Not a problem on all Forums. At least one other I know of is not disrespectful but restricts religious and political posts to avoid problems.
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Linux because it works. No social or political motives in my decision to use it.
Always consider Occam's Razor
Rich -
OK back to the NSA reading our e-mails. Everyone who knows me says, "Simon you are so paranoid.". This is true, I am paranoid that the government --and not just the US-- my country as well, is too big and powerful for the good of the people. Let me break it down for you;
My friend Frank said, "Simon the only people the NSA look for are bad guys (aka terrorist) doing bad things. We live in Canada we are not even under US authority.".
The NSA and other agencies are not just one person. However for a moment let's ask what about a disgruntle employee who might get angry about something you said in a tweet or posted to Facebook. The employee has a virtual arsenal of "nasty" at their fingers to find out who you are, seek you out, and mess up your life. You might reply, "Oh but that can't happen, they have safe guards in place.". Recently last Halloween, Alicia Ann Lynch, a 22-year-old, dressed up in costume that sparked a frenzy on both Facebook and Twitter. People were so outraged by her costume the sent her death threats and even people on her friends list got death threats too. Other people went as far as digging up her home address on her state driver's license and posting it. Miss Lynch lost her job because of the flurry of hate projected and bad press, although her employer didn't seem to mind the costume at the time of the photo...
What does that story have to do with the NSA? That was just "ordinary people" on the web attacking and ruining a young girl's life over a poor choice of Halloween costume. Think of what a simple employee of the NSA or any other agency could do if they got upset with your online values? My point is you don't need to have a lot of power to do bad things and you don't need to be a "bad guy" to be a target.
My friend Kimberly once told me, "Simon you can't fight all the world governments." What she should have said or meant to say, "You can't fight the system.". You are the government and moment you forget that people like David Johnston, Stephen Harper, and Beverley McLachlin are PUBLIC servants is the moment you release your control to them. I am considered an activist being a member of Greenpeace and wrote some papers against logging in Canada. That might not attract the attention of some yahoos like the animal rights activist that threatened to kill Ted Nugent and his family for hunting deer. Yes there are nut jobs on both sides of the fence. I don't believe that change comes fast, but things do change. For the right or wrong reasons, people in the foreground who promote changes get hurt the worse. A primary example is the US history of John Brown who was hung for killing slave owners and their families. It would be another century after his death before race riots would erupt. So change is a slow process and hurts people on both sides but things do change.
For now, I don't just dive in with the mainstream on this gmail and yahoo kick. I don't Facebook, Twitter, or g+ either. I think Linux is better than Windows because I don't want the rest of the world to know more than I care to share with them. As for the NSA hacking email? Wouldn't be easier to add a key logger to someone's PC and read what they typed? With the wireless being so popular and being mobile wouldn't be easier to intercept the wifi traffic and read it? In my opinion, big number algos are not the solution, knowing exactly what is running on your PC is the solution.
Ok that is my rant for the day.
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Most people believe that the police are your friends and only want to help you. Such is NOT the case. Here is a video of a lawyer and a police detective explaining why you should NEVER SAY ANYTHING to the police: "Make NO statement to the police under any circumstance!"Originally posted by Simon View Post
"A nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.”
– John F. Kennedy, February 26, 1962.Comment
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Absolutes seem to me dangerous. One should not see the world as black and white. Not all police are the enemy. Not all authority is the enemy. Why should anyone be trusted if you beleive that. Now, I am not naive, trust but verify or verify and then trust.Linux because it works. No social or political motives in my decision to use it.
Always consider Occam's Razor
RichComment
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Not just forums. There has been an undercurrent of hostility against women in the FLOSS world for a while, but things seem to be improving a bit. The skeptic movement, another that tends to encourage opinionated people to occasionally forget about self-restraint, also struggles with hostility toward women. PZ Myers regularly writes about this on his blog.Originally posted by Feathers McGraw View Post
It's sad, really. This is the 21st fskcing century. People should not be categorized on things that are basically accidents: race, gender, sexual orientation, nation of birth.Comment
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Yes. Judge them on their choice of Linux distribution! That's what really matters.Originally posted by SteveRiley View Post
Windows no longer obstructs my view.
Using Kubuntu Linux since March 23, 2007.
"It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data." - Sherlock HolmesComment
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Hopefully we're moving in the right direction with more women in prominent positions, like the kernel developer whose name I can't remember (saw her on a YouTube video ages ago).
I think one of the best places to try and change things is in education... sadly, teachers (and everyone else) tend to expect boys to be better than girls at maths, science, IT related things. It has been demonstrated many times that the teacher's expectations of results have a lot of influence on the student's actual results. Get teachers to expect girls to be as good or better than boys, give equal encouragement to girls that show an interest, and the gap will close.
Eugh, as for the Myers / TAA thing, most of what I read by following those links and the links I got to from there show that both of them are mainly arguing ad hominem. I've actually seen the video by TAA that Myers mentions, the actual arguments he makes are pretty good (and not at all deconstructed by Myers, who dismisses the while lot as a whine). Then again, those quotations from the Reddit thread are disgusting. CBA with the rest of that feud...Comment
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Windows no longer obstructs my view.
Using Kubuntu Linux since March 23, 2007.
"It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data." - Sherlock HolmesComment
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So...when she invented the compiler, do you think she backdoored it?Originally posted by Snowhog View Post
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There was probably not a need to "back door" it because it was programmed using binary, there was no "login" or network connection, and it took highly trained people, mostly women, to run it. (EDIT: I forgot to add that it was the first electronic computer, so no other computer existed that could be used to hack into it!)
From Wikipedia and other places:
For many years after the ENIAC computers were always big and heavy, which is why, when I was attending the Barnes School of Business in 1959 to study "Data Processing", they were called "heavy iron", a term which later gave way to "main frames" because of the structure on which the component modules were placed. "Main frames" gave way to "racks" which contained stacks of computers (called "blades"). I haven't been close to that end of the technology since I retired so I don't know what terminology currently in use is. Something about "virtual"?The ENIAC contained 17,468 vacuum tubes, along with 70,000 resistors, 10,000 capacitors, 1,500 relays, 6,000 manual switches and 5 million soldered joints. It weighed more than 30 short tons, was roughly 8 by 3 by 100 feet of floor space, weighed 30 tons, consumed 160 kilowatts of electrical power.
In one second, the ENIAC (one thousand times faster than any other calculating machine to date) could perform 5,000 additions, 357 multiplications or 38 divisions. The use of vacuum tubes instead of switches and relays created the increase in speed, but it was not a quick machine to re-program. Programming changes would take the technicians weeks, and the machine always required long hours of maintenance. As a side note, research on the ENIAC led to many improvements in the vacuum tube.
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ENIAC used common octal-base radio tubes of the day; the decimal accumulators were made of 6SN7 flip-flops, while 6L7's, 6SJ7's, 6SA7's and 6AC7's were used in logic functions. Numerous 6L6's and 6V6's served as line drivers to drive pulses through cables between rack assemblies.
Detail of the back of a section of ENIAC, showing vacuum tubes
Several tubes burned out almost every day, leaving it nonfunctional about half the time. Special high-reliability tubes were not available until 1948. Most of these failures, however, occurred during the warm-up and cool-down periods, when the tube heaters and cathodes were under the most thermal stress. Engineers reduced ENIAC's tube failures to the more acceptable rate of one tube every two days. According to a 1989 interview with Eckert, "We had a tube fail about every two days and we could locate the problem within 15 minutes." In 1954, the longest continuous period of operation without a failure was 116 hours—close to five days.
In 1997, the six women who did most of the programming of ENIAC were inducted into the Women in Technology International Hall of Fame. As they were called by each other in 1946, they were Kay McNulty, Betty Jennings, Betty Snyder, Marlyn Wescoff, Fran Bilas and Ruth Lichterman. Jennifer S Light's essay, "When Computers Were Women", documents and describes the role of the women of ENIAC as well as outlines the historical omission or downplay of women's roles in computer science history.
That article didn't mention it, but when she was working with that 18,000 vacuum tube computer one of her programs stopped running, which she realized was caused by a mechanical or electrical failure. She went hunting through the hardware for the fault and found a moth which had shorted out a relay. She taped the moth in her journal and added the note "first real bug". The term "bug" had been used to refer to programming mistakes but removing the "bugs" was called "debugging" after Hopper's bug hunt.
"A nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.”
– John F. Kennedy, February 26, 1962.Comment
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I do agree and admit being open about your age, sex, origins, beliefs, etc. is still a bad move these days on the internet. I play a few online games and while most are immature 12 year-olds, there are some trolls out there that are old enough to know better. I once stated that my country of birth is Canada but my mom and dad are Japanese. The statement sparked a troll to accuse me for the bombing of Pearl Harbor. I only responded that my grandfather was born in 1943, so I seriously doubt any family member had much say in that action. During the last election in the states many of my online games were flooded with politics to the point my ignore list was growing by leaps and bounds. I don't see the point to playing a social game and being anti-social. But I guess it is hard for some to be friendly if you are blasting on some guy in player vs player.It's sad, really. This is the 21st fskcing century. People should not be categorized on things that are basically accidents: race, gender, sexual orientation, nation of birth.
Even if you chalk this up to just a bunch of children being childish, where do you think they learn this behavior? I know I take more after my mom, my dad is very anti-social and would be an internet troll by anyone's standards. It would be nice to wave the magic wand and make everyone see the light.
Meanwhile...
Steve
I heard it said that there's too much choice in Linux, but the truth is actually that there's too much duplication. I want to know how do you program an OS to be Satanic or Christian? While I am a member of the Church of England, some of those Satanic wallpapers I find appealing. So I am having mixed emotions about both distributions. LoLComment
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Run UbuntuCE on Sundays and run Satanic Edition the rest of the week. You know, just like most church goers. LOLOLOLOriginally posted by Simon View PostComment
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Thanks for your divine wisdom on this matter
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I looked into it a while ago, it seemed that the CE was mainly a censored Ubuntu, with the names of programs like Evolution changed...Originally posted by Simon View Post
Strictly speaking, the satanic edition should have been censored too, seeing as you have to be religious to believe in Satan
The atheist version would just be plain Ubuntu, I guess!
If you like the wallpapers, use them - what's the harm? Although... that's what Satan would want you to think, right? Could be a super sneaky trick.Comment
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