I got 1490/1600 on the SAT. Based on that, will you trust me to run your company as it's Chief Executive Officer? Come on, you can trust me. I passed a standardized test. What could possibly go wrong?
Socialism necessitates a higher level of bureaucracy to regulate everything, like Communism, but to a lesser degree. If the government were more libertarian, it would be smaller, and simpler. We'd just have a defensive military reserve, a police force, and a tax authority. Even America's current Keynesian take on Capitalism has a more complicated (and therefore more bureaucratic) system; we have zoning authorities, welfare distribution, city planning commissions, a department of agriculture... more control breeds more power, and larger size breeds more opportunities for someone to be corrupted by that power.
I suppose I was assuming that if it had the largest market share, that would have only been feasible through it becoming a desktop utility "brand" like Windows has. As in, Linux itself, the kernel, won't become the most widely distributed OS, but some specific user-friendly distro of it, like Ubuntu, would become that OS, and therefore, as a single system (like Windows) it would be subject to that vulnerability.
Although I do get what you're driving at now. I'll rephrase; whenever 90% of the population uses an identical OS (even if that OS if based on Linux, or anything else "not Winblows"), that OS will develop the largest share of malicious code. To reiterate, Windows doesn't suck, it's highly functional; it's just the biggest target out there for hackers.
in order for Windows to have a "brand" it can market, it has to have a coherent set of services and applications which are identified with it. This fixed set becomes a target
I said:
if you wrote a virus, would you rather design it to attack 90% of the OSes in the wild, or 2%?
No one exploit is going to be broad enough even to get most of them, and you can't say that about any version of Windows.
Isn't that basically a summation of my original point? There's just no incentive to the hacker to write a specialized virus, unless they have a very specific target or motivation, so Winblows gets all of the hijack-your-bank-account keylogging trojans?
That's funny, I've always had good experiences with the customer service at Fry's. Of course, there are two possible reasons for this; I always know exactly what I'm looking for (or at least what questions to ask), and we're discussing the Fry's in Oregon. Northwesterners tend to be pretty amicable.
I got modded flamebait and contradicted twice, but nobody has offered any evidence whatsoever.
I'm not a computer scientist or programmer. I study economics. I'm making my inference based on logical conjecture.
I'd love it if a real programmer chimed in and explained why Windows is "so easy to 0wn" as it is compared to Linux. And I want to hear solid architectural reasons; "Windows lusers are more likely to run an infected.exe on their machine because they think it's a picture" is not a sufficient reason, since it follows that if all of those Windows lusers started using Linux instead, they'd still run infected files like giddy schoolchildren.
So what gives? Is there a reason that Windows is "easier to crack" other than the economy of scale involved in writing a virus for the most ubiquitous operating system out there? Or are all of the "this is not true" people just trying to minimize their own cognitive dissonance by ignoring reason?
Some help would be appreciated. Also, to whoever modded me flamebait; there isn't a "-1 disagree" option for a reason. You would have been better off replying with an insightful comment.
If Linux had the greatest market share, it would have the most viruses. Windows is just a big target. Think about it -- if you wrote a virus, would you rather design it to attack 90% of the OSes in the wild, or 2%?
The smugness of the "windows has viruses because it sucks" position is a really poorly thought-out one.
I have more to say about this but I have to go to work. Expect a lengthy follow-up reply. You're a fool if you think of Saddam's soldiers as anything but people. They all joined up for different reasons. Maybe they were forced to, maybe they needed money to feed their family, maybe they were living on the street, who knows. Do you think that the American soldiers who killed villagers in Vietnam were evil? No. And every soldier is somebody's husband, son, brother, and father. It only took about 20-100 pissed off, irrational people to perpetrate the CRIMINAL ATTACK (not declaration of war) that was 9/11. If we go and kill a few tens of thousands of enemy soldiers, what do you think the likelihood is that we create 20-100 irrational, pissed off young adults who want to do 9/11 all over again? Again, I don't give a fuck about those sand niggers, but the war was inefficient, both in terms of resources and in terms of diplomatic favor lost. If we don't stop killing aimlessly in retaliation, the cycle of violence will continue. And I don't want a cycle of violence. I would rather spend the money here, educating our young people, developing technologies, and putting ourselves in a position to hire all of those backwards sand niggers to work in piss-poor conditions for $1/hour. Wouldn't that be more efficient?
In summary, people opposing the war on moral grounds are self-righteous moralists, and people supporting the war on moral grounds are short-sighted idiots. I oppose the war because we should have had a better strategy for victory. "Mission Accomplished" my ass. What a fucking loser our president is (was).
I'm pretty sure you're mistaken in thinking that "horrific" and "justified" are mutually exclusive propositions. It might have been "justified" if we had decided to draw-and-quarter Adolf Hitler, but that wouldn't mean that watching it wouldn't be horrific.
And that's besides the whole argument of whether or not the war really was "justified." Even if it was "justified," (and I am an agnostic, amoral nihilist, so that word means nothing to me), it was still a piss-poor decision. We would have been better off if we'd spent that money on research grants. Any kind of research grant.
What if we took $200 billion dollars, and instead of waging war with Iraq, decided to design an electrically-powered Gauss tank? Wouldn't we be way, way ahead of where we are now?
Opportunity cost, man. Opportunity cost. Don't let your bloodlust overwhelm your reason. We need to kill those sand-niggers efficiently, and throwing tanks at them today isn't as efficient as investing the money domestically in order to widen the technology gap tomorrow.
Everybody's so worried about dependence on fossil fuels; so why aren't we hard at work designing a tank that doesn't use gasoline and oil?
Agreed. If we legalized prostitution, the "sex service" industry would become safer in terms of health risks, and it would ALSO reduce unemployment! It's win/win for everybody!
congrats on making your choice for being an equal member of the nations of earth, instead of the arrogance of the last 8 years
That's what pisses me off. It was the arrogance of our warhawk representatives that caused that, and some number of short-sighted, bloodthirsty "patriots" who supported them.
There have been plenty, PLENTY of Americans who were horrified by the war on day one; don't take them to task over what Bush did. Don't accuse them of arrogance and not wanting to be an "equal member of the nations of earth."
Backlash from the war and the voting preferences of the next generation (many people who voted in 2008 were too young to vote in 2004) skewed the margins in Obama's favor, but he still only won by about 5%.
And all of us who voted for him were just as disappointed in Bush as the rest of the world was.
So no, America hasn't changed, and it's fucking self-righteous of you to welcome us "back to the world." I'm sorry, but fuck you. I get the feeling that if America is ever on the losing end of a really big war, against an unforgiving invader, 45% of the population is going to be punished for the actions of one man that 55% of the population supports.
You goddamn asshole. America is made of it's citizenry, not it's administration. The administration is changing, and that's good, but the political views of Americans all remain rather constant.
Stop bringing every American to task over what the administration does. For every American that likes the current president, I can find you one who loathes him. It's always that way.
Over 4,000 American soldiers have died, and that death tally doesn't even include the other side. When we respond to the murder of 3,000 of our citizens by getting that many soldiers killed again, and killing 30,000 or more in retaliation, yeah, it's horrific.
I don't think we should measure the horror of war relative to other wars; it is all a tragedy.
Obama is willing to sit down with our worst enemies and talk to them. That's the first step. Our foreign policy is usually to make demands; we often tell countries that we won't even enter diplomatic talks with them unless they agree to some up-front demands, like dismantling their entire nuclear program (N. Korea).
If I say "give me your gun, then we can talk" and the other guy says "no," do you think continuing to repeat "give me your gun, then we can talk" is going to get a different response? No; it's a deliberate attempt to avoid diplomacy. It's what the police would do - yell at a suspect to put down their weapon, and loudly, several times, so that nobody can call the cop a murderer when he shoots the guy.
That's fine for police work - but when we're talking about an international war, I think that's the wrong approach. We need to be willing to at least talk with other nations.
We never gave them any handout. When we freed the slaves circa 1880, we gave them nothing, no payment for their forced labor whatsoever. With no ability to get a job, many of them turned to sharecropping, essentially making them wage slaves.
If you're wondering why people in those gang-ridden areas are poor and uneducated and angry at the police, consider history, consider what their parents remember about racial conflict (parents born in the 1960's most likely), and what they were likely taught as children about history.
I wouldn't argue or vote for reparation payments myself, either, but I get the impression that lots of white people say "they're poor because they're lazy," which isn't exactly true. We have deliberately fucked their people sideways for hundreds of years; you think that doesn't affect the present? Institutionalized racial discrimination only ended maybe 50 years ago; believe it or not, things that affected your grandparents have a ripple effect on you. Just consider the Hilton sisters; they are multi-millionaires due to the actions of their grandfather, the founder of Hilton hotels who was born in 1887. Did blacks have the opportunity to found a hotel chain in 1887? That sort of power and investment is worth way, way more than the welfare payments over the past 40 years. In 1887, most blacks were illiterate, and that's because slaveowners deliberately kept them from learning to read or write.
Also, word to the wise: nihilism is rampant in modern-day society as a whole. It's just that those nihilists are more visible than others because for some reason they think it's profitable to tote guns around and deal (wrongfully) illegal drugs; it's not.
I know he can't man up on all of his big welfare and medical plan promises. But that's okay - I didn't want that shit anyway. I hope he's smart enough to get into office, see the financial problems, and instead of wasting all the money, honestly admit what he can and can't do.
I will be happy if we just bring our troops home. And Obama has a more enlightened and strategic approach to international diplomacy than Bush; not to mention that his skin color is closer to the worldwide average, which will make him a better diplomat for entirely superficial reasons as well.
Well, that's what you get for not nominating Ron Paul. I don't think anyone wanted to vote "bomb Iran man" into the White House after a horrific 8-year war.
Whether or not this proves to be true, not enough voters were convinced that even less regulation (and less taxes) are the solution.
A lot of people voted based on the war, not the economy. The Republicans have fucked up by acting like war hawks; even people like me, who would have loved to vote for Ron Paul over Obama, voted Obama just to keep "bomb Iran man" out of the white house.
We need to bring our troops home and repair our international image. Voting in a total welfare queen is worth that to me.
You're the arrogant one. Just because Obama is in office right now doesn't mean America has changed; do you think everybody here voted for Bush? That we all liked his foreign policy?
And everybody didn't vote for Obama, either. Lots of old folks who have always voted Republican voted McCain; the margins of our elections here are only about 5% or so of the majority.
I'm pissed at everybody in the foreign world for assuming that the president of the USA is somehow a representation and reflection of USA's citizens; mostly because, if somebody decides to lynch mob America, I don't want to be blamed for some dolt of a president we happen to have and all of the senile old geezers that voted him in out of racism, paranoia and selfishness.
Jesus christ. At least what I figured would happen, happened - the rest of the world will forgive all past transgressions, just because we have a black-skinned, diplomatically competent president now. Nevermind that all of the dolts who voted in Bush are still very much alive and still hold all the same backwards ideas.
You know, the sort of things our ancestors did to that race have ripple effects. They were systematically discriminated against all the way up through the better part of the 1900's. You should look into the racial discrimination of the Federal Housing Administration in the 1930's (they wouldn't give the new cheap mortgages, the FEDERALLY SUBSIDIZED, hand-out style mortgages, to any minorities). Then you should ask yourself why the average white family has more equity and assets than the average black family (it couldn't be history, right?), and THEN realize that having a lot of assets, say equity in your home, makes it easier to send your children to college if they weren't whiz-bang good enough to get a full-ride in scholarships and grants.
To call them a "persistantly" underperforming segment of society without realizing why they are the way they are, is simply ignorance and self-righteousness.
Speaking of persistently underperforming, you should use a spellchecker.
Slashdot Mirror
I got 1490/1600 on the SAT. Based on that, will you trust me to run your company as it's Chief Executive Officer? Come on, you can trust me. I passed a standardized test. What could possibly go wrong?
Socialism necessitates a higher level of bureaucracy to regulate everything, like Communism, but to a lesser degree. If the government were more libertarian, it would be smaller, and simpler. We'd just have a defensive military reserve, a police force, and a tax authority. Even America's current Keynesian take on Capitalism has a more complicated (and therefore more bureaucratic) system; we have zoning authorities, welfare distribution, city planning commissions, a department of agriculture ... more control breeds more power, and larger size breeds more opportunities for someone to be corrupted by that power.
I suppose I was assuming that if it had the largest market share, that would have only been feasible through it becoming a desktop utility "brand" like Windows has. As in, Linux itself, the kernel, won't become the most widely distributed OS, but some specific user-friendly distro of it, like Ubuntu, would become that OS, and therefore, as a single system (like Windows) it would be subject to that vulnerability.
Although I do get what you're driving at now. I'll rephrase; whenever 90% of the population uses an identical OS (even if that OS if based on Linux, or anything else "not Winblows"), that OS will develop the largest share of malicious code. To reiterate, Windows doesn't suck, it's highly functional; it's just the biggest target out there for hackers.
All the "garage inventor" needs is a working prototype; not an entire production line.
You said:
in order for Windows to have a "brand" it can market, it has to have a coherent set of services and applications which are identified with it. This fixed set becomes a target
I said:
if you wrote a virus, would you rather design it to attack 90% of the OSes in the wild, or 2%?
No one exploit is going to be broad enough even to get most of them, and you can't say that about any version of Windows.
Isn't that basically a summation of my original point? There's just no incentive to the hacker to write a specialized virus, unless they have a very specific target or motivation, so Winblows gets all of the hijack-your-bank-account keylogging trojans?
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power lost.
"Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied."
Alternative interpretation for you there.
Oh, the facts! Of course, why didn't I consider those before. Now it makes complete sense. *rolls eyes* You're not very helpful.
That's funny, I've always had good experiences with the customer service at Fry's. Of course, there are two possible reasons for this; I always know exactly what I'm looking for (or at least what questions to ask), and we're discussing the Fry's in Oregon. Northwesterners tend to be pretty amicable.
I got modded flamebait and contradicted twice, but nobody has offered any evidence whatsoever.
I'm not a computer scientist or programmer. I study economics. I'm making my inference based on logical conjecture.
I'd love it if a real programmer chimed in and explained why Windows is "so easy to 0wn" as it is compared to Linux. And I want to hear solid architectural reasons; "Windows lusers are more likely to run an infected .exe on their machine because they think it's a picture" is not a sufficient reason, since it follows that if all of those Windows lusers started using Linux instead, they'd still run infected files like giddy schoolchildren.
So what gives? Is there a reason that Windows is "easier to crack" other than the economy of scale involved in writing a virus for the most ubiquitous operating system out there? Or are all of the "this is not true" people just trying to minimize their own cognitive dissonance by ignoring reason?
Some help would be appreciated. Also, to whoever modded me flamebait; there isn't a "-1 disagree" option for a reason. You would have been better off replying with an insightful comment.
If Linux had the greatest market share, it would have the most viruses. Windows is just a big target. Think about it -- if you wrote a virus, would you rather design it to attack 90% of the OSes in the wild, or 2%?
The smugness of the "windows has viruses because it sucks" position is a really poorly thought-out one.
I sincerely hope he doesn't. It'd be too expensive. We just need him to bring the troops home and repair our international image.
I have more to say about this but I have to go to work. Expect a lengthy follow-up reply. You're a fool if you think of Saddam's soldiers as anything but people. They all joined up for different reasons. Maybe they were forced to, maybe they needed money to feed their family, maybe they were living on the street, who knows. Do you think that the American soldiers who killed villagers in Vietnam were evil? No. And every soldier is somebody's husband, son, brother, and father. It only took about 20-100 pissed off, irrational people to perpetrate the CRIMINAL ATTACK (not declaration of war) that was 9/11. If we go and kill a few tens of thousands of enemy soldiers, what do you think the likelihood is that we create 20-100 irrational, pissed off young adults who want to do 9/11 all over again? Again, I don't give a fuck about those sand niggers, but the war was inefficient, both in terms of resources and in terms of diplomatic favor lost. If we don't stop killing aimlessly in retaliation, the cycle of violence will continue. And I don't want a cycle of violence. I would rather spend the money here, educating our young people, developing technologies, and putting ourselves in a position to hire all of those backwards sand niggers to work in piss-poor conditions for $1/hour. Wouldn't that be more efficient?
In summary, people opposing the war on moral grounds are self-righteous moralists, and people supporting the war on moral grounds are short-sighted idiots. I oppose the war because we should have had a better strategy for victory. "Mission Accomplished" my ass. What a fucking loser our president is (was).
I'm pretty sure you're mistaken in thinking that "horrific" and "justified" are mutually exclusive propositions. It might have been "justified" if we had decided to draw-and-quarter Adolf Hitler, but that wouldn't mean that watching it wouldn't be horrific.
And that's besides the whole argument of whether or not the war really was "justified." Even if it was "justified," (and I am an agnostic, amoral nihilist, so that word means nothing to me), it was still a piss-poor decision. We would have been better off if we'd spent that money on research grants. Any kind of research grant.
What if we took $200 billion dollars, and instead of waging war with Iraq, decided to design an electrically-powered Gauss tank? Wouldn't we be way, way ahead of where we are now?
Opportunity cost, man. Opportunity cost. Don't let your bloodlust overwhelm your reason. We need to kill those sand-niggers efficiently, and throwing tanks at them today isn't as efficient as investing the money domestically in order to widen the technology gap tomorrow.
Everybody's so worried about dependence on fossil fuels; so why aren't we hard at work designing a tank that doesn't use gasoline and oil?
Agreed. If we legalized prostitution, the "sex service" industry would become safer in terms of health risks, and it would ALSO reduce unemployment! It's win/win for everybody!
congrats on making your choice for being an equal member of the nations of earth, instead of the arrogance of the last 8 years
That's what pisses me off. It was the arrogance of our warhawk representatives that caused that, and some number of short-sighted, bloodthirsty "patriots" who supported them.
There have been plenty, PLENTY of Americans who were horrified by the war on day one; don't take them to task over what Bush did. Don't accuse them of arrogance and not wanting to be an "equal member of the nations of earth."
Backlash from the war and the voting preferences of the next generation (many people who voted in 2008 were too young to vote in 2004) skewed the margins in Obama's favor, but he still only won by about 5%.
And all of us who voted for him were just as disappointed in Bush as the rest of the world was.
So no, America hasn't changed, and it's fucking self-righteous of you to welcome us "back to the world." I'm sorry, but fuck you. I get the feeling that if America is ever on the losing end of a really big war, against an unforgiving invader, 45% of the population is going to be punished for the actions of one man that 55% of the population supports.
You goddamn asshole. America is made of it's citizenry, not it's administration. The administration is changing, and that's good, but the political views of Americans all remain rather constant.
Stop bringing every American to task over what the administration does. For every American that likes the current president, I can find you one who loathes him. It's always that way.
Over 4,000 American soldiers have died, and that death tally doesn't even include the other side. When we respond to the murder of 3,000 of our citizens by getting that many soldiers killed again, and killing 30,000 or more in retaliation, yeah, it's horrific.
I don't think we should measure the horror of war relative to other wars; it is all a tragedy.
Obama is willing to sit down with our worst enemies and talk to them. That's the first step. Our foreign policy is usually to make demands; we often tell countries that we won't even enter diplomatic talks with them unless they agree to some up-front demands, like dismantling their entire nuclear program (N. Korea).
If I say "give me your gun, then we can talk" and the other guy says "no," do you think continuing to repeat "give me your gun, then we can talk" is going to get a different response? No; it's a deliberate attempt to avoid diplomacy. It's what the police would do - yell at a suspect to put down their weapon, and loudly, several times, so that nobody can call the cop a murderer when he shoots the guy.
That's fine for police work - but when we're talking about an international war, I think that's the wrong approach. We need to be willing to at least talk with other nations.
We never gave them any handout. When we freed the slaves circa 1880, we gave them nothing, no payment for their forced labor whatsoever. With no ability to get a job, many of them turned to sharecropping, essentially making them wage slaves.
The Time Value of Money
If you're wondering why people in those gang-ridden areas are poor and uneducated and angry at the police, consider history, consider what their parents remember about racial conflict (parents born in the 1960's most likely), and what they were likely taught as children about history.
I wouldn't argue or vote for reparation payments myself, either, but I get the impression that lots of white people say "they're poor because they're lazy," which isn't exactly true. We have deliberately fucked their people sideways for hundreds of years; you think that doesn't affect the present? Institutionalized racial discrimination only ended maybe 50 years ago; believe it or not, things that affected your grandparents have a ripple effect on you. Just consider the Hilton sisters; they are multi-millionaires due to the actions of their grandfather, the founder of Hilton hotels who was born in 1887. Did blacks have the opportunity to found a hotel chain in 1887? That sort of power and investment is worth way, way more than the welfare payments over the past 40 years. In 1887, most blacks were illiterate, and that's because slaveowners deliberately kept them from learning to read or write.
Also, word to the wise: nihilism is rampant in modern-day society as a whole. It's just that those nihilists are more visible than others because for some reason they think it's profitable to tote guns around and deal (wrongfully) illegal drugs; it's not.
I know he can't man up on all of his big welfare and medical plan promises. But that's okay - I didn't want that shit anyway. I hope he's smart enough to get into office, see the financial problems, and instead of wasting all the money, honestly admit what he can and can't do.
I will be happy if we just bring our troops home. And Obama has a more enlightened and strategic approach to international diplomacy than Bush; not to mention that his skin color is closer to the worldwide average, which will make him a better diplomat for entirely superficial reasons as well.
Well, that's what you get for not nominating Ron Paul. I don't think anyone wanted to vote "bomb Iran man" into the White House after a horrific 8-year war.
Whether or not this proves to be true, not enough voters were convinced that even less regulation (and less taxes) are the solution.
A lot of people voted based on the war, not the economy. The Republicans have fucked up by acting like war hawks; even people like me, who would have loved to vote for Ron Paul over Obama, voted Obama just to keep "bomb Iran man" out of the white house.
We need to bring our troops home and repair our international image. Voting in a total welfare queen is worth that to me.
You're the arrogant one. Just because Obama is in office right now doesn't mean America has changed; do you think everybody here voted for Bush? That we all liked his foreign policy?
And everybody didn't vote for Obama, either. Lots of old folks who have always voted Republican voted McCain; the margins of our elections here are only about 5% or so of the majority.
I'm pissed at everybody in the foreign world for assuming that the president of the USA is somehow a representation and reflection of USA's citizens; mostly because, if somebody decides to lynch mob America, I don't want to be blamed for some dolt of a president we happen to have and all of the senile old geezers that voted him in out of racism, paranoia and selfishness.
Jesus christ. At least what I figured would happen, happened - the rest of the world will forgive all past transgressions, just because we have a black-skinned, diplomatically competent president now. Nevermind that all of the dolts who voted in Bush are still very much alive and still hold all the same backwards ideas.
You know, the sort of things our ancestors did to that race have ripple effects. They were systematically discriminated against all the way up through the better part of the 1900's. You should look into the racial discrimination of the Federal Housing Administration in the 1930's (they wouldn't give the new cheap mortgages, the FEDERALLY SUBSIDIZED, hand-out style mortgages, to any minorities). Then you should ask yourself why the average white family has more equity and assets than the average black family (it couldn't be history, right?), and THEN realize that having a lot of assets, say equity in your home, makes it easier to send your children to college if they weren't whiz-bang good enough to get a full-ride in scholarships and grants.
To call them a "persistantly" underperforming segment of society without realizing why they are the way they are, is simply ignorance and self-righteousness.
Speaking of persistently underperforming, you should use a spellchecker.