> In the US, we DO have a legitimate government, in the sense that the majority of voters have chosen it. That is as true today as it was when > anyone else was president.
You may feel that its so. I, on the other hand, feel that the voting system is completely gamed. Not only that but a recent rasmussen poll says that only about 20% of people feel that congress rules with the will of the people.
I too however feel that they are as legitimate today as they were under any president....not at all.
> Whether or not YOU voted for this government doesn't alter its legitimacy.
Agreed. Its the fact that they are willing to use violence to enact social policy, against non-violent people that makes them illegitimate, in my eyes. No amount of voting by any number of people will change that.
I love stop snitching. I just think of it as a gang fighting tool. That is the gang that calls itself a legitimate government, all the while stealing my money for torture programs, wasteful and uneeded wars, and tossing people in jail for the crusade on drugs. The "government" has, in my eyes, no more right to claim legitimacy than MS-13 with a track record like theirs.
They are easily responsible for more senseless murders. Their prisons put the people trafficking industries to shame. At least gangs like MS-13, if they have a problem with you, they just go out and kill you. They don't need to wrap it in a flag and wash their own hands by turning it into some drone flying video game.
> The reality is that there's a lot of information that doesn't belong in the public domain, and it's in the best interest of the > country/corporation/individual to keep secured.
For an indivudual, or a corporation sure. However, a corporation has share holders and/or trustees. There is no legitimate reason for a "corporation" to withhold information from them. They are the owners, the final deciders.
With a government, or at least, any organization that I am willing to consider as such in a legitimate fashion, the people are the share holders, we are the board. There is no legitimate reason to hide information from even the lowest of us. We OWN IT. It is OUR SECRET.
Keeping information (with the VERY narrow exception of individuals personally identifiable information like tax, employment, or social security records) is corruption. plain and simple. Justice Roberts claims the government deserves a lot of "leeway" in "national security" matters. I argue it deserves no leeway at all, ever, in any circumstance.
The single most important function of government is to provide checks and balances against its own corruption. Even defense should be secondary.
If the linden should crash and users exodus the second life servers, what is the world then? Surely there are things, there are names of people who owned things (before they left, for whatever reason) but... its a wasteland, a virtual ruin.
Without the people, its simply not "second life".
You can't really say that for most of the things people are talking about. Doom is doom. The maps are what they are, unless you change them. A cyberdemon is still a cyberdemon.
Whats interesting about the virtual worlds is, that unless projects like this come along, they wont even leave ruins. Their very availability has a cost associated with it, and once that upkeep stops, the entire world vanishes.
> Politics haven't been like that since (at least) the 1968 democratic national convention.
Maybe if you drop the 1 and add a BCE to that number. Politicians are the same scumbags today that they were when democracy and republic were invented.
I am not ignoring it, I am rejecting the moral relativism that argues that we should ignore our own shortcomings because our neighbors are even worst than we are. What they do isn't done in my name with my resources.
I don't recognize a moral duty to end evil in the world. I do however see a moral duty to not supporting evil.
> Are you sure of the age of *every* picture in your porn collection? For each picture can you direct an investigator to the appropriate Custodian > of Records? And are you sure the model didn't lie about their age to get the gig?
Well, why wouldn't you assume that to be the case. Afterall, I am sure that there has never been a well known public case of a girl who was a porn star underage, and then whose real age came out. Never!Ever!
You don't even need an internet connection to end up with "Child Porn" and not even realize it, its been happening for years.
> Hmm.. while I agree in principal that your statement applies to almost any government, I'm curious to understand why you single out the US gov., > when there are many more egregious governments out there. Aside from the obvious target that our government makes by its size,
For my part, I tend to be of the opinion that the actions of the people who wish to be able to legitimately claim to represent my interests is more important to me than the actions of those who don't. As such, yes, the North Korean regime is bad, but, nothing that they do, makes our actions better.
More to the point, when Kim Jong Il sends someone to reeducation camp for failing to trim his hair in accordance with a socialist lifestyle, he isn't doing it in my name, with money that he took from me. The same cannot be said for many of the actions (both within and outside the federation's borders) that I consider absolutely repugnant (like putting people in cages for providing the pot that other adults want to smoke) which is done, in my name, with my money.
SO I can't speak for anyone else but, thats why I give them a ton more shit than I do other regimes.
> 1) Just because MAD is not applicable to today's circumstances, does not make it a naive theory. It did exactly its job > in the circumstances for which it was created.
However, the expected outcome doesn't prove anything either. I am sure that many people in the US (less so in Russia, but I am sure still many) prayed for us to not go to war. That, clearly, also had the intended outcome.
The problem with MAD is that it assumes that a) one or both sides wanted to go to war in the first place and b) would have been otherwise willing to do it. Open war between the US and USSR, nukes aside, would still have been a very bloody and expensive conflict for both sides. As it is, our ridiculous proxy wars were bad enough.
Neither the US nor USSR can be distilled down to a pair of sets of ideologies or strategies. There were elements within both countries that wanted open war, elements that liked cold war, and elements that thought the entire thing was stupid. Frankly, I think that the very idea that MAD worked gives FAR too much credit to the war hawks and their paranoid delusions. (on both sides of the Iron Curtain)
> 2) If you write off Iran, Afghanistan and North Korea as "stupid", then you are a fool. Yes, their motivations differ > from yours - enough so that you clearly do not understand them. However, you're claim that they're suicidal needs some > support.
Very true. None are stupid, nor entirely united behind a single banner (though, the DPRK does make it quite hard to tell otherwise). Admittedly, I only know a few Iranians, but, the ones I know use the term "towel head" better than your average red neck, and tend to lament that their people are not still Zoroastrian (seriously). I can't claim that they are representative of the average person on the streets of Iran but... to think that Iranians make up some cohesive group with a single POV is... even more insane than some of their leaders make them look.
Yes yes, I assumed that part was obvious. Though, unless you exist within a point, thats not correct either. A beam from your eye to a spot caused by another light source would direct the beam back to that source. However, my hand and eye tend to not be in the same point in space.
I got a 300 mW laser a bit ago (burned out the diode when I tried it with a new power supply...oops)
What I found interesting was, shortly after I ordered it, and was waiting for the parts to arrive, I found myself quite preoccupied with the dangerousness of it. Maybe preoccupied is the wrong word but, I found myself frequently getting mental images of myself accidentally shining it on something reflective or allowing the spot and beam to line up (hint: when you see a reflective spot on a surface and shine the beam on that spot, it reflects directly back to your eye, best to try that out with one of the really wimpy lasers that wont damage your eye faster than you can blink).
It was almost like part of my mind was trying to mentally prepare itself for handling the dangerous item, and got me all loaded up with bad scenarios that would result in me, or someone else, blinded. It reminded me of some of the theories people have about dreams being a test bed for developing and practicing responses to danger in a safe environment.
I heard someone say once (it may have been Ira Glass on TAL but, I am not sure), "If I told you that I am basically a decent guy, you would instantly know that I am not to be trusted, and you should probably keep your kids away from me".
Overall, I don't think that reaction is as common as it should be, because the sentiment seems to be dead on.
I am certainly not the first person to point out that the politicians and commentators who get caught with prostitutes or having affairs, all seem to be the ones that crowed the loudest when someone else did it. The same goes for the ones who get caught with gay prostitutes or soliciting men, they so often seem to have opposed gay rights in some way, or even talked about how immoral homosexuality is.
Certainly, not everyone who has a problem with homosexuality or infidelity is an offender, I can't prove that by a long shot but, it does seem to be the ones who are loud mouthed about it, the ones with a particular interest in the cases of others, who turn out to be doing the same thing.
Video recording them interferes with their job. They have been using bogus reasons all over to arrest people for it. At the same time, its been the single most effective tool in history at catching cops acting badly. How does that saying go, "if you aren't doing anything wrong, what do you have to hide?"
Apparently, whats good for the goose isn't good for the gander, who knew.
> But it's not "cheating" unless you're engaged or married.
Even then, I know several married couples for whom its not cheating.
> If you want fidelity, you must ask for it.
And then hope to be one of the lucky few who gets it. Given how rare lifelong fidelity is anymore, you have to wonder why people keep deluding themselves that its normal or default.
> Don't take a poly from the agency you'd like to work for? Terrible advice.
Better advice: Don't work for anyone who has so little respect for you as a human being that they are willing to subject you to that as a condition of employment. Have some god damned backbone and dignity for gods sake.
The Court's intentions in Roe vs. Wade, where the "right to privacy" argument was first advanced, were good on the whole--but their legal justification was lousy. The case really had little to do with privacy in either sense, but instead of simply ruling the abortion to be legal (or illegal, depending on the law rather than their personal preferences) they jumped through hoops find some basis to throw out the anti-abortion side of the case, and the "right to privacy" was the result.
See this is where I don't get it. After hearing so much about it for years, I decided to go read the Roe decision. I like it a lot, however, the parts that I found most compelling had very little to do with privacy.
Quite simply, what I took from it was, that since any situation where the mother's life was in danger due to the pregnancy, she would have a valid cause to have grievance with the law and bring a suit to the court. Since such a situation would put her life in danger, and no court could guarantee her a resolution to the situation before it killed her, any law that did not at LEAST allow for the life of the mother would effectively deny her right to have her case heard and decided upon.
Its been a while since I read it but, thats how I understood it and I didn't really take a right to privacy from it.
No way. It would be about 20 times longer. See today, they hand it off to interns to write. The goal is to write everything so thick and deep, that NOBODY could credibly claim to have read it.
Now, maybe you mean "it would mean less and contain less protections". Thats absolutely true. As far as I can tell, the people in charge today would junk the entire bill of rights, from freedom of the press and right to bear arms, all the way down through.
I would be absolutely shocked if you retained any rights other than to vote in the already rigged voting system, and would probably gain a few pointless ones like an inalienable right to pay taxes.
> Why do you rate Windows the worst and Linux the best? What makes Windows so horrible to maintain? All you have to do is > pop-in a CD and install. After that the system usually has everything the user needs (web browser, Microsoft Office, etc).
Devil is always in the details. Actually, compared to a linux system, Windows is pretty, spartan. Everything a user needs? Office? Office is a separate product. Many linux distros install OpenOffice by default though, so thats a definite 1-up for Linux.
> And what makes Linux so easy? In my experience it's a pain in the ass - for example my Linux laptop refuses to execute flash > websites (like disney.com or tv.com). And I can't get it to talk to my Netscape ISP.
Well, mine has no issue. It still doesn't execute much flash since I use noscript and tend to feel that removal of flash represents lossless compression of data and an overall improvement of my web browsing experience. However, in those rare moments when I am heading to youtube or want to play a flash game, it seldom lets me down.
And um...Netscape is an ISP now? still? I mean... really? Different Netscape?
I would submit that most non-windows systems are also poorly managed.
The difference is monoculture vs diversity. Look at windows users, and you will find lots of people using the same tools. Outlook, as soon as a company installs exchange you can be sure that the vast majority will be using outlook to connect to it. You find a vulnerability in outlook, or word, or a system service, and you can suddenly hit huge swaths of machines.
Now, Unix? You have multiple hardware architectures, distributions of even similar systems like Redhat and Debian Linux have made different choices for default daemons for various services. A hole in pine or mutt may not effect evolution users, or thunderbird users.
So in addition to a smaller audience, you get a smaller percentage of that audience.
to put it in business terms, the ROI of windows vulnerability exploits is just higher. That is, unless you are targeting a specific system, in which case, well, I know that where I work, many more windows servers exist than the entire unix environment, but, the Unix environment has a higher percentage of the mission critical (or more to the point, patient care critical) servers.
So thats not to say there isn't definite ROI on such attacks, it can even be higher. However, I don't think that such attacks realy factor into this discussion since specific attacks on specific machines for their content is the exception rather than the rule for most systems/users.
Well the problem with having a somewhat nuanced and non-mainstream ideology is, that its very hard to talk about a lot of issues without going into a long diatribe about basic values and ideas and well... nobody wants to do that in every single conversation just to get a point across.
I am almost, but not quite, a pacifist. Not really, I fully believe in self defense, and the defense of others (who want to be defended, certainly if you jump in the middle of a boxing match to 'defend' someone you are not a hero, you are a dickhead) but, in NO WAY violence as a means to an end. Maybe in some extreme circumstances? Sure.
I have never said that some things shouldn't be crimes and shouldn't be punished. Or that some manner of government isn't ok with me. It certainly is, I could even be made to pay taxes and not complain (done it for years). However, violence is violence and the threat of it is NO BETTER, and I think that realization should inform EVERY law.
So a law against child molestation, murder, thievery, you will here no complaints from me. Locking up serial offenders of these things and removing them from society, sure. You do what you have to do and truely dangerous parasites are the exception not the rule.
Its when you get into Vice, drugs, prostitution, gambling, now you are just using the threat of violence and imprisonment to effect broad social policy, to force people to "act the way we like". The same goes for decency laws (who are you to say I need to wear clothing in public on a hot day? we were all born naked, I reject any notion of nude bodies harming anyone in any way that a clothed body doesn't).
Whenever violence is used in this manner, the person or group using it is, in my eyes, illegitimate, and unworthy of any support, on any level.
To this end, I am also suspicous of any attempt to centralize power, as it only benefits those who want to enact sweeping social policy and helps to divorce the making of rules and high level allocation of resources to their enforcement from the actual violence. It lets us sit back and make laws and use them as excuses, without having to think about the thugs we are sending into peoples homes to destroy their families.... over what?
drugs are bad, and I am going to prove it, because see, they lead to me breaking down the door of your house and forcing you into a jail cell....see how bad drugs are.
Its a ridiculous game, and I may be forced to play it, but, I will be damned if I don't bitch about the shitty rules at every turn.
Abuse is abuse, regardless of who does it or how much process they put around it. I see little to no difference here. Vice is vice and punishing vice is punishing vice. Its wrong no matter who does it, and wrong no matter how many people vote for it, its wrong no matter how many silly people in silly blue costumes and black robe costumes decide it must be done.
I was thinking the same thing. It's a really sick world. I also have crystal meth addiction but I'm not bothering anybody and don't have nagging parents telling me to get off the ice. I remembered when I was young I had my pipe taken away (parents thought that the pipe was the meth), little did they know I had a few spare pipes under the bed. Up all night in HS sleeping during class, but know what I still got A's. People are different, just because someone behaves different than the others you shouldn't lock them up if they are not hurting anybody or bothering anyone else.
There I fixed that for you...though you could substitute just about anything from prostitutes to religions. This is large scale social engineering. They are "culling the herd" like cattle. Traits that they want to remove, they remove. Just be glad they don't want to remove genetic traits or else you might find yourself castrated.
Its really in NO WAY different from what we do here. .
I know that I am supposed to think "Oh wow, they have internet addiction camps, how horrible" though... how is that any different from "Vice" laws here in the US? We punish Vice too, just different ones.
Slashdot Mirror
> In the US, we DO have a legitimate government, in the sense that the majority of voters have chosen it. That is as true today as it was when
> anyone else was president.
You may feel that its so. I, on the other hand, feel that the voting system is completely gamed. Not only that but a recent rasmussen poll says that only about 20% of people feel that congress rules with the will of the people.
I too however feel that they are as legitimate today as they were under any president....not at all.
> Whether or not YOU voted for this government doesn't alter its legitimacy.
Agreed. Its the fact that they are willing to use violence to enact social policy, against non-violent people that makes them illegitimate, in my eyes. No amount of voting by any number of people will change that.
-Steve
I don't really care. They are the biggest waste of my money out there. Talk about a group of people we don't need.
I love stop snitching. I just think of it as a gang fighting tool. That is the gang that calls itself a legitimate government, all the while stealing my money for torture programs, wasteful and uneeded wars, and tossing people in jail for the crusade on drugs. The "government" has, in my eyes, no more right to claim legitimacy than MS-13 with a track record like theirs.
They are easily responsible for more senseless murders. Their prisons put the people trafficking industries to shame. At least gangs like MS-13, if they have a problem with you, they just go out and kill you. They don't need to wrap it in a flag and wash their own hands by turning it into some drone flying video game.
Stop Snitchin!
-Steve
> The reality is that there's a lot of information that doesn't belong in the public domain, and it's in the best interest of the
> country/corporation/individual to keep secured.
For an indivudual, or a corporation sure. However, a corporation has share holders and/or trustees. There is no legitimate reason for a "corporation" to withhold information from them. They are the owners, the final deciders.
With a government, or at least, any organization that I am willing to consider as such in a legitimate fashion, the people are the share holders, we are the board. There is no legitimate reason to hide information from even the lowest of us. We OWN IT. It is OUR SECRET.
Keeping information (with the VERY narrow exception of individuals personally identifiable information like tax, employment, or social security records) is corruption. plain and simple. Justice Roberts claims the government deserves a lot of "leeway" in "national security" matters. I argue it deserves no leeway at all, ever, in any circumstance.
The single most important function of government is to provide checks and balances against its own corruption. Even defense should be secondary.
-Steve
Second life is the interesting one to me.
If the linden should crash and users exodus the second life servers, what is the world then? Surely there are things, there are names of people who owned things (before they left, for whatever reason) but... its a wasteland, a virtual ruin.
Without the people, its simply not "second life".
You can't really say that for most of the things people are talking about. Doom is doom. The maps are what they are, unless you change them. A cyberdemon is still a cyberdemon.
Whats interesting about the virtual worlds is, that unless projects like this come along, they wont even leave ruins. Their very availability has a cost associated with it, and once that upkeep stops, the entire world vanishes.
-Steve
> Politics haven't been like that since (at least) the 1968 democratic national convention.
Maybe if you drop the 1 and add a BCE to that number. Politicians are the same scumbags today that they were when democracy and republic were invented.
-Steve
I am not ignoring it, I am rejecting the moral relativism that argues that we should ignore our own shortcomings because our neighbors are even worst than we are. What they do isn't done in my name with my resources.
I don't recognize a moral duty to end evil in the world. I do however see a moral duty to not supporting evil.
-Steve
> Are you sure of the age of *every* picture in your porn collection? For each picture can you direct an investigator to the appropriate Custodian
> of Records? And are you sure the model didn't lie about their age to get the gig?
Well, why wouldn't you assume that to be the case. Afterall, I am sure that there has never been a well known public case of a girl who was a porn star underage, and then whose real age came out. Never! Ever!
You don't even need an internet connection to end up with "Child Porn" and not even realize it, its been happening for years.
-Steve
> Hmm.. while I agree in principal that your statement applies to almost any government, I'm curious to understand why you single out the US gov.,
> when there are many more egregious governments out there. Aside from the obvious target that our government makes by its size,
For my part, I tend to be of the opinion that the actions of the people who wish to be able to legitimately claim to represent my interests is more important to me than the actions of those who don't. As such, yes, the North Korean regime is bad, but, nothing that they do, makes our actions better.
More to the point, when Kim Jong Il sends someone to reeducation camp for failing to trim his hair in accordance with a socialist lifestyle, he isn't doing it in my name, with money that he took from me. The same cannot be said for many of the actions (both within and outside the federation's borders) that I consider absolutely repugnant (like putting people in cages for providing the pot that other adults want to smoke) which is done, in my name, with my money.
SO I can't speak for anyone else but, thats why I give them a ton more shit than I do other regimes.
-Steve
> 1) Just because MAD is not applicable to today's circumstances, does not make it a naive theory. It did exactly its job
> in the circumstances for which it was created.
However, the expected outcome doesn't prove anything either. I am sure that many people in the US (less so in Russia, but I am sure still many) prayed for us to not go to war. That, clearly, also had the intended outcome.
The problem with MAD is that it assumes that a) one or both sides wanted to go to war in the first place and b) would have been otherwise willing to do it. Open war between the US and USSR, nukes aside, would still have been a very bloody and expensive conflict for both sides. As it is, our ridiculous proxy wars were bad enough.
Neither the US nor USSR can be distilled down to a pair of sets of ideologies or strategies. There were elements within both countries that wanted open war, elements that liked cold war, and elements that thought the entire thing was stupid. Frankly, I think that the very idea that MAD worked gives FAR too much credit to the war hawks and their paranoid delusions. (on both sides of the Iron Curtain)
> 2) If you write off Iran, Afghanistan and North Korea as "stupid", then you are a fool. Yes, their motivations differ
> from yours - enough so that you clearly do not understand them. However, you're claim that they're suicidal needs some
> support.
Very true. None are stupid, nor entirely united behind a single banner (though, the DPRK does make it quite hard to tell otherwise). Admittedly, I only know a few Iranians, but, the ones I know use the term "towel head" better than your average red neck, and tend to lament that their people are not still Zoroastrian (seriously). I can't claim that they are representative of the average person on the streets of Iran but... to think that Iranians make up some cohesive group with a single POV is... even more insane than some of their leaders make them look.
-Steve
Yes yes, I assumed that part was obvious. Though, unless you exist within a point, thats not correct either. A beam from your eye to a spot caused by another light source would direct the beam back to that source. However, my hand and eye tend to not be in the same point in space.
-Steve
As I said in the original post:
Aside from that, it was pretty damned bright. I could focus it and burn pin holes in paper, but, not where the paper was white.
I got a 300 mW laser a bit ago (burned out the diode when I tried it with a new power supply...oops)
What I found interesting was, shortly after I ordered it, and was waiting for the parts to arrive, I found myself quite preoccupied with the dangerousness of it. Maybe preoccupied is the wrong word but, I found myself frequently getting mental images of myself accidentally shining it on something reflective or allowing the spot and beam to line up (hint: when you see a reflective spot on a surface and shine the beam on that spot, it reflects directly back to your eye, best to try that out with one of the really wimpy lasers that wont damage your eye faster than you can blink).
It was almost like part of my mind was trying to mentally prepare itself for handling the dangerous item, and got me all loaded up with bad scenarios that would result in me, or someone else, blinded. It reminded me of some of the theories people have about dreams being a test bed for developing and practicing responses to danger in a safe environment.
-Steve
I heard someone say once (it may have been Ira Glass on TAL but, I am not sure), "If I told you that I am basically a decent guy, you would instantly know that I am not to be trusted, and you should probably keep your kids away from me".
Overall, I don't think that reaction is as common as it should be, because the sentiment seems to be dead on.
I am certainly not the first person to point out that the politicians and commentators who get caught with prostitutes or having affairs, all seem to be the ones that crowed the loudest when someone else did it. The same goes for the ones who get caught with gay prostitutes or soliciting men, they so often seem to have opposed gay rights in some way, or even talked about how immoral homosexuality is.
Certainly, not everyone who has a problem with homosexuality or infidelity is an offender, I can't prove that by a long shot but, it does seem to be the ones who are loud mouthed about it, the ones with a particular interest in the cases of others, who turn out to be doing the same thing.
-Steve
And whats the latest line by the cops all over?
Video recording them interferes with their job. They have been using bogus reasons all over to arrest people for it. At the same time, its been the single most effective tool in history at catching cops acting badly. How does that saying go, "if you aren't doing anything wrong, what do you have to hide?"
Apparently, whats good for the goose isn't good for the gander, who knew.
-Steve
> But it's not "cheating" unless you're engaged or married.
Even then, I know several married couples for whom its not cheating.
> If you want fidelity, you must ask for it.
And then hope to be one of the lucky few who gets it. Given how rare lifelong fidelity is anymore, you have to wonder why people keep deluding themselves that its normal or default.
-Steve
> Don't take a poly from the agency you'd like to work for? Terrible advice.
Better advice: Don't work for anyone who has so little respect for you as a human being that they are willing to subject you to that as a condition of employment. Have some god damned backbone and dignity for gods sake.
-Steve
See this is where I don't get it. After hearing so much about it for years, I decided to go read the Roe decision. I like it a lot, however, the parts that I found most compelling had very little to do with privacy.
Quite simply, what I took from it was, that since any situation where the mother's life was in danger due to the pregnancy, she would have a valid cause to have grievance with the law and bring a suit to the court. Since such a situation would put her life in danger, and no court could guarantee her a resolution to the situation before it killed her, any law that did not at LEAST allow for the life of the mother would effectively deny her right to have her case heard and decided upon.
Its been a while since I read it but, thats how I understood it and I didn't really take a right to privacy from it.
What am I missing?
-Steve
No way. It would be about 20 times longer. See today, they hand it off to interns to write. The goal is to write everything so thick and deep, that NOBODY could credibly claim to have read it.
Now, maybe you mean "it would mean less and contain less protections". Thats absolutely true. As far as I can tell, the people in charge today would junk the entire bill of rights, from freedom of the press and right to bear arms, all the way down through.
I would be absolutely shocked if you retained any rights other than to vote in the already rigged voting system, and would probably gain a few pointless ones like an inalienable right to pay taxes.
-Steve
> Why do you rate Windows the worst and Linux the best? What makes Windows so horrible to maintain? All you have to do is
> pop-in a CD and install. After that the system usually has everything the user needs (web browser, Microsoft Office, etc).
Devil is always in the details. Actually, compared to a linux system, Windows is pretty, spartan. Everything a user needs? Office? Office is a separate product. Many linux distros install OpenOffice by default though, so thats a definite 1-up for Linux.
> And what makes Linux so easy? In my experience it's a pain in the ass - for example my Linux laptop refuses to execute flash
> websites (like disney.com or tv.com). And I can't get it to talk to my Netscape ISP.
Well, mine has no issue. It still doesn't execute much flash since I use noscript and tend to feel that removal of flash represents lossless compression of data and an overall improvement of my web browsing experience. However, in those rare moments when I am heading to youtube or want to play a flash game, it seldom lets me down.
And um...Netscape is an ISP now? still? I mean... really? Different Netscape?
-Steve
I would submit that most non-windows systems are also poorly managed.
The difference is monoculture vs diversity. Look at windows users, and you will find lots of people using the same tools. Outlook, as soon as a company installs exchange you can be sure that the vast majority will be using outlook to connect to it. You find a vulnerability in outlook, or word, or a system service, and you can suddenly hit huge swaths of machines.
Now, Unix? You have multiple hardware architectures, distributions of even similar systems like Redhat and Debian Linux have made different choices for default daemons for various services. A hole in pine or mutt may not effect evolution users, or thunderbird users.
So in addition to a smaller audience, you get a smaller percentage of that audience.
to put it in business terms, the ROI of windows vulnerability exploits is just higher. That is, unless you are targeting a specific system, in which case, well, I know that where I work, many more windows servers exist than the entire unix environment, but, the Unix environment has a higher percentage of the mission critical (or more to the point, patient care critical) servers.
So thats not to say there isn't definite ROI on such attacks, it can even be higher. However, I don't think that such attacks realy factor into this discussion since specific attacks on specific machines for their content is the exception rather than the rule for most systems/users.
-Steve
Well the problem with having a somewhat nuanced and non-mainstream ideology is, that its very hard to talk about a lot of issues without going into a long diatribe about basic values and ideas and well... nobody wants to do that in every single conversation just to get a point across.
I am almost, but not quite, a pacifist. Not really, I fully believe in self defense, and the defense of others (who want to be defended, certainly if you jump in the middle of a boxing match to 'defend' someone you are not a hero, you are a dickhead) but, in NO WAY violence as a means to an end. Maybe in some extreme circumstances? Sure.
I have never said that some things shouldn't be crimes and shouldn't be punished. Or that some manner of government isn't ok with me. It certainly is, I could even be made to pay taxes and not complain (done it for years). However, violence is violence and the threat of it is NO BETTER, and I think that realization should inform EVERY law.
So a law against child molestation, murder, thievery, you will here no complaints from me. Locking up serial offenders of these things and removing them from society, sure. You do what you have to do and truely dangerous parasites are the exception not the rule.
Its when you get into Vice, drugs, prostitution, gambling, now you are just using the threat of violence and imprisonment to effect broad social policy, to force people to "act the way we like". The same goes for decency laws (who are you to say I need to wear clothing in public on a hot day? we were all born naked, I reject any notion of nude bodies harming anyone in any way that a clothed body doesn't).
Whenever violence is used in this manner, the person or group using it is, in my eyes, illegitimate, and unworthy of any support, on any level.
To this end, I am also suspicous of any attempt to centralize power, as it only benefits those who want to enact sweeping social policy and helps to divorce the making of rules and high level allocation of resources to their enforcement from the actual violence. It lets us sit back and make laws and use them as excuses, without having to think about the thugs we are sending into peoples homes to destroy their families.... over what?
drugs are bad, and I am going to prove it, because see, they lead to me breaking down the door of your house and forcing you into a jail cell....see how bad drugs are.
Its a ridiculous game, and I may be forced to play it, but, I will be damned if I don't bitch about the shitty rules at every turn.
-Steve
Abuse is abuse, regardless of who does it or how much process they put around it. I see little to no difference here. Vice is vice and punishing vice is punishing vice. Its wrong no matter who does it, and wrong no matter how many people vote for it, its wrong no matter how many silly people in silly blue costumes and black robe costumes decide it must be done.
I was thinking the same thing. It's a really sick world. I also have crystal meth addiction but I'm not bothering anybody and don't have nagging parents telling me to get off the ice. I remembered when I was young I had my pipe taken away (parents thought that the pipe was the meth), little did they know I had a few spare pipes under the bed. Up all night in HS sleeping during class, but know what I still got A's. People are different, just because someone behaves different than the others you shouldn't lock them up if they are not hurting anybody or bothering anyone else.
There I fixed that for you...though you could substitute just about anything from prostitutes to religions. This is large scale social engineering. They are "culling the herd" like cattle. Traits that they want to remove, they remove. Just be glad they don't want to remove genetic traits or else you might find yourself castrated.
Its really in NO WAY different from what we do here. .
-Steve
I know that I am supposed to think "Oh wow, they have internet addiction camps, how horrible" though... how is that any different from "Vice" laws here in the US? We punish Vice too, just different ones.
-Steve