the early stages, is like when Dell started offering Ubuntu on a few of their computers. One had to find the link WAAAYYY down on the left side that said something or other about open-source and buy that way... God forbid you mention in the hardware setup (when you're buying) that you have an OS option other than Windows.
Of course, Dell is still doing this today even though they have sold a decent number of Ubuntu computers.
Point to be made here: The only people who are going to end up buying this online are people who know what they're looking for specifically and the only people that are going to buy this in the store will be the same - plus a few who make a mistake.
That's my opinion and I'm sticking to it.
I always find it amusing that people say things like this. My subscription (given, I'm on RoadRunner not ComCast) is for an unlimited 5Mb connection. If I was sold an unlimited 5Mb connection, why am I not allowed to use it? Your rationale is that if I went to McDonald's and was sold a double cheeseburger, I shouldn't be allowed to eat the whole thing.
ISP's have oversold their abilities and they are feeling the pinch. Instead of doing the right thing and putting more of their hard swindled money into their infrastructure, they go about their day whining about subscribers that are actually using what they pay for.
Try this: track your connection speeds for a month or two. Tell your ISP that you will pay them a percentage of your bill as compared to the percent of bandwidth you were able to reach. Wouldn't it be nice if we could be like the ISP's? They promise "up to" xMb connection. Have you ever tried to pay "up to" $x and keep your service? I've tried... it does't work.
orz
Welcome to the world of Linux.
All of the methods for testing your system with Linux have their merits, and their drawbacks. Make sure that you consider each of them, and possibly try each of them in turn.
VMWare: While this is RAM intensive and will give you a good feel of the system itself, this method is, by no means, a good way of checking to see if your existing hardware will work with the particular distro that you've chosen. VMWare uses it's own magical way of connecting the guest OS to your hardware. In other words, you are not testing your wireless, sound, or anything else. The guest is connected via software to the host, which we assume works already. Snapshotting is available so if you hose your system you can just turn back the clock without needing to reinstall.
LiveCD: This will test out all of your hardware, though this is quite possibly the most RAM-intensive of the bunch. Everything is run from RAM with the CD being accessed only for new information. There really isn't, to my knowledge, a physical swap being used. Everything runs much slower than if it was installed and all of your work is lost once the machine is rebooted. That said, there are ways of making a persistent LiveCD by either using HDD space, a rewritable CD, or a USB drive. I've personally never gotten it to work, but have heard from people that it does work nicely.
Dual booting: With this you have full access to all of your hardware. The only real drawback comes with partitioning an existing system. (1) Make sure to fully defragment your Windows drive prior to partitioning or you risk losing all of your data. (2) Make sure if you are doing two new installs (Windows and Linux) that you install Windows first since it prefers to be the only OS on your system. (3) Separate HDD's are the way to go with this method.
Separate HDD's: This one is my personal favorite. I only use my laptop if I am dual-booting so I have two separate drives that I can swap out; one with Windows and one with Linux. The only drawback to this is being unable to share info between the two. For desktops, the method is similar in that you can have two separate HDD's installed for the different OS's. As mentioned previously, be sure to install Windows first or you will be unable to boot into Linux.
All of the different distributions mentioned, and the million others that haven't, all have their uses. I would suggest that you look at the community involvement (forums, tech support, etc) that comes with each one before commiting. My distro of choice is Ubuntu 6.10 with Gnome as the Windows Manager. It works perfectly with my old Micron GX2 (1GHz, 512MB RAM, 16MB ATI Radeon) and much faster than Windows 2K that came on it originally.
Let's start out simply and semi-realistically. What If Today's Media Had Covered WWII and What If Today's MSM Had Covered WWII say it rather well, I think. Given, these are not nationally syndicated nor official news reports, but it's an interesting opinion spin.
On to the meat of things. The Battle of Guadalcanal lasted approximately six months and had 6,509 Alllied deaths and probably an order of magnitude over that for wounded in action (WIA). The Battle of Tarawa lasted a mere four days and had 1,001 killed and 2,296 WIA for the U.S. alone. Finally, The Battle of Iwo Jima , which lasted from 19 February until 26 March (about 5 weeks) saw 7,000 dead and 26,000 WIA for the Americans. These three battles lasting a total of about seven months brought the Allied toll up to about 14,000 KIA and well over 29,000 WIA. SEVEN MONTHS!
Overall World War II saw 17 million military and 33 million civilian dead for the Allied powers. On the other side (the Axis) there were a mere 12 million dead.
I do agree with your heartfelt question of how many must die, though I do not agree with your end-state. Firstly, the human race can not look evil in the face and run. We must, as a race, face down those that would harm others needlessly, take away freedoms from entire populations, and subject others to wanton cruelty. We must be willing to pay whatever price is asked to ensure that all people are treated equally.
Secondly, to reach this end of equality, we must ensure that those who are not willing to pay the price are kept from positions of mamagement. If one is not willing to sacrifice themselves for the betterment of society as a whole, then they should be relegated to the lower spectrum of society (similar to Starship Troopers). We do not need a populace that does nothing but hold their hand out and ask for more. We need a populace that is willing to work for and defend their freedoms.
Some other interesting factoids for the masses: Bosnia and Herzegovina had between 100,000 and 110,000 military and civilians killed in ethnic cleansing and war, The Iran-Iraq War had over 875,000 military and civilians killed in their "war", and we're not even going to start discussing the deaths in various South American and African conflicts.
Back to your original question: personally, I will never declare defeat. As long as someone is being oppressed, as long as there is evil in this world, I will not give up. I pray that our leaders feel the same way. As a United States Marine, I am willing and able to go forth into battle to defend those who can not or will not defend themselves. Hopefully more people feel the same way.
Hmmm, Korea was a stalemate, Vietnam was a fiasco due to the media messing with the morale of the American People, and I see Iraq going the same way as Vietnam.
And what about the city you live in? Are there incidents of rape or does everyone get along marvelously? There are people in every society, the US Military included, that will try to gain power over others in an amoral fashion.
Occupied? Pretending to be a friend? I would appreciate a little background on your training/education/experience that gives you the knowledge that any of these inflammatory statements are accurate.
From my experience having spent a year in Iraq, nine months in FYR Bosnia, and countless other deployments, we are not an occupational force nor are there any falsehoods of friendship being made by the troops in-country. I can not say that the same is true of the politicos as I do not have that experience, but the troops, in general, are there to help, not subjugate, the masses.
This is more of a change of tactics. The US Military hasn't been trained in defense from guerrila tactics in years. All that needs to be done is for us to return to our roots and become guerrilas ourselves. Anyone remember how this nation was able to defeat the British in the War for Independence?
I agree - to a point. Politicians that start conflicts should be required to serve in said conflict either until its end or their attrition. However, the reduction of a military budget would be foolhearty in this day and age. Call me paranoid or call me overly cautious, but there are too many fronts on which we, as a nation, can be attacked. A continual reduction of the military budget would be similar to me taking the locks off all your doors, opening all your windowshades, and putting a sign out front advertising all your worldly possessions. It would be an invitation to those who despise our way of life to come and take it from us.
Just to clarify, I do not feel that we should be the world's police. We should, however, not bury our collective heads in the sand and ignore the mass injustices that take place in today's society. Should we focus more on the needs at home? Yes. Should we care about the world as a whole? Yes, but after we've taken care of ourselves.
I just ordered my mom a dell system with a monitor for $500. It comes with windows
It is a given that when a computer comes from the manufacturer that it will be set up to work with the included hardware. There are even some start-up companies that offer Linux boxes preconfigured http://www.sub500.com/mainpage.htm, http://www.system76.com/, and http://www.linux.org/vendor/system/index.html to name a couple.
She will be able to telecommute to work, she will be able to surf the internet, get email, do her taxes, edit he pictures from her camera and do it quickly, reliably, and with no hassle at all.
From my (limited) experience with Linux, this can all be done rather easily with a standard load (with the exception of taxes). No muss, no fuss, no "hassle".
My problem with Windows, in general, is the requirement to load each driver individually, reboot after each driver load (for my laptop), load service packs and updates, reboot after each service pack or update, etc. My latest distro (Ubuntu) worked 100% out of the box. I had to reboot one time after a kernel upgrade. Of course this is all for the non-preinstalled operating systems so it may not matter to the masses. It is, though, important to people who find themselves using an unsupported OS.
With a little caution towards security on the users part there is nothing it cant do for the average computer user.
I agree 100%. The weak link in any OS is the user and it will be this way regardless of which piece of software you use.
BS meter being pegged is an understatement.
This is right up there with something like this (bear with me): your house gets robbed. You know exactly who did it, go to their house, break in, and retieve your stuff. Now, if the cops were to find out that you broke into someone's house and took only the stuff that was originally stolen from you, do you think that they'd pat you on the back and say "good job"? Hell no, you'd be going to jail as well as the dink that stole your trash.
For anyone out there that is running an illegal MS OS and gets shut down, you are the original thief and MS is the thief that's trying to thief back his stuff. You broke the law, they broke the law, it's that simple. MS is not law enforcement. If they want to do something like this legally, then I say good deal. Go get a court order that makes them a law enforcement agency or get an agency to assist in bringing these horrible, horrible people to justice.
Does MS have the right to be pissed off about their "property" being "stolen"? Yes, in my opinion. Do they have the right to come into my home and enforce the law? Nope.
On an aside, I just completed the migration of my most of my 4 computer household to Linux. My wife is still holding out with an old copy (legal) of Win2K. This is good timing for the rumor. It reminds me of yet another reason why I am getting away from MS.
Your real identity or someone who used your computer while they were over your house, or someone that borrowed your laptop?
This brings about the real question for those of us that are "computer gigalos": how do we go about registering each and every computer that we may use throughout the day/week/whatever? Being in the military and traveling often, I use a good number of different computers. Would it not be better to !GASP! use something akin to the CAC (Combined Access Card) that we in the services are being issued? Almost all in the service have CACs. We carry our CACs with us everywhere we go. We are able to use our CACs many times a day, but I digress. The main purpose of a CAC is to be able to (1) carry around your ID/military/medical/personal information with you and (2) be able to log on to computers or access secure areas by using ID as well as a password (two of the three requirements for any security).
It's not quite like getting the chip implanted in your skin, though some may see it that way, and it's a heck of a lot more forward-thinking than to expect everyone to use just one or two computers to do all of their work on the 'net.