But for day to day things....routine office visits, and meds....that needs to be planned out in your budget as another part of living within your means.
My meds work out to be $10-12K per year. That's a pretty hefty dent in my income, meaning I am (still) tied to my job, either for health insurance or for a good paying salary that will let me absorb that much out of pocket while still paying normal living expenses. An HSA helps, since that money is pre-tax, but not enough.
Your plan sounds great for the average, relatively healthy person. However, it doesn't address the needs of people with long term medical problems.
So next time a cop pulls me over because I'm driving 5mph over the speed limit, the cop asks me if I know why he pulled me over, and I answer "why, no sir, I don't,", I should be arrested for lying to the officer?
1) She lied to an officer. If you arrested everyone who ever did that, you would have no room for the murderers, rapists, child-molesters and kids who send text messages in class/s.
2) Do you really think that sending text messages in class was a legitimate reason to call the cops in the first place?
Seriously, do you people actually believe the things you post on/.?!?!?
The problem with pp's point of view is that it's not always that cut-and-dried. Yes, the equipment belongs to your employer, and I agree that this is something that the network (or server or database or...) admin needs to weigh in the balance.
However, consider this: suppose the admin has reason to believe that handing over the passwords will compromise the privacy of cusotmers/users of the network, server, or other system? For example, if I was an admin at a bank, and I had reason to believe that handing over passwords to an undisclosed number of people had an unacceptably high probability of leading to disclosure of the financial details of the banks customers, wouldn't I have an ethical obligation to refuse? Suppose I was an admin for a hospital or health insurance agency and I thought handing over the passwords could reasonably be expected to mean that patients' health information could be leaked? Would I not be morally, ethically and (at least potentially) legally liable for giving the passwords away in a case like this?
Childs may not have handled the situation in the best possible way, but it looks to me like he had reasonable concerns about what he was asked to do, and that he was justified in refusing to hand out the passwords when asked.
Irrelevant. As someone else mentioned above, your shocks aren't only necessary when driving on bumpy surfaces. Your shocks absorb the rolling and pitching tendencies caused by turning and braking/accelerating as well.
It strikes me as odd that Texas, a state many of us considered the "first and foremost in protecting the rights of its populace against tyranny of federal government"...
As a techie, have you ever run across an otherwise intelligent person who wants to argue with you about why their network/computer/whatever doesn't work the way they think it should? Did you ever get frustrated because, despite the fact that this is what you studied to do, spent the last five (ten, thirty) years doing, etc., etc., they think they know more about networking/programming/computer security than you?
Now, as a techie, did it ever occur that some times, in arenas other than tech, it is *you* (and me -- I'm not pointing fingers) that is the know-it-all who just doesn't get it?
I think you may have had a "modified" version (or at least an addon to include TCP/IP). WfW was the O/S we used on the first network I built, and we used IPX/SPX because IIRC that and NetBEUI were the only two networking protocols I remember being available (there might have been others, but I distinctly recall TCP/IP *not* being an available choice).
Linux Starter --> Knoppix (no install required!)
Linux Home Basic --> Ubuntu
Linux Home Premium --> Fedora/Debian
Linux Business --> Suse
Linux Enterprise --> RHEL
Linux Ultimate --> Gentoo, of course
First, Gentoo is a framework by which you can make your own distribution. It's not a distribution itself; it's a meta-distribution. But I don't like semantic arguments, so off to...
...Second, while I love Gentoo (it's my distro of choice), I wouldn't recommend it to someone who is new to Linux or to someone who needs a machine set up in a hurry. Gentoo is great once you get it running, but after several years of using Slackware, it still took me a week to get Gentoo running the first time. Also, a lot of people have neither the patience, the inclination or the desire to have applications break while they emerge -e world to rebuild the whole system, nor do a lot of people have the technical know-how to resolve issues when one of the inevitable bugs slips past the Gentoo dev team (like recently happened when two required system packages conflicted and you had to emerge -f one of the packages, uninstall them both, then emerge the one package that replaced them both...I forget what packages these were right now and I'm too lazy to look them up).
./configure && make && make install works pretty well most of the time.
If you want to try to install prepackaged binaries designed for another distribution, then yeah, better be prepared to spend some time resolving dependencies. On the other hand, I have seen similar problems when a Windows app requires a certain service pack version (or requires !service pack version, as the case may be).
Issues with hardware are not isolated to Linux, and IMHO can be even more difficult to fix in Windows. My wife is about ready to replace her desktop computer at home because of a problems with her video card. She uses Windows, and I'm nearly certain it's an OS/driver issue because her computer ran fine for a couple of days with Knoppix, but broke within a couple of hours once we rebooted into Windows. Oops. So we're looking at either reinstalling Windows (and all of her applications and all of her data, and hoping we didn't miss anything) or buying a new machine and slowly migrating data and applications. On my Linux machines, all I would have to do is upgrade X11 and possibly some libraries. Sounds easier and less risky to me.
Why apt-get over RPMs? I don't know enough about Debian to answer that question, but I use emerge over RPM because then I am not stuck with the dependencies that RedHat built into their packages. In older versions of RH at least (don't know if it's still the case), you had to install X11 with Apache and PHP because PHP wanted the X libraries. With Gentoo, I can build my entire system with the "-X" flag to leave X11 out. It's a little more difficult to learn the USE flags, and I wouldn't recommend this method (or distro) to a non-techie type, but that's what makes Linux cool. If I want a stock, no frills, plain-vanilla distro, I can get one. If I want a distro that I can tweak and optimize to my heart's content, I can get one. Emerge works for me; apt-get works for gpp and apparently RPMs (yum?) works for you. Cool.
As far as learning Linux...you have to learn to use *any* operating system, not just Linux. There was an uproar when Microsoft released Win95 because everything was different than what people got used to with Win 3.0/3.1. Moving the "x" to close a window from the left corner to the right corner drove me absolutely insane at first because I kept closing my windows when I only wanted to minimize them. After a (very) little while, however, I got used to it. Likewise, Mac OS X has it's own layout, and people moving to a Mac from Windows (or vice versa) have to learn the differences. However, especially if you are using a newbie-friendly distro like Ubuntu or Knoppix, learning the new environment isn't that hard. Gnome and KDE are easy to learn, and where I've worked, we've seen that even a very computer illiterate person can learn to use these desktop environments (our field techs use Gnome). As an example of the opposite extreme, I wouldn't recommend Gentoo to someone who 1) isn't a geek, 2) thinks of a computer as a tool rather than a hobby, and 3) needs to become productive quickly but I strongly disagree with your assertion that not everyone can learn to use Linux.
But that's the beauty of Linux. Linus may be "a geek, a developer" and may indeed be out of touch with what companies need, but that's okay because RedHat and Novell stepped up to fill that need. Meanwhile Daniel Robbins created a distro for those who either like to tweak and build bleeding edge systems or who need systems that don't have to be rebuilt every couple of years when the packages are all out of date. Mark Shuttleworth built a distro for people who want a version of Linux that just works right out of the box. Klaus Knopper had the great idea to create a distro you can run from a CD instead of installing on a hard drive.
This is cool because you can use the right distro for the job at hand. We use Gentoo where I work because we can keep our servers up to date with minimal downtime -- we don't have to rebuild our servers every time we want to upgrade. I run Slack at home because, well, it's what I learned first. I've got a hard drive install of Knoppix on a laptop because I couldn't boot from CD on that particular machine, so I pulled the hard drive, mounted it in an external enclosure, booted Knoppix on another machine and followed the instructions for a hard drive install using the USB drive, then reinstalled the hard drive in the laptop. I knew Knoppix was very good at automatically detecting hardware, so I felt Knoppix would have a good chance of working on the first install (it did).
If this volcano blows, people in Alaska are going to have a really bad time.
I doubt it. Redoubt blew 20 years ago, and was no big deal. Spurr blew a few years later ('92, IIRC) and was no big deal. Augustine started steaming a few years ago and was no big deal. I haven't heard anything from AVO to suggest that Redoubt's repeat engagement will be any different.
Where would you recommend living, then? In Alaska, we have cold, volcanoes and earthquakes. Along the west coast of the lower-48 and in Hawaii, we have much the same, minus the cold. The midwest through the southeast has tornados and the gulf states have hurricanes. The east coast is already overpopulated, and also deals with the hurricanes that don't make landfall in the gulf states.
I'll take my chances with volcanoes that at least give you some warning, first.
In comparison, my impression is that most of the Anchorage metro area is at risk from a tsunami.
Negative. I've never seen it actually documented (or else I'd provide a link), but the urban legend (at least) in Anchorage is that Cook Inlet isn't conducive to tsunamis reaching the Anchorage area. Most of the water near Anchorage is pretty shallow, which you can verify for yourself by looking at Cook Inlet, Knik Arm and Turnagain Arm at low tide -- especially this time of year, when the glacial-fed rivers that empty into Knik and Turnagain arms are just barely trickling. Therefore, most of the energy of a tsunami would be dissipated before reaching Anchorage. Also, Anchorage sits on a ~100 foot high bluff. The airport elevation at Merrill Field is ~130 feet above sea level. While there are parts of Anchorage that are lower (the port and some of the area near the Coastal Trail), I suspect it would take a really large wall of water (which I already showed isn't likely) to flood most of Anchorage.
I don't think most of us up here are too worried about it. I've lived here through Redoubt in '89, Spurr a few years later and Augustine just a couple of years ago, and none of these have been anything more than a bit of an inconvenience in Anchorage. We've had some ash fall on us, and that can certainly cause some complications, but nothing on the order of Katrina -- not even remotely close.
Where I work, we've started making plans for what it would take to shut all of our servers and network equipment down in a hurry (to protect from ash). People are stocking up on pantyhose (to use as a pre-filter for cars to keep the ash out of engines) and buying dust masks. But I don't think anyone here expects Redoubt to be the next Krakatoa or anything like that.
Yep -- I've still got a bottle of ash from Mt. Spur(r?), and in the private pilot ground schools I teach, I usually mention the KLM flight as an example of why you don't want to fly during an active eruption.
The volcanic plume can definitely be beautiful. IIRC, AVO has some images from a few years ago when Mt. Augustine erupted, one of which shows the shadow of the plume against the western sky as the sun set -- very, very beautiful. I'd post a link, but if AVO is already down...
Anyway, I know you were j/k, but we've had Redoubt, Spurr and Augustine erupt since I moved to AK in 1989, so I don't think this next eruption of Redoubt is going to be an earth-shaking event (no pun intended).
I heard one time that the former Soviet Union had a Constitution that was really quite remarkable -- it guaranteed much the same rights and freedoms that the U.S. Consitution did. The only difference between the U.S and the U.S.S.R. was that, since the only choice on the ballot in the U.S.S.R. was for Communist Party members, there was no opposition to what the Communist Party wanted to do, and therefore the courts rubber-stamped whatever the Politburo wanted done (and the Politburo rubber-stamped the wishes of the General Secretary).
So what does that have to do with your comment? The FISA court's decision is in contradiction to what the Fourth Amendment states, and no amount of handwaving can cover that fact. The *only* reason it continues is that no one in government has either the cojones (or the desire) to do anything about it and as long as the people of the U.S. are still getting their reality T.V. fix, they don't care enough to hold their elected officials to task for it. Like in the Soviet Union, there is not nearly enough dissent to force our government to obey the Constitution.
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But for day to day things....routine office visits, and meds....that needs to be planned out in your budget as another part of living within your means.
My meds work out to be $10-12K per year. That's a pretty hefty dent in my income, meaning I am (still) tied to my job, either for health insurance or for a good paying salary that will let me absorb that much out of pocket while still paying normal living expenses. An HSA helps, since that money is pre-tax, but not enough.
Your plan sounds great for the average, relatively healthy person. However, it doesn't address the needs of people with long term medical problems.
So next time a cop pulls me over because I'm driving 5mph over the speed limit, the cop asks me if I know why he pulled me over, and I answer "why, no sir, I don't,", I should be arrested for lying to the officer?
/s.
/.?!?!?
1) She lied to an officer. If you arrested everyone who ever did that, you would have no room for the murderers, rapists, child-molesters and kids who send text messages in class
2) Do you really think that sending text messages in class was a legitimate reason to call the cops in the first place?
Seriously, do you people actually believe the things you post on
The problem with pp's point of view is that it's not always that cut-and-dried. Yes, the equipment belongs to your employer, and I agree that this is something that the network (or server or database or...) admin needs to weigh in the balance.
However, consider this: suppose the admin has reason to believe that handing over the passwords will compromise the privacy of cusotmers/users of the network, server, or other system? For example, if I was an admin at a bank, and I had reason to believe that handing over passwords to an undisclosed number of people had an unacceptably high probability of leading to disclosure of the financial details of the banks customers, wouldn't I have an ethical obligation to refuse? Suppose I was an admin for a hospital or health insurance agency and I thought handing over the passwords could reasonably be expected to mean that patients' health information could be leaked? Would I not be morally, ethically and (at least potentially) legally liable for giving the passwords away in a case like this?
Childs may not have handled the situation in the best possible way, but it looks to me like he had reasonable concerns about what he was asked to do, and that he was justified in refusing to hand out the passwords when asked.
I think Inda omitted the "/s" tag. I didn't think it was necessary, but I could be wrong...
Irrelevant. As someone else mentioned above, your shocks aren't only necessary when driving on bumpy surfaces. Your shocks absorb the rolling and pitching tendencies caused by turning and braking/accelerating as well.
It strikes me as odd that Texas, a state many of us considered the "first and foremost in protecting the rights of its populace against tyranny of federal government"...
Not anymore. That distinction now belongs to New Hampshire: http://www.gencourt.state.nh.us/legislation/2009/HCR0006.html
As a techie, have you ever run across an otherwise intelligent person who wants to argue with you about why their network/computer/whatever doesn't work the way they think it should? Did you ever get frustrated because, despite the fact that this is what you studied to do, spent the last five (ten, thirty) years doing, etc., etc., they think they know more about networking/programming/computer security than you?
Now, as a techie, did it ever occur that some times, in arenas other than tech, it is *you* (and me -- I'm not pointing fingers) that is the know-it-all who just doesn't get it?
I think you may have had a "modified" version (or at least an addon to include TCP/IP). WfW was the O/S we used on the first network I built, and we used IPX/SPX because IIRC that and NetBEUI were the only two networking protocols I remember being available (there might have been others, but I distinctly recall TCP/IP *not* being an available choice).
Linux Starter --> Knoppix (no install required!)
:)
Linux Home Basic --> Ubuntu
Linux Home Premium --> Fedora/Debian
Linux Business --> Suse
Linux Enterprise --> RHEL
Linux Ultimate --> Gentoo, of course
Yes, but no.
...Second, while I love Gentoo (it's my distro of choice), I wouldn't recommend it to someone who is new to Linux or to someone who needs a machine set up in a hurry. Gentoo is great once you get it running, but after several years of using Slackware, it still took me a week to get Gentoo running the first time. Also, a lot of people have neither the patience, the inclination or the desire to have applications break while they emerge -e world to rebuild the whole system, nor do a lot of people have the technical know-how to resolve issues when one of the inevitable bugs slips past the Gentoo dev team (like recently happened when two required system packages conflicted and you had to emerge -f one of the packages, uninstall them both, then emerge the one package that replaced them both...I forget what packages these were right now and I'm too lazy to look them up).
First, Gentoo is a framework by which you can make your own distribution. It's not a distribution itself; it's a meta-distribution. But I don't like semantic arguments, so off to...
At risk of being slight off-topic, your sig seems highly appropriate to this discussion :)
./configure && make && make install works pretty well most of the time.
If you want to try to install prepackaged binaries designed for another distribution, then yeah, better be prepared to spend some time resolving dependencies. On the other hand, I have seen similar problems when a Windows app requires a certain service pack version (or requires !service pack version, as the case may be).
Meh. That's 90% fud.
Issues with hardware are not isolated to Linux, and IMHO can be even more difficult to fix in Windows. My wife is about ready to replace her desktop computer at home because of a problems with her video card. She uses Windows, and I'm nearly certain it's an OS/driver issue because her computer ran fine for a couple of days with Knoppix, but broke within a couple of hours once we rebooted into Windows. Oops. So we're looking at either reinstalling Windows (and all of her applications and all of her data, and hoping we didn't miss anything) or buying a new machine and slowly migrating data and applications. On my Linux machines, all I would have to do is upgrade X11 and possibly some libraries. Sounds easier and less risky to me.
Why apt-get over RPMs? I don't know enough about Debian to answer that question, but I use emerge over RPM because then I am not stuck with the dependencies that RedHat built into their packages. In older versions of RH at least (don't know if it's still the case), you had to install X11 with Apache and PHP because PHP wanted the X libraries. With Gentoo, I can build my entire system with the "-X" flag to leave X11 out. It's a little more difficult to learn the USE flags, and I wouldn't recommend this method (or distro) to a non-techie type, but that's what makes Linux cool. If I want a stock, no frills, plain-vanilla distro, I can get one. If I want a distro that I can tweak and optimize to my heart's content, I can get one. Emerge works for me; apt-get works for gpp and apparently RPMs (yum?) works for you. Cool.
As far as learning Linux...you have to learn to use *any* operating system, not just Linux. There was an uproar when Microsoft released Win95 because everything was different than what people got used to with Win 3.0/3.1. Moving the "x" to close a window from the left corner to the right corner drove me absolutely insane at first because I kept closing my windows when I only wanted to minimize them. After a (very) little while, however, I got used to it. Likewise, Mac OS X has it's own layout, and people moving to a Mac from Windows (or vice versa) have to learn the differences. However, especially if you are using a newbie-friendly distro like Ubuntu or Knoppix, learning the new environment isn't that hard. Gnome and KDE are easy to learn, and where I've worked, we've seen that even a very computer illiterate person can learn to use these desktop environments (our field techs use Gnome). As an example of the opposite extreme, I wouldn't recommend Gentoo to someone who 1) isn't a geek, 2) thinks of a computer as a tool rather than a hobby, and 3) needs to become productive quickly but I strongly disagree with your assertion that not everyone can learn to use Linux.
But that's the beauty of Linux. Linus may be "a geek, a developer" and may indeed be out of touch with what companies need, but that's okay because RedHat and Novell stepped up to fill that need. Meanwhile Daniel Robbins created a distro for those who either like to tweak and build bleeding edge systems or who need systems that don't have to be rebuilt every couple of years when the packages are all out of date. Mark Shuttleworth built a distro for people who want a version of Linux that just works right out of the box. Klaus Knopper had the great idea to create a distro you can run from a CD instead of installing on a hard drive.
This is cool because you can use the right distro for the job at hand. We use Gentoo where I work because we can keep our servers up to date with minimal downtime -- we don't have to rebuild our servers every time we want to upgrade. I run Slack at home because, well, it's what I learned first. I've got a hard drive install of Knoppix on a laptop because I couldn't boot from CD on that particular machine, so I pulled the hard drive, mounted it in an external enclosure, booted Knoppix on another machine and followed the instructions for a hard drive install using the USB drive, then reinstalled the hard drive in the laptop. I knew Knoppix was very good at automatically detecting hardware, so I felt Knoppix would have a good chance of working on the first install (it did).
If this volcano blows, people in Alaska are going to have a really bad time.
I doubt it. Redoubt blew 20 years ago, and was no big deal. Spurr blew a few years later ('92, IIRC) and was no big deal. Augustine started steaming a few years ago and was no big deal. I haven't heard anything from AVO to suggest that Redoubt's repeat engagement will be any different.
Where would you recommend living, then? In Alaska, we have cold, volcanoes and earthquakes. Along the west coast of the lower-48 and in Hawaii, we have much the same, minus the cold. The midwest through the southeast has tornados and the gulf states have hurricanes. The east coast is already overpopulated, and also deals with the hurricanes that don't make landfall in the gulf states.
I'll take my chances with volcanoes that at least give you some warning, first.
In comparison, my impression is that most of the Anchorage metro area is at risk from a tsunami.
Negative. I've never seen it actually documented (or else I'd provide a link), but the urban legend (at least) in Anchorage is that Cook Inlet isn't conducive to tsunamis reaching the Anchorage area. Most of the water near Anchorage is pretty shallow, which you can verify for yourself by looking at Cook Inlet, Knik Arm and Turnagain Arm at low tide -- especially this time of year, when the glacial-fed rivers that empty into Knik and Turnagain arms are just barely trickling. Therefore, most of the energy of a tsunami would be dissipated before reaching Anchorage. Also, Anchorage sits on a ~100 foot high bluff. The airport elevation at Merrill Field is ~130 feet above sea level. While there are parts of Anchorage that are lower (the port and some of the area near the Coastal Trail), I suspect it would take a really large wall of water (which I already showed isn't likely) to flood most of Anchorage.
Yeah...store owners would shoot back. It's not by accident that our governor lists the ability to field dress a moose as one of her qualifications ;)
I don't think most of us up here are too worried about it. I've lived here through Redoubt in '89, Spurr a few years later and Augustine just a couple of years ago, and none of these have been anything more than a bit of an inconvenience in Anchorage. We've had some ash fall on us, and that can certainly cause some complications, but nothing on the order of Katrina -- not even remotely close.
Where I work, we've started making plans for what it would take to shut all of our servers and network equipment down in a hurry (to protect from ash). People are stocking up on pantyhose (to use as a pre-filter for cars to keep the ash out of engines) and buying dust masks. But I don't think anyone here expects Redoubt to be the next Krakatoa or anything like that.
Yep -- I've still got a bottle of ash from Mt. Spur(r?), and in the private pilot ground schools I teach, I usually mention the KLM flight as an example of why you don't want to fly during an active eruption.
Only from their back yards ;)
The volcanic plume can definitely be beautiful. IIRC, AVO has some images from a few years ago when Mt. Augustine erupted, one of which shows the shadow of the plume against the western sky as the sun set -- very, very beautiful. I'd post a link, but if AVO is already down...
Anyway, I know you were j/k, but we've had Redoubt, Spurr and Augustine erupt since I moved to AK in 1989, so I don't think this next eruption of Redoubt is going to be an earth-shaking event (no pun intended).
More than likely, it was all of us in Kenai, Soldotna and Anchorage reloading every five minutes to get the latest update on Redoubt.
I heard one time that the former Soviet Union had a Constitution that was really quite remarkable -- it guaranteed much the same rights and freedoms that the U.S. Consitution did. The only difference between the U.S and the U.S.S.R. was that, since the only choice on the ballot in the U.S.S.R. was for Communist Party members, there was no opposition to what the Communist Party wanted to do, and therefore the courts rubber-stamped whatever the Politburo wanted done (and the Politburo rubber-stamped the wishes of the General Secretary).
So what does that have to do with your comment? The FISA court's decision is in contradiction to what the Fourth Amendment states, and no amount of handwaving can cover that fact. The *only* reason it continues is that no one in government has either the cojones (or the desire) to do anything about it and as long as the people of the U.S. are still getting their reality T.V. fix, they don't care enough to hold their elected officials to task for it. Like in the Soviet Union, there is not nearly enough dissent to force our government to obey the Constitution.
Dude, I am so sorry to hear that. I hope everything works out for you.