>This is one of the main reasons I support legalization and/or decriminalization of all drugs. Demand is demand, and a black market economy is worse than a transparent & regulated economy.
Nobel economist Milton Friedman said,
"The proper role of government is exactly what John Stuart Mill Said in the middle of the 19th century in 'On Liberty.' is to prevent other people from harming an individual. Government, he said, never has any right to interfere with an individual for that individual’s own good. The case for prohibiting drugs is exactly as strong and as weak as the case for prohibiting people from overeating. We all know that overeating causes more deaths than drugs do. If it’s in principle OK for the government to say you must not consume drugs because they’ll do you harm, why isn’t it all right to say you must not eat too much because you’ll do harm? Why isn’t it all right to say you must not try to go in for skydiving because you’re likely to die? Why isn’t it all right to say, “Oh, skiing, that’s no good, that’s a very dangerous sport, you’ll hurt yourself”? Where do you draw the line? If you look at the drug war from a purely economic point of view, the role of the government is to protect the drug cartel. That's literally true.”
Milton Friedman interview from 1991 on America’s War on Drugs
>The FBI isn’t asking to access an uncrackable safe. It wants to compromise the boundaries of the self.
This article brings up the concept of cognitive liberty. The more we rely on technology and AI the more this may become a concern.
"Cognitive liberty, or the "right to mental self-determination", is the freedom of an individual to control his or her own mental processes, cognition, and consciousness. It has been argued to be both an extension of, and the principle underlying, the right to freedom of thought. Though a relatively recently defined concept, many theorists see cognitive liberty as being of increasing importance as technological advances in neuroscience allow for an ever-expanding ability to directly influence consciousness."
Verify the OpenPGP signatures provided by the distribution, keep up to date with security issues and join the distribution to help out with hardening it.
I use Linux on all my computers and the 'the system update' paradox is something that I am still a bit puzzled with. Everything I read on security stresses the importance of updates, yet, updating is leaving a system vulnerable to a “golden key” backdoor. From a security point of view, is it safer to leave a system in its original installed state or is it best to update frequently?
Curious, are there any HN readers out there who use Gentoo? If so, how do you find that it differs from other linux distros?
I have been intimidated with the idea of 'building from source'. Recently I have been curious about trying Gentoo and BSD, but every time I do some research it is not encouraging.
Militant Gentoo user here with a fleet of Calculate/Gentoo-based chromebooks deployed. with quickpkg, I can flash and install a new chromebook in less than 5 minutes
Start with Calculate Linux. it's gentoo, but without the scary install, and most of the packages are binary-based. If your package isn't binary'd already, you'll have to wait for it to build. that'll take longer than you may expect. If you're testing new packages, you may have to make an ebuild. Ebuilds are surprisingly simple.
You can use systemd if you enjoy that sort of massochism, but it's definitely not (recommended) required.
I used to use Gentoo, until I switched to OpenBSD. Now the way you just bundled "Gentoo and BSD" together sounds as if you think they have something in common. They really don't, and the BSDs are quite different to each other too so you can't really treat them as one.
As the linked writeup says, Gentoo is very much about choice. The ability to keep use flags turned off meant I had a leaner system with fewer dependencies, and I never had (pulse)audio problems all the while I had to fix family members' computers running kubuntus and such every week. No need to fix and change configurations and whatnot after every update -- set the system up once, and it'll mostly work the same way for a long long time. The other monolithinc distros seemed to break every time a big upgrade rolled. And since your programs are built against your libraries, you don't get the dependency problem of having to update all your packages just because someone bumped a popular library or two. It's all nice, and there's nothing to fear re. building from source, as the portage tooling do it all for you automatically. It just takes time, which can be a problem and one reason why I'm not running Gentoo now. Also, the last time I used Gentoo, it required a little more configuration than I think it should. As in, I think it could use more defaults that you don't need to touch unless you want to.
I can't speak for the other BSDs, but OpenBSD is totally opposite to Gentoo. You get binary packages and are mostly discouraged from building from source. There aren't that many knobs and optional dependencies. The devs want to provide good defaults and eliminate the need for twisting knobs and configuring things that can be handled by the OS. Indeed, they want to remove knobs, so that there are fewer ways to shoot yourself in the foot making the system less secure, or to just generally end up in a poorly tested configuration. You don't get to choose between five bootloaders, three init systems, seven filesystems and a few hundred kernel options. And if you go out of your way to build a very special custom system, you can expect no help from the community when you run into trouble.
The first time I used it was for my personal mail & web server. I did a little research and found OpenBSD's reputation for having some of the cleanest code out there, as well as the project's focus on security and correctness. That sounded like a good fit for the application.
A year or two later, I bought a netbook so I could unload and process photos from my camera while travelling. I had no idea what to install on it since I didn't really want to spend all the time Gentoo required, and I knew I wouldn't be updating the system regularly, which could result in a lot of pain on Gentoo if you ever needed something new. And I had too many bad experiences with all the other Linux distros I'd tried. So, just for the heck of it, I tried OpenBSD. Ten minutes later I have a working system and GIMP one pkg_add away.
As for the desktop.. well, I didn't switch from Gentoo directly. I had been running Debian for a short while. I can't remember why exactly. Could be that I had a hard drive break and I didn't have the time for Gentoo. Unfortunately Debian had been a pain from the start and one night, in a bad mood I was, for some reason I had to reboot. Which I couldn't, because apparently in some routine round of package updates Debian had messed with the bootloader. By that time I was just so sick of it, and didn't really want to look for yet another distro. I went to bed, and next morning installed OpenBSD, which had already proven painless so far.
'building from source' shouldn't intimidate you no matter which distro you use. Every distro does builds from source and lets its users build from source too. If anything, Gentoo makes it easier to build from source.
Law enforcement took more stuff from people than burglars did last year.
Quote
"Here's an interesting factoid about contemporary policing: In 2014, for the first time ever, law enforcement officers took more property from American citizens than burglars did. Martin Armstrong pointed this out at his blog, Armstrong Economics, last week.
Officers can take cash and property from people without convicting or even charging them with a crime — yes, really! — through the highly controversial practice known as civil asset forfeiture. Last year, according to the Institute for Justice, the Treasury and Justice departments deposited more than $5 billion into their respective asset forfeiture funds. That same year, the FBI reports that burglary losses topped out at $3.5 billion."
I just learned of an interesting program in San Francisco called Lava Mae. They have re-purposed transportation buses into showers and toilets on wheels to serve homeless of SF.
It is an interesting project that is using some innovation to solve a social problem.
Nobel economist Milton Friedman said, "The proper role of government is exactly what John Stuart Mill Said in the middle of the 19th century in 'On Liberty.' is to prevent other people from harming an individual. Government, he said, never has any right to interfere with an individual for that individual’s own good. The case for prohibiting drugs is exactly as strong and as weak as the case for prohibiting people from overeating. We all know that overeating causes more deaths than drugs do. If it’s in principle OK for the government to say you must not consume drugs because they’ll do you harm, why isn’t it all right to say you must not eat too much because you’ll do harm? Why isn’t it all right to say you must not try to go in for skydiving because you’re likely to die? Why isn’t it all right to say, “Oh, skiing, that’s no good, that’s a very dangerous sport, you’ll hurt yourself”? Where do you draw the line? If you look at the drug war from a purely economic point of view, the role of the government is to protect the drug cartel. That's literally true.”
Milton Friedman interview from 1991 on America’s War on Drugs
https://www.aei.org/publication/milton-friedman-interview-fr...