Stallman may be weird and near-impossible to deal with on a personal basis, but he has rarely if ever been wrong on the big issues. I like Linux, I really do; Gentoo is a joy to run and maintain, and I'm learning more every day. Long before Torvalds expressed his surprise at the resilience of the 2.6 kernel, I was amazed at how rarely it broke on me (read: never) considering the development model and policy. But I also agree with Stallman that GPLv2 does not protect free and open source software against new types of attacks via DRM and patent trolling, for the simple reason that most of these issues did not exist when it was drawn up.
When v2 was drafted and adopted, no one had any idea that computers would become media-playing devices, and the forms of DRM that the exponentially-increasing technology have made available today did not exist. The closest analog, and it was analog then, was the VCR vs Betamax debate. Who would have dreamed in 1989 that anyone would have a gigabyte of hard drive space or a gigahertz CPU or a video card that could pull more than 640x480x256 colors? Perhaps more importantly, who would have known media and software companies would become bloated, incestuous lovers with corrupt politicians to this extent? No one in the mainstream really took the idea of "information age" seriously in the late 80s, but a bare 15 years later, the Internet had connected virtually the entire world.
I don't anticipate Linus moving his kernel to GPLv3. I like him, but I don't like his politics. I realize that he created Linux as a hobby and a way onto the school network via his 386, but when you release something under the GPLv* it becomes a political football by default. If he wants to keep the kernel at v2, fine...if Solaris endorses v3 it will be a huge sea change across the FOSS world and I fully expect to see an industry shift if that happens. It's sad, because the Linux kernel has a wonderful, lively aura and a fast-paced dev "cycle," which I don't quite trust Solaris to keep alive, but all that means nothing if the license doesn't stop unscrupulous people from perverting the kernel into something which takes away freedoms.
And Stallman may finally be vindicated in his "It's GNU/Linux, dammit, Linux is just the kernel!" attitude when people boot into Nexenta and go "Hey, this looks like Linux!" Have faith, RMS...you will be proven right again, as you have time after time. Let's just hope Solaris doesn't become another Novell or, worse, Microsoft. Watch your back, Sun...I eagerly anticipate this, but I will drop you like a hot iron if you somehow manage to twist the GPLv3 into something abominable.
VC: "muskets." Perhaps that's the sound of revolution.
For the truly paranoid, a good idea might be to use onion routing such as ToR (http://tor.eff.org/) to conduct your searchyes. I don't know how it works in Windows, but in Linux I pop open an aterm, type in "torify firefox," hit enter, and away it goes. Yes, a ToR connection is slower than browsing normally, but it may be worth it.
Note that the site itself claims that this is experimental software and shouldn't be relied on for strong anonymity. But to be honest, unless you're searching for something that actually is criminal, like kiddie porn, you shouldn't have anything to worry about. I just use it because I'm a professional paranoid =P
VC: beloved. Ahh, yes, my beloved ToR. Someday onion routing will be one of our most potent tools in preserving our civil liberties.
Okay...it is possible for a newbie to install Gentoo as her first Linux (I did it). But the thing is, I also printed out the 70+ pages of documentation, read it all, and approached it with an open mind. I have also had some background in programming, computer hardware, and HTML.
Yes, you can install Gentoo and get it working if you follow the directions to the letter (and peruse the forums), but as several people have mentioned, Joe Sixpack doesn't want to do any of that. He wants a CD he can pop in and hit the OK button on a few times.
And just try to imagine his reaction when you tell him it will take, on a modern system (let's say an AMD 64 3500+ Venice CPU with 2 GB of RAM), the better part of a day to install a working desktop, because everything has to be compiled from source. Oh, and let's not forget all the files to edit, the need to partition manually, having to configure the kernel yourself or be stuck with that PoS genkernel, and needing to know your hardware inside and out in order to configure said kernel properly. And the fact that an emerge -e system and then an emerge -e world with a tuned make.conf are recommended to flush and optimize your toolchain. And that's even not compiler-ricing; that's getting the "safe" optimizations Gentoo is supposed to give you over, for example, Debian.
I did install Gentoo as my first Linux, in mid-2004. But that's because I'm insane.
> So how does the melting of the polar caps make the sea rise when the whole mass is actually shrinking?
Melting of the sea ice won't cause sea levels to rise because that water came from the ocean to begin with, and more importantly, never left the ocean; it's still floating in it. "The sea gives and the sea takes," indeed. But the ice of Antarctica is mostly over land, which means it's not displacing any water where it is. If that ice melts, and the water runs into the sea, it will put water into the ocean that wasn't there before, for a value of "before" stretching back wayyyy before the history of humanity.
Question: why does everyone advocating biodiesel think it has to come from corn oil? Why not just raise a huge amount of algae? You could harvest them off of eutrophicated bodies of water, thus helping to restore the natural balance while you load up on your fuel source. God knows we have enough stagnant ponds around because of runoff...
Besides, raising algae commercially/intentionally is a lot cheaper and easier than raising corn, plus humans don't eat algae (yet) and you can grow it in places you would never be able to grow food crops. Why not build a giant algae tank facility in the middle of a region like the Sonoran Desert? Keep it glass-enclosed and as long as there's enough water and simple nutrients, you should be able to harvest it almost continuously and render it down.
I am not a pedophile myself nor (to the best of my knowledge) do I know any either online or in the Real World (TM), but it was interesting to read the account of a supposed real-life one here. Pedophilia is one of those issues that, as several people have mentioned, triggers knee-jerk responses; however, a little cold, calm thought is beneficial in cases like this.
Let's start with the dictionary definition, "(sexual) love of children." For purposes of this discussion we are including ephebophiles, those who are attracted to children during or past puberty but not yet of the age of majority, under the heading or "pedophile." The point is that this says nothing about any propensity to commit any act, just that the attraction is there. Think about that for a few minutes.
Essentially, jailing or otherwise punishing someone simply for being a pedophile is an example of thoughtcrime. What should be punished (and more importantly, publicized in the media as being punished) is the abuse and exploitation of the child victims. I am not a psychologist or psychiatrist and have some doubts about how someone can be "wired" to pedophilia, but as long as they do not harm a child, why should they be punished?
The definition of "harm a child" doesn't just mean direct abuse or harrassment of course; if you're buying, selling, or accessing kiddie porn, you are continuing the cycle. I also do agree that computer-generated images that look lifelike should come under the heading of child porn, if only because they are supposedly nearly indistinguishable (not that I'm gonna check) from the real thing. But if a pedophile does not harm children directly or indirectly, if s/he is "celibate" as our Anonymous Brave is, there shouldn't be any need to cause problems for that person.
See the problem? Pedophiles are the new boogeymen. They've been turned into a class of untermensch, fodder for one of the modern Two-Minutes Hate campaigns. Pure evil, something no patriotic (notice I didn't say "critically thinking") American should feel any qualms about seeing harrassed, imprisoned, and even tortured or killed. This is a fundamentally sick mindset and one that serves the government, in its ablation of civil rights, very well. All these supposedly good Christian people might want to consider one of Jesus's quotes: "Hate the sin, not the sinner." In the same vein, "punish the act, not the thought."
Now, part two. I moderate a fairly large subsection of an anime image community, and one of the things we need to deal with is "lolicon," a back-loan-word meaning "Lolita complex." No one would ever mistake a lolicon image for actual child porn (eyeballs the size of hardboiled eggs and pink or blue hair tend to do that). It is against my particular board's policy, but it gave me an idea: why not use lolicon as an alternative or "safety valve" for the real thing? And I don't mean ration it out like drugs in rehab; I mean let the artists make it so pedophiles can access it through normal channels on the 'net, like I would to go looking for "normal" porn. By definition no actual child can be harmed in its making because it's hand-drawn or computer-generated, and anime/manga art looks nothing like real life.
Heh, and my vericode is "bargains." Sounds like even the server has the right idea. Also, anyone who's ever whacked it to Sailor Moon hentai is a pedo; those girls may look and (usually) act like adults, but they're only 16.
AV companies are ambulance chasers, simple as that. Few or no home AV products, much less free ones, are heuristic in nature; they're nearly all tied to a database of static signatures, and if the virus code changes by a single byte, the program won't recognize it. The person who said that an AV scanner was an investment in knowledge was dead on...specifically, it's an investment in letting someone think for you since it (ideally) means the purchaser can continue his or her habits.
This is a dark scenario, as any thinking geek can tell you. Because there will always be new viruses and zero-day exploits, no firewall or AV that works on the level Norton et. al do is ever going to be truly effective. A real, kernel-level, stateful firewall like Linux's IPTables should be both the first and second line of defense (in other words, get a router that can run Linux like the WRT54GL and run Linux/*BSD host-side with IPTables/ipfw), but most people can't or won't learn this. Even in those cases, a properly-configured router will be more effective and cost less than Norton/McAfee/Kaspersky's bloated scareware "solutions." Once again: ambulance chasers.
Gee, this is news. Intel's newest CPU, a generation of technology and a die shrink ahead, defeats AMD's last-generation offerings. This is ideally how things are supposed to go, isn't it, with newer technology doing better? This is non-news; all it says is that Intel has finally become a competent chipmaker again. I am eagerly awaiting AMD's answer to this (K8-L?) and hoping they don't drop the ball, having been an AMD user since 2001.
I've been using this for several months to run my copy of XP in. Basically there are 2 reasons I still use Windows: Anvil Studio (MIDI sequencer), and Super Jukebox (SNES music player). Which brings me to the issue of sound. VMWare Server emulates what seems to be a low-end SoundBlaster, perhaps an Ensoniq 1370.
The point? You *will* get skips and weirdness if you play MIDIs through the MSGS synth (standard synth on Windows), and even wave or mp3 audio can hiccup. VMWare isn't meant to be a multimedia solution, I know, but would it be so hard to emulate something a little more powerful for sound? A slightly better graphics card wouldn't hurt either, though it knocks the socks off Qemu's. I wonder if they'll eventually let you use the graphics and sound HW directly as they do with the CPU?
I have mixed feelings about this. I am dead-set against the firewall on principle, but wouldn't China have the right to declare (D)DoS attacks on its firewall "cyberterrorism?"
But that's not what I really worry about. What really has me concerned is if somehow someone from outside China conducted an attack and the method used made it look like someone from inside the country did it. We all know how the Chinese government deals with disobedience of any kind (Tiananmen Square, anyone?); what will happen to the poor sap whose machine got used as a zombie?
Being such a huge enterprise, it has to be stateless, and any script kiddie can tell you that stateless firewalls are ineffective. But the cost of building and maintaining a stateful firewall would be exponentially higher and I don't think the Chinese government would be able to justify that amount of money even to itself. As mentioned above, stateful firewalls don't scale well; they really have no choice but to use the stateless solution.
Personally, setting morals aside for the moment, I think it would be well-deserved if the Great Firewall were so horribly DoS'd that it failed nationwide. That's all kinds of illegal and would almost certainly be seen as an act of terrorism, but I wonder if it isn't worth it. Just a plea to all crackers and hackers considering taking their stab at the Yellow Brick Wall: please don't do something that'll get some poor son of a bitch behind the firewall jailed or executed. Perhaps asking someone to be morally immoral is a contradiction, I don't know, but the fewer innocents involved the better.
I have to side with the "tinfoil" crowd on this: our President may be an idiot himself but the rest of the government is not. They are intellignet...very, very intelligent. It also takes a certain mindset to do well in the ultra-high-security arena, the kind of mindset that uses misinformation and purposeful leaks as standard tools of the trade. This looks like a perfectly-executed bait-and-switch, and people are playing right into their hands. Critical thinking is a must, people!
> Yes, some glaciers are growing. However, the combined net change is a loss of glacial mass.
> A similar effect is true of global temperature. Despite global warming, there are areas of the earth that are coolear. However, the global average is
> up. Note that temperatures at the poles can be affected very dramatically, the average at the north pole by as much as 8 degrees. This obviously has a
> greater impact on the polar ice than a 1 degree rise would have had.
This makes perfect sense if you consider that it takes a lot less heat to melt ice (80 cal/g) than to vaporize water (540 cal/g). Of course the poles are going to show the effects first. And while the North Pole's ice melting wouldn't be a catastrophe as far as sea level goes (it already displaces its own weight), that water is much less saline and will screw with the thermohaline circulation something fierce. In English, the less-salty water will mess with concentration gradients that drive currents like the Gulf Stream. Know why London isn't 40 below in May despite being at the same latitude as Siberia? Yep, it receives energy from the warm limb of the Gulf Stream.
Ice melting off the Antarctic and Greenland, though, *will* cause sea level change because it's being held up by the land, not by buoyant forces. It will, of course, have the same pernicious effects on the ocean currents as melting icebergs. I'm amazed people don't take phase change into account when considering things like this; the poles are the places that will show climate change fastest and hardest.
I really don't think MS is going to disappear anytime soon, unfortunately. I for one would be literally jumping up and down howling like a blue-assed baboon if they did, but if nothing else the sheer amount of vendor lock-in they're already perpetrated will keep them going at least 5 years longer.
Keep in mind they have iron-fisted OEM policies, where they basically say "You bundle Windows with your computers, or you lose the licensing, capice?" Even if Vista turns out to be a complete pile of horse buns, which it probably will, it's still going to see massive distribution because of that.
And on the business front, it's all about the Office. I love ABIWord and even OO.org 2.0, but the fact remains no one knows exactly how to open a.doc except the boys at MS and the format itself is a moving target (backwards incompatibility anyone?) Add that to what they did to the open document format idea, and you have the perfect crapstorm. Microsoft may actually be kept alive by its office software even if the OS division founders. In summary, I don't see them going anywhere anytime soon, but with any luck they are going to pay for their sins and pay dearly...
For what it's worth, it was my Catholic upbringing that almost made me an agnostic. Science brought me back into the fold, though as a very strong Deist instead of a Catholic. I've noticed that many scientists, as pointed out above, are or become deeply spiritual (though not religious--there is a very fundamental difference) after enough time studying their field, especially if it's something like cosmology or biology. Newton, Einstein, all the great minds...I wouldn't dare presume to put myself up there as I've not yet even finished university, but it seems interesting that so many serious scientists trend this way...
I agree with the parent and another post higher up that the religious/institutional end of it seems to be more a social engineering scheme than anything, an institution designed to solidify and keep power for the ruling group. That's all well and good (not really), but I wish they'd come right out and say it, instead of insulting everyone in the fold with a triple-digit IQ...
*nods* And for the naysayers, three words: Pebble Bed Reactor. No nuclear energy is going to be waste-free, but we've come a long way from U235 rods in light-water-moderated reactors. With a good pebble bed program and enough space for the still-"hot"-but-not-for-millions-of-years waste the US could have a viable nuclear program.
Why is this being called trolling? This, people, is *market research* for the OSS developer community. This is a self-described hardened Windows user who had the courage and the intiative to try Linux, and gave a list of valid criticisms. Notice that his basic points weren't about applications (except the FM); they were about *ease of maintainence.* This is the demographic the OSS dev-comm has to market to, and while what he's said is nothing they haven't heard before, improvement in these areas is what Linux needs to claim more mindshare.
For all that people accuse Theo de Raadt of being abrasive, singleminded, and ideological, we NEED people like him. It's the de Raadts and the Stallmans, the ones who refuse to back down in the face of corporate and (soon) government pressure, who make the open source movement possible. I think this very same bloody-minded stubbornness is one of the most important things he brings to the table. I admire his convictions and worry about his blood pressure. Theo, if you're reading this: don't give up!
Once again, we have a case of someone confusing Linux (the kernel) with a fullblown distro. I'm not surprised Negroponte thinks Linux is too fat if the project partner is RedHat; yes, RedHat is one of the few institutions able to pull this off, but their distro is not meant for this kind of hardware. Especially not their modern distros.
Seriously...all these machines are the exact same spec, right? Have a single production server at the project's home base install Gentoo in a chroot environment, with GCC set to -Os -fomit-frame-pointer -march=k6 (or whatever it is Geode CPUs use), and build a minimal system. Modular X.org so it only has the stuff for the relevant video card, Nautilus and Gnome-Panel but NOT Gnome itself, and Fluxbox as the WM with the Panel running on top of it. AbiWord and GNUmeric over Openoffice.org, iDesk for icons, Aterm instead of Gnome-terminal, etc. Then strip out Portage, GCC, and any other dev tools that aren't going to be used. I'd be surprised if that whole thing took 700 MB. Load it onto all the machines, and theyre good to go.
As far as the kernel goes, since (I believe) 2.6.15 certain patchsets have an option to pass GCC -Os instead of -O2 for building the kernel. It'll still probably take more memory than a comparable 2.4.x kernel but that's a start. It's all a matter of making intelligent choices, and the more I read about this project the less I tink Negroponte understands the technical aspects of this...
I believe Gentoo is what you make of it. It's so powerful because it's a "meta-distribution," meaning you can start with the minimal, base system and then add to and tweak it to make it work for your particular needs. The fine-grained control Portage grants with USE flags, make.conf, and files like/etc/portage/package.keywords let you tailor-make a system so it does exactly what you want it to and nothing more. Conversely, they also let you hose your system royally if you don't know what you're doing with it.
Put simply, Gentoo is not about speed. Not the way the "compiler ricers" would have you believe. Yes, the compiler can squeeze sometimes significant speed boosts out of the software if you pet it just so, but in my opinion if you want a stable system anything more than -O2 -march=(your arch) -pipe -fomit-frame-pointer is asking for trouble. It's the ability to start a minimum of services that does it (and rc-update is the best tool I've seen yet for this purpose). The real speed bottleneck in binary distros I can see is that so much is running by default; a very minimalist Debian should be able to perform nearly neck-and-neck with a sanely optimized Gentoo running the same apps and services.
No, what does it for me is the control. Gentoo lets you control almost everything, and it makes you learn to use the command line to do it. The lack of GUI tools frightens some people, but the flip side of that is that Gentoo makes you learn how Linux works; by the time you've figured out how to make a potentially dangerous tweak, odds are you know what you're doing. An example is the kernel: you start with a stock Gentoo-patched kernel, but you're immediately able to download several patch variants and nothing at all stops you from going to kernel.org, grabbing a vanilla release and your favorite patches, and applying those. You might not know or be told you can do that, but if you do know you won't be stopped.
Then there's the USE flags and the ability to mix stable and unstable packages. You're not tied to a bunch of "repositories;" there's ONE portage tree and you pick the fruit you feel like eating. Then, you prepare it exactly the way you want it. Want an "unstable" (~arch) version of a package? 'echo package-category/packagename ~arch >>/etc/portage/package.keywords' and then emerge it as normal. Want XMMS with ogg/vorbis support but not mp3? 'USE="-mp3 oggvorbis" emerge -av xmms.' Yes, you pay for his flexibility in compile time and in just plain needing to know more stuff, but to many people it's worth it.
Now, Gentoo has its share of problems too. The same flexibility that allows for incremental updates and mixing stable/unstable packages can break a production server, where stability is the most important factor. etc-update is an ugly hack and even dispatch-conf isn't much better. And the build time for big packages is a killer on anything but a modern machine (though the GRP partly solves that).
In this case, it's a question of using the right tool for the job. You could make Gentoo the "right tool" but in time-critical situations you just want something that works, and this is where Debian shines. Everyone knows the jokes ("Debian is old, and Debian stable is older than your computer/car/mother"), but the delay means Debian is mature and time-tested.
You could run a production server on Gentoo (my friend does), but you'd have to be very strict about what gets updated when; making it a policy to do no updating but 'emerge sync && emerge -uD world' on the days a new release is announced, for example. In that situation I would rather run Debian stable, even if I have to go through the entire system with a fine-toothed comb and disable all the stuff I don't want that got installed anyway. You wouldn't use a surgical scalpel to cut a steak, so why use a distro whose focus is microscopic tweakability on a system whose purpose is uptime?
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Stallman may be weird and near-impossible to deal with on a personal basis, but he has rarely if ever been wrong on the big issues. I like Linux, I really do; Gentoo is a joy to run and maintain, and I'm learning more every day. Long before Torvalds expressed his surprise at the resilience of the 2.6 kernel, I was amazed at how rarely it broke on me (read: never) considering the development model and policy. But I also agree with Stallman that GPLv2 does not protect free and open source software against new types of attacks via DRM and patent trolling, for the simple reason that most of these issues did not exist when it was drawn up.
When v2 was drafted and adopted, no one had any idea that computers would become media-playing devices, and the forms of DRM that the exponentially-increasing technology have made available today did not exist. The closest analog, and it was analog then, was the VCR vs Betamax debate. Who would have dreamed in 1989 that anyone would have a gigabyte of hard drive space or a gigahertz CPU or a video card that could pull more than 640x480x256 colors? Perhaps more importantly, who would have known media and software companies would become bloated, incestuous lovers with corrupt politicians to this extent? No one in the mainstream really took the idea of "information age" seriously in the late 80s, but a bare 15 years later, the Internet had connected virtually the entire world.
I don't anticipate Linus moving his kernel to GPLv3. I like him, but I don't like his politics. I realize that he created Linux as a hobby and a way onto the school network via his 386, but when you release something under the GPLv* it becomes a political football by default. If he wants to keep the kernel at v2, fine...if Solaris endorses v3 it will be a huge sea change across the FOSS world and I fully expect to see an industry shift if that happens. It's sad, because the Linux kernel has a wonderful, lively aura and a fast-paced dev "cycle," which I don't quite trust Solaris to keep alive, but all that means nothing if the license doesn't stop unscrupulous people from perverting the kernel into something which takes away freedoms.
And Stallman may finally be vindicated in his "It's GNU/Linux, dammit, Linux is just the kernel!" attitude when people boot into Nexenta and go "Hey, this looks like Linux!" Have faith, RMS...you will be proven right again, as you have time after time. Let's just hope Solaris doesn't become another Novell or, worse, Microsoft. Watch your back, Sun...I eagerly anticipate this, but I will drop you like a hot iron if you somehow manage to twist the GPLv3 into something abominable.
VC: "muskets." Perhaps that's the sound of revolution.
For the truly paranoid, a good idea might be to use onion routing such as ToR (http://tor.eff.org/) to conduct your searchyes. I don't know how it works in Windows, but in Linux I pop open an aterm, type in "torify firefox," hit enter, and away it goes. Yes, a ToR connection is slower than browsing normally, but it may be worth it.
Note that the site itself claims that this is experimental software and shouldn't be relied on for strong anonymity. But to be honest, unless you're searching for something that actually is criminal, like kiddie porn, you shouldn't have anything to worry about. I just use it because I'm a professional paranoid =P
VC: beloved. Ahh, yes, my beloved ToR. Someday onion routing will be one of our most potent tools in preserving our civil liberties.
Okay...it is possible for a newbie to install Gentoo as her first Linux (I did it). But the thing is, I also printed out the 70+ pages of documentation, read it all, and approached it with an open mind. I have also had some background in programming, computer hardware, and HTML.
Yes, you can install Gentoo and get it working if you follow the directions to the letter (and peruse the forums), but as several people have mentioned, Joe Sixpack doesn't want to do any of that. He wants a CD he can pop in and hit the OK button on a few times.
And just try to imagine his reaction when you tell him it will take, on a modern system (let's say an AMD 64 3500+ Venice CPU with 2 GB of RAM), the better part of a day to install a working desktop, because everything has to be compiled from source. Oh, and let's not forget all the files to edit, the need to partition manually, having to configure the kernel yourself or be stuck with that PoS genkernel, and needing to know your hardware inside and out in order to configure said kernel properly. And the fact that an emerge -e system and then an emerge -e world with a tuned make.conf are recommended to flush and optimize your toolchain. And that's even not compiler-ricing; that's getting the "safe" optimizations Gentoo is supposed to give you over, for example, Debian.
I did install Gentoo as my first Linux, in mid-2004. But that's because I'm insane.
> So how does the melting of the polar caps make the sea rise when the whole mass is actually shrinking?
Melting of the sea ice won't cause sea levels to rise because that water came from the ocean to begin with, and more importantly, never left the ocean; it's still floating in it. "The sea gives and the sea takes," indeed. But the ice of Antarctica is mostly over land, which means it's not displacing any water where it is. If that ice melts, and the water runs into the sea, it will put water into the ocean that wasn't there before, for a value of "before" stretching back wayyyy before the history of humanity.
Question: why does everyone advocating biodiesel think it has to come from corn oil? Why not just raise a huge amount of algae? You could harvest them off of eutrophicated bodies of water, thus helping to restore the natural balance while you load up on your fuel source. God knows we have enough stagnant ponds around because of runoff...
Besides, raising algae commercially/intentionally is a lot cheaper and easier than raising corn, plus humans don't eat algae (yet) and you can grow it in places you would never be able to grow food crops. Why not build a giant algae tank facility in the middle of a region like the Sonoran Desert? Keep it glass-enclosed and as long as there's enough water and simple nutrients, you should be able to harvest it almost continuously and render it down.
I am not a pedophile myself nor (to the best of my knowledge) do I know any either online or in the Real World (TM), but it was interesting to read the account of a supposed real-life one here. Pedophilia is one of those issues that, as several people have mentioned, triggers knee-jerk responses; however, a little cold, calm thought is beneficial in cases like this.
Let's start with the dictionary definition, "(sexual) love of children." For purposes of this discussion we are including ephebophiles, those who are attracted to children during or past puberty but not yet of the age of majority, under the heading or "pedophile." The point is that this says nothing about any propensity to commit any act, just that the attraction is there. Think about that for a few minutes.
Essentially, jailing or otherwise punishing someone simply for being a pedophile is an example of thoughtcrime. What should be punished (and more importantly, publicized in the media as being punished) is the abuse and exploitation of the child victims. I am not a psychologist or psychiatrist and have some doubts about how someone can be "wired" to pedophilia, but as long as they do not harm a child, why should they be punished?
The definition of "harm a child" doesn't just mean direct abuse or harrassment of course; if you're buying, selling, or accessing kiddie porn, you are continuing the cycle. I also do agree that computer-generated images that look lifelike should come under the heading of child porn, if only because they are supposedly nearly indistinguishable (not that I'm gonna check) from the real thing. But if a pedophile does not harm children directly or indirectly, if s/he is "celibate" as our Anonymous Brave is, there shouldn't be any need to cause problems for that person.
See the problem? Pedophiles are the new boogeymen. They've been turned into a class of untermensch, fodder for one of the modern Two-Minutes Hate campaigns. Pure evil, something no patriotic (notice I didn't say "critically thinking") American should feel any qualms about seeing harrassed, imprisoned, and even tortured or killed. This is a fundamentally sick mindset and one that serves the government, in its ablation of civil rights, very well. All these supposedly good Christian people might want to consider one of Jesus's quotes: "Hate the sin, not the sinner." In the same vein, "punish the act, not the thought."
Now, part two. I moderate a fairly large subsection of an anime image community, and one of the things we need to deal with is "lolicon," a back-loan-word meaning "Lolita complex." No one would ever mistake a lolicon image for actual child porn (eyeballs the size of hardboiled eggs and pink or blue hair tend to do that). It is against my particular board's policy, but it gave me an idea: why not use lolicon as an alternative or "safety valve" for the real thing? And I don't mean ration it out like drugs in rehab; I mean let the artists make it so pedophiles can access it through normal channels on the 'net, like I would to go looking for "normal" porn. By definition no actual child can be harmed in its making because it's hand-drawn or computer-generated, and anime/manga art looks nothing like real life.
Heh, and my vericode is "bargains." Sounds like even the server has the right idea. Also, anyone who's ever whacked it to Sailor Moon hentai is a pedo; those girls may look and (usually) act like adults, but they're only 16.
AV companies are ambulance chasers, simple as that. Few or no home AV products, much less free ones, are heuristic in nature; they're nearly all tied to a database of static signatures, and if the virus code changes by a single byte, the program won't recognize it. The person who said that an AV scanner was an investment in knowledge was dead on...specifically, it's an investment in letting someone think for you since it (ideally) means the purchaser can continue his or her habits.
This is a dark scenario, as any thinking geek can tell you. Because there will always be new viruses and zero-day exploits, no firewall or AV that works on the level Norton et. al do is ever going to be truly effective. A real, kernel-level, stateful firewall like Linux's IPTables should be both the first and second line of defense (in other words, get a router that can run Linux like the WRT54GL and run Linux/*BSD host-side with IPTables/ipfw), but most people can't or won't learn this. Even in those cases, a properly-configured router will be more effective and cost less than Norton/McAfee/Kaspersky's bloated scareware "solutions." Once again: ambulance chasers.
Gee, this is news. Intel's newest CPU, a generation of technology and a die shrink ahead, defeats AMD's last-generation offerings. This is ideally how things are supposed to go, isn't it, with newer technology doing better? This is non-news; all it says is that Intel has finally become a competent chipmaker again. I am eagerly awaiting AMD's answer to this (K8-L?) and hoping they don't drop the ball, having been an AMD user since 2001.
I've been using this for several months to run my copy of XP in. Basically there are 2 reasons I still use Windows: Anvil Studio (MIDI sequencer), and Super Jukebox (SNES music player). Which brings me to the issue of sound. VMWare Server emulates what seems to be a low-end SoundBlaster, perhaps an Ensoniq 1370.
The point? You *will* get skips and weirdness if you play MIDIs through the MSGS synth (standard synth on Windows), and even wave or mp3 audio can hiccup. VMWare isn't meant to be a multimedia solution, I know, but would it be so hard to emulate something a little more powerful for sound? A slightly better graphics card wouldn't hurt either, though it knocks the socks off Qemu's. I wonder if they'll eventually let you use the graphics and sound HW directly as they do with the CPU?
Hm...vericode was "extends." Interesting.
I have mixed feelings about this. I am dead-set against the firewall on principle, but wouldn't China have the right to declare (D)DoS attacks on its firewall "cyberterrorism?"
But that's not what I really worry about. What really has me concerned is if somehow someone from outside China conducted an attack and the method used made it look like someone from inside the country did it. We all know how the Chinese government deals with disobedience of any kind (Tiananmen Square, anyone?); what will happen to the poor sap whose machine got used as a zombie?
Being such a huge enterprise, it has to be stateless, and any script kiddie can tell you that stateless firewalls are ineffective. But the cost of building and maintaining a stateful firewall would be exponentially higher and I don't think the Chinese government would be able to justify that amount of money even to itself. As mentioned above, stateful firewalls don't scale well; they really have no choice but to use the stateless solution.
Personally, setting morals aside for the moment, I think it would be well-deserved if the Great Firewall were so horribly DoS'd that it failed nationwide. That's all kinds of illegal and would almost certainly be seen as an act of terrorism, but I wonder if it isn't worth it. Just a plea to all crackers and hackers considering taking their stab at the Yellow Brick Wall: please don't do something that'll get some poor son of a bitch behind the firewall jailed or executed. Perhaps asking someone to be morally immoral is a contradiction, I don't know, but the fewer innocents involved the better.
We are at war with Eastasia. We have always been at war with Eastasia. Minitruth crimethink doubleplus ungood.
I have to side with the "tinfoil" crowd on this: our President may be an idiot himself but the rest of the government is not. They are intellignet...very, very intelligent. It also takes a certain mindset to do well in the ultra-high-security arena, the kind of mindset that uses misinformation and purposeful leaks as standard tools of the trade. This looks like a perfectly-executed bait-and-switch, and people are playing right into their hands. Critical thinking is a must, people!
> A similar effect is true of global temperature. Despite global warming, there are areas of the earth that are coolear. However, the global average is
> up. Note that temperatures at the poles can be affected very dramatically, the average at the north pole by as much as 8 degrees. This obviously has a
> greater impact on the polar ice than a 1 degree rise would have had.
This makes perfect sense if you consider that it takes a lot less heat to melt ice (80 cal/g) than to vaporize water (540 cal/g). Of course the poles are going to show the effects first. And while the North Pole's ice melting wouldn't be a catastrophe as far as sea level goes (it already displaces its own weight), that water is much less saline and will screw with the thermohaline circulation something fierce. In English, the less-salty water will mess with concentration gradients that drive currents like the Gulf Stream. Know why London isn't 40 below in May despite being at the same latitude as Siberia? Yep, it receives energy from the warm limb of the Gulf Stream.
Ice melting off the Antarctic and Greenland, though, *will* cause sea level change because it's being held up by the land, not by buoyant forces. It will, of course, have the same pernicious effects on the ocean currents as melting icebergs. I'm amazed people don't take phase change into account when considering things like this; the poles are the places that will show climate change fastest and hardest.
I really don't think MS is going to disappear anytime soon, unfortunately. I for one would be literally jumping up and down howling like a blue-assed baboon if they did, but if nothing else the sheer amount of vendor lock-in they're already perpetrated will keep them going at least 5 years longer.
.doc except the boys at MS and the format itself is a moving target (backwards incompatibility anyone?) Add that to what they did to the open document format idea, and you have the perfect crapstorm. Microsoft may actually be kept alive by its office software even if the OS division founders. In summary, I don't see them going anywhere anytime soon, but with any luck they are going to pay for their sins and pay dearly...
Keep in mind they have iron-fisted OEM policies, where they basically say "You bundle Windows with your computers, or you lose the licensing, capice?" Even if Vista turns out to be a complete pile of horse buns, which it probably will, it's still going to see massive distribution because of that.
And on the business front, it's all about the Office. I love ABIWord and even OO.org 2.0, but the fact remains no one knows exactly how to open a
For what it's worth, it was my Catholic upbringing that almost made me an agnostic. Science brought me back into the fold, though as a very strong Deist instead of a Catholic. I've noticed that many scientists, as pointed out above, are or become deeply spiritual (though not religious--there is a very fundamental difference) after enough time studying their field, especially if it's something like cosmology or biology. Newton, Einstein, all the great minds...I wouldn't dare presume to put myself up there as I've not yet even finished university, but it seems interesting that so many serious scientists trend this way...
I agree with the parent and another post higher up that the religious/institutional end of it seems to be more a social engineering scheme than anything, an institution designed to solidify and keep power for the ruling group. That's all well and good (not really), but I wish they'd come right out and say it, instead of insulting everyone in the fold with a triple-digit IQ...
*nods* And for the naysayers, three words: Pebble Bed Reactor. No nuclear energy is going to be waste-free, but we've come a long way from U235 rods in light-water-moderated reactors. With a good pebble bed program and enough space for the still-"hot"-but-not-for-millions-of-years waste the US could have a viable nuclear program.
Why is this being called trolling? This, people, is *market research* for the OSS developer community. This is a self-described hardened Windows user who had the courage and the intiative to try Linux, and gave a list of valid criticisms. Notice that his basic points weren't about applications (except the FM); they were about *ease of maintainence.* This is the demographic the OSS dev-comm has to market to, and while what he's said is nothing they haven't heard before, improvement in these areas is what Linux needs to claim more mindshare.
For all that people accuse Theo de Raadt of being abrasive, singleminded, and ideological, we NEED people like him. It's the de Raadts and the Stallmans, the ones who refuse to back down in the face of corporate and (soon) government pressure, who make the open source movement possible. I think this very same bloody-minded stubbornness is one of the most important things he brings to the table. I admire his convictions and worry about his blood pressure. Theo, if you're reading this: don't give up!
Once again, we have a case of someone confusing Linux (the kernel) with a fullblown distro. I'm not surprised Negroponte thinks Linux is too fat if the project partner is RedHat; yes, RedHat is one of the few institutions able to pull this off, but their distro is not meant for this kind of hardware. Especially not their modern distros.
Seriously...all these machines are the exact same spec, right? Have a single production server at the project's home base install Gentoo in a chroot environment, with GCC set to -Os -fomit-frame-pointer -march=k6 (or whatever it is Geode CPUs use), and build a minimal system. Modular X.org so it only has the stuff for the relevant video card, Nautilus and Gnome-Panel but NOT Gnome itself, and Fluxbox as the WM with the Panel running on top of it. AbiWord and GNUmeric over Openoffice.org, iDesk for icons, Aterm instead of Gnome-terminal, etc. Then strip out Portage, GCC, and any other dev tools that aren't going to be used. I'd be surprised if that whole thing took 700 MB. Load it onto all the machines, and theyre good to go.
As far as the kernel goes, since (I believe) 2.6.15 certain patchsets have an option to pass GCC -Os instead of -O2 for building the kernel. It'll still probably take more memory than a comparable 2.4.x kernel but that's a start. It's all a matter of making intelligent choices, and the more I read about this project the less I tink Negroponte understands the technical aspects of this...
Put simply, Gentoo is not about speed. Not the way the "compiler ricers" would have you believe. Yes, the compiler can squeeze sometimes significant speed boosts out of the software if you pet it just so, but in my opinion if you want a stable system anything more than -O2 -march=(your arch) -pipe -fomit-frame-pointer is asking for trouble. It's the ability to start a minimum of services that does it (and rc-update is the best tool I've seen yet for this purpose). The real speed bottleneck in binary distros I can see is that so much is running by default; a very minimalist Debian should be able to perform nearly neck-and-neck with a sanely optimized Gentoo running the same apps and services.
No, what does it for me is the control. Gentoo lets you control almost everything, and it makes you learn to use the command line to do it. The lack of GUI tools frightens some people, but the flip side of that is that Gentoo makes you learn how Linux works; by the time you've figured out how to make a potentially dangerous tweak, odds are you know what you're doing. An example is the kernel: you start with a stock Gentoo-patched kernel, but you're immediately able to download several patch variants and nothing at all stops you from going to kernel.org, grabbing a vanilla release and your favorite patches, and applying those. You might not know or be told you can do that, but if you do know you won't be stopped.
Then there's the USE flags and the ability to mix stable and unstable packages. You're not tied to a bunch of "repositories;" there's ONE portage tree and you pick the fruit you feel like eating. Then, you prepare it exactly the way you want it. Want an "unstable" (~arch) version of a package? 'echo package-category/packagename ~arch >> /etc/portage/package.keywords' and then emerge it as normal. Want XMMS with ogg/vorbis support but not mp3? 'USE="-mp3 oggvorbis" emerge -av xmms.' Yes, you pay for his flexibility in compile time and in just plain needing to know more stuff, but to many people it's worth it.
Now, Gentoo has its share of problems too. The same flexibility that allows for incremental updates and mixing stable/unstable packages can break a production server, where stability is the most important factor. etc-update is an ugly hack and even dispatch-conf isn't much better. And the build time for big packages is a killer on anything but a modern machine (though the GRP partly solves that).
In this case, it's a question of using the right tool for the job. You could make Gentoo the "right tool" but in time-critical situations you just want something that works, and this is where Debian shines. Everyone knows the jokes ("Debian is old, and Debian stable is older than your computer/car/mother"), but the delay means Debian is mature and time-tested.
You could run a production server on Gentoo (my friend does), but you'd have to be very strict about what gets updated when; making it a policy to do no updating but 'emerge sync && emerge -uD world' on the days a new release is announced, for example. In that situation I would rather run Debian stable, even if I have to go through the entire system with a fine-toothed comb and disable all the stuff I don't want that got installed anyway. You wouldn't use a surgical scalpel to cut a steak, so why use a distro whose focus is microscopic tweakability on a system whose purpose is uptime?