Yahoo doesn't get to choose to ignore laws they think are wrong. If the DOJ shows up at a library wanting to know who is reading about a certain topic they have to comply, even if they believe the order is wrong and evil, and/or unconstituional. If the DOJ shows up at Yahoo and demands the same thing, they must also comply. Why would Chinese laws would apply any less?
It's WILDLY hipocritcal for the US Congress to haul Yahoo in and chastize them for complying with the same kinds of immoral, illegal, intrusive orders that they themselves are allowing the US government to issue.
Glass houses, stones, pot, kettle... etc. etc. This is simply dog wagging.
The problem isn't the absence of the gold standard. The problem is allowing deficit spending. That should be banned.
I would like to see a constitutional amendment forcing a general population vote to approve any deficit spending with a 4 year time limit on that approval. I'd also like to see a hard limit on spending of 30% of the income in the entire population. Let them distribute the taxes however they like but don't let them exceed that number without the vote.
It would also be different if we had a true democracy and the rich had nothing to gain from bribing politicians.
Public opinion is even easier to sway than politicians. Remember, the money that is corrupting things isn't for the politicians personally, it's simply to convince the public that they should vote for them instead of kicking them out of office. I remember a great example of this somewhere, Australia I think, where DeBeers actually convinced the general public to allow DeBeers to have a monopoly on all the country's diamonds instead of selling them on the open market.
The problem with a true democracy is that people don't have time to give issues enough thought to consider anything but superficial arguments. There is no deep thought or discussion. We'd get dumb laws like "Brad and Jennifer must stay together" and "Nobody can be rich" and "all people must follow x religion" and dumb crap like that. Our society is a complicated system with complex behavior and interactions. Laws don't ever simply do what their creators intended them to, they change the system's balance to a new equilibrium. Representative democracy works better because the people making laws have time to understand them.
you're voting for the rich elitest business interest...
Everyone who donates to campaigns are rich. The idea that this could be different is silly. You won't be donating to candidates unless you have nothing better to do with the money and that only happens when you are pretty well off.
However, the idea that receiving money from wealthy people makes you thier puppet is silly. People are individuals who in general do things that they feel are in their best instrest. If they want to get elected again they will do things that will get them more votes.
The problem is that challengers are so empoverished that unless you killed a hooker or something they won't have the money to explain to voters that you are corrupt and shouldn't be voted for. The $1000 limit ensures that.
The way to fix it is to create a system where politicians lose more votes for getting paid to support bad legislation than they win.
You've been working more and getting less in return for it, on average, for 40 years now.
No way. The average family has cell phones and cable and air conditioning and 2 reliable cars (not that shit Detroit tried to push on us 20 and 30 years ago) and spend tons of money keeping ourselves healthy (whereas before we just died). While employment may be down around you, it's doing fine most places. Life isn't perfect, far from it, but it's better than it used to be.
One of the most powerful influences on the buying power of the average American is the giant efficient chain stores like Wal*Mart driving the prices down lower than they ever have been.
You argue that the standard of living in the US is dropping.. that just isn't true. That may be true for you personally, but that might just be because you are a militant nut and nobody wants to hire you for a good job.:)
And who passes such laws? Centralized governments...
Incorrect. Most of these laws come from town/city zoning boards. Thats as local as government gets. They are influenced by overall trends and ideas like the "suburban sprawl" misinformation you keep hearing people spew but the decisions are purely local.
Actually, they're NOT the same crappy manufactured goods if you shop at the right places- they're American made pride, not Chinese crap.
Oh please! Nearly every mom and pop store will have plenty of chinese made stuff in it and Wal*Mart has plenty of US made stuff in it.
In the end, and I doubt it will take too long, China will rise from the backwords third world nation it has been into a modern economic superpower. Quality will rise, it's people will demand high wages and we will be back on a more or less level playing field like we are with Japan.
In the meantime, we are having them do all the work and we're keeping most of the money and paying US people to mangage and engineer and market the products, instead of being factory workers. We win on both ends, more cheaper products and more better jobs.
Oh yeah, and Wal*Mart- you really need to compare their prices to the Mom&Pop stores sometime
I do. All the time. Wal*Mart is cheaper. Sometimes a lot cheaper. Like 1/10th the price. Some US company wants to sell me an 16 foot inflatable plastc pool for $3,000. It's well made, superior in every way to Wal*Mart's, but Wal*Mart sells a 16' pool for $279. The US company and the Mom&Pop store (which is right across the street from Wal*Mart by the way) can take their $3k price tag and shove it. I don't want a pool that bad, I wouldn't buy it, I wouldn't have one. I'd go without. The Wal*Mart one I'd buy. Those aren't the only things I've found at 1/10th the price either. We live in a world where it's unimaginable that people would gouge us for things if it werent for competition, but we get just the slightest touch of what it would be like and it crushes us as with the recent gas price hikes. Imagine going to the store and not paying $100 for groceries but $500. And you beg and plead and haggle with the store owner so they cut you a break and let you leave for $400. That's not better.
I said that the pricing of the free market supports PROFITEERING- you can't make a profit if you're selling something for less than it's produced for.
And in a free market you can't sell it for much more either or someone will undercut you and steal your business. There are pockets for profiteering but when the playing field is level, they must remain small or you will get your customers stolen.
The press doesn't matter- this is no longer a democracy.
Incorrect. While there are plenty of tricks and cheats people can use to influence governmnet, at the end of the day it's elections that decide who represent us. The power still lies with the people, they just don't know how to use that power to fix whats wrong.
I'm talking about it, and I have a solution. But it's not a pretty one.
Economies of scale mean nothing when it comes to providing the most work for the most people possible.
That's a horrible goal. I don't want to have to work more, I want to work less and get more for it. So far, I'm getting what I want and so are most of the people in the US.
My life isn't full of art and history and happiness and effortless productivity- it's full of 56 hour weeks just to keep my family in a house that is worth about 10x what it sold for when it was built in 1968. That's your "progress".
Inflated house prices are usually due to crappy restrictive local policies that aim to reign in the normal flow of housing expansion which drives prices up. That makes things better for all the existing home owners and dramatically worse for anyone looking to buy a house.
Unless you boycot walmart, however, your purchasing power has probably gone up from what it would have been many years ago and you probably live better.
They are when you take the full cost of business on an entire community into account. For each $1 you spend at a small local business- that dollar moves an average of 8 times through the local community. For each $1 you spend at Wal-Mart, $.08 stays in your local community. When it comes to providing your neighbors with jobs, economies of scale don't matter one whit- it's about 100x more expensive to shop at Wal-Mart than it is at your local Mom&Pop store in the long run.
That's untrue. If I shop at my local mom and pop store they buy the same crappy manufactured goods they just spend more time and effort selling it to me. Frankly.. I don't want to pay 100 shopkeepers 30% markup so they can put their kids through college while mine starve. I'd rather pay 10 walmart people minimum wage and push people who want to make good money into productive useful jobs instead of pushy retail sails.
The free market is very good at making something as expensive to buy as it is to produce. I know you don't believe that but you are wrong.
Not likely- the money they make will just enable them to buy out their competitors instead of actually competing.
I highly doubt, after all the recent press coverage, whether anyone will let Exxon/Mobile buy anything remotely resembling a competitor for a while.
and there isn't anything to stop them because the Democrats are just as corrupt, just as bribed by big money, and so are the courts.
The courts aren't corrupt they have just done some silly things lately and are floundering in a lack of reasonable leadership.
You are quite right about politicians being corrupt, and I see very little reasonable talk about the right way to solve it. Politicians are currently horribly starved for money. Anyone with any little bit of money can buy them off easily. This is due to a very democratic sounding ruling from the supreme court with seriously un-democratic repercussions. They ruled that people can only donate up to $1,000 to politicians turning fund raising into a form of election, which sounds healthy until you realize that it's an election that only rich people can participate in and that you now can't win an office without first winning the rich people contribution vote. This desperately needs to be overturned. We traded the appearance of corruption from big contributions, for real hard core systematic corruption and a fundamental undermining of the democratic system. Politicians raise money from companies while they preside over bills that regulate them, a practice that is obviously corrupt and that most politicians wouldn't touch with a 10 foot poll except its now the only way to get enough money to stay in office. Worse, most of the solutions I hear proposed would simply further empoverish politians increasing their corruptibility even more.
There are big problems with politics today, everyone seems to know it but they don't know what it is. The supreme court took a functioning system and detroyed it's balance in an attempt to make it more fair
True- now think about what would happen if they were simply not allowed to merge at all- if each oil well, each refinery, each gas station had to be owned separately and serve only it's community? Competition is not neccessarily a good thing in small amounts- but it becomes a great thing in large amounts.
Incorrect. Economies of scale help efficiency dramatically. By your rationale small businesses would be cheaper than WalMart. They aren't.
That's the beauty of the free market economy. It steamrolls ineficient systems in favor of efficient ones, but not entirely sucking profitability out of things. You don't have to charge as little as possible, just less than a competitor could charge and trive and take your business away. The Exxon/Mobile thing will get sorted out.. because the profit margins have increased competitors will gain the ability to expand and compete and take their business away. In the short term, they will make huge money but in the long term, the company will lose ground and shrink.
There are rules that you need to keep things in balance in a free market economy. One of them is you can't have anti-competitive behavior. Buying your competition is an example of that anti-competitive behavior. Sometimes, merging is beneficial to economics though and the FTC is put in place to decide which mergers are which. The FTC made a huge mistake when they allowed Exxon/Mobile to happen, and it will hopefully be a lesson well remembered.
If the system feeds all of the people all of the time, then who cares if it is off balance?
Who cares? Everyone. Because when it's off balance everyone loses, and not a little. Look at China for a good example. They are currently trying to balance both a "fair" centrally planned economy and a capitalist one. People living under the "fair" system are misterable peasants powerless against those who use brutal oppressive tactics against them. The ones in the harsh capitalist system are horribly exploited by corperations and are much happier for it. They live wildly better lives and have much more freedom and oportunity.
We are all victoms of the horrible unstoppable capitalist machine.. because we want to be. It makes our lives better. You won't convince me that making my life worse is worth it so I can get back to the roots of what it means to be human. The roots of humanity are plagued with famine, brutality, powerlessness and back breaking toil. My life is full of art and history and happiness and effortless productivity. I may not be as holy or spiritual as I would have been if I was facing death and starvation every day.. but that's a tradeoff I'm rather happy to make.
The real question is the individual human experience, not the group and certainly not a small minority of con artists.
An economic system that requires people to concider the needs of others over the needs of themselves is doomed. "A small minority of con artists" is a silly way of characterizing what is an obvious problem: when people are faced with the decision of balancing their needs with the needs of others, they typically give a higher priority to their own. The capitalist system works with this ensuring that to meet your own needs you have to meet the needs of others. A system that relies on this not being the case is doomed to failure.
You point out that economic matters affect personal relationships and this needs to be taken into account and yet are dismissive of the desire to not expose yourself to people who might abuse a business relationship with you. That has a horrible affect on personal relationships that we fortunately don't experience often in modern society.
One is only poor if one knows that there are rich people elsewhere.
That's relativism taken to it's most ludicrous extreme. Only someone who lives such a blessed life as to never have seen real hardship could make such a heartless argument. If someone is starving, downtrodden and powerless to do anything about it do you really think they're just as well off as long as everyone else is too? Unable to afford necessary medical treatments, unable to stop people from abusing them, destroying or even taking their lives at will. Being a peasant wasn't happy, wasn't fair, wasn't just as good as being poor today.
Is that why computer security is a growing field, why everybody seems interested in closed networks and encryption?
Yup. That's precicely why.
Except for- you don't. You buy the Chinese for $10 and leave your neighbor with nothing, until he breaks into your house to steal the $30, because you just don't care, as you said above. The end result of that "self balancing" system will be that the people with the guns will own everything.
Except for- he doesn't. Instead he finds a job that's useful instead of useless makes good money and is happy and productive. The temporary pain of adjusting to reality goes away and everyone is better off.
You seem to be very nostalgic for the days of old when life was simple. The problem is it simply sucked for almost everyone. A very few enjoyed an existance which was slightly less squalid but even they lived pretty awefully. This, even with the fact that there were many fewer people with many more natural resources to support them. Watch Les Mis sometime if you want a reminder about how much it sucked.
How many of these transactions are truly free? That is, how many of them were haggled over and decided on a Fair Wage and a Just Price, or did they just take the price offered without haggling?Chances are the later.
Haggling over each individual sale is a reasonable but inefficient and simplistic way to reach a balance. The system we have is similar but it's done in bulk and in public with records and much greater scrutiny and we call it free market competition. Manufacturers compete to create items cheaper and better than the next guy so the retailers will carry them and the retailers compete with each other to deliver the product to the consumer with the lowest mark-up possible.
Places with fair competition get fine tuned extraordinarily well. Where there is a lack of it is where things go wrong. Take, for example, the recent high fuel prices in the US. It has a partial basis in high oil costs but the real scandal there is the Exxon/Mobile record profits. The fact that the two largest and fiercest competitors in the fuel delivery markets were not just allowed to price fix with each other but were actually allowed to merge and avoid competing entirely is ridiculous.
You do the best work for people you know- and you give the best price to people you love. You should not be doing business with anybody else.
Right. For example, you should have your parents or brother-in-law or someone else you know well be your financial advisors. Hell.. it works so damn well for stars, why wouldn't I. I mean... it's not like anyone's parents, or other close friends ever stole from them, right?
The sad reality is that people you know well are much more likely, to cheat, steal and rip you off than a Wall Mart cashier.
-Fair profit. -The needs of the individual workman.
Frankly.. I don't care if you need more money. If the guy down the street will do the same job for half as much, I'll hire him. You want charity.. get in line with the rest of the beggers. You want to do business.. compete.
-Income of individuals that need the good.
Why would I pay more for the same thing than someone who made less money? That's basically the same as saying everyone should make the same amount of money, which is an economic policy with a long history of miserable failure.
As far as the rest of your points... complete garbage. The free market does an excellent job of accounting for and balancing all of them.
In other words it fails to take into account what EVERY 13th century peasant had as a right to under the guild system that it replaced- a fair wage and a just price.
And you know what else EVERY 13th centruy peasant had... they were a pesant! And they were in good company since almost everyone was a peasant too. They would look at a poor person in the US in awe of the lavish lifestyle they lead.
The free market is inaccurate because it encourages an absence of information- and thus fraud.
That's complete bs. Cooperations are more and more open books. Useful information is nearly impossible to keep hidden.
Systems that balance themselves are hard for many people to understand. The balancing point is chaotic and impossible to predict and people hate unpredictability. Lots of simple-minded hippie types like to advocate predictable calm systems but, the trade off is the system that will always be off balance.
People also rail about the unfairness when they lose their jobs. This is the hard underbelly of the system but it's necessary. It keeps people from being useless and forces them to do useful things. If it costs an American worker $40 to make a shirt and we can import them from china for $10, I'd rather buy the Chinese for $10 and give the American $30 to stay home and watch TV because at least they wouldn't being deluded into thinking they are doing something useful.
I wouldn't bother leaving the last drive out of the Raid5 array. I have a software RAID 6 array and it's speed is limited by the speed of the drives, not by the parity calculations. Just get a nice dual-core cpu so one can do the RAID math while the other runs your application. RAID parity calculations are very easy work for CPUs these days and so generally the more drives in an array the faster it is, especially with bulk data transfer. Another good option is to just get more RAM so you don't really use that scratch space as much. I'm planning on 4 GB in my next box since with DDR2 that's only about $300. That's a lot of pixels.
Also consider mixing protection schemes. My current desktop box has 2 drives with 3 partitions on each. The first partition on each drive is a solo partition (1 OS on each drive so I have a backup in case one has trouble), the second is a striped set for things I want to be fast and don't care about reliability (games, swap, etc) and the third partition is a mirrored set for data I want to keep safe. This combination gives me everything I need without having to power and have room for a whole array of drives in my desktop. The only issue I had was having to hack XP to support mirroring since it's crippled by default (shame on you Microsoft) but that was made much easier by having the second OS partition around. Hopefully with Vista they won't be so dumb.
I'm very happy with this mixed protection scheme and I'll probably do the same thing on all the computers I build soon. I'd like to see retail boxes configured like this by default. It makes a ton of sense, even for casual users.
Unix is great at providing source level compatibility. You can (usually) easily create source code that will compile binaries for a wide variety of operating systems and versions. What Windows does beautifully is take this one step further and provide binary level compatibilty between different versons. I can take something created for Windows 95 and it installs and runs well today on Windows XP. You can distribute a version of a program that works with pretty much all currently used Windows versions as one single file, and that's what vendors typically do. Linux doesn't have that. LSB is a step in that direction but we have a lot further to go still.
One thing that I think is lacking in all distributions is a good method for installing OS independant third party applications. Most Linux distributions like to rely on the OS's native package management system for this task but the requirements are somewhat different and the two systems should have different interfaces for third-party packages. Third party applications often have options as to what components get installed, are less trustworthy and therefor should have more restrictions on what they can do, and should have extra functionality allowing the package to be non-OS specific. Installing packages today using the OS's package management system requires root privledges and allows a package to pretty much do whatever it wants. This isn't secure at all when dealing with third-party packages.
What would be great is if someone created an open source third-party-program package management system that would allow the creation of packages that would install on lots of OSs (Windows, Mac, Linuxs, etc.) and architectures (x86, x86_64, ppc, etc). A publisher could pick a whole set of OSs and platforms and bundle it all up in one file or separate them however they wanted. Only the OS/archetecture specific parts would have to be duplicated for each bundle. A third party package manager should be configurable to run from non-administrator/root but allow root/administrator things to be done as long as the user is prompted and agrees. Big warnings should be given for anything that would run by default or alter the system significantly. It should also be configurable to prompt for incoming/outgoing IP ports the application may use and other security related things. The installation manager could prompt for downloads of common depenancies that weren't already installed (java,.net 2.0, vbrun6.dll, glibc 2.3 etc.) to fill in the gaps so that application vendors don't have to bundle them with the application. It should also take care of installing menu entries in appropriate places and the user should be able to configure where they go and if they install silently or require prompting.
Putting the reqirement on the OS to make the program work instead of vice versa just makes sense. The current situation makes Linux very ugly and dangerous when dealing with software that's not already in the distribution. A little midlleware glue software that would figure out how make a vendor supplied distribution work properly on this OS would make Linux much more attractive to end users and if the same file they installed on their Windows box also installed on their Linux box, it can only help interoperability between the two.
They did something with my product that I didn't intend! CRIMINALS! FRY THEM! And worse.. they MADE MONEY! Throw the book at them!
Seriously.. the extortion thing was pretty dumb of them, but this sense of ownership of everything a company touches is insane and needs to end. People will build on top of your work. Its the way free market economies work. Get over it.
I don't know. When I look at the law, it makes sense to me.
That's because you are assuming you will agree with it whenever it is enforced. If only speech that the government/general population agrees with is allowed then we have no freedom of speech at all.
From the law: Every one who advocates or promotes genocide is guilty of an indictable offence...
I think everyone with the bird flu should be killed and their bodies and possessions burned.
There.. I just violated that law by expressing an opinion. I better not go to Canada soon! It may be a good idea that saves billions of lives, it may be a bad idea that needlessly kills innocent people, either way it's wrong to prohibit talking about it.
And why! Why are we prohibiting talk? It's a thought crime, basically saying that we shouldn't be able to communicate certain ideas to others? It's based on the notion that evil is stronger than good.. that hateful, genocidal ideas when allowed in public will win against rational ideas that value life. This view that government must save us from our own evil nature is a horrible stance for government to take. It's the exact same moral ground governments need to ban religions and lifestyle choices and new-fangled ideas like freedom and democracy.
The problem is that evil ideas spread *best* in the dark, they shrivel and disappear when exposed to public discussion and rational thought. By blocking discussion of them you are essentially protecting them and fostering their growth.
Take my bird flu comment for example. What might sound like a terribly good idea whispered in a one on one discussion between military generals would likely be torn apart if splashed on the front page of a newspaper. Prohibit talk about something and you dramatically increase the chance of it happening. It's analogous to tying down that annoying drippy relief valve on your water heater. There.. that made that problem go away, everythings neet and tidy now. Time to get some sleep.
For example, Canada has hate crime laws, and I think they are pretty good things; they probably wouldn't stand up in the U.S. legal system.
If they disallow speech, they worsen the problem. It may look better on the surface but you have stifled people and the effects of that will be much broader and deeper than the problem you think you solved. You may not believe it. There may or may not be existing evidece for it. I have no proof to offer other than if you think about it you'll probably see why. Just because I don't have any proof to point to to help convince you of my opinion, doesn't mean it's not true. It just means I'll have a hard time convincing others.
It's not editorializing if you aren't trying (always in vein) to write objectively.
Actually, they're not required to go to school either. However, they're required to go to some sort of educational program. Homeschooling, private school, private tutor, etc.
Those without the means to supply an alternative educational program (all require a significant investment of time and/or money) must attend public school. A majority of the population does not have the means and thus is required to go to public school.
Actually, public schools are generally local government institutions - and so should be completely unaffected by the constitutional ban on federal laws restricting the freedom of speach.
Incorrect. As the parent stated, the first ammendment was extended by the fourteenth to include state and local government. Just how the 14'th extends things has been a matter of much legal debate and lots of rulings but it has generally been held up by the courts as meaning the entire bill of rights applies as much to state and local governments as to federal.
Schools impose all kinds of restrictions on students. Places of business impose all kinds of restrictions on employees. Owners of property impose restrictions on trespassers.
Schools are government bodies and attendance is mandatory. All children in this country who don't have the means to attian an alternate education are forced to be subjected to public school's rules. That makes your exmampeles irrelivant. The appropriate analogous situation would be prison. We do not allow prisons to remove inmates free speech rights, why would we let schools.
This is legal. Schools are allowed to have dress codes. Schools are allowed to decide what constitutes "non-disruptive" activity to the learning environment.
These things are pseudo-legal and only involve behavior while within the walls of the school. To extend the schools reach to everything a student does all the time is pretty obviously wrong. You wouldn't think it was right for schools impose a dress code on kids when they were at home would you?
Some people still don't get Columbine. The lesson there is trying to suppress issues and make them go away quietly is exactly the wrong thing to do. It makes things worse. The great thing is that lots of people did learn the lesson and started to listen to kids who didn't think everything was just perfect in their schools. Sadly this seems to be a school that has forgotten the lesson and is comfortable insisting students shut up and pretend everything is great.
I'm all for schools teaching kids good behavior but there are a few things they do that are both wrong and just plain illegal. Things schools should keep in mind:
Schools are mandatory. School attendance is not optional in the US. Kids have to go. There are a few who have the means to attend alternatives but those who don't are forced to attend public schools no matter what.
Schools are part of the government. Like police and judges our schools are government bodies. You can not give schools the ability to force the removal of fundamental rights. Judges can't. Police can't. Schools *MUST* be bound by the bill of rights including the right to free speech. They don't have the right to take that away much like they don't have the right to take your life away (forget detention.. you're going to the gas chamber.) You could argue that schools should be allowed to control speech in school creating short periods of time when their rights are suspended, although it's probably a bad idea. To say they have the ability to remove fundamental rights from people altogether is completely ludicrous. No federal, state or local government body can have that power. Granted, the bill of rights only specifically mentions federal government, the trend lately seems to be ruling that the 14'th amendment extends the bill of rights to state and local government. This would include schools.
The other thing that it's important to note is that speech restriction is essentially creating thought crimes and the effects are usually precisely the opposite of what was intended. Discouraging open exchange only worsens the problem that we are trying to ignore or make invisible. The first amendment exists for this reason and it's for this reason we should defend it absolutely without question always. Everyone has a right to be heard.
Why pay extra for an internal UPS for each piece when you can use the economies of scale to get a gigantic one that covers multiple pieces instead?
Because the solution offers superior reliability and no single point of failure. Its hard to protect from someone from unplugging the server from the UPS. With batteries in the box you are protected. Also.. it's hardly fair to call putting it in the server a UPS. With batteries in the computer there is no DC->AC->DC conversion. It's DC->DC which is much easier to make more efficient. This gives you more backup time with less battery.
Also, the batteries in a UPS are a consumable; they go bad after some number of years. Not the sort of thing you want to have to take your server down to repair. With a UPS, you just switch to another, interchangable unit,...
And with a laptop you can usually yank a battery out and put a new one in without so much as powering the machine down. With 2 batteries you can do one at a time and not even risk power failure if the AC power goes dead. No reboot necessary.
Centralized UPS systems also suffer from the "not my problem" problem. If battery life isn't the server designers problem, they don't optimize for it at all. And since 1 server doesn't usually affect he runtime of a big UPS that much people don't care if the new box uses 4x as much power and pulls a minute off the runtime of the centralized UPS. That one server now affects the runtime of all your machines now though. If each server has it's own interal power backup you could spec for only getting machines that will last 30 minutes on battery and not worry if the new box will pull that down to 25 minutes because it's usage won't affect the runtime of other boxes.
There are, of course, disadvantages too but I'd expect to see this as a more popular option.
Laptops generally aren't built to be on 24x7. The fans and harddrives would be my biggest concern. With clean air and frequent drive replacements it could work.
The real question this spurs is why don't servers have internal UPS's like laptops do and why aren't there ones designed for low power and long batery life. A laptop motherboard with several big UPS style batteries, a mirrored set of drives and some reasonable low power cooling fans could probalby live for up to a day on battery and still be quite a capable server.
I'll also point out that AMD is doing all this at 90nm while these Intel chips are 65nm. Intel is ahead in rolling out new manufacturing processes and it's giving them a huge boost but AMD has a better processor design.
Unless AMD moves to 65nm and keeps investing in their processor design and moving it forward they will lose this edge fast though as Intel is demonstrating. It's good to see Intel dropping their bad design decisions that lead to the P4 and Itanic and getting back on track with classic good processor design.
The problem with unions is they suck the motivation and drive out of the workforce which reduces their worth. In a global economy, reducing the worth of your employees pretty much adds up to reducing their pay, their numbers or both.
It's about a day too late for anyone to moderate anything up and nobody will ever read this so I won't be diplomatic.
What the hell is wrong with you all!
This is the CORRECT way to fight DVD piracy.
Here are INCORRECT ways: Throwing people in jail for making it so you can play DVD's on Linux. Cramming DRM and TCPA down our throats. Screwing up 80 years of open standards by forcing encrypion on every device that is capable of displaying a movie.
For once these guys got it right!
Congratulations MPAA, for the first time in modern memory you've actually done something of value to your member companies that doesn't screw us, their customers. Well done! Keep it up.
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Yahoo doesn't get to choose to ignore laws they think are wrong. If the DOJ shows up at a library wanting to know who is reading about a certain topic they have to comply, even if they believe the order is wrong and evil, and/or unconstituional. If the DOJ shows up at Yahoo and demands the same thing, they must also comply. Why would Chinese laws would apply any less?
It's WILDLY hipocritcal for the US Congress to haul Yahoo in and chastize them for complying with the same kinds of immoral, illegal, intrusive orders that they themselves are allowing the US government to issue.
Glass houses, stones, pot, kettle... etc. etc. This is simply dog wagging.
If we had Sound Money, this would be different.
The problem isn't the absence of the gold standard. The problem is allowing deficit spending. That should be banned.
I would like to see a constitutional amendment forcing a general population vote to approve any deficit spending with a 4 year time limit on that approval. I'd also like to see a hard limit on spending of 30% of the income in the entire population. Let them distribute the taxes however they like but don't let them exceed that number without the vote.
It would also be different if we had a true democracy and the rich had nothing to gain from bribing politicians.
Public opinion is even easier to sway than politicians. Remember, the money that is corrupting things isn't for the politicians personally, it's simply to convince the public that they should vote for them instead of kicking them out of office. I remember a great example of this somewhere, Australia I think, where DeBeers actually convinced the general public to allow DeBeers to have a monopoly on all the country's diamonds instead of selling them on the open market.
The problem with a true democracy is that people don't have time to give issues enough thought to consider anything but superficial arguments. There is no deep thought or discussion. We'd get dumb laws like "Brad and Jennifer must stay together" and "Nobody can be rich" and "all people must follow x religion" and dumb crap like that. Our society is a complicated system with complex behavior and interactions. Laws don't ever simply do what their creators intended them to, they change the system's balance to a new equilibrium. Representative democracy works better because the people making laws have time to understand them.
you're voting for the rich elitest business interest...
Everyone who donates to campaigns are rich. The idea that this could be different is silly. You won't be donating to candidates unless you have nothing better to do with the money and that only happens when you are pretty well off.
However, the idea that receiving money from wealthy people makes you thier puppet is silly. People are individuals who in general do things that they feel are in their best instrest. If they want to get elected again they will do things that will get them more votes.
The problem is that challengers are so empoverished that unless you killed a hooker or something they won't have the money to explain to voters that you are corrupt and shouldn't be voted for. The $1000 limit ensures that.
The way to fix it is to create a system where politicians lose more votes for getting paid to support bad legislation than they win.
The elections are all faked- there hasn't been an honest election in the United States in 120 years.
Where do you get that?
You've been working more and getting less in return for it, on average, for 40 years now.
:)
No way. The average family has cell phones and cable and air conditioning and 2 reliable cars (not that shit Detroit tried to push on us 20 and 30 years ago) and spend tons of money keeping ourselves healthy (whereas before we just died). While employment may be down around you, it's doing fine most places. Life isn't perfect, far from it, but it's better than it used to be.
One of the most powerful influences on the buying power of the average American is the giant efficient chain stores like Wal*Mart driving the prices down lower than they ever have been.
You argue that the standard of living in the US is dropping.. that just isn't true. That may be true for you personally, but that might just be because you are a militant nut and nobody wants to hire you for a good job.
And who passes such laws? Centralized governments...
Incorrect. Most of these laws come from town/city zoning boards. Thats as local as government gets. They are influenced by overall trends and ideas like the "suburban sprawl" misinformation you keep hearing people spew but the decisions are purely local.
Actually, they're NOT the same crappy manufactured goods if you shop at the right places- they're American made pride, not Chinese crap.
Oh please! Nearly every mom and pop store will have plenty of chinese made stuff in it and Wal*Mart has plenty of US made stuff in it.
In the end, and I doubt it will take too long, China will rise from the backwords third world nation it has been into a modern economic superpower. Quality will rise, it's people will demand high wages and we will be back on a more or less level playing field like we are with Japan.
In the meantime, we are having them do all the work and we're keeping most of the money and paying US people to mangage and engineer and market the products, instead of being factory workers. We win on both ends, more cheaper products and more better jobs.
Oh yeah, and Wal*Mart- you really need to compare their prices to the Mom&Pop stores sometime
I do. All the time. Wal*Mart is cheaper. Sometimes a lot cheaper. Like 1/10th the price. Some US company wants to sell me an 16 foot inflatable plastc pool for $3,000. It's well made, superior in every way to Wal*Mart's, but Wal*Mart sells a 16' pool for $279. The US company and the Mom&Pop store (which is right across the street from Wal*Mart by the way) can take their $3k price tag and shove it. I don't want a pool that bad, I wouldn't buy it, I wouldn't have one. I'd go without. The Wal*Mart one I'd buy. Those aren't the only things I've found at 1/10th the price either. We live in a world where it's unimaginable that people would gouge us for things if it werent for competition, but we get just the slightest touch of what it would be like and it crushes us as with the recent gas price hikes. Imagine going to the store and not paying $100 for groceries but $500. And you beg and plead and haggle with the store owner so they cut you a break and let you leave for $400. That's not better.
I said that the pricing of the free market supports PROFITEERING- you can't make a profit if you're selling something for less than it's produced for.
And in a free market you can't sell it for much more either or someone will undercut you and steal your business. There are pockets for profiteering but when the playing field is level, they must remain small or you will get your customers stolen.
The press doesn't matter- this is no longer a democracy.
Incorrect. While there are plenty of tricks and cheats people can use to influence governmnet, at the end of the day it's elections that decide who represent us. The power still lies with the people, they just don't know how to use that power to fix whats wrong.
I'm talking about it, and I have a solution. But it's not a pretty one.
Economies of scale mean nothing when it comes to providing the most work for the most people possible.
That's a horrible goal. I don't want to have to work more, I want to work less and get more for it. So far, I'm getting what I want and so are most of the people in the US.
My life isn't full of art and history and happiness and effortless productivity- it's full of 56 hour weeks just to keep my family in a house that is worth about 10x what it sold for when it was built in 1968. That's your "progress".
Inflated house prices are usually due to crappy restrictive local policies that aim to reign in the normal flow of housing expansion which drives prices up. That makes things better for all the existing home owners and dramatically worse for anyone looking to buy a house.
Unless you boycot walmart, however, your purchasing power has probably gone up from what it would have been many years ago and you probably live better.
They are when you take the full cost of business on an entire community into account. For each $1 you spend at a small local business- that dollar moves an average of 8 times through the local community. For each $1 you spend at Wal-Mart, $.08 stays in your local community. When it comes to providing your neighbors with jobs, economies of scale don't matter one whit- it's about 100x more expensive to shop at Wal-Mart than it is at your local Mom&Pop store in the long run.
That's untrue. If I shop at my local mom and pop store they buy the same crappy manufactured goods they just spend more time and effort selling it to me. Frankly.. I don't want to pay 100 shopkeepers 30% markup so they can put their kids through college while mine starve. I'd rather pay 10 walmart people minimum wage and push people who want to make good money into productive useful jobs instead of pushy retail sails.
The free market is very good at making something as expensive to buy as it is to produce. I know you don't believe that but you are wrong.
Not likely- the money they make will just enable them to buy out their competitors instead of actually competing.
I highly doubt, after all the recent press coverage, whether anyone will let Exxon/Mobile buy anything remotely resembling a competitor for a while.
and there isn't anything to stop them because the Democrats are just as corrupt, just as bribed by big money, and so are the courts.
The courts aren't corrupt they have just done some silly things lately and are floundering in a lack of reasonable leadership.
You are quite right about politicians being corrupt, and I see very little reasonable talk about the right way to solve it. Politicians are currently horribly starved for money. Anyone with any little bit of money can buy them off easily. This is due to a very democratic sounding ruling from the supreme court with seriously un-democratic repercussions. They ruled that people can only donate up to $1,000 to politicians turning fund raising into a form of election, which sounds healthy until you realize that it's an election that only rich people can participate in and that you now can't win an office without first winning the rich people contribution vote. This desperately needs to be overturned. We traded the appearance of corruption from big contributions, for real hard core systematic corruption and a fundamental undermining of the democratic system. Politicians raise money from companies while they preside over bills that regulate them, a practice that is obviously corrupt and that most politicians wouldn't touch with a 10 foot poll except its now the only way to get enough money to stay in office. Worse, most of the solutions I hear proposed would simply further empoverish politians increasing their corruptibility even more.
There are big problems with politics today, everyone seems to know it but they don't know what it is. The supreme court took a functioning system and detroyed it's balance in an attempt to make it more fair
True- now think about what would happen if they were simply not allowed to merge at all- if each oil well, each refinery, each gas station had to be owned separately and serve only it's community? Competition is not neccessarily a good thing in small amounts- but it becomes a great thing in large amounts.
Incorrect. Economies of scale help efficiency dramatically. By your rationale small businesses would be cheaper than WalMart. They aren't.
That's the beauty of the free market economy. It steamrolls ineficient systems in favor of efficient ones, but not entirely sucking profitability out of things. You don't have to charge as little as possible, just less than a competitor could charge and trive and take your business away. The Exxon/Mobile thing will get sorted out.. because the profit margins have increased competitors will gain the ability to expand and compete and take their business away. In the short term, they will make huge money but in the long term, the company will lose ground and shrink.
There are rules that you need to keep things in balance in a free market economy. One of them is you can't have anti-competitive behavior. Buying your competition is an example of that anti-competitive behavior. Sometimes, merging is beneficial to economics though and the FTC is put in place to decide which mergers are which. The FTC made a huge mistake when they allowed Exxon/Mobile to happen, and it will hopefully be a lesson well remembered.
If the system feeds all of the people all of the time, then who cares if it is off balance?
Who cares? Everyone. Because when it's off balance everyone loses, and not a little. Look at China for a good example. They are currently trying to balance both a "fair" centrally planned economy and a capitalist one. People living under the "fair" system are misterable peasants powerless against those who use brutal oppressive tactics against them. The ones in the harsh capitalist system are horribly exploited by corperations and are much happier for it. They live wildly better lives and have much more freedom and oportunity.
We are all victoms of the horrible unstoppable capitalist machine.. because we want to be. It makes our lives better. You won't convince me that making my life worse is worth it so I can get back to the roots of what it means to be human. The roots of humanity are plagued with famine, brutality, powerlessness and back breaking toil. My life is full of art and history and happiness and effortless productivity. I may not be as holy or spiritual as I would have been if I was facing death and starvation every day.. but that's a tradeoff I'm rather happy to make.
The real question is the individual human experience, not the group and certainly not a small minority of con artists.
An economic system that requires people to concider the needs of others over the needs of themselves is doomed. "A small minority of con artists" is a silly way of characterizing what is an obvious problem: when people are faced with the decision of balancing their needs with the needs of others, they typically give a higher priority to their own. The capitalist system works with this ensuring that to meet your own needs you have to meet the needs of others. A system that relies on this not being the case is doomed to failure.
You point out that economic matters affect personal relationships and this needs to be taken into account and yet are dismissive of the desire to not expose yourself to people who might abuse a business relationship with you. That has a horrible affect on personal relationships that we fortunately don't experience often in modern society.
One is only poor if one knows that there are rich people elsewhere.
That's relativism taken to it's most ludicrous extreme. Only someone who lives such a blessed life as to never have seen real hardship could make such a heartless argument. If someone is starving, downtrodden and powerless to do anything about it do you really think they're just as well off as long as everyone else is too? Unable to afford necessary medical treatments, unable to stop people from abusing them, destroying or even taking their lives at will. Being a peasant wasn't happy, wasn't fair, wasn't just as good as being poor today.
Is that why computer security is a growing field, why everybody seems interested in closed networks and encryption?
Yup. That's precicely why.
Except for- you don't. You buy the Chinese for $10 and leave your neighbor with nothing, until he breaks into your house to steal the $30, because you just don't care, as you said above. The end result of that "self balancing" system will be that the people with the guns will own everything.
Except for- he doesn't. Instead he finds a job that's useful instead of useless makes good money and is happy and productive. The temporary pain of adjusting to reality goes away and everyone is better off.
You seem to be very nostalgic for the days of old when life was simple. The problem is it simply sucked for almost everyone. A very few enjoyed an existance which was slightly less squalid but even they lived pretty awefully. This, even with the fact that there were many fewer people with many more natural resources to support them. Watch Les Mis sometime if you want a reminder about how much it sucked.
How many of these transactions are truly free? That is, how many of them were haggled over and decided on a Fair Wage and a Just Price, or did they just take the price offered without haggling?Chances are the later.
Haggling over each individual sale is a reasonable but inefficient and simplistic way to reach a balance. The system we have is similar but it's done in bulk and in public with records and much greater scrutiny and we call it free market competition. Manufacturers compete to create items cheaper and better than the next guy so the retailers will carry them and the retailers compete with each other to deliver the product to the consumer with the lowest mark-up possible.
Places with fair competition get fine tuned extraordinarily well. Where there is a lack of it is where things go wrong. Take, for example, the recent high fuel prices in the US. It has a partial basis in high oil costs but the real scandal there is the Exxon/Mobile record profits. The fact that the two largest and fiercest competitors in the fuel delivery markets were not just allowed to price fix with each other but were actually allowed to merge and avoid competing entirely is ridiculous.
You do the best work for people you know- and you give the best price to people you love. You should not be doing business with anybody else.
Right. For example, you should have your parents or brother-in-law or someone else you know well be your financial advisors. Hell.. it works so damn well for stars, why wouldn't I. I mean... it's not like anyone's parents, or other close friends ever stole from them, right?
The sad reality is that people you know well are much more likely, to cheat, steal and rip you off than a Wall Mart cashier.
-Fair profit.
-The needs of the individual workman.
Frankly.. I don't care if you need more money. If the guy down the street will do the same job for half as much, I'll hire him. You want charity.. get in line with the rest of the beggers. You want to do business.. compete.
-Income of individuals that need the good.
Why would I pay more for the same thing than someone who made less money? That's basically the same as saying everyone should make the same amount of money, which is an economic policy with a long history of miserable failure.
As far as the rest of your points... complete garbage. The free market does an excellent job of accounting for and balancing all of them.
In other words it fails to take into account what EVERY 13th century peasant had as a right to under the guild system that it replaced- a fair wage and a just price.
And you know what else EVERY 13th centruy peasant had... they were a pesant! And they were in good company since almost everyone was a peasant too. They would look at a poor person in the US in awe of the lavish lifestyle they lead.
The free market is inaccurate because it encourages an absence of information- and thus fraud.
That's complete bs. Cooperations are more and more open books. Useful information is nearly impossible to keep hidden.
Systems that balance themselves are hard for many people to understand. The balancing point is chaotic and impossible to predict and people hate unpredictability. Lots of simple-minded hippie types like to advocate predictable calm systems but, the trade off is the system that will always be off balance.
People also rail about the unfairness when they lose their jobs. This is the hard underbelly of the system but it's necessary. It keeps people from being useless and forces them to do useful things. If it costs an American worker $40 to make a shirt and we can import them from china for $10, I'd rather buy the Chinese for $10 and give the American $30 to stay home and watch TV because at least they wouldn't being deluded into thinking they are doing something useful.
I wouldn't bother leaving the last drive out of the Raid5 array. I have a software RAID 6 array and it's speed is limited by the speed of the drives, not by the parity calculations. Just get a nice dual-core cpu so one can do the RAID math while the other runs your application. RAID parity calculations are very easy work for CPUs these days and so generally the more drives in an array the faster it is, especially with bulk data transfer. Another good option is to just get more RAM so you don't really use that scratch space as much. I'm planning on 4 GB in my next box since with DDR2 that's only about $300. That's a lot of pixels.
Also consider mixing protection schemes. My current desktop box has 2 drives with 3 partitions on each. The first partition on each drive is a solo partition (1 OS on each drive so I have a backup in case one has trouble), the second is a striped set for things I want to be fast and don't care about reliability (games, swap, etc) and the third partition is a mirrored set for data I want to keep safe. This combination gives me everything I need without having to power and have room for a whole array of drives in my desktop. The only issue I had was having to hack XP to support mirroring since it's crippled by default (shame on you Microsoft) but that was made much easier by having the second OS partition around. Hopefully with Vista they won't be so dumb.
I'm very happy with this mixed protection scheme and I'll probably do the same thing on all the computers I build soon. I'd like to see retail boxes configured like this by default. It makes a ton of sense, even for casual users.
Unix is great at providing source level compatibility. You can (usually) easily create source code that will compile binaries for a wide variety of operating systems and versions. What Windows does beautifully is take this one step further and provide binary level compatibilty between different versons. I can take something created for Windows 95 and it installs and runs well today on Windows XP. You can distribute a version of a program that works with pretty much all currently used Windows versions as one single file, and that's what vendors typically do. Linux doesn't have that. LSB is a step in that direction but we have a lot further to go still.
.net 2.0, vbrun6.dll, glibc 2.3 etc.) to fill in the gaps so that application vendors don't have to bundle them with the application. It should also take care of installing menu entries in appropriate places and the user should be able to configure where they go and if they install silently or require prompting.
One thing that I think is lacking in all distributions is a good method for installing OS independant third party applications. Most Linux distributions like to rely on the OS's native package management system for this task but the requirements are somewhat different and the two systems should have different interfaces for third-party packages. Third party applications often have options as to what components get installed, are less trustworthy and therefor should have more restrictions on what they can do, and should have extra functionality allowing the package to be non-OS specific. Installing packages today using the OS's package management system requires root privledges and allows a package to pretty much do whatever it wants. This isn't secure at all when dealing with third-party packages.
What would be great is if someone created an open source third-party-program package management system that would allow the creation of packages that would install on lots of OSs (Windows, Mac, Linuxs, etc.) and architectures (x86, x86_64, ppc, etc). A publisher could pick a whole set of OSs and platforms and bundle it all up in one file or separate them however they wanted. Only the OS/archetecture specific parts would have to be duplicated for each bundle. A third party package manager should be configurable to run from non-administrator/root but allow root/administrator things to be done as long as the user is prompted and agrees. Big warnings should be given for anything that would run by default or alter the system significantly. It should also be configurable to prompt for incoming/outgoing IP ports the application may use and other security related things. The installation manager could prompt for downloads of common depenancies that weren't already installed (java,
Putting the reqirement on the OS to make the program work instead of vice versa just makes sense. The current situation makes Linux very ugly and dangerous when dealing with software that's not already in the distribution. A little midlleware glue software that would figure out how make a vendor supplied distribution work properly on this OS would make Linux much more attractive to end users and if the same file they installed on their Windows box also installed on their Linux box, it can only help interoperability between the two.
They did something with my product that I didn't intend! CRIMINALS! FRY THEM! And worse.. they MADE MONEY! Throw the book at them!
Seriously.. the extortion thing was pretty dumb of them, but this sense of ownership of everything a company touches is insane and needs to end. People will build on top of your work. Its the way free market economies work. Get over it.
The point isn't the example. The point is forbidding any discussion by law is wrong.
That's because you are assuming you will agree with it whenever it is enforced. If only speech that the government/general population agrees with is allowed then we have no freedom of speech at all.
From the law: Every one who advocates or promotes genocide is guilty of an indictable offence... There.. I just violated that law by expressing an opinion. I better not go to Canada soon! It may be a good idea that saves billions of lives, it may be a bad idea that needlessly kills innocent people, either way it's wrong to prohibit talking about it.
And why! Why are we prohibiting talk? It's a thought crime, basically saying that we shouldn't be able to communicate certain ideas to others? It's based on the notion that evil is stronger than good.. that hateful, genocidal ideas when allowed in public will win against rational ideas that value life. This view that government must save us from our own evil nature is a horrible stance for government to take. It's the exact same moral ground governments need to ban religions and lifestyle choices and new-fangled ideas like freedom and democracy.
The problem is that evil ideas spread *best* in the dark, they shrivel and disappear when exposed to public discussion and rational thought. By blocking discussion of them you are essentially protecting them and fostering their growth.
Take my bird flu comment for example. What might sound like a terribly good idea whispered in a one on one discussion between military generals would likely be torn apart if splashed on the front page of a newspaper. Prohibit talk about something and you dramatically increase the chance of it happening. It's analogous to tying down that annoying drippy relief valve on your water heater. There.. that made that problem go away, everythings neet and tidy now. Time to get some sleep .
For example, Canada has hate crime laws, and I think they are pretty good things; they probably wouldn't stand up in the U.S. legal system.
If they disallow speech, they worsen the problem. It may look better on the surface but you have stifled people and the effects of that will be much broader and deeper than the problem you think you solved. You may not believe it. There may or may not be existing evidece for it. I have no proof to offer other than if you think about it you'll probably see why. Just because I don't have any proof to point to to help convince you of my opinion, doesn't mean it's not true. It just means I'll have a hard time convincing others.
It's not editorializing if you aren't trying (always in vein) to write objectively.
Actually, they're not required to go to school either. However, they're required to go to some sort of educational program. Homeschooling, private school, private tutor, etc.
Those without the means to supply an alternative educational program (all require a significant investment of time and/or money) must attend public school. A majority of the population does not have the means and thus is required to go to public school.
Actually, public schools are generally local government institutions - and so should be completely unaffected by the constitutional ban on federal laws restricting the freedom of speach.
Incorrect. As the parent stated, the first ammendment was extended by the fourteenth to include state and local government. Just how the 14'th extends things has been a matter of much legal debate and lots of rulings but it has generally been held up by the courts as meaning the entire bill of rights applies as much to state and local governments as to federal.
Schools impose all kinds of restrictions on students. Places of business impose all kinds of restrictions on employees. Owners of property impose restrictions on trespassers.
Schools are government bodies and attendance is mandatory. All children in this country who don't have the means to attian an alternate education are forced to be subjected to public school's rules. That makes your exmampeles irrelivant. The appropriate analogous situation would be prison. We do not allow prisons to remove inmates free speech rights, why would we let schools.
This is legal. Schools are allowed to have dress codes. Schools are allowed to decide what constitutes "non-disruptive" activity to the learning environment.
These things are pseudo-legal and only involve behavior while within the walls of the school. To extend the schools reach to everything a student does all the time is pretty obviously wrong. You wouldn't think it was right for schools impose a dress code on kids when they were at home would you?
Some people still don't get Columbine. The lesson there is trying to suppress issues and make them go away quietly is exactly the wrong thing to do. It makes things worse. The great thing is that lots of people did learn the lesson and started to listen to kids who didn't think everything was just perfect in their schools. Sadly this seems to be a school that has forgotten the lesson and is comfortable insisting students shut up and pretend everything is great.
I'm all for schools teaching kids good behavior but there are a few things they do that are both wrong and just plain illegal. Things schools should keep in mind:
Schools are mandatory. School attendance is not optional in the US. Kids have to go. There are a few who have the means to attend alternatives but those who don't are forced to attend public schools no matter what.
Schools are part of the government. Like police and judges our schools are government bodies. You can not give schools the ability to force the removal of fundamental rights. Judges can't. Police can't. Schools *MUST* be bound by the bill of rights including the right to free speech. They don't have the right to take that away much like they don't have the right to take your life away (forget detention.. you're going to the gas chamber.) You could argue that schools should be allowed to control speech in school creating short periods of time when their rights are suspended, although it's probably a bad idea. To say they have the ability to remove fundamental rights from people altogether is completely ludicrous. No federal, state or local government body can have that power. Granted, the bill of rights only specifically mentions federal government, the trend lately seems to be ruling that the 14'th amendment extends the bill of rights to state and local government. This would include schools.
The other thing that it's important to note is that speech restriction is essentially creating thought crimes and the effects are usually precisely the opposite of what was intended. Discouraging open exchange only worsens the problem that we are trying to ignore or make invisible. The first amendment exists for this reason and it's for this reason we should defend it absolutely without question always. Everyone has a right to be heard.
Why pay extra for an internal UPS for each piece when you can use the economies of scale to get a gigantic one that covers multiple pieces instead?
Because the solution offers superior reliability and no single point of failure. Its hard to protect from someone from unplugging the server from the UPS. With batteries in the box you are protected. Also.. it's hardly fair to call putting it in the server a UPS. With batteries in the computer there is no DC->AC->DC conversion. It's DC->DC which is much easier to make more efficient. This gives you more backup time with less battery.
Also, the batteries in a UPS are a consumable; they go bad after some number of years. Not the sort of thing you want to have to take your server down to repair. With a UPS, you just switch to another, interchangable unit,...
And with a laptop you can usually yank a battery out and put a new one in without so much as powering the machine down. With 2 batteries you can do one at a time and not even risk power failure if the AC power goes dead. No reboot necessary.
Centralized UPS systems also suffer from the "not my problem" problem. If battery life isn't the server designers problem, they don't optimize for it at all. And since 1 server doesn't usually affect he runtime of a big UPS that much people don't care if the new box uses 4x as much power and pulls a minute off the runtime of the centralized UPS. That one server now affects the runtime of all your machines now though. If each server has it's own interal power backup you could spec for only getting machines that will last 30 minutes on battery and not worry if the new box will pull that down to 25 minutes because it's usage won't affect the runtime of other boxes.
There are, of course, disadvantages too but I'd expect to see this as a more popular option.
Laptops generally aren't built to be on 24x7. The fans and harddrives would be my biggest concern. With clean air and frequent drive replacements it could work.
The real question this spurs is why don't servers have internal UPS's like laptops do and why aren't there ones designed for low power and long batery life. A laptop motherboard with several big UPS style batteries, a mirrored set of drives and some reasonable low power cooling fans could probalby live for up to a day on battery and still be quite a capable server.
I'll also point out that AMD is doing all this at 90nm while these Intel chips are 65nm. Intel is ahead in rolling out new manufacturing processes and it's giving them a huge boost but AMD has a better processor design.
Unless AMD moves to 65nm and keeps investing in their processor design and moving it forward they will lose this edge fast though as Intel is demonstrating. It's good to see Intel dropping their bad design decisions that lead to the P4 and Itanic and getting back on track with classic good processor design.
The problem with unions is they suck the motivation and drive out of the workforce which reduces their worth. In a global economy, reducing the worth of your employees pretty much adds up to reducing their pay, their numbers or both.
It's about a day too late for anyone to moderate anything up and nobody will ever read this so I won't be diplomatic.
What the hell is wrong with you all!
This is the CORRECT way to fight DVD piracy.
Here are INCORRECT ways: Throwing people in jail for making it so you can play DVD's on Linux. Cramming DRM and TCPA down our throats. Screwing up 80 years of open standards by forcing encrypion on every device that is capable of displaying a movie.
For once these guys got it right!
Congratulations MPAA, for the first time in modern memory you've actually done something of value to your member companies that doesn't screw us, their customers. Well done! Keep it up.