Speaking frankly, I think the fears of code forking are unfounded. Linux is very good for high-performance clustering, but here at the Linux General Store, getting high-availability clustering has been a pain in the rear. TurboLinux's kernel patches to support high-availability clustering are an easy win for Linux, and a no-brainer for Linus. TurboLinux did the Linux community a great service by adding these patches (IMO).
Take up martial arts. No geek is going to think they have a chance in Hell with a six-time Karate champion (like Tove Torvalds), or a black belt in Tae Kwon Do (like Catherine Raymond).
Frankly, any claim of America's moral superiority to some other nation is a highly dubious one. The same applies to cultural superiority (one which I hear a lot of conservatives whip out).
I personally believe that moral superiority is something tangible; that there is a such thing as objective morality, and that the United States has violated it with foreign and domestic policies that are contradictory to the benefit of humankind in general and Americans in particular. We support tinhorn dictators in the name of oil (before, it was "fighting communism"), we let companies put cyanide and other poisons in our water, and we let the government walk all over our civil rights in the name of a drug war. The same can be said of almost any other country, and almost certainly every industrialized nation, over the last 100 years.
Claims of cultural superiority are simply fascist nonsense, since the measuring stick of superiority depends on the culture from which one measures.
The best that we can say about America is not that we are morally superior, or that we are culturally superior; but that the United States generally allows persons to seek their own path, with a minimum of interference in most cases. Whether this is good or bad depends on your yardstick.
This is a document to pay attention to.
on
Managing Geeks
·
· Score: 1
Our experiences at the Linux General Store are just as this document describes. We run an almost pure-geek shop, and we've run into a lot of the problems that this report describes. It's definitely worth paying attention to if you want to start a computer-related business.
While I regard anecdotal evidence as just about useless in a scientific or philosophical argument, I'd like to pipe in with another data point...
I've got a dear friend who was born with spina bifida. For those of you who don't know, spina bifida is disorder where the child is born with an exposed spine and/or braincase. This tends to run in families. Children with spina bifida lose some of their motor function, especially in the lower body. It used to be thought that spina bifida patients were mentally retarded. The standard treatment for infants born with spina bifida (in the early 1970's) was euthanization. In today's terms, SB is still regarded as a severe physical disability.
Fortunately, her father is a persistent SOB, and as a result, my friend not only stayed alive but taught herself to walk. She can walk short distances, or moderate distances when she wears braces. She graduated from the University of Chicago (nb- she's the only spina bifida patient known to have done this) and is currently living in Texas with her SO. She's technologically illiterate, but hey, that's life. She writes impressive poetry. (nb- I'm comparing to PhD's in English here.) The only way that I see her disorder limiting her is that it's damned expensive to afford things to make life easier -- leg braces, check-ups with spina bifida specialists (almost all of them are pediatricians -- there aren't a lot of adult SB patients in the US), and of course, transportation costs. Driving a regular car is impossible for most SB patients, since leg use is limited. Other than this, and the fact that I have to carry her up stairwells sometimes, it hasn't been a hell of an issue.
For me, it makes little or no sense to euthanize children with physical disabilities. In an world where what you know and how you can use your brain makes the greatest difference, I see any potential roadblock to a person's contributing to society (ie, euthanizing disabled children) as nothing more than pissing away valuable talent.
3. Promises of SMP.... Well excuse me for not running a superserver but most mid level and small businesses, lets face it they are the ones paying for MS licenses, will not need or require that level of service.
Actually, I'm sitting here in a shop with several SMP machines. All running Linux. In fact, they make awesome Quake machines. Let's see NT do that. (Remember, NT does not have DirectX.)
Python is just downright funny and clever too, so im not surprised its popular in the US, although looking at most US-produced TV you would have thought that clever was the kiss of death.
Hey, it's not our fault that Europeans prefer Baywatch over, say, Law and Order or Frasier...:)
Some of the python humor is very much british and Im surprised that americans get it. For instance the Romans Go Home bit in Life of Brian... when i was about 10 I had latin at school, the teaching method was pretty much the same as in that skit except that the latin master wasn't allowed a sword.
As a matter of fact, I had Latin in high school, and my instructor did bring a sword into class. Nothing like a gladius to make damn sure you remember how to conjugate in the subjunctive. (Oh yeah, anyone who has the chance, say hi to Frank Raispis for me.)
I think that much of British humor (I'm excepting Benny Hill here, no offense) catches on well with Geeks, especially American Geeks, because it doesn't insult our intelligence. Considering that much of American pop culture plays down to the lowest common demoninator, it's always a delight to see intelligent television, music, and fiction. All y'all on the other side of the pond might be surprised to know that Doctor Who and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy are also phenomenally popular amoungst American Geeks. Not to mention my favorite export from the UK, Warhammer 40,000 AD.
I can see it now.....homes wired to the hilt, including lights, garage door, security system... all maintained by a small, inexpensive box with some sort of free UNIX, commercial UNIX, or MS system running on it. The whole thing can operated through command line interface or though an X-based interface. Wonderful!
But what if your home security is as weak as most corporate network security? Next thing you know, your home system is infected with a virus (especially if it's MS based)......some cracker uses a buffer overflow exploit to get root, allowing for easy break-in, or worse, the haunted house from Hell...your house gets ping-flooded and shuts down for as long as it takes for your friendly neighborhood HomeOnTheNet(tm) representative to come by and reboot...some stupid script kiddie uses a downloaded executible to open the bathroom/bedroom curtains when your self/wife/sister/daughter (or husband/son/brother) is nekkid...there are all kinds of analogues to stupid computer security goofs. What are you gonna do, call in an expert to keep it secure? A lot of the so-called experts can't keep boxes secure today, as the archives on attrition.org should demonstrate.
What will save most people is the fact that their lives are just too boring to pay attention to. As for everyone else, they'll have to be on their toes, all the time, to avoid far more annoying cyberpranks than ever before. At minimum they'll need a secure firewall; if they're a celebrity, they'll need to hire a trusted system administrator who's an expert in maintaining secure systems -- and those aren't exactly easy to find. All in all, it makes me wonder who would want their home system on Internet in the first place.............
Um, it's not the Full Moon tonight. It's the New Moon. You know, the phase of the moon when it's completely DARK. The Full Moon is when it's completely.. well, FULL.
This is what happens when I'm spending most of my days and nights in front of a computer (or two or three as the case may be...)
I tend to agree with Bruce Schneider...Microsoft is probably not in league with the NSA to reveal all our secrets. But the CryptoAPI is still not trustworthy.
The strength of encryption is based not on how big the keys are (sorry, but 32kbit keys are just plain unneccesary), but on how hard it is to get the plaintext, based on the crypttext and other known information. If the secrecy of your credit card numbers depends on other people not knowing the algorithm, or the implementation, of your encryption, then your encryption is pretty darn weak. Once the algorithm leaks out (due to espionage or hacking), your secrets are out.
The best encryption for one to use has five components working for it:
The algorithm is known
The implementation is known (open sourced)
The details of the development are public knowledge (this is why I would trust Twofish over, say, 3DES)
The method has been analysed for possible backdoors and is considered secure
The keyspace is large enough to make brute-force search impractical
In the case of the CryptoAPI, we don't have an open-source implementation, nor do we know the details of the development of the CryptoAPI. Microsoft has all this information and isn't about to release it to anyone. Because of this, we don't know if the analysis of the CryptoAPI is sufficient. Therefore, we should consider Microsoft's CryptoAPI package untrustworthy.
Actually today is a day of some significance for pagan folks (again, like myself.) Why? Not because it's 9/9/99...as far as I'm concerned that's just another day in the calendar. Rather, it's because today is a full moon.
Wiccans and other neo-pagans have holiday cycles based on both solar and lunar events. Solar events (the Equinoxes and Solstices, plus four other holidays that occur roughly six weeks after each Equinox or Solstice) are considered major holidays, especially May 1st and October 31st. Lunar events (full moon and new moon) are minor holidays, usually calling for a ceremony in the evening.
Just FYI - the ceremonies usually involve nothing more spectacular than calling on the four elements (earth, air, fire, water), invoking a god and goddess, and sharing some food and drink. It's a nice way for a pagan to get back in touch with his/her spirituality, and to be amoung friends. Sorta like Sunday services for most Christians.
I think it's pretty much a given that George Bush would have had the same stand on encryption policy as Bill Clinton does. And the same would probably apply to Bob Dole, Al Gore, George W. Bush...
The simple fact of the matter is that the Federal government lies to itself in the name of power. Allow me to present two (non-crypto, non-geeky) examples to demonstrate my point:
During the Reagan years, the government refused political asylum to persons fleeing from torture and rape, because the dictators they fled from were in America's pockets instead of the Soviets'. Fascist regimes in Chile, Guatemala, El Salvador, Brazil, &c were conveniently classified as "democracies" and given millions in funding to support death squads, censorship, and the usual BS you get with any fascist dictatorship. (Of course, we were fighting Communism at the time; but you'd be hard stretched to prove that people were better off under our fascist governments than under their communist governments. At least the communist nations had decent education systems and better standards of living, even if no more actual freedom.)
We see this same phenomenon in the Drug War. Prominent judges and scientists have stated for years that we need to either relax or abandon our War on Drugs. Virtually every politician is scared to take their advice, because they would almost certainly lose the next election (or so the thinking goes). Meanwhile, officials in the Federal government ignore the advice of their own experts and continue to tell the public, the elected officials, and the media that all of the experts are wrong, and that it is worth our while to invade our most basic liberties in order to stamp out this enemy. Again, the enemy is overblown; the response is to over-react; the evidence and arguments for sanity are ignored.
Both of these phenomena would have occured under any administration. This is because they are sustained by elements of the government that are willing to lie to the President and the Congress to get their way. These same elements are the elements in control of the "war on crypto." These are the persons telling Congress, under oath, that the minimum time that the NSA could take to crack DES is seven thousand years; and the same persons who call the EFF "irresponsible" when they figure out a way to break DES in five days. These are the same elements who will ensure that nothing changes in crypto policy, except for continued erosion of our civil rights.
"Single geek guy seeks single geek girl. Likes: ANSI/POSIX C, GNU programming tools, vi(m), GNOME, flower arranging. Dislikes: Microsoft Anything, ties, conspicuous consumption. Seeking single 20something girl who knows the difference between df and du, an integer and an integral, force and momentum. Relative sanity an absolute must. Fax resume to: (...)"
One thing that this article points out, indirectly, is that honesty and responsibility pay. AT&T, by taking its share of the blame and being open about its problems, probably gained quite a few customers; MCI, by keeping quiet and shrugging off the blame, looks like it could lose some major clients.
We can draw a lesson from this. Most of the source of anger against Microsoft is the fact that they close the ranks and engage in finger-pointing when there's a problem, and attack the competition with FUD instead of concentrating on a better product. The Linux world, which is for the most part inherently honest (thanks to the Open Source paradigm), earns the reputation of a better product.
Another lesson to draw from this: it is better to be open about the strengths and weaknesses of Linux than to just plain Microsoft bash. But then again, this is already in the Linux Advocacy HOWTO.
This is an interesting "mental illness." I'm still trying to figure out how they determined that four hours a day or more constitutes addiction.
In my case, I'm in charge of documentation, training and publications for a small start-up company. Part of my job is being on the Web for at least four hours a day on an average day, including reading Slashdot, in order to keep track of what's happening with Linux and report on it in detail to the rest of the company. But with my free time, I'm doing other things: hanging out in cafes, writing short stories, enjoying the natural beauty of North Georgia, and sometimes stirring up trouble. And of course, I play with Linux and crypto an awful lot. It's not a cheerleader-level social life, but it's fairly healthy, given the circumstances.
And yet, despite this, it seems that my four hours a day of Internet activity is enough to get me scheduled (sp?) for therapy.
I suppose its easier to write up a new mental illness with a cookie-cutter diagnostic method than to take a look at the life that a patient is leading, and lead them on to a new, healthier life. Unfortunately, it doesn't necesarily mean that people's lives are going to improve any.
My thinking is that police will use a radar scanner as a way to get around having to obtain a search warrant. Why obtain a search warrant when you can search someone's house without even stepping on their property?
In many states, there are laws against premarital sex, homosexual sex, oral sex, anal sex, &c. These are almost never enforced because, as long as the act takes place between two consenting adults within a dwelling, the police can't just barge in and arrest people for breaking this law.
Now, let's put this scanner in the hands of the Jerkoff County, SC Sheriff's department. They drive down a residential street until they catch two people in close proximity, accelerated heartbeats...all the signs of copulation. Is there a married couple in there? A quick check of a countywide information system tells them that this residence belongs to a single woman with a teenage daughter from a previous marriage. Inspired by righteous morality, they break down the door and arrest the couple -- the single mother and her boyfriend -- for adultery.
The ACLU sides with the couple and fights the case all the way to the Supreme Court, eventually making it illegal for the police to use radar scanners without a search warrant. But the couple goes through years of Hell in the process -- and who knows how many other couples are busted the same way.
Just a note for LinuxPPC users: the G3 Mac doesn't load properly unless you remove USB support from the machine before install. This caused us some problems before one of our managers figured this out:)
This having been said, my only problem with the PPC architechture is that so many darn PPC machines still use one-button mouses...
Television is the electronic altar. It is a shiny bright cathode ray tube which, when stared at, slows down the metabolism to below sleep levels. We position our furniture around the television. We eat our meals in front of the television. We orient our lives around the television.
Television exists to sell cars and cookies to the masses in between episodes of Baywatch.
Television is one-way communication as opposed to the two-way communication promised by Undernet and Slashdot.
Television is content edited for consumption by the lowest common denominator, and the results are plain to see: Jerry Springer, Access Hollywood, tabloid "news."
The content of your television is determined by ratings groups concentrated in the Tennessee Valley. If you wondered why Max Headroom died after less than a season while Hee Haw went on for twenty years, wonder no more.
Television is the uninformed people's substitute for thought, directed to telling us what to think, when we should be concentrating on learning how to think.
Television has us believing that there is no alternative to the slow destruction of the environment and our civil rights.
Television sells us the war on drugs, the war on crime, the war on Arabs, the war on guns, the war on crypto, the war on ourselves.
Television discourages discussion by encouraging absorbtion.
Biafra used to say, "MTV Get Off The Air." We should take the whole thing off the air and start communicating with each other again. Who knows, maybe we'll learn something.
This can only be good for us in the long run. With every attempt on Microsoft's part to stretch their tendrils in to people's lives, the case for Free and Open Source software becomes stronger.
Consider this: you're an average consumer, maybe a little better informed. You are looking at two computers. One comes with Windows 2000, MS Office, MS Internet Explorer, and an MS Entertainment Pack. The other comes with Red Hat Linux 7.0, StarOffice 6.0, Mozilla 5.0; and is a bit more expensive, since it uses higher quality hardware.
You compare the prices, and you think maybe the Windows computer is a better bargain -- until you take a look at this little thing at the end of the price on the Windows box. $1299, plus $25.00 a month for software rental??? Compare this to $1400 for a Linux box, with $0 a month in software rental charges.
The sad fact is, I can easily see Microsoft making a killing off of software rental, which IMO is immoral and appalling; and I can see Software Rental Fraud laws appearing on the books of every state, making it a felony to defraud Microsoft out of their monthly checks. The major question in my mind is what role Linux will play in this new way of doing business.
Slashdot Mirror
Speaking frankly, I think the fears of code forking are unfounded. Linux is very good for high-performance clustering, but here at the Linux General Store, getting high-availability clustering has been a pain in the rear. TurboLinux's kernel patches to support high-availability clustering are an easy win for Linux, and a no-brainer for Linus. TurboLinux did the Linux community a great service by adding these patches (IMO).
Take up martial arts. No geek is going to think they have a chance in Hell with a six-time Karate champion (like Tove Torvalds), or a black belt in Tae Kwon Do (like Catherine Raymond).
Warning: I'm on a soapbox.
Frankly, any claim of America's moral superiority to some other nation is a highly dubious one. The same applies to cultural superiority (one which I hear a lot of conservatives whip out).
I personally believe that moral superiority is something tangible; that there is a such thing as objective morality, and that the United States has violated it with foreign and domestic policies that are contradictory to the benefit of humankind in general and Americans in particular. We support tinhorn dictators in the name of oil (before, it was "fighting communism"), we let companies put cyanide and other poisons in our water, and we let the government walk all over our civil rights in the name of a drug war. The same can be said of almost any other country, and almost certainly every industrialized nation, over the last 100 years.
Claims of cultural superiority are simply fascist nonsense, since the measuring stick of superiority depends on the culture from which one measures.
The best that we can say about America is not that we are morally superior, or that we are culturally superior; but that the United States generally allows persons to seek their own path, with a minimum of interference in most cases. Whether this is good or bad depends on your yardstick.
Our experiences at the Linux General Store are just as this document describes. We run an almost pure-geek shop, and we've run into a lot of the problems that this report describes. It's definitely worth paying attention to if you want to start a computer-related business.
does it have an Ethernet port?
Man, this thing doesn't even have a crimping tool.
While I regard anecdotal evidence as just about useless in a scientific or philosophical argument, I'd like to pipe in with another data point...
I've got a dear friend who was born with spina bifida. For those of you who don't know, spina bifida is disorder where the child is born with an exposed spine and/or braincase. This tends to run in families. Children with spina bifida lose some of their motor function, especially in the lower body. It used to be thought that spina bifida patients were mentally retarded. The standard treatment for infants born with spina bifida (in the early 1970's) was euthanization. In today's terms, SB is still regarded as a severe physical disability.
Fortunately, her father is a persistent SOB, and as a result, my friend not only stayed alive but taught herself to walk. She can walk short distances, or moderate distances when she wears braces. She graduated from the University of Chicago (nb- she's the only spina bifida patient known to have done this) and is currently living in Texas with her SO. She's technologically illiterate, but hey, that's life. She writes impressive poetry. (nb- I'm comparing to PhD's in English here.) The only way that I see her disorder limiting her is that it's damned expensive to afford things to make life easier -- leg braces, check-ups with spina bifida specialists (almost all of them are pediatricians -- there aren't a lot of adult SB patients in the US), and of course, transportation costs. Driving a regular car is impossible for most SB patients, since leg use is limited. Other than this, and the fact that I have to carry her up stairwells sometimes, it hasn't been a hell of an issue.
For me, it makes little or no sense to euthanize children with physical disabilities. In an world where what you know and how you can use your brain makes the greatest difference, I see any potential roadblock to a person's contributing to society (ie, euthanizing disabled children) as nothing more than pissing away valuable talent.
Just my two cents.
3. Promises of SMP .... Well excuse me for not running a superserver but most mid level and small businesses, lets face it they are the ones paying for MS licenses, will not need or require that level of service.
Actually, I'm sitting here in a shop with several SMP machines. All running Linux. In fact, they make awesome Quake machines. Let's see NT do that. (Remember, NT does not have DirectX.)
Python is just downright funny and clever too, so im not surprised its popular in the US, although looking at most US-produced TV you would have thought that clever was the kiss of death.
:)
Hey, it's not our fault that Europeans prefer Baywatch over, say, Law and Order or Frasier...
Some of the python humor is very much british and Im surprised that americans get it. For instance the Romans Go Home bit in Life of Brian... when i was about 10 I had latin at school, the teaching method was pretty much the same as in that skit except that the latin master wasn't allowed a sword.
As a matter of fact, I had Latin in high school, and my instructor did bring a sword into class. Nothing like a gladius to make damn sure you remember how to conjugate in the subjunctive. (Oh yeah, anyone who has the chance, say hi to Frank Raispis for me.)
I think that much of British humor (I'm excepting Benny Hill here, no offense) catches on well with Geeks, especially American Geeks, because it doesn't insult our intelligence. Considering that much of American pop culture plays down to the lowest common demoninator, it's always a delight to see intelligent television, music, and fiction. All y'all on the other side of the pond might be surprised to know that Doctor Who and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy are also phenomenally popular amoungst American Geeks. Not to mention my favorite export from the UK, Warhammer 40,000 AD.
It appears that someone mixed about 6 times too much uranium into a fuel processing tank.
Must have been a mistake converting to Metric.
I can see it now.....homes wired to the hilt, including lights, garage door, security system... all maintained by a small, inexpensive box with some sort of free UNIX, commercial UNIX, or MS system running on it. The whole thing can operated through command line interface or though an X-based interface. Wonderful!
But what if your home security is as weak as most corporate network security? Next thing you know, your home system is infected with a virus (especially if it's MS based)......some cracker uses a buffer overflow exploit to get root, allowing for easy break-in, or worse, the haunted house from Hell...your house gets ping-flooded and shuts down for as long as it takes for your friendly neighborhood HomeOnTheNet(tm) representative to come by and reboot...some stupid script kiddie uses a downloaded executible to open the bathroom/bedroom curtains when your self/wife/sister/daughter (or husband/son/brother) is nekkid...there are all kinds of analogues to stupid computer security goofs. What are you gonna do, call in an expert to keep it secure? A lot of the so-called experts can't keep boxes secure today, as the archives on attrition.org should demonstrate.
What will save most people is the fact that their lives are just too boring to pay attention to. As for everyone else, they'll have to be on their toes, all the time, to avoid far more annoying cyberpranks than ever before. At minimum they'll need a secure firewall; if they're a celebrity, they'll need to hire a trusted system administrator who's an expert in maintaining secure systems -- and those aren't exactly easy to find. All in all, it makes me wonder who would want their home system on Internet in the first place.............
When can we expect an After-y2k book?
Um, it's not the Full Moon tonight. It's the New Moon. You know, the phase of the moon when it's completely DARK. The Full Moon is when it's completely.. well, FULL.
This is what happens when I'm spending most of my days and nights in front of a computer (or two or three as the case may be...)
The strength of encryption is based not on how big the keys are (sorry, but 32kbit keys are just plain unneccesary), but on how hard it is to get the plaintext, based on the crypttext and other known information. If the secrecy of your credit card numbers depends on other people not knowing the algorithm, or the implementation, of your encryption, then your encryption is pretty darn weak. Once the algorithm leaks out (due to espionage or hacking), your secrets are out.
The best encryption for one to use has five components working for it:
In the case of the CryptoAPI, we don't have an open-source implementation, nor do we know the details of the development of the CryptoAPI. Microsoft has all this information and isn't about to release it to anyone. Because of this, we don't know if the analysis of the CryptoAPI is sufficient. Therefore, we should consider Microsoft's CryptoAPI package untrustworthy.
Actually today is a day of some significance for pagan folks (again, like myself.) Why? Not because it's 9/9/99...as far as I'm concerned that's just another day in the calendar. Rather, it's because today is a full moon.
Wiccans and other neo-pagans have holiday cycles based on both solar and lunar events. Solar events (the Equinoxes and Solstices, plus four other holidays that occur roughly six weeks after each Equinox or Solstice) are considered major holidays, especially May 1st and October 31st. Lunar events (full moon and new moon) are minor holidays, usually calling for a ceremony in the evening.
Just FYI - the ceremonies usually involve nothing more spectacular than calling on the four elements (earth, air, fire, water), invoking a god and goddess, and sharing some food and drink. It's a nice way for a pagan to get back in touch with his/her spirituality, and to be amoung friends. Sorta like Sunday services for most Christians.
I think it's pretty much a given that George Bush would have had the same stand on encryption policy as Bill Clinton does. And the same would probably apply to Bob Dole, Al Gore, George W. Bush ...
The simple fact of the matter is that the Federal government lies to itself in the name of power. Allow me to present two (non-crypto, non-geeky) examples to demonstrate my point:
During the Reagan years, the government refused political asylum to persons fleeing from torture and rape, because the dictators they fled from were in America's pockets instead of the Soviets'. Fascist regimes in Chile, Guatemala, El Salvador, Brazil, &c were conveniently classified as "democracies" and given millions in funding to support death squads, censorship, and the usual BS you get with any fascist dictatorship. (Of course, we were fighting Communism at the time; but you'd be hard stretched to prove that people were better off under our fascist governments than under their communist governments. At least the communist nations had decent education systems and better standards of living, even if no more actual freedom.)
We see this same phenomenon in the Drug War. Prominent judges and scientists have stated for years that we need to either relax or abandon our War on Drugs. Virtually every politician is scared to take their advice, because they would almost certainly lose the next election (or so the thinking goes). Meanwhile, officials in the Federal government ignore the advice of their own experts and continue to tell the public, the elected officials, and the media that all of the experts are wrong, and that it is worth our while to invade our most basic liberties in order to stamp out this enemy. Again, the enemy is overblown; the response is to over-react; the evidence and arguments for sanity are ignored.
Both of these phenomena would have occured under any administration. This is because they are sustained by elements of the government that are willing to lie to the President and the Congress to get their way. These same elements are the elements in control of the "war on crypto." These are the persons telling Congress, under oath, that the minimum time that the NSA could take to crack DES is seven thousand years; and the same persons who call the EFF "irresponsible" when they figure out a way to break DES in five days. These are the same elements who will ensure that nothing changes in crypto policy, except for continued erosion of our civil rights.
What's the alternative? Hell if I know....
"Single geek guy seeks single geek girl. Likes: ANSI/POSIX C, GNU programming tools, vi(m), GNOME, flower arranging. Dislikes: Microsoft Anything, ties, conspicuous consumption. Seeking single 20something girl who knows the difference between df and du, an integer and an integral, force and momentum. Relative sanity an absolute must. Fax resume to: (...)"
One thing that this article points out, indirectly, is that honesty and responsibility pay. AT&T, by taking its share of the blame and being open about its problems, probably gained quite a few customers; MCI, by keeping quiet and shrugging off the blame, looks like it could lose some major clients.
We can draw a lesson from this. Most of the source of anger against Microsoft is the fact that they close the ranks and engage in finger-pointing when there's a problem, and attack the competition with FUD instead of concentrating on a better product. The Linux world, which is for the most part inherently honest (thanks to the Open Source paradigm), earns the reputation of a better product.
Another lesson to draw from this: it is better to be open about the strengths and weaknesses of Linux than to just plain Microsoft bash. But then again, this is already in the Linux Advocacy HOWTO.
This is an interesting "mental illness." I'm still trying to figure out how they determined that four hours a day or more constitutes addiction.
In my case, I'm in charge of documentation, training and publications for a small start-up company. Part of my job is being on the Web for at least four hours a day on an average day, including reading Slashdot, in order to keep track of what's happening with Linux and report on it in detail to the rest of the company. But with my free time, I'm doing other things: hanging out in cafes, writing short stories, enjoying the natural beauty of North Georgia, and sometimes stirring up trouble. And of course, I play with Linux and crypto an awful lot. It's not a cheerleader-level social life, but it's fairly healthy, given the circumstances.
And yet, despite this, it seems that my four hours a day of Internet activity is enough to get me scheduled (sp?) for therapy.
I suppose its easier to write up a new mental illness with a cookie-cutter diagnostic method than to take a look at the life that a patient is leading, and lead them on to a new, healthier life. Unfortunately, it doesn't necesarily mean that people's lives are going to improve any.
How'd you find out about this law? Any idea where I can find similar information for my state (Minnesota)? I'd like to know if I'm breaking the law...
The ACLU has a list of laws regulating sexual behavior in different states.
My thinking is that police will use a radar scanner as a way to get around having to obtain a search warrant. Why obtain a search warrant when you can search someone's house without even stepping on their property?
In many states, there are laws against premarital sex, homosexual sex, oral sex, anal sex, &c. These are almost never enforced because, as long as the act takes place between two consenting adults within a dwelling, the police can't just barge in and arrest people for breaking this law.
Now, let's put this scanner in the hands of the Jerkoff County, SC Sheriff's department. They drive down a residential street until they catch two people in close proximity, accelerated heartbeats...all the signs of copulation. Is there a married couple in there? A quick check of a countywide information system tells them that this residence belongs to a single woman with a teenage daughter from a previous marriage. Inspired by righteous morality, they break down the door and arrest the couple -- the single mother and her boyfriend -- for adultery.
The ACLU sides with the couple and fights the case all the way to the Supreme Court, eventually making it illegal for the police to use radar scanners without a search warrant. But the couple goes through years of Hell in the process -- and who knows how many other couples are busted the same way.
Just a note for LinuxPPC users: the G3 Mac doesn't load properly unless you remove USB support from the machine before install. This caused us some problems before one of our managers figured this out :)
This having been said, my only problem with the PPC architechture is that so many darn PPC machines still use one-button mouses...
Biafra used to say, "MTV Get Off The Air." We should take the whole thing off the air and start communicating with each other again. Who knows, maybe we'll learn something.
This can only be good for us in the long run. With every attempt on Microsoft's part to stretch their tendrils in to people's lives, the case for Free and Open Source software becomes stronger.
Consider this: you're an average consumer, maybe a little better informed. You are looking at two computers. One comes with Windows 2000, MS Office, MS Internet Explorer, and an MS Entertainment Pack. The other comes with Red Hat Linux 7.0, StarOffice 6.0, Mozilla 5.0; and is a bit more expensive, since it uses higher quality hardware.
You compare the prices, and you think maybe the Windows computer is a better bargain -- until you take a look at this little thing at the end of the price on the Windows box. $1299, plus $25.00 a month for software rental??? Compare this to $1400 for a Linux box, with $0 a month in software rental charges.
The sad fact is, I can easily see Microsoft making a killing off of software rental, which IMO is immoral and appalling; and I can see Software Rental Fraud laws appearing on the books of every state, making it a felony to defraud Microsoft out of their monthly checks. The major question in my mind is what role Linux will play in this new way of doing business.
Any PAGAN geeks out there give me a hoot!