The economic model was fundamentally flawed. The Soviets never learned the lessons from Stalin's disastrous communist experiments
Your first statement is true only if you recognize that Stalinism as "the economic model" was an outright and total perversion of communism, with almost no real resemblance to communism as Karl Marx had first proposed in The Communist Manifesto.
The economic system was completely geared toward state interests (the definition of a planned economy)
The definition of a planned economy, perhaps. But the definition of a communist system, certainly not.
Calling the Soviet states communists is about as accurate as claiming that the United States runs solely on The Federalist Papers. Either argument falls apart in less than 5 minutes for anyone who has read either.
The Soviet Union fell because communism doesn't work. Period
Not true. Communism as implemented doesn't work.
(Or do you really believe that communism is viable, and that the Soviet implimentation was flawed?)
There is no definite answer to the viability of communism. Communism has never been implemented as it was originally described by Marx. If you were to read the Communist Manifesto you would understand that, amongst other things, Marx never intended for it to be implemented in large countries. Karl Marx knew well enough to realize that large countries could not handle true communism.
It was the relaxation of political control that led to the fall of the USSR, not an economic failure
And why did they relinquish control of the other soviet states? Because they couldn't afford them. They needed to contract their sphere of influence in order to have any chance of maintaining their imploding economy.
Moreover, they were still quite capable of competing with us militarily at the time.
I don't know where you got that notion from. We have seen time and again how their military infrastructure was rapidly deteriorating throughout the 80s.
The Soviet Union fell because planned economies do not work
A stronger argument could be made that they failed due to lack of a meaningful plan. Their government-military-industrial-complex became top heavy with no direction. It was only a matter of time until their system ate itself from the inside out.
I know conservatives need to lay something at the feet of St. Reagan
I urge you to re-read my post if you took it to be an act of idolizing Reagan. You would do yourself well to consider reading some of my other posts as well, if you are for some reason accusing me of such an act.
Indeed, Reagan's true achievement wasn't in intimidating the USSR militarily into despair. Rather, he managed to convince them that he thought Star Wars was a documentary. He then subsequently convinced them that we were building this fantastic laser-beam and ICBM-based international defense system that would annihilate them if they sneezed on us. Which cause the military hot-heads over there to spend far too much money on military defenses, while letting the rest of their empire rot.
Hence Reagan's irresponsible spending and gloating lead to even more irresponsible spending and gloating in the USSR - which became their undoing.
I suspect those are the types that are filed before the invention is actually complete (not even necessarily in regards to the invention ever being completed) - and they can indeed earn quite a bit.
I had a third grade teacher who made me stay after school for several days so I could learn how to write a proper lower-cased "r" in cursive. Never mind that I was the best mathematician in my class; for some reason I was a terrible excuse for a human being by not being able to properly write that letter "r" in cursive.
I don't remember the last time I wrote anything in cursive. My signature on my credit card doesn't in the least resemble the cursive that we were drilled on for so long in grade school. Cursive can go away and be banished to the deepest levels of hell for as far as I am concerned.
...this? Wow, looks like California is trying hard to maintain their reputation as the most dysfunctional state government. Granted, over here in NY state we may still hold the record for the least amount of actual legislation written this year (so far almost none); but at least our government is talking about thinking about proposing to hold meetings about news conferences about talking about proposing to write legislation that spends money looking into our budget problems.
Of course, they'll do that right after they vote themselves a pay raise and have actual meetings about re-gerrymandering their favorite districts.
Jonathan G. Parker, 19, of Fort Loudoun, Pa., was arraigned Tuesday one count of felony daytime burglary.
During the investigation, a friend of the victim told her that he knew where Parker was staying, in the same area as the victim's house.
Police then went to the home and spoke with a friend of Parker's.
The man said Parker had stopped by his home occasionally, but he said the man didn't live there.
He also said that the night before the burglary, Parker asked him if he wanted to help break into the victim's home but he refused.
So apparently the underqualified burglar was staying with a neighbor, asked said neighbor for help, and then proceeded anyways to break into the house that the neighbor refused to help him break into.
Frankly I'm surprised our criminal didn't leave behind his wallet or an autographed self-portrait as well.
I understood perfectly. You basically said "in defense of cable" that it was cheaper than training pigeons, which is more costly in time and money.
Wrong again, you assumed that to be my argument. I did not assert one to be cheaper than the other. I was arguing that the logic presented was incomplete.
Much like your own analysis of what I have been saying:
Now you're trying to backpeddle and pretend you never said that
There is no backpedaling, no matter how much you may assert (or misspell) it. Kindly go back and re-read what I have written, without your own assumptions.
, but it seems quite clear - you forgot laying cable ALSO requires traiining and money and time.
I never claimed that was done magically or at no cost. However you will find that in other posts I have pointed out that cable is not laid for single purposes; pigeons are single purpose. Furthermore between a point A and a point B, very little of the cable used for communication is specifically laid for the occupants of point A or point B in most cases. The same cannot be said of the pigeons, their preparation, or their deployment.
Right now I'm leaning towards the pigeon being cheaper
Since you seem to have no concern for my opinion on the matter, I won't worry about yours either.
It's certainly faster (about 50 times faster).
At the very least you need to divide that number by two, as someone had to get the pigeon down to point B so it could return to point A. And that is only if you assume that the trip for the pigeon to point B was at the same speed (around 50mph) as it took to get back to point A when flying (and that is also only if you assume that the bird immediately leaves point B for point A with no time between).
I want my 4000x2400 21" display. I want to be able to have tiny letters in high quality anti-aliased fonts and have it look really good. Why hasn't it happened?
I've been asking the same question for some time. I find it disappointing that 30" displays get the same resolution as 24" displays but at significantly higher cost. And for that matter 24" displays get barely any higher resolution than 21" displays.
Back when CRT monitors were still the standard displays, resolution generally increased significantly with size. For some reason we have accepted that to not be necessary with LCD?
We don't know where the cabled network is lagging. For that matter we don't know if the people who wrote this article even know where the network is lagging. By the time some amount of data traverses from point A to point B it has passed through several routers, switches, etc. Just because the bandwidth was underachieving doesn't mean that the problem can't be solved with a sensible investment of time and resources.
Do you think the time and money invested in digging-up the ground, hiring men, laying cable, and then connecting it with the required headends/servers is trivial either?
I never suggested such a thing, you made it up based on how you (mis)read what I wrote.
Futhermore, the investment in networking infrastructure is dramatically different than the investment in training a bird. In particular, cabling to a site is in most cases multi-use - it connects to the internet and not just a single site. Unless you have some reason to claim that dedicated cabling was running between the two sites, your argument doesn't hold much weight. After all, the bird is capable of going only to one site - and very few pigeons ever learn to do a round trip on their own.
I suspect training the pigeon would actually be LESS time consuming.
That is based on a whole lot of assumptions that you cannot support. How the time expense of wiring at each site compares to the round-trip drive between the sites is not defined.
A couple of important things were omitted that are important to the pigeon - in particular the time and money that went into training the bird to make that flight. They didn't exactly just reach out of their office window and grab any pigeon that happened to be nearby.
I don't think thats important at all. Its not like they reached out the window, and grabbed any phone line either. This was simply comparing quality of service between two provider's networks. Telekom lost.
My point is that the time and money invested in the bird is not trivial. If the pigeon is to carry something to point B from point A, someone needs to deliver the pigeon from point B to point A in order for that to happen. And that person will then themselves return to point B (if they live or work at point B) or else they originated at point A (if they live or work there). Hence there is a round trip by car (or other vehicle) for someone between A and B that should be considered. That round trip took time and money for someone. And the bird likely wasn't free either.
Though nonetheless, the data transfer rates over cable were atrocious, as shown in the summary.
A couple of important things were omitted that are important to the pigeon - in particular the time and money that went into training the bird to make that flight. They didn't exactly just reach out of their office window and grab any pigeon that happened to be nearby.
The summary claims that the article says OpenOffice is making inroads. Of course others have already addressed the statistical dilemmas with the purported data set; there are some very rough meta-meta-analysis statements one could consider based on this statement:
Indeed the set surveyed does reflect windows users fairly well in at least some regards because OpenOffice has been slow in adoption in segments where MS Office is well entrenched
Or, the sample is not well selected to reflect on Windows users in general; they are adopting OpenOffice at a much lower rate than stated
Or, the sample is not well selected, and Windows users are adopting at a much higher rate than stated.
What the hell word is that even supposed to be? I guess "ruminate" would be the closest word that sounds remotely similar to "laminate" and also makes sense in context.
I suspect that person wanted the word lament. Though we could chew on the possibility of ruminate as well.
One might further speculate the user was using spell check and trusting it to make sense of the grammar; notice the subject is "to bad really", it should have likely been "too bad really". This would explain how (a misspelling of ) "lament" became "laminate".
Supported non-windows and non-mac systems quite well. This was perhaps aided by our very strong CSci program. Your questions:
WiFi: Worked great for my laptop running Linux, BSD, or, if I really had to, Windows.
Remote printing: Was something I never used myself as I always lived off-campus, I can't really comment on it since I never had a use for it
Classroom Applications: I'm not entirely sure what you mean by that, we used a few web-based classroom applications (Blackboard, turnitin.com) and they worked fine.
Perhaps I'm missing something here, but isn't the C64 pretty much just a BASIC interpreter? I thought just about everything for the C64 was written in BASIC; and IIRC the start prompt on the C64 took BASIC code natively.
... An unbiased jury pool should be of paramount importance in a trial like this. After all, the accused is being called to trial in the state that executes more prisoners than the rest of the country combined.
The last computer I purchased didn't have a restore CD, it had a restore partition on the hard drive. However, there was a fairly straightforward method that I followed that allowed me to use the restore partition to make a windows install CD that made a fresh install of my OS.
reinstalling, which you *will* have to do now and then
That is at least as much the fault of the user as it is the fault of the OS. Intelligently setup windows boxes don't need OS reinstalls with any more frequency than their *nix counterparts; however many windows boxes are compromised by poorly informed users.
The fact that this course is offered to BestBuy employees - and apparently only BestBuy employees - says something about consumer electronics retail in 2009 in the US. When I worked at CompUSA (pre - 2000) I frequently went to vendor-sponsored "classes" where they would give us food, beer, free hardware/software, etc, for listening to their pitch. We generally went there and found that there were also BestBuy, CircuitCity, and even OfficeMax or OfficeDepot employees, depending on what was being sold. Now of those five retailers (including CompUSA) only BestBuy remains a significant factor in consumer elecrtonics sales.
I'm surprised that Microsoft apparently didn't even think highly enough of Microcenter to invite them. I guess they are still rather small fish (in terms of market presence) at the moment.
That was a different idea altogether. Blue Frog ran under the assumptin that the spammers could be pressured directly into removing people from their lists.
On the other hand, I acknowledge that attempting to work directly with the spammers is a lost cause. Instead you need to attack something that the spammers really care about - their profits. If you can disconnect the spammers from their revenue streams then you will remove their incentive to send out spam.
Slashdot Mirror
The economic model was fundamentally flawed. The Soviets never learned the lessons from Stalin's disastrous communist experiments
Your first statement is true only if you recognize that Stalinism as "the economic model" was an outright and total perversion of communism, with almost no real resemblance to communism as Karl Marx had first proposed in The Communist Manifesto.
The economic system was completely geared toward state interests (the definition of a planned economy)
The definition of a planned economy, perhaps. But the definition of a communist system, certainly not.
Calling the Soviet states communists is about as accurate as claiming that the United States runs solely on The Federalist Papers. Either argument falls apart in less than 5 minutes for anyone who has read either.
The Soviet Union fell because communism doesn't work. Period
Not true. Communism as implemented doesn't work.
(Or do you really believe that communism is viable, and that the Soviet implimentation was flawed?)
There is no definite answer to the viability of communism. Communism has never been implemented as it was originally described by Marx. If you were to read the Communist Manifesto you would understand that, amongst other things, Marx never intended for it to be implemented in large countries. Karl Marx knew well enough to realize that large countries could not handle true communism.
It was the relaxation of political control that led to the fall of the USSR, not an economic failure
And why did they relinquish control of the other soviet states? Because they couldn't afford them. They needed to contract their sphere of influence in order to have any chance of maintaining their imploding economy.
Moreover, they were still quite capable of competing with us militarily at the time.
I don't know where you got that notion from. We have seen time and again how their military infrastructure was rapidly deteriorating throughout the 80s.
The Soviet Union fell because planned economies do not work
A stronger argument could be made that they failed due to lack of a meaningful plan. Their government-military-industrial-complex became top heavy with no direction. It was only a matter of time until their system ate itself from the inside out.
I know conservatives need to lay something at the feet of St. Reagan
I urge you to re-read my post if you took it to be an act of idolizing Reagan. You would do yourself well to consider reading some of my other posts as well, if you are for some reason accusing me of such an act.
Indeed, Reagan's true achievement wasn't in intimidating the USSR militarily into despair. Rather, he managed to convince them that he thought Star Wars was a documentary. He then subsequently convinced them that we were building this fantastic laser-beam and ICBM-based international defense system that would annihilate them if they sneezed on us. Which cause the military hot-heads over there to spend far too much money on military defenses, while letting the rest of their empire rot.
Hence Reagan's irresponsible spending and gloating lead to even more irresponsible spending and gloating in the USSR - which became their undoing.
What are "vegetative patents" ?
I suspect those are the types that are filed before the invention is actually complete (not even necessarily in regards to the invention ever being completed) - and they can indeed earn quite a bit.
... when I see the pie charts presented to show it happened.
I had a third grade teacher who made me stay after school for several days so I could learn how to write a proper lower-cased "r" in cursive. Never mind that I was the best mathematician in my class; for some reason I was a terrible excuse for a human being by not being able to properly write that letter "r" in cursive.
I don't remember the last time I wrote anything in cursive. My signature on my credit card doesn't in the least resemble the cursive that we were drilled on for so long in grade school. Cursive can go away and be banished to the deepest levels of hell for as far as I am concerned.
...this? Wow, looks like California is trying hard to maintain their reputation as the most dysfunctional state government. Granted, over here in NY state we may still hold the record for the least amount of actual legislation written this year (so far almost none); but at least our government is talking about thinking about proposing to hold meetings about news conferences about talking about proposing to write legislation that spends money looking into our budget problems.
Of course, they'll do that right after they vote themselves a pay raise and have actual meetings about re-gerrymandering their favorite districts.
Jonathan G. Parker, 19, of Fort Loudoun, Pa., was arraigned Tuesday one count of felony daytime burglary.
During the investigation, a friend of the victim told her that he knew where Parker was staying, in the same area as the victim's house.
Police then went to the home and spoke with a friend of Parker's.
The man said Parker had stopped by his home occasionally, but he said the man didn't live there.
He also said that the night before the burglary, Parker asked him if he wanted to help break into the victim's home but he refused.
So apparently the underqualified burglar was staying with a neighbor, asked said neighbor for help, and then proceeded anyways to break into the house that the neighbor refused to help him break into.
Frankly I'm surprised our criminal didn't leave behind his wallet or an autographed self-portrait as well.
Look for The Flying DutchFrog to see electromagnet experiments in levitation on other vertebrates.
I understood perfectly. You basically said "in defense of cable" that it was cheaper than training pigeons, which is more costly in time and money.
Wrong again, you assumed that to be my argument. I did not assert one to be cheaper than the other. I was arguing that the logic presented was incomplete.
Much like your own analysis of what I have been saying:
Now you're trying to backpeddle and pretend you never said that
There is no backpedaling, no matter how much you may assert (or misspell) it. Kindly go back and re-read what I have written, without your own assumptions.
, but it seems quite clear - you forgot laying cable ALSO requires traiining and money and time.
I never claimed that was done magically or at no cost. However you will find that in other posts I have pointed out that cable is not laid for single purposes; pigeons are single purpose. Furthermore between a point A and a point B, very little of the cable used for communication is specifically laid for the occupants of point A or point B in most cases. The same cannot be said of the pigeons, their preparation, or their deployment.
Right now I'm leaning towards the pigeon being cheaper
Since you seem to have no concern for my opinion on the matter, I won't worry about yours either.
It's certainly faster (about 50 times faster).
At the very least you need to divide that number by two, as someone had to get the pigeon down to point B so it could return to point A. And that is only if you assume that the trip for the pigeon to point B was at the same speed (around 50mph) as it took to get back to point A when flying (and that is also only if you assume that the bird immediately leaves point B for point A with no time between).
I want my 4000x2400 21" display. I want to be able to have tiny letters in high quality anti-aliased fonts and have it look really good. Why hasn't it happened?
I've been asking the same question for some time. I find it disappointing that 30" displays get the same resolution as 24" displays but at significantly higher cost. And for that matter 24" displays get barely any higher resolution than 21" displays.
Back when CRT monitors were still the standard displays, resolution generally increased significantly with size. For some reason we have accepted that to not be necessary with LCD?
We don't know where the cabled network is lagging. For that matter we don't know if the people who wrote this article even know where the network is lagging. By the time some amount of data traverses from point A to point B it has passed through several routers, switches, etc. Just because the bandwidth was underachieving doesn't mean that the problem can't be solved with a sensible investment of time and resources.
Or of course they can just use birds.
God you dense.
Your typing leaves something to be desired.
Do you think the time and money invested in digging-up the ground, hiring men, laying cable, and then connecting it with the required headends/servers is trivial either?
I never suggested such a thing, you made it up based on how you (mis)read what I wrote.
Futhermore, the investment in networking infrastructure is dramatically different than the investment in training a bird. In particular, cabling to a site is in most cases multi-use - it connects to the internet and not just a single site. Unless you have some reason to claim that dedicated cabling was running between the two sites, your argument doesn't hold much weight. After all, the bird is capable of going only to one site - and very few pigeons ever learn to do a round trip on their own.
I suspect training the pigeon would actually be LESS time consuming.
That is based on a whole lot of assumptions that you cannot support. How the time expense of wiring at each site compares to the round-trip drive between the sites is not defined.
A couple of important things were omitted that are important to the pigeon - in particular the time and money that went into training the bird to make that flight. They didn't exactly just reach out of their office window and grab any pigeon that happened to be nearby.
I don't think thats important at all. Its not like they reached out the window, and grabbed any phone line either. This was simply comparing quality of service between two provider's networks. Telekom lost.
My point is that the time and money invested in the bird is not trivial. If the pigeon is to carry something to point B from point A, someone needs to deliver the pigeon from point B to point A in order for that to happen. And that person will then themselves return to point B (if they live or work at point B) or else they originated at point A (if they live or work there). Hence there is a round trip by car (or other vehicle) for someone between A and B that should be considered. That round trip took time and money for someone. And the bird likely wasn't free either.
Though nonetheless, the data transfer rates over cable were atrocious, as shown in the summary.
A couple of important things were omitted that are important to the pigeon - in particular the time and money that went into training the bird to make that flight. They didn't exactly just reach out of their office window and grab any pigeon that happened to be nearby.
What the hell word is that even supposed to be? I guess "ruminate" would be the closest word that sounds remotely similar to "laminate" and also makes sense in context.
I suspect that person wanted the word lament. Though we could chew on the possibility of ruminate as well.
One might further speculate the user was using spell check and trusting it to make sense of the grammar; notice the subject is "to bad really", it should have likely been "too bad really". This would explain how (a misspelling of ) "lament" became "laminate".
but I can't really laminate about how terrible sega is
Are you afraid you might gloss over the story?
Perhaps I'm missing something here, but isn't the C64 pretty much just a BASIC interpreter? I thought just about everything for the C64 was written in BASIC; and IIRC the start prompt on the C64 took BASIC code natively.
... An unbiased jury pool should be of paramount importance in a trial like this. After all, the accused is being called to trial in the state that executes more prisoners than the rest of the country combined.
Sounds like the OS for the pre has almost caught up with functionality that BlackBerry users have had for years...
a worthless "restore" CD
The last computer I purchased didn't have a restore CD, it had a restore partition on the hard drive. However, there was a fairly straightforward method that I followed that allowed me to use the restore partition to make a windows install CD that made a fresh install of my OS.
reinstalling, which you *will* have to do now and then
That is at least as much the fault of the user as it is the fault of the OS. Intelligently setup windows boxes don't need OS reinstalls with any more frequency than their *nix counterparts; however many windows boxes are compromised by poorly informed users.
The fact that this course is offered to BestBuy employees - and apparently only BestBuy employees - says something about consumer electronics retail in 2009 in the US. When I worked at CompUSA (pre - 2000) I frequently went to vendor-sponsored "classes" where they would give us food, beer, free hardware/software, etc, for listening to their pitch. We generally went there and found that there were also BestBuy, CircuitCity, and even OfficeMax or OfficeDepot employees, depending on what was being sold. Now of those five retailers (including CompUSA) only BestBuy remains a significant factor in consumer elecrtonics sales.
I'm surprised that Microsoft apparently didn't even think highly enough of Microcenter to invite them. I guess they are still rather small fish (in terms of market presence) at the moment.
there was an antispam system that used 'revenge' : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Frog
That was a different idea altogether. Blue Frog ran under the assumptin that the spammers could be pressured directly into removing people from their lists.
On the other hand, I acknowledge that attempting to work directly with the spammers is a lost cause. Instead you need to attack something that the spammers really care about - their profits. If you can disconnect the spammers from their revenue streams then you will remove their incentive to send out spam.