If I were president, I would put transparency, corruption, and a balanced budget at the top of the list of priorities, because those are like tar that slows everything else down. Once you actually have a balanced budget you can see clearly how many resources you have available to put towards health care, what can be sacrificed, etc. The government would run so much more smoothly.
The one thing that should be even more important than those, however, is cutting back spending. It's not enough to just have a balanced budget... Soviet Russia balance its budget all day long, but overall spending was so high that they sucked their citizens dry with taxes, rewarded people who didn't work at the same level as those who did, and generally stifled their economy. Your anology about tar is actually good, but it doesn't quite go far enough. Really, it should be: "The government is like tar. If it is cut back, society as a whole would run so much more smoothly."
PS - Does anyone realize that at the start of this decade, we had a two trillion dollar budget, and now it's four trillion? Does a 100% increase in ten years seem warranted? Does anything else in this country, whether it be individual incomes or corporate revenues, grow that fast? Does this seem sustainable? How many jobs have been destroyed by government (think of how many people could have been employed had that two trillion stayed in the private sector, rather than being sucked up by government)? This year alone, in a recession, several departments like "Housing and Urban Development" and the agriculture department got 45% percent budget increases. Does that seem right, when EVERYTHING else in America is scaling back? Is it sustainable?
New York's economy just shrunk by about 4%, while Washington's grew by 3%. Does that seem right? The 165 million spent by AIG on retention bonuses (note: not performance bonuses) was 1/1000 of the amount given them in the bailout. Meanwhile, congress passed the 800 billion stimulus bill, the massive Omnibus bill, and the earmark bill. Is this sustainable? Why are we nitpicking this tiny amount when trillions are being spent and squandered? Especially since both Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have been giving out bonuses just like this, and they were bailed out even more? Could there be any more hypocrisy on this? Of course, Fannie and Freddie are Chris Dodd and Barney Frank's favorite institutions, institutions they protected from President Bush, who believe it or not fought to reform them earlier in his second term, before anyone even knew this was all coming. What a mess we might have been spared had that actually happened, although we still would have had problems, since Bush was probably the fifth worst president on fiscal responsibility... right behind Lyndon Johnson, FDR, Jimmy Carter, and already the grandaddy of them all, Barack Obama, who's own budget projections show he will add more to the national debt in his first term than all other presidents COMBINDED. By the way, is that sustainable?
I would say, "Absolutely Not!", and that's why it is time for an immediate spending cut. And by the way Mr. President, we really do need an axe, not a scalpel.
This isn't a theme competition, it's a user interface competition.
After reading the technical requirements, it's clear this isn't really a user interface competition. User interface is a part, yes, but I would say the much smaller part of the contest. Take a look at this part of the official "technical requirements" of the contest to see what you would have to implement, in addition to a UI. Actually, I would say the 200,000 they are putting up for the contest is an absolute steal... implementing all these features would typically take a team of quite a few engineers (or a few working much longer), and you'd probably end up paying them much more than 200,000 dollars combined regardless.
Technical Requirements:
REQUIRED FEATURES
A. Network
1. Interfaces
2. Bridge
2.1 STP - Spanning Tree Protocol
2.2 Port management
3. Point-to-Point tunneling
3.1 IPSec (AH/ESP)
3.2 PPTP/PPPOE concentrator/server; including authentication (PAP, CHAP, MSCHAPv1 and MSCHAPv2), MPPE encryption, compression possibilities
3.3 L2TP (VPN)
4. VLANs - IEEE802.1q Virtual LANs
5. DNS - Domain Name System
5.1 Static
5.2 Proxy
5.3 Dynamic
6. DHCP - Dynamic Host Configuration
6.1 Client
6.2 Server - with static and dynamic leases
6.3 Relay
7. Routing tables
7.1 Static Source
7.2 Multi path routing
7.3 Selective/Policy Based Source
7.4 Dynamic routing
7.4.1 RIP
7.4.2 BGP
7.4.3 OSPF
8. Bonding - aggregating multiple network interfaces into a single logical one
9. SNMP agent - for read-only statistics
10. Traffic accounting (monitoring/graphing)
B. Wireless
1. Ubiquiti SR/XR/SR71 radio support with card frequency detection
2. Virtual AP (MBSSID)
3. Modes
3.1 Station
3.2 AP
3.3 Repeater
3.4 WDS (utilizing WPA/WPA2)
4. Security
4.1 WEP
4.2 WPA/WPA2/IEEE802.11i
4.2.1 Personal (PSK)
4.2.2 Enterprise (EAP)
4.3 Layer2 Isolation
4.4 Access Control List
5. Basic
5.1 ESSID
5.2 Channels/Frequency
5.3 Output Power
5.4 Data Rate
5.5 Frequency List
5.6 Site Survey
6. Advanced
6.1 ACK Timeout Adjustment
6.2 RTS/CTS
6.3 Fragmentation
6.4 Super Features
6.5 802.11e (WMM)
6.6 Antenna Selection
6.7 Multicast Rate Selection
C. Network Access
1. AAA (Authentication Authorization and Accounting)
1.1 HotSpot Gateway with RADIUS
1.2 HotSpot Captive portal, splash screen customization, walled garden
2. IP Firewall
2.1 TCP/UDP matches
2.2 ICMP matches
2.3 MAC matches
2.4 IPP2P
2.5 Layer7
2.6 Port Forwarding
2.7 DMZ
2.8 NAT - Network Address Translation
3. Bridging Firewall
3.1 802.3 matches
3.2 ARP matches
3.3 IP matches
3.4 Mark matches
3.5 Packet type matches
3.6 STP matches
3.7 VLAN matches
4. QOS/TOS - manageable per MAC/IP/subnets/ports and port ranges
4.1 Static Bandwidth Control
4.2 Dynamic client rate equalizing
4.3 p2p traffic management
4.4 Bursting
D. Management Access
1. Telnet
2. SSH Server
3. Layer2 telnet
4. HTTP/HTTPS
4.1 Server
4.2 Proxy
5. System Users and their passwords
E. System/Services
1. Manual clock control
2. NTP (Network Time) Client
3. Logging - both local and remote
4. User login access (admin/read-only)
5. Usage Statistics
6. Firmware Upgrade
7. Configuration file upload/download
8. USB Mass Storage Support / Flash Memory Auto-Backup
F. Utilities
1. Ping
2. Trace Route
3. Memory Info
4. CPU load
5. Network Statistics
6. TCP Dump
7. Speed Test
The idea is that people should never have to be ready for (nor aware of) any OS at all.
WHAT?!! If they aren't aware of their OS and its inner workings, then how are they going to edit their config files? It's not a true computer, or a true operating system, if you don't have to edit config files from the command line! This whole idea makes no sense to me!
well, that's a kind of limited-functionality materialized view with a special engine to access it.
I know I'm being pedantic, but it grates on me to hear the term "materialized view". There is no such thing, and "materialized view" is a contradiction in terms, since a view by definition is never fixed and changes as the data in the tables it references change. You would be better off referring to "materialized views" as snapshots. Because once you "materialize" something, it is definitely no longer a view.
that they were going to implement proper user account permissions (a la UNIX) so UAC wouldn't be needed.
Most Linux distributions I've used, including Fedora and Ubuntu, prompt me for my password whenever I try to go into some system menu or app, like the networking configuration. That's very similar to UAC popping up and asking for permission. My other option in *nix is to log in as root to make all those changes, but that requires knowledge and taking the time to switch users. Either one of these options is arguably just as intrusive as UAC, so I really don't know what all you people are talking about.
The secret to a more secure and cost effective government is through Open Source technologies and products.
Not quite. The real secret to a more secure and cost effective government is to have less government. Less people to leak news from the intelligence community, less people to waste money, etc. Until open source software can intelligently pick and fire a large number of government workers, it is not the solution.
As as someone already pointed out, this is less of a problem for people who are paying for their service, rather than getting them for free.
I really don't think this lessens the problem that much though. Just because you are paying doesn't mean the service will last. What you really have to depend on is whether a lot of OTHERS are paying as well. They don't care if they have a paying customer or two if the service overall isn't profitable. They'll still shut it down.
And even if it is a profitable service, is the company as a whole profitable? Because you aren't protected from companies going belly up (which they might, if other services they offer are unprofitable enough). Sure, Google is probably not in danger at the moment, but even long companies with storied histories may go bankrupt and take even the services people pay for down with them. The current downturn ought to be evidence enough of that, as quite a few 100+ year old companies have suddenly died.
And as another example of this, consider the big three automakers. I bought a car from Chrysler in January 2008, and a big part of our choice of car was that they were offering a lifetime powertrain warranty. That's a service they provide that obviously I (and a lot of others) pay for, and it's probably profitable (if they have the reliability they claim) since it sells more of their cars, but might that service get shut down on me? Might it get shut down on me even before a 3 year/36,000 mile warranty would have? It might if they go belly up.
So that's at least one reason I would never put anything business critical in the cloud... no matter what you pay, and no matter how great your company is at business, if the other company isn't managing itself as well as your company is then you are just one economic downturn from losing all your data. And that should be pretty sobering to anyone.
Ubuntu has hidden more stuff so that when it doesn't work it's hard to figure out. For me, a professional Software Engineer with a penchant for *nix.
I think we both have similar backgrounds, since I did computer engineering and computer science in school. I have a slightly different view of this though.
I've been using Linux for probably 8 years, and I've used about every major flavor around. SuSE, Mandrake/Mandriva, Debian, a large amount of time in the Red Hat and later Fedora distro, and a large amount of time on the gentoo distro, but I just put Ubuntu on my desktop a few days ago, and after seeing it I decided I'm going to stick with it for a while. I have two reasons for this:
I like the "hiddenness" of it and the polish, because I like to see how they've hidden it and how they've gotten something to integrate so smoothly, and I find I learn a lot from trying to figure out how they do things.
When I don't have time to figure something out, it does just work. And that saves me a lot of time over, say, Gentoo, which I used for a good long while but always took forever to do anything (because it seemed like you had to compile another package about every time you moved the mouse).
So that's just my 2 cents, and why I enjoy tinkering on a "hidden" operating system as much as on the open ones.
It really is depressing, so many states are bringing in their own petty versions of the chinese firewall that it's getting close to critical mass where in any country where it isn't done the call will become "well they're doing it in all these other countries!They care about the children there! Protect the children!"
I'm far less concerned about this. Why shouldn't we block this material? This isn't "free speech", not by a long shot. It's unprotected by the constitution (speaking from a US standpoint), and therefore, at least in the US, the government has every right to block it, especially if we as a society support banning this sort of material, which probably 96% of us do.
As far as the firewall being used for other things goes, I'm not too worried about that either. We still have a constitution, courts, and an elected slate of representatives. The constitution clearly defines what the government can and can't do, and the courts help protect it. And if nothing else, should our representatives put this technology to use banning anti-government speech, we can vote the whole lot of them out. So I'm not concerned about this being used for other things or being some sort of "scary slippery slope".
Now, if you are worried that our representatives will use a filter for blocking true free speech and that our people WON'T throw them out, well, then you have bigger problems than a filter. Because in the last analysis, the constitution is nothing more than a sheet of paper that we delegate power to. If we respect it, it has power and works, but if we have a whole population that doesn't know or care about constitutional protections, then the constitution is powerless and worth nothing, and the government can do whatever it wants. I would argue that has already happened, and our federal government being involved in enough stuff to need four trillion dollars next year is probably proof enough.
But in principle, I have no problem with the government banning unprotected stuff like this. Never, including at our nations founding, was this sort of material considered protected free speech. We should go ahead and do whatever we want, including block out all this content, until we actually see the government break the constitution. Only at that point do we need to get worried/take action.
Egypt's a "democratic" country terrorizing its people under the guise of a "war on terror."
That's bull. What hate America, left wing source gave you that information and tried to compare us to Egypt in terms of democracy? This is patently false on it's face. Egypt instantly fails the first test anyone would do when trying to determine see if a country is a democracy. They don't have any free or fair elections. Hosni Mubarak proved that beyond a shadow of a doubt. They have been a mild dictatorship at best for decades, and everyone knows it. Contrast that to the US... if we were a dictatorship under president Bush, as so many on the left wildly claim, then why is he voluntarily leaving power? A dictator doesn't care about term limits. And why is someone he didn't vote for coming to power? Because we still respect the will of the people in this country. We actually are a democracy and don't have hand picked successors.
Just ask yourself: What Would Nixon Do?
How about we ask, "What would George Washington do?" Answer: The exact same thing. Ever since this country was founded we have done this same sort of stuff. The early presidents all found spying ok, all engaged in it, and all inspected foreign mail during war. Move forward a little and you'll find that FDR and JFK did the same sorts of warrantless wiretapping we are doing now, and they are Democrat heroes. In fact, Robert Kennedy did more than probably anyone in history. There is a difference between regular criminal mischief and war, and a difference between American citizens protected under the constitution and people from other countries. Most reasonable people recognize this. During wars especially, but even when not at war, the US (and all other nations) have the right to spy on each other without asking for a warrant from the international court. Only our own citizens are protected from illegal search and seizure under the constitution. Foreign enemy terrorists are not. Sorry.
Fine with me. That's probably about the time I'll finally give up my tried and true CRT for something new. Up to now, I've just kept it, because what with format wars in the blu ray space, expensive content sources (whether it be players, the discs themselves, or HD cable), three competing large screen technologies (LCD, Plasma and rear projection) all with their own problems, TVs not always being 1080p, and sometimes just 1080i, changing cable designs, etc, I figured I just keep my CRT until OLED came along and killed them all. No sense spending thousands trying to guess which technology isn't going to be obsolete or which one isn't going to have tons of problems.
I mean, I can stand murdering, looting, and raping, but my god man, at least be honest about it.
Easy to say when you aren't being murdered, looted or raped. Besides, none of the athiests were honest about it either. Communists often sent people to "re-education camps". They did these things for the "good of the people". There was HUGE propoganda about all of it. They never came out and said, "Yeah, we're killing 30 million people and we're being up front about it." And Hitler, though fascist rather than communist, was not out publicizing where he was removing the Jews to and what he was doing to them. Sure, people probably knew, but do you really think he was up front and honest about it, and that there was no propoganda?
Actually, the religious groups are probably more honest. Currently many Muslims are calling for the blood of Jews (and in some places Christians) openly, and the only thing they say that isn't true is that they are going to get an end reward for it. But they don't lie about that... they are convinced they are going to get rewarded.
But when religion becomes involved as a motivating factor, suddenly the problem becomes a LOT bigger, bloodier and more dangerous.
Spoken by someone who doesn't know their history. I'm getting tired of this schtick about "religions kill everyone, religions cause wars, the crusades are the worst conflict the world has ever seen, blah blah etc." In the last 100 years athiests have killed more people than probably every religious war COMBINED. Certainly way more than the crusades or the current middle east conflicts combined. As evidence, I cite Adolph Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Pol Pot, Kruschev, Castro, the current Chinese government, and most especially Mao Tse Tung. And I'm sure you could find many others among the cast of characters inhabiting all the socialist, communist, or fascist nations that made athiesm their official religion during the last 100 years.
And no, Joseph Stalin being baptized as an infant, and/or Adolph Hitler being dragged to a few church services before he was ten do not make them Christians.
Sucks for the people who were going to retire soon but if they were going to retire next year why the hell did they have so many investments in equities? If I was close to retirement I'd have most of my nest egg invested in cash......
That's a pretty dumb position to have, considering that on average if you make it to age 60 you will live to be about 90. That's another 30 years you have to outpace inflation, and some people are going to live even longer than that, possibly to 100 or more. Since you don't know how long you are going to live, at retirement you need to keep most of your nest egg tied up in equities, because that is one of the few things likely to outpace inflation over that length of time.
What I don't understand is why these people don't have some sort of 3-6 month emergency fund on hand in cash that they can use for a while after they retire. If you have 6 months in cash you can often ride out some or all of the worst downturns without touching the equities, and you can replenish that later as they rise. If you were to have a years worth of expenses on hand (say 30 thousand assuming you live really frugally in that first year of retirement) you would be in an especially good position. But the bulk of the nest egg really should remain in equities to outpace inflation.
I have used Linux as my only Desktop OS for 6 Years and have noticed the hardware requirements go through the roof.
I've noticed the same, though to be fair this probably has more to do with what is packaged in distros, and especially some of the desktop managers (Gnome, KDE, etc) and openoffice, rather than the actual Linux kernel itself. But this is absolutely true. I just tried to put Fedora Core 10 on an Athlon XP 2100+ system with 1 GB of RAM, a 64 MB video card, sound card, etc, and my mouse is jumping from place to place as I try to move it. It doesn't scroll smoothly, but just leaps around, apparently because my system is somehow "underpowered". Before I put Fedora on it, I had Windows XP running very nicely at a quick pace on it.
Whether Fedora now takes more resources than Vista I'm not sure, because I haven't bothered to test, but it is certainly true that the speed argument isn't holding as true for many distros as it used to.
The "it's free" and "no viruses" argument is still valid!
Well, the it's free part is, anyway, but I don't think the "no viruses" argument has ever been valid. If that argument ever actually starts working and attracts people to Linux, that will be the day when that argument turns into a lie. There are no viruses for Linux right now not because Linux is bug free, but because not enough people use it to make it a worthwhile target. These days I think you'd be hard pressed to get yourself infected with a DOS virus as well, not because DOS was awesome or secure but because nobody uses it or wastes their time writing exploits for it anymore.
That's an understatement. I just installed this things and was extremely unimpressed.
Anyone here remember those old dot matrix ribbon printers from the 80's and early 90's? Remember how bad their print quality was? Well, with this font, you can enjoy that same level of quality on your screen as well as your printout!
So yeah, unless you are a glutton for ribbon printer nostalgia, this thing is terrible.
I have co-workers that didn't know there were other candidates for president besides McCain and Obama...
That has far more to do with a corrupt and dishonest media than it does with democracy or our electoral system (or even the two parties). If the media actually covered the other candidates, or allowed them to participate in the media moderated and sponsored debates, people would know about them.
Funny how we're supposed to be fighting regimes that block citizens of other countries from having a democracy but we don't have anything more than a sham here...
Actually, we don't have a true democracy here (thank goodness). We have a federal republic with checks and balances. And that's very fortunate, because democracy in its pure form is simply mob rule. We have some checks on the majority to keep it from just running rampant over minorities, which does technically break with pure democracy but is a very good idea. Ultimately, of course, at the end of the day super-majorities do have the ultimate say, because that's better than a king, but fortunately we do not have a pure democracy.
Now, if you are trying to claim that the will of the people is not properly represented within the system we currently have, I call bull and demand that you provide some evidence. Yes, our government is pretty terrible at the moment (and I think will be even worse when the new congress and administration come in), but it isn't because the government isn't reflecting us. Rather, it is because the government reflects us that it is so terrible. We as a society are becoming a bunch of lazy, uneducated, entitlement people who think we have a right to everything without actually working hard at learning and producing. We, as a society, don't bother to learn anything about economics, government (especially how ours is supposed to work), foreign affairs or anything else. Then we go to the polls and vote based on our ignorance (usually for whoever "looks presidential" or "will fix our lives" or "promised us X").
No, the sad fact is, our government is a VERY good reflection of what we are becoming as a society and a nation. Does congress look like a whiny, clueless island of misfit toys? Yes, but so do we.
So the bigger "why" is this: Why can't we just agree that taxes in general are a bad thing? It's not just the music tax that would be bad, it's almost all of them. Of course some very minimal taxes are necessary to build just enough government to protect our freedoms from anarchy and external threats, and to provide for a very few public goods like roads, but otherwise taxes are bad. Any time you take money in the form of taxes, you are taking money out of the economy that could have been used productively, and giving it to government which, without the pressure of market forces, is not going to have any incentive to use those resources in an optimal way.
And for those who are skeptical, I think I need to go no further for an example than to point to President Elect Obama's appointments for cabinet and agency heads. It's not the "who is appointed" that matters, it's the how freakin' many are appointed. Seriously, its like he's appointed three or four cabinet or agency heads a day for the past month! We started out this country with only three secretaries. Are all these cabinet positions actually providing a service? You've got the department of energy with nearly 30 billion dollars, a department that was created by Jimmy Carter to help us achieve energy security and independence. Obviously that didn't happen, and in fact we've gone the opposite direction, so what exactly are they doing over there with all those billions? Then you have the department of education (also created by da man Jimmy Carter) with what, 60 billion a year? They are supposed to ensure our children have a good education, yet we spend more money per capita on students than anywhere in the world and have some of the worst results of any industrialized nation. What in the world are they doing over there with all that money, besides handing large sums directly to the teachers unions?
I think you see my point. You can go right down the list... secretary of health and human services, secretary of housing and urban development (that's been a real bright spot of success, right?), secretary of agriculture, secretary of labor, secretary of veterans affairs (we need a whole cabinet branch for this?), etc. We've taken hundreds of billions, if not trillions, of dollars out of the economy annually through taxes and given it to these guys. Is that productive, especially in comparison to letting that money drive growth in our economy, which raises the prosperity of every single citizen?
Taxes are a bad thing... they simply allow the bureaucracy to expand to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy. I think Dave Ramsey said it best when he said that the economy is a wild, powerful dog, happy and free. And the government and its taxes are a tick on the backside of that dog. A tick that, in some of the more productive sectors of our economy, is easily 40% of the size of the dog!
You have to oversubscribe to be cost-effective (this is why business-grade 1Mbit data connections cost 10x more than consumer-grade; the former is not oversubscribed while the latter is).
Then why don't the ISPs publicize this and offer consumer home connections that are not oversubscribed and charge a higher price for it, while continuing to offer hit or miss oversubscribed connections at the current rates? Those who are happy with sometimes slow traffic can stick with it, and the rest of us can move up to the non-oversubscribed lines. And our additional payments should give them money to invest in more infrastructure.
I actually probably couldn't afford this idea myself right now due to working my way out of debt and getting ready for our first child, but I can certainly see a day when I would be ready to move up a more expensive, unshared connection if one was actually an option.
And they aren't the only one. You know all those Totino's party pizzas you always see in the supermarkets? The ones you used to eat so much of in college? The Totino's plant makes over 1.25 million pizzas a day. At that rate of production, it only takes about 800 days to produce 1 billion pizzas.
And that don't forget about Totino's pizza rolls... 30 million of those are made daily. Totino's is truly an amazing story of high volume manufacturing (and Americans are amazing for being able to eat that many frozen pizzas a day, since this number doesn't even count other brands).
You don't cut in the tiniest slices of the pie first, you cut in the big slices.
That is true if and only if all slices are equally legitimate functions of the federal government. However, since the military is one of the very few things that the constitution actually allows congress to do, we should be cutting unconstitutional things out first before we worry about the constitutional activities.
Additionally, it's easy to make military cuts, both now and later. What is hard is cutting spending on social programs when you've gotten multiple generations addicted to government handouts of money they didn't earn. We need to cut that stuff out NOW, especially since our social programs are expected to grow at such a rate over the next couple decades that they will dwarf everything else, including defense spending. They will crush our federal budget.
No, in this instance, you definitely cut social programs before the military spending.
Yep, that's unbelievably lame to most people, but some people are going to have fun. There exists a subset of the population that will be intensely serious (perhaps even obsessive/compulsive) about carrying out these virtual negotions. You've seen them in other online games before... the people for whom the game becomes their reality, and they are so dedicated they don't eat or sleep in the real world.
However, that's not the group I was referring to when I said some people are going to have fun. That group is going to be tortured. The group that is going to have fun is the group that LOVES to mock the serious gamers, screw around in negotiations and generally tick people off. Essentially, they'll be the Leroy Jenkins of Virtual Peace.
For those that haven't seen the World of Warcraft video about Leroy Jenkins, here is a link. Listen to the square in the background being all serious, carefully planning out this raid as though it somehow matters or has significance in life. Then you've got ANOTHER loon in the background doing "number crunching" and calculating their odds of success to ridiculous significant figures. They're the first group. Then along comes Leroy, member of the second group. I think it's pretty obvious who was having fun, and who was being tortured as their carefully ordered virtual life was messed with. Leroy is going to have a good time in here:D.
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The one thing that should be even more important than those, however, is cutting back spending. It's not enough to just have a balanced budget... Soviet Russia balance its budget all day long, but overall spending was so high that they sucked their citizens dry with taxes, rewarded people who didn't work at the same level as those who did, and generally stifled their economy. Your anology about tar is actually good, but it doesn't quite go far enough. Really, it should be: "The government is like tar. If it is cut back, society as a whole would run so much more smoothly."
PS - Does anyone realize that at the start of this decade, we had a two trillion dollar budget, and now it's four trillion? Does a 100% increase in ten years seem warranted? Does anything else in this country, whether it be individual incomes or corporate revenues, grow that fast? Does this seem sustainable? How many jobs have been destroyed by government (think of how many people could have been employed had that two trillion stayed in the private sector, rather than being sucked up by government)? This year alone, in a recession, several departments like "Housing and Urban Development" and the agriculture department got 45% percent budget increases. Does that seem right, when EVERYTHING else in America is scaling back? Is it sustainable?
New York's economy just shrunk by about 4%, while Washington's grew by 3%. Does that seem right? The 165 million spent by AIG on retention bonuses (note: not performance bonuses) was 1/1000 of the amount given them in the bailout. Meanwhile, congress passed the 800 billion stimulus bill, the massive Omnibus bill, and the earmark bill. Is this sustainable? Why are we nitpicking this tiny amount when trillions are being spent and squandered? Especially since both Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have been giving out bonuses just like this, and they were bailed out even more? Could there be any more hypocrisy on this? Of course, Fannie and Freddie are Chris Dodd and Barney Frank's favorite institutions, institutions they protected from President Bush, who believe it or not fought to reform them earlier in his second term, before anyone even knew this was all coming. What a mess we might have been spared had that actually happened, although we still would have had problems, since Bush was probably the fifth worst president on fiscal responsibility... right behind Lyndon Johnson, FDR, Jimmy Carter, and already the grandaddy of them all, Barack Obama, who's own budget projections show he will add more to the national debt in his first term than all other presidents COMBINDED. By the way, is that sustainable?
I would say, "Absolutely Not!", and that's why it is time for an immediate spending cut. And by the way Mr. President, we really do need an axe, not a scalpel.
After reading the technical requirements, it's clear this isn't really a user interface competition. User interface is a part, yes, but I would say the much smaller part of the contest. Take a look at this part of the official "technical requirements" of the contest to see what you would have to implement, in addition to a UI. Actually, I would say the 200,000 they are putting up for the contest is an absolute steal... implementing all these features would typically take a team of quite a few engineers (or a few working much longer), and you'd probably end up paying them much more than 200,000 dollars combined regardless.
Technical Requirements:
WHAT?!! If they aren't aware of their OS and its inner workings, then how are they going to edit their config files? It's not a true computer, or a true operating system, if you don't have to edit config files from the command line! This whole idea makes no sense to me!
I know I'm being pedantic, but it grates on me to hear the term "materialized view". There is no such thing, and "materialized view" is a contradiction in terms, since a view by definition is never fixed and changes as the data in the tables it references change. You would be better off referring to "materialized views" as snapshots. Because once you "materialize" something, it is definitely no longer a view.
Most Linux distributions I've used, including Fedora and Ubuntu, prompt me for my password whenever I try to go into some system menu or app, like the networking configuration. That's very similar to UAC popping up and asking for permission. My other option in *nix is to log in as root to make all those changes, but that requires knowledge and taking the time to switch users. Either one of these options is arguably just as intrusive as UAC, so I really don't know what all you people are talking about.
Not quite. The real secret to a more secure and cost effective government is to have less government. Less people to leak news from the intelligence community, less people to waste money, etc. Until open source software can intelligently pick and fire a large number of government workers, it is not the solution.
I really don't think this lessens the problem that much though. Just because you are paying doesn't mean the service will last. What you really have to depend on is whether a lot of OTHERS are paying as well. They don't care if they have a paying customer or two if the service overall isn't profitable. They'll still shut it down.
And even if it is a profitable service, is the company as a whole profitable? Because you aren't protected from companies going belly up (which they might, if other services they offer are unprofitable enough). Sure, Google is probably not in danger at the moment, but even long companies with storied histories may go bankrupt and take even the services people pay for down with them. The current downturn ought to be evidence enough of that, as quite a few 100+ year old companies have suddenly died.
And as another example of this, consider the big three automakers. I bought a car from Chrysler in January 2008, and a big part of our choice of car was that they were offering a lifetime powertrain warranty. That's a service they provide that obviously I (and a lot of others) pay for, and it's probably profitable (if they have the reliability they claim) since it sells more of their cars, but might that service get shut down on me? Might it get shut down on me even before a 3 year/36,000 mile warranty would have? It might if they go belly up.
So that's at least one reason I would never put anything business critical in the cloud... no matter what you pay, and no matter how great your company is at business, if the other company isn't managing itself as well as your company is then you are just one economic downturn from losing all your data. And that should be pretty sobering to anyone.
I think we both have similar backgrounds, since I did computer engineering and computer science in school. I have a slightly different view of this though.
I've been using Linux for probably 8 years, and I've used about every major flavor around. SuSE, Mandrake/Mandriva, Debian, a large amount of time in the Red Hat and later Fedora distro, and a large amount of time on the gentoo distro, but I just put Ubuntu on my desktop a few days ago, and after seeing it I decided I'm going to stick with it for a while. I have two reasons for this:
So that's just my 2 cents, and why I enjoy tinkering on a "hidden" operating system as much as on the open ones.
I'm far less concerned about this. Why shouldn't we block this material? This isn't "free speech", not by a long shot. It's unprotected by the constitution (speaking from a US standpoint), and therefore, at least in the US, the government has every right to block it, especially if we as a society support banning this sort of material, which probably 96% of us do.
As far as the firewall being used for other things goes, I'm not too worried about that either. We still have a constitution, courts, and an elected slate of representatives. The constitution clearly defines what the government can and can't do, and the courts help protect it. And if nothing else, should our representatives put this technology to use banning anti-government speech, we can vote the whole lot of them out. So I'm not concerned about this being used for other things or being some sort of "scary slippery slope".
Now, if you are worried that our representatives will use a filter for blocking true free speech and that our people WON'T throw them out, well, then you have bigger problems than a filter. Because in the last analysis, the constitution is nothing more than a sheet of paper that we delegate power to. If we respect it, it has power and works, but if we have a whole population that doesn't know or care about constitutional protections, then the constitution is powerless and worth nothing, and the government can do whatever it wants. I would argue that has already happened, and our federal government being involved in enough stuff to need four trillion dollars next year is probably proof enough.
But in principle, I have no problem with the government banning unprotected stuff like this. Never, including at our nations founding, was this sort of material considered protected free speech. We should go ahead and do whatever we want, including block out all this content, until we actually see the government break the constitution. Only at that point do we need to get worried/take action.
That's bull. What hate America, left wing source gave you that information and tried to compare us to Egypt in terms of democracy? This is patently false on it's face. Egypt instantly fails the first test anyone would do when trying to determine see if a country is a democracy. They don't have any free or fair elections. Hosni Mubarak proved that beyond a shadow of a doubt. They have been a mild dictatorship at best for decades, and everyone knows it. Contrast that to the US... if we were a dictatorship under president Bush, as so many on the left wildly claim, then why is he voluntarily leaving power? A dictator doesn't care about term limits. And why is someone he didn't vote for coming to power? Because we still respect the will of the people in this country. We actually are a democracy and don't have hand picked successors.
How about we ask, "What would George Washington do?" Answer: The exact same thing. Ever since this country was founded we have done this same sort of stuff. The early presidents all found spying ok, all engaged in it, and all inspected foreign mail during war. Move forward a little and you'll find that FDR and JFK did the same sorts of warrantless wiretapping we are doing now, and they are Democrat heroes. In fact, Robert Kennedy did more than probably anyone in history. There is a difference between regular criminal mischief and war, and a difference between American citizens protected under the constitution and people from other countries. Most reasonable people recognize this. During wars especially, but even when not at war, the US (and all other nations) have the right to spy on each other without asking for a warrant from the international court. Only our own citizens are protected from illegal search and seizure under the constitution. Foreign enemy terrorists are not. Sorry.
Fine with me. That's probably about the time I'll finally give up my tried and true CRT for something new. Up to now, I've just kept it, because what with format wars in the blu ray space, expensive content sources (whether it be players, the discs themselves, or HD cable), three competing large screen technologies (LCD, Plasma and rear projection) all with their own problems, TVs not always being 1080p, and sometimes just 1080i, changing cable designs, etc, I figured I just keep my CRT until OLED came along and killed them all. No sense spending thousands trying to guess which technology isn't going to be obsolete or which one isn't going to have tons of problems.
Easy to say when you aren't being murdered, looted or raped. Besides, none of the athiests were honest about it either. Communists often sent people to "re-education camps". They did these things for the "good of the people". There was HUGE propoganda about all of it. They never came out and said, "Yeah, we're killing 30 million people and we're being up front about it." And Hitler, though fascist rather than communist, was not out publicizing where he was removing the Jews to and what he was doing to them. Sure, people probably knew, but do you really think he was up front and honest about it, and that there was no propoganda?
Actually, the religious groups are probably more honest. Currently many Muslims are calling for the blood of Jews (and in some places Christians) openly, and the only thing they say that isn't true is that they are going to get an end reward for it. But they don't lie about that... they are convinced they are going to get rewarded.
Exactly! They probably don't even have to worry about that old 65,536 row limit!
Spoken by someone who doesn't know their history. I'm getting tired of this schtick about "religions kill everyone, religions cause wars, the crusades are the worst conflict the world has ever seen, blah blah etc." In the last 100 years athiests have killed more people than probably every religious war COMBINED. Certainly way more than the crusades or the current middle east conflicts combined. As evidence, I cite Adolph Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Pol Pot, Kruschev, Castro, the current Chinese government, and most especially Mao Tse Tung. And I'm sure you could find many others among the cast of characters inhabiting all the socialist, communist, or fascist nations that made athiesm their official religion during the last 100 years.
And no, Joseph Stalin being baptized as an infant, and/or Adolph Hitler being dragged to a few church services before he was ten do not make them Christians.
That's a pretty dumb position to have, considering that on average if you make it to age 60 you will live to be about 90. That's another 30 years you have to outpace inflation, and some people are going to live even longer than that, possibly to 100 or more. Since you don't know how long you are going to live, at retirement you need to keep most of your nest egg tied up in equities, because that is one of the few things likely to outpace inflation over that length of time.
What I don't understand is why these people don't have some sort of 3-6 month emergency fund on hand in cash that they can use for a while after they retire. If you have 6 months in cash you can often ride out some or all of the worst downturns without touching the equities, and you can replenish that later as they rise. If you were to have a years worth of expenses on hand (say 30 thousand assuming you live really frugally in that first year of retirement) you would be in an especially good position. But the bulk of the nest egg really should remain in equities to outpace inflation.
I've noticed the same, though to be fair this probably has more to do with what is packaged in distros, and especially some of the desktop managers (Gnome, KDE, etc) and openoffice, rather than the actual Linux kernel itself. But this is absolutely true. I just tried to put Fedora Core 10 on an Athlon XP 2100+ system with 1 GB of RAM, a 64 MB video card, sound card, etc, and my mouse is jumping from place to place as I try to move it. It doesn't scroll smoothly, but just leaps around, apparently because my system is somehow "underpowered". Before I put Fedora on it, I had Windows XP running very nicely at a quick pace on it.
Whether Fedora now takes more resources than Vista I'm not sure, because I haven't bothered to test, but it is certainly true that the speed argument isn't holding as true for many distros as it used to.
Well, the it's free part is, anyway, but I don't think the "no viruses" argument has ever been valid. If that argument ever actually starts working and attracts people to Linux, that will be the day when that argument turns into a lie. There are no viruses for Linux right now not because Linux is bug free, but because not enough people use it to make it a worthwhile target. These days I think you'd be hard pressed to get yourself infected with a DOS virus as well, not because DOS was awesome or secure but because nobody uses it or wastes their time writing exploits for it anymore.
Well clearly what we need the vendors to do is put Linux on an actual desktop. This garbage about "Linux on a laptop" is just no substitute :D.
That's an understatement. I just installed this things and was extremely unimpressed.
Anyone here remember those old dot matrix ribbon printers from the 80's and early 90's? Remember how bad their print quality was? Well, with this font, you can enjoy that same level of quality on your screen as well as your printout!
So yeah, unless you are a glutton for ribbon printer nostalgia, this thing is terrible.
That has far more to do with a corrupt and dishonest media than it does with democracy or our electoral system (or even the two parties). If the media actually covered the other candidates, or allowed them to participate in the media moderated and sponsored debates, people would know about them.
Actually, we don't have a true democracy here (thank goodness). We have a federal republic with checks and balances. And that's very fortunate, because democracy in its pure form is simply mob rule. We have some checks on the majority to keep it from just running rampant over minorities, which does technically break with pure democracy but is a very good idea. Ultimately, of course, at the end of the day super-majorities do have the ultimate say, because that's better than a king, but fortunately we do not have a pure democracy.
Now, if you are trying to claim that the will of the people is not properly represented within the system we currently have, I call bull and demand that you provide some evidence. Yes, our government is pretty terrible at the moment (and I think will be even worse when the new congress and administration come in), but it isn't because the government isn't reflecting us. Rather, it is because the government reflects us that it is so terrible. We as a society are becoming a bunch of lazy, uneducated, entitlement people who think we have a right to everything without actually working hard at learning and producing. We, as a society, don't bother to learn anything about economics, government (especially how ours is supposed to work), foreign affairs or anything else. Then we go to the polls and vote based on our ignorance (usually for whoever "looks presidential" or "will fix our lives" or "promised us X").
No, the sad fact is, our government is a VERY good reflection of what we are becoming as a society and a nation. Does congress look like a whiny, clueless island of misfit toys? Yes, but so do we.
So the bigger "why" is this: Why can't we just agree that taxes in general are a bad thing? It's not just the music tax that would be bad, it's almost all of them. Of course some very minimal taxes are necessary to build just enough government to protect our freedoms from anarchy and external threats, and to provide for a very few public goods like roads, but otherwise taxes are bad. Any time you take money in the form of taxes, you are taking money out of the economy that could have been used productively, and giving it to government which, without the pressure of market forces, is not going to have any incentive to use those resources in an optimal way.
And for those who are skeptical, I think I need to go no further for an example than to point to President Elect Obama's appointments for cabinet and agency heads. It's not the "who is appointed" that matters, it's the how freakin' many are appointed. Seriously, its like he's appointed three or four cabinet or agency heads a day for the past month! We started out this country with only three secretaries. Are all these cabinet positions actually providing a service? You've got the department of energy with nearly 30 billion dollars, a department that was created by Jimmy Carter to help us achieve energy security and independence. Obviously that didn't happen, and in fact we've gone the opposite direction, so what exactly are they doing over there with all those billions? Then you have the department of education (also created by da man Jimmy Carter) with what, 60 billion a year? They are supposed to ensure our children have a good education, yet we spend more money per capita on students than anywhere in the world and have some of the worst results of any industrialized nation. What in the world are they doing over there with all that money, besides handing large sums directly to the teachers unions?
I think you see my point. You can go right down the list... secretary of health and human services, secretary of housing and urban development (that's been a real bright spot of success, right?), secretary of agriculture, secretary of labor, secretary of veterans affairs (we need a whole cabinet branch for this?), etc. We've taken hundreds of billions, if not trillions, of dollars out of the economy annually through taxes and given it to these guys. Is that productive, especially in comparison to letting that money drive growth in our economy, which raises the prosperity of every single citizen?
Taxes are a bad thing... they simply allow the bureaucracy to expand to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy. I think Dave Ramsey said it best when he said that the economy is a wild, powerful dog, happy and free. And the government and its taxes are a tick on the backside of that dog. A tick that, in some of the more productive sectors of our economy, is easily 40% of the size of the dog!
Then why don't the ISPs publicize this and offer consumer home connections that are not oversubscribed and charge a higher price for it, while continuing to offer hit or miss oversubscribed connections at the current rates? Those who are happy with sometimes slow traffic can stick with it, and the rest of us can move up to the non-oversubscribed lines. And our additional payments should give them money to invest in more infrastructure.
I actually probably couldn't afford this idea myself right now due to working my way out of debt and getting ready for our first child, but I can certainly see a day when I would be ready to move up a more expensive, unshared connection if one was actually an option.
And they aren't the only one. You know all those Totino's party pizzas you always see in the supermarkets? The ones you used to eat so much of in college? The Totino's plant makes over 1.25 million pizzas a day. At that rate of production, it only takes about 800 days to produce 1 billion pizzas.
And that don't forget about Totino's pizza rolls... 30 million of those are made daily. Totino's is truly an amazing story of high volume manufacturing (and Americans are amazing for being able to eat that many frozen pizzas a day, since this number doesn't even count other brands).
That is true if and only if all slices are equally legitimate functions of the federal government. However, since the military is one of the very few things that the constitution actually allows congress to do, we should be cutting unconstitutional things out first before we worry about the constitutional activities.
Additionally, it's easy to make military cuts, both now and later. What is hard is cutting spending on social programs when you've gotten multiple generations addicted to government handouts of money they didn't earn. We need to cut that stuff out NOW, especially since our social programs are expected to grow at such a rate over the next couple decades that they will dwarf everything else, including defense spending. They will crush our federal budget.
No, in this instance, you definitely cut social programs before the military spending.
Yep, that's unbelievably lame to most people, but some people are going to have fun. There exists a subset of the population that will be intensely serious (perhaps even obsessive/compulsive) about carrying out these virtual negotions. You've seen them in other online games before... the people for whom the game becomes their reality, and they are so dedicated they don't eat or sleep in the real world.
However, that's not the group I was referring to when I said some people are going to have fun. That group is going to be tortured. The group that is going to have fun is the group that LOVES to mock the serious gamers, screw around in negotiations and generally tick people off. Essentially, they'll be the Leroy Jenkins of Virtual Peace.
For those that haven't seen the World of Warcraft video about Leroy Jenkins, here is a link. Listen to the square in the background being all serious, carefully planning out this raid as though it somehow matters or has significance in life. Then you've got ANOTHER loon in the background doing "number crunching" and calculating their odds of success to ridiculous significant figures. They're the first group. Then along comes Leroy, member of the second group. I think it's pretty obvious who was having fun, and who was being tortured as their carefully ordered virtual life was messed with. Leroy is going to have a good time in here :D.
Open Office sucks too!