Oh for fucks sake please stop engaging in such false equivalencies. I know you appended the smiley in an effort to make a joke of this, and this isn't aimed at you personally. Far too many people really think it isn't that bad, and we shouldn't say anything because we're not perfect either, and your post (meant in jest or not) feeds into that notion.

The United States may have put an inexperienced African-American in office ahead of a vastly more qualified female, but our gender (and other issues) are miniscule compared to how women are treated in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and other places.

* Women are routinely murdered for stepping out of line, in despicable, dishonorable acts referred to by their perpetrators as "honor killings."
* Women who offend the sensibilities of the men of their family are often locked up for life in a room with no light, no sound, and no outside contact beyond a tray of food being shoved under a door, a practice that makes solitary confinement in the US and other western states look like a picnic in comparison. The result is almost universal madness on the part of the victim, usually within a relatively short time. This practice is so common and entrenched that there is a term for this facility, the "woman's room" (not to be confused with a restroom or loo)
* victims of rape are routinely charged and convicted of fornication, adultery, etc. for having the audacity of being a victim, and imprisoned or worse (see above). Worse, they are convicted merely on the word of a few men, while female testimony is dismissed (by law) and not considered as a counterweight. In many places, they are stoned to death.
* Even women who manage to escape all of this and are considered "upstanding" by the psychotic standards of the culture can, at best, expect to be buried in the desert with no record of their passing (no marker, no death record, nothing). This after a life in servitude and bondage.
* Women in Saudi Arabia are not allowed to leave the house without the company of a man, even if the man is a boy-child.
* Women in Saudi Arabia are not allowed to drive, on pain of severe punushment.

and the list goes on. Women drowned in front of their entire families in the family swimming pool. Women disfigured by acid for refusing the advances of a suiter, and so on and so on, ad nauseum.

People should read the book "Princess" by Jean Sasson, about the nightmare of being a Saudi Princess, arguably the most privileged and sheltered position a woman can occupy in that society. There are also several excellent, Iranian-made movies that depict, describe, and criticize the epidemic of female-stonings in that society, often with little or no evidence beyond the word of a husband keen to ditch his wife for a prettier woman, e.g. The Stoning of Soraya M.

It's appalling, and we in the west have betrayed everything we purport to stand for, year after year and decade after decade, by cozying up to such regimes and abusive societies.

If anyone else were advocating the violent death of another, it would be a crime; perhaps it's time for some standards to be applied to all - right, left, far left (journalists), far right (faux journalists at fox, etc.).

FTFY

The media in the US is by and large very conservative. The "liberal" media is a myth, the US media is anything but liberal, particularly the news media.

That's nice, but he isn't speaking German, he's speaking English and in English it doesn't mean poison.

Ah, but English is a Germanic language. Aging beyond young adulthood is deadly. If it is a gift, then it is a poisonous one, so the interlingual play on words is quite apropos.

if we have a global nuclear war, does that mean science won?

No. In all liklihood, it will mean religious fanatics in either America, some other region, or both, got their hands on nukes and decided to usher in whatever their version of post-apacalyptic "our religion now rules on Earth as it does in Heaven" millennium. By the time they realize what fools they were, we as a species have joined the other 99% of species in extinction.

Regardless, it will mean the baser side of human nature won, and happened to use a scientificly derived tool as it defeated our better natures, and our species.

Take I-80 coast to coast. The big challenge is staying awake through 1000 miles of corn, but you'll start to appreciate just how much of it we grow.

That's the beauty of 800mph travel. You only have to look at the corn for an hour and fifteen minutes, then you get a change of scenery. New York-Cleaveland-Chicago-KC-Denver would be a nice route to have, with maybe a southern spur St Louis, Memphis, New Orleans, along with a second western route from New Orleans through Houston, San Antonio, Touscon, Pheonix, to LA. Add a northern routhe Chicago-Minneapolis-Bismarck-Billings-Misoula-Spokane-Portland, hooking up to a west coast link from Vancouver to San Diego and you have a pretty well connected country. Obviously speeds would have to be slower in the rockies, barring expensive tunneling projects, but it would still beat air travel between most of those cities.

There would be far less complexity if the Ultra Rich decided to purchase something like Australia as well as all the drones that you could stick a shake at to attack anything that came within 500 miles, and then for sport lob a few high yield explosives into population centers that appear to be getting a little too uppity.

Dear would-be Rich Overlord:

I'll see your drones, and raise you one toxic airborn virus (vaccine not included), released as part of a dusting upwind of Australia along one of the prevailing jetstreams.

--(signed) One Uppity Human

Would be Overlord (between hacking coughs, spewing phlem laced with the remnants of his decaying internal organs): the space station idea might have been worth the cost...(more hacking coughs, followed by his final expiry)

+1 for this one. Reagan was the opposite of Carter, a full time political player with no interest in academical solutions

And then we reached our true nadir with George Dubya, who proudly and vehemently proclaimed "I am not an intellectual!" It showed, too...we'll be digging out of the hole he put us in for the next 15 years, assuming we're lucky^H^H^H^H^H smart enough not to elect another one just like him...

I'll describe the entire Earth in only 2:

Mostly Harmless

I'll describe it in one:

shit

*sigh*

Fucking slashdot won't let me post this in a timely manner. We really need an edit function, or a better preview mode.

"linking the current pope" should read:

"linking the then-current pope", i.e. the Pope who stepped down, not the one who replaced him.

Actually, this is what did happen in the US. The church kept records of known child abusing priests, and did not report them to the police. The priests were simply moved to new locations, instead. This is why victims were later able to sue the church diocese, instead of just the priest. The church was guilty of hiding the crimes of the priests.

The same thing happened in the United Kingdom, Italy, Ireland, Germany, and a whole host of other countries. This is not a US problem, it's a world problem. The timing of the last pope stepping down was quite interesting...a week after an HBO documentary "Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God" was released for general consumption, linking both the current Pope and his soon-to-be-sainted predecisor directly to the pedophile coverups and worse. In fact, Pope John-Paul II covered for his good pedophile friend up until he died and passed the mantle on to Ratzinger. I wonder if they'll make St. Pedo, I mean John-Paul II, the patron saint of children and knock the other guy aside?

One thing is sure, mothers will still be carting their kids off to the churches, never mind the danger to their offspring. That, more than anything, illustrates the power of indoctrination and denial.

http://www.hbo.com/#/schedule/detail/Mea+Maxima+Culpa%3A+Silence+in+the+House+of+God/562415

Florida Man bans smart phones, computers, and the Internet!

It requires some agent to be installed on a target server which communicates back to the Puppet Master.

You can run puppet in masterless mode, against a local copy of the manifests, either managed locally or checked out from a version control repository.

Likewise with salt (my preferred choice over puppet, but both work), you can run either with a master host, or masterlessly. With salt the nice thing is, you can use the same config for both, just invoke the command differently (salt-call --local vs salt).

Infosec is no reason not to automate, just don't automate with a master server if your policies don't permit it.

Its good to see a BSD release picking up another major instance of commercial use. One of the obstacles the BSDs have faced is mindshare. Linux has had such an overpowering presence in the free/open world that it often overshadows the BSDs. That plays out in the commercial software that is available. If you look at high end vendor software, such as Oracle or other databases, or CAD tools, it is pretty rare to see much released for anything except Red Hat, or maybe Suse Linux. But getting the BSDs out where users are aware of it will definitely help.

I've been a Linux aficianado since 0.1, but find *bsd appealing for a number of reasons.

1. Portage version available (relatively seamless transition for playing around from Gentoo)
2. Avoids the whoile systemd debacle
3. avoids the udev debacle
4. Did I mention it avoids systemd? So does Gentoo, but if enough lemmings follow Red Hat over the cliff, then *bsd it will be...

I've had the misfortune to have to deal with this Ian guy and he's an UTTER UTTER c--t.

BT is a disgraceful company and the amount of people in the company I work for who have needed to use BT and been royally screwed over by them is shocking.

At least he's leaving BT and going in to government where this behavior is expected I guess.

As a dual British citizen, I can only say this:

his appointment to the House of Lords is a strong argument in favour of getting rid of the undemocratic House of Lords, or at least making it an elected body.

The fact that "cloud computing" needs 1.5 pages for definition alone is proof that the concept was created by the Marketing Department of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation.

And here I thought it was Tyrell Corp, developing it as a ploy to use up the limited lifespan of any Android foolish enough to escape their servitude.