You must not do many long debugging sessions. Debuggers deserve their own screen.
Just to provide a contrary anecdote, I had two monitors here at work at one point and ended up giving one away. Using the second one to keep an eye on email was too distracting, and using the second to extend my desktop just didn't help me. And it's not because I don't keep enough open: I usually have eight virtual desktops, and right now I'm using ten with exactly 40 windows open -- mostly terminals and gvim windows, plus a couple acroreads, one ddd (I know I'm lame, I'm not as productive with straight gdb), one rdesktop, and one firefox. I have the desktops named for the various projects I'm working on. My setup is such that I can have three terminals or gvim windows open at 80 characters wide without any overlap.
I guess if I was stuck in Windows, or I couldn't use virtual desktops, or I had a smaller monitor, a second monitor would be nice. Or at least I'd stop being lazy and start using screen and vim buffers or tabs.
According to an article about projects started in '09 to reduce it's usage 80% reduction in power is 52 million kWh annually, putting its total usage at 65 million kWh annually.
this gets me at 2000 ish days of pure sunlight (at 2MW, when I say pure, I mean 24 hours of it) to completely meet its annual demands (divide all numbers by 365 to get your daily number).
The articles I've seen have said 68GWh was the reduction, putting its total pre-upgrades usage at 85GWh. That means it averaged about 10MW of usage at any given time. Also, don't forget the other upgrades they're planning/implementing to bring energy costs down: wind turbines and solar water heaters, efficiency upgrades like replacing single pane windows and outdated elevators, and installing advanced lighting systems and more efficient plumbing.
+1 Liquid nitrogen and dry ice experiments. It's always fun when your science teacher screws something up, too. Ours dipped an egg in liquid nitrogen and threw it at the wall, at which time we all discovered he didn't hold it in long enough. We proceeded to use the rest of the eggs to determine the length of time to freeze an egg solid in liquid nitrogen. The janitor must have been pissed.
Also, it's kind of silly but another experiment I remember was the time our high school physics class had a power generation competition where we timed each other running up some flights of stairs. Perhaps I remember it because I won, being large and (back then) athletic, but it was also interesting to learn just how little energy we generated. And then we talked about muscle efficiency and calculated how many Calories we burned.
You could easily make this more fun by using the Internet for unit conversions. Find the local price of a kilowatt-hour and calculate how much "money" your kids generated, or if you want to really depress them, have them find the energy content of gasoline and calculate how long their collective generated energy could run your car. Tie in some nutrition information and have them figure out how easily they could gain those Calories back by eating various foods, etc.
You'd think so... but other states (like Ohio) have in their Constitution that you must believe in a higher power to hold office.
As a former Ohioan I was curious about this, so I looked it up. I found this:
Section 1.07: Rights of conscience; education; the necessity of religion and knowledge (1851)
All men have a natural and indefeasible right to worship Almighty God according to the dictates of their own conscience. No person shall be compelled to attend, erect, or support any place of worship, or maintain any form of worship, against his consent; and no preference shall be given, by law, to any religious society; nor shall any interference with the rights of conscience be permitted. No religious test shall be required, as a qualification for office, nor shall any person be incompetent to be a witness on account of his religious belief; but nothing herein shall be construed to dispense with oaths and affirmations. Religion, morality, and knowledge, however, being essential to good government, it shall be the duty of the general assembly to pass suitable laws to protect every religious denomination in the peaceable enjoyment of its own mode of public worship, and to encourage schools and the means of instruction.
Emphasis mine. The whole section (including the title) kind of stinks of the problem, but I think the bold sentence negates the claim. So that is not quite the case in Ohio, though I wouldn't be surprised to find it elsewhere.
the period of time from which the position of the Sun in the sky at a given, fixed Mercury longitude returns to that same position is 176 Earth days.
It's okay, you can say "Mercury's day is 176 Earth days long." I mean, unless you want to replace "Earth day" with the same long-winded macro you used for "Mercury day"....
To be fair Earth's solar day and sidereal day are four minutes apart, so we Earthlings might easily think "one rotation" is synonymous to a day. Not true, but close enough. But it's not even close on Mercury, where a solar day is exactly three sidereal days. Depending where you are on the surface, a single solar day might have more than one sunrise.
Another interesting property of Mercury is that it has a very miniscule axial tilt (<0.1 degrees), which means at the poles, the sun -- appearing three times larger than on Earth -- will always be halfway above the horizon and the temperature would stay relatively constant. Constant temperatures, possible water ice, Mars-level gravity...all interesting things. If we ever become the space-faring species we should be, we may very well have a place there.
Another alternative is using Con Kolivas' BFS, which reportedly shows similar improvements, not to mention actually pays attention to nice levels. Of course you actually have to build your own kernel, or get it from someone else, or use a distro that uses it by default like PCLinuxOS or Zenwalk.
You dropped the acronym I was looking for, but proceeded not to say anything about it.
The summary itself says that they're not just talking about GPS in your car or your phone, but the whole GPS system. But GPS isn't the only game in town. GLONASS is the Russian version of GPS, already covers most of the world, and is expected to provide global coverage this year. The EU is building up Galileo, only a couple test satellites in, with the first four operational satellites being launched this year. The Chinese are building COMPASS/Beidou-2, also only a couple satellites in.
And those are just the global systems. Many countries have or are building systems to provide regional position data. The Chinese already have Beidou-1, the Japanese are building QZSS, and India is planning on launching the first satellite of IRNSS this year. I'm sure I'm missing some.
It was only one of the rationales for the bill. Besides, it is true - many places do teach socialist policies as part of their education curriculum (I got it in some of my classes in middle and high school, not that I cared).
So? Socialism is not a curse word, despite what Republican pundits would have us all believe. Why not call certain policies what they are? For example, the Women, Infants and Children (WIC) program has virtually universal bipartisan support. It's a socialist program because it uses tax dollars to provide food, care, and education for low-income pregnant and postpartum women and children up to age five.
Everybody with half a brain knows that some level of socialist programs are good for society; the two main parties just disagree on what level is appropriate. That Democrats support more socialist programs doesn't make them socialists -- just look at how Dems are in bed with Hollywood and the RIAA/MPAA. Now I'm no political scientist, but I can't think of any kind of socialist that would ever side with them, and yet the Justice Department is now ruled by RIAA lackeys thanks to Joe Biden.
Which I have successfully used from Wine before. Of course I only saved the Windows XP OEM key (the sticker was illegible) and not the Photoshop one. I figured she can reinstall that if she actually has it. I also installed Ubuntu right beside Windows for good measure, and she actually uses Ubuntu to this day. Of course she has switched most of her computing activities to her Android phone, so it wasn't such a stretch.
The thing of value was the knowledge we would have gained from the satellite. The post above you was dead on correct.
This should be pretty obvious. I mean, does anybody honestly think the components in the satellite are worth half a billion dollars? The vast majority of that money went to paying the people that developed it over the past several years.
They could also just ditch Orbital and go with SpaceX for all of COTS.
To be fair, you'd have to be quite brave to put an expensive satellite on top of a Falcon with so few launches so far.
It's also important to note that Taurus is the rocket with two failures in a row (three of the last four failed, even). Taurus II, a new medium-lift rocket that Orbital has developed with a liquid fuel first stage, is going to be used for COTS. If they were smart they'd rename Taurus II right about now and move away from that name. Their other products are far more successful.
I was thinking roughly the same thing. "Satellite orbited to study the environment fucks up (in a very small way) same environment, and cannot do the study it was launched to perform. Twice."
Third time's the charm?
Funny you should mention that: NASA is already paying Orbital to build and launch OCO-2 in February 2013.
I'm so sorry, Mr. Stuxnet
But we just don't know how to fix you right now
But they're feeling so insanely super
Even the fact that they can't run can't bring us down
He spent very little time talking about being a christian. When he did in his books, he left the image that it was a calculated political decision to declare himself a christian and even the church he attended which a lot of people don't think is christian outside of name, was calculated.
Mod parent up. Obama only invokes the label when it makes sense to do so, when people want to hear it. He's only gone to church half a dozen times since he's been in office, always at opportune times. I wouldn't be surprised if this pattern is common in elected officials and, from the recent trends in religious affiliation, the United States in general. People just call themselves Christians because it's still somewhat taboo to be anything else.
P.S.=> Which, in the end, speaks MORE FOR ME, than against me... because, when ALL YOU HAVE IS EFFETE MOD DOWNS, that have NO TECHNICAL JUSTIFICATION BEHIND THEM? You're shown as "helpless henrys"... and you ALL know it! apk
I know, I know, don't feed the trolls.
I'll play along for a moment and keep pretending like the number of vulnerabilities are a valid measure of a system's security. Let's take a closer look at your secunia links: the number for the Linux kernel includes all vulnerabilities from 2003-2011. Windows 7 was released in October 2009. The most severe unpatched vulnerability in the Linux kernel is rated "Less critical," or 2/5. The most severe unpatched Windows vulnerability is rated "Highly critical," or 4/5. The actual numbers are pretty even: both had 47 in 2010, Win7 has had 6 and Linux has had 4 so far this year. And hey, I don't even need to cite this info, you've already done it for me.
Now let's find some more of these facts that you love so much. There were at least 1,017,208 malware programs *created* in the first half of 2010...99.4% of them for Windows. Now consider that, by far, the primary entry point of malware is social engineering, not actual system vulnerabilities. I know this is Slashdot and all, but once you have less tech-savvy family and friends on your computers and networks, it doesn't matter how careful or knowledgeable you are.
In the sixteenth century, the Venetians innovated ways to make colored glass. They protected their IP by turning the glass blowing factory into a fortress. Revealing the secrets to folks outside the factory was punishable by death.
The Chinese had a monopoly on silk making, and used similar methods to ensure that no silk worms left the country. Italian monks eventually managed to smuggle some out hidden in hollowed out walking sticks. Hey, ancient Industrial Espionage!
So ancient cultures did understand the value of protecting their innovations. They just used different methods to protect them.
Keeping trade secrets is pretty widely accepted among the End Software Patents crowd.
All taxes are regressive. The lie of the left is taxes can be progressive at all. Everyone pays all the taxes. Hiding taxes among the 'rich' doesn't help people realize this, as the taxes just get hidden, and passed down to the little guy in the form of higher prices, lower wages and so on.
And this is the lie of the rich: conflating "rich" with "businesses." We know what happens when taxes on the rich (not businesses, just the rich) go down: they save more. In President Bush's first term, the highest tax bracket went from 39.6% to 35%. The percentage of income the rich put into savings in the same time from went from 2.2% to 7.6%.
You want my solution to taxes, spending, and so on? It is simple. Vote on things you don't want society to promote, make it legal and tax those things. Legalize drugs, tax them. Legalize Prostitution, tax it. Legalize whatever you think is a "victimless crime" and tax the activity. You'll end up with far more revenue, far less crime (by definition) and the problems of society become controlled.
You can see this with Cigarettes. Legal, taxed to death, and we don't have nearly the problem with second hand smoke as we used to.
Now sin taxes, I fully agree with. I have no problem helping out the poor with more progressive mandatory taxes, but if they want to waste their extra money on entirely unnecessary stuff like cigarettes and booze, that's their problem. But yeah, it's not hard to imagine how huge of a positive impact legalizing and taxing marijuana would have, even considering that there would be a large number of people that grow it on their own. Alcohol and cigarette lobbies and various conservative groups have been powerful enough to thwart these efforts in most states, but I think we're inching toward it.
So, you would suggest that rich people should pay sales tax in relation to their income? So if the poor person buys a pair of shoes and pays $3 sales tax on them, the same pair of shoes should rack up $300 for the rich person?
Hey, way to take it to the logical extreme there! Let's look at this from another angle. Under our current system, the economy has grown by about 20% in the last ten years. And yet, the wages of the lower and middle classes have been virtually unchanged. Guess where all of that wealth is going? Tell me, how is that fair for the middle class, to whom this country owes most of its productivity gains? And you want to make it *worse* by lowering taxes on the rich and raising them for everybody else? That's what these so-called Fair Tax proposals do.
I'll tell you what, when taxes on the rich are increased to a point where the country's increase in wealth is distributed properly to the people responsible, you go right ahead and quit trying to be productive. I'll gladly step in and take the raise.
With the PogoPlug, all you're doing really on the device is stopping a shell script that's running, and installing a new bootloader. Everything else gets installed on whatever storage device you attach to it, so I think it's probably fairly difficult to properly brick it (although there are more obscure NAND installs that do have the potential to really screw it up).
I actually think Debian is a more obvious choice for these devices than an Arch-based distro as it has more packages than any other distro and has good support for ARM. In my case I really wanted a number of packages that were in Debian, such as byobu and procmail, and I use Ubuntu on the desktop and have always liked Debian-based distros, so it seemed the obvious choice.
Funny story: I actually came across your blog yesterday as I browsed for info about setting up a mail server on the PogoPlug. I'm not sure I'll do it (getting a web server and website up and running is first), but just considering some options. I'm actually an Arch user normally, but I tend to agree that Debian might be better since I don't care about having bleeding edge stuff on there. Thanks for the info!
Isn't the fact that you can "unbrick" it mean it's not really bricked?
Also I think this requires JTAG, which comes with Sheevaplug but is sold separately from Guruplug, and AFAIK is not available on the PogoPlug, et al. So, not quite so useful for me (I just picked up a PogoPlug on the cheap with the intent of running Plugbox Linux.
Pretty much any time someone makes a reference to tea bagging in relation to the tea party movement, that's a good indication of someone who's following the misinformation of the MSM.
Or, you know, we're just juvenile and we find enjoyment in referring to you as teabaggers. The other hilarious part is that you guys think you still have any real influence even though you've simply become a wing of the Republican party, who only "cares" about the deficit when it'll win them votes. Case in point: their "compromise" for keeping tax breaks for the rich (which increases the deficit, I might add) was to increase the deficit even further. Luckily for them, of course, the Dems keep on heaping on the spending, so watch Republicans pretend to care again next November.
I'm still waiting for somebody to catch on to the fact that the summary called Fox News part of the mainstream media. That alone would throw half the Fox News-watching population into a rage.
It's "big version number envy". Nothing more. The Mozilla folks have given in to the idea that "3.6 is less than 8.0 and is less than 12, therefore FireFox 3.6 is less than MSIE 8.0 and Chrome 12". Is this a sign that marketing people are now running Mozilla? Will the budget go to engineers or Superbowl ads?
Perhaps they've gotten enough complaints or questions from their users that they decided this change was better. Perhaps there are a bunch of people on Firefox 3.0.x and 3.5.x that aren't upgrading to 3.6.x because the number isn't that much bigger. I'm sure there was similar grumbling when Slackware decided to jump from version 4 to version 7, but I suspect nobody really cares now.
On a related note, though it bugged me at first, Ubuntu's simple YY.MM version numbering is growing in popularity and now I quite like it. When everybody knows how old a release is, there's no confusion about which is the latest version and the developers have extra incentive for a new stable release if their competitors have a newer one.
And if the President isn't going to (or shouldn't) kill the Internet, why bring it up at all (as some Senators did)?
Because some people think he should have the power to protect critical computer systems across the country from compromise. But hey, let's just pretend for a moment that people aren't once again talking out of their asses for political purposes when they talk about the Internet kill switch. The Communications Act of 1934 *already gives* the President the power to close or take control over "any facility or station for wire communication" when the U.S. is at war. Go ahead, read 47 U.S.C. 606, I'll wait.
If anything, the so-called kill-switch bill will limit the President's power to only having the ability to cut off computer systems at government and critical infrastructure locations.
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You must not do many long debugging sessions. Debuggers deserve their own screen.
Just to provide a contrary anecdote, I had two monitors here at work at one point and ended up giving one away. Using the second one to keep an eye on email was too distracting, and using the second to extend my desktop just didn't help me. And it's not because I don't keep enough open: I usually have eight virtual desktops, and right now I'm using ten with exactly 40 windows open -- mostly terminals and gvim windows, plus a couple acroreads, one ddd (I know I'm lame, I'm not as productive with straight gdb), one rdesktop, and one firefox. I have the desktops named for the various projects I'm working on. My setup is such that I can have three terminals or gvim windows open at 80 characters wide without any overlap.
I guess if I was stuck in Windows, or I couldn't use virtual desktops, or I had a smaller monitor, a second monitor would be nice. Or at least I'd stop being lazy and start using screen and vim buffers or tabs.
According to an article about projects started in '09 to reduce it's usage 80% reduction in power is 52 million kWh annually, putting its total usage at 65 million kWh annually.
this gets me at 2000 ish days of pure sunlight (at 2MW, when I say pure, I mean 24 hours of it) to completely meet its annual demands (divide all numbers by 365 to get your daily number).
The articles I've seen have said 68GWh was the reduction, putting its total pre-upgrades usage at 85GWh. That means it averaged about 10MW of usage at any given time. Also, don't forget the other upgrades they're planning/implementing to bring energy costs down: wind turbines and solar water heaters, efficiency upgrades like replacing single pane windows and outdated elevators, and installing advanced lighting systems and more efficient plumbing.
+1 Liquid nitrogen and dry ice experiments. It's always fun when your science teacher screws something up, too. Ours dipped an egg in liquid nitrogen and threw it at the wall, at which time we all discovered he didn't hold it in long enough. We proceeded to use the rest of the eggs to determine the length of time to freeze an egg solid in liquid nitrogen. The janitor must have been pissed.
Also, it's kind of silly but another experiment I remember was the time our high school physics class had a power generation competition where we timed each other running up some flights of stairs. Perhaps I remember it because I won, being large and (back then) athletic, but it was also interesting to learn just how little energy we generated. And then we talked about muscle efficiency and calculated how many Calories we burned.
You could easily make this more fun by using the Internet for unit conversions. Find the local price of a kilowatt-hour and calculate how much "money" your kids generated, or if you want to really depress them, have them find the energy content of gasoline and calculate how long their collective generated energy could run your car. Tie in some nutrition information and have them figure out how easily they could gain those Calories back by eating various foods, etc.
You'd think so... but other states (like Ohio) have in their Constitution that you must believe in a higher power to hold office.
As a former Ohioan I was curious about this, so I looked it up. I found this:
Section 1.07: Rights of conscience; education; the necessity of religion and knowledge (1851)
All men have a natural and indefeasible right to worship Almighty God according to the dictates of their own conscience. No person shall be compelled to attend, erect, or support any place of worship, or maintain any form of worship, against his consent; and no preference shall be given, by law, to any religious society; nor shall any interference with the rights of conscience be permitted. No religious test shall be required, as a qualification for office, nor shall any person be incompetent to be a witness on account of his religious belief; but nothing herein shall be construed to dispense with oaths and affirmations. Religion, morality, and knowledge, however, being essential to good government, it shall be the duty of the general assembly to pass suitable laws to protect every religious denomination in the peaceable enjoyment of its own mode of public worship, and to encourage schools and the means of instruction.
Emphasis mine. The whole section (including the title) kind of stinks of the problem, but I think the bold sentence negates the claim. So that is not quite the case in Ohio, though I wouldn't be surprised to find it elsewhere.
Do you honestly believe that most Slashdot users are in some way vastly more enlightened about the way the world works
Yes.
just because they subscribe to a technology news aggregator?
No.
the period of time from which the position of the Sun in the sky at a given, fixed Mercury longitude returns to that same position is 176 Earth days.
It's okay, you can say "Mercury's day is 176 Earth days long." I mean, unless you want to replace "Earth day" with the same long-winded macro you used for "Mercury day"....
To be fair Earth's solar day and sidereal day are four minutes apart, so we Earthlings might easily think "one rotation" is synonymous to a day. Not true, but close enough. But it's not even close on Mercury, where a solar day is exactly three sidereal days. Depending where you are on the surface, a single solar day might have more than one sunrise.
Another interesting property of Mercury is that it has a very miniscule axial tilt (<0.1 degrees), which means at the poles, the sun -- appearing three times larger than on Earth -- will always be halfway above the horizon and the temperature would stay relatively constant. Constant temperatures, possible water ice, Mars-level gravity...all interesting things. If we ever become the space-faring species we should be, we may very well have a place there.
Isn't this the version that 200-line patch was slated for?
I'm pretty sure that's what "automatic process grouping" is.
Yup. Some links:
You dropped the acronym I was looking for, but proceeded not to say anything about it.
The summary itself says that they're not just talking about GPS in your car or your phone, but the whole GPS system. But GPS isn't the only game in town. GLONASS is the Russian version of GPS, already covers most of the world, and is expected to provide global coverage this year. The EU is building up Galileo, only a couple test satellites in, with the first four operational satellites being launched this year. The Chinese are building COMPASS/Beidou-2, also only a couple satellites in.
And those are just the global systems. Many countries have or are building systems to provide regional position data. The Chinese already have Beidou-1, the Japanese are building QZSS, and India is planning on launching the first satellite of IRNSS this year. I'm sure I'm missing some.
It was only one of the rationales for the bill. Besides, it is true - many places do teach socialist policies as part of their education curriculum (I got it in some of my classes in middle and high school, not that I cared).
So? Socialism is not a curse word, despite what Republican pundits would have us all believe. Why not call certain policies what they are? For example, the Women, Infants and Children (WIC) program has virtually universal bipartisan support. It's a socialist program because it uses tax dollars to provide food, care, and education for low-income pregnant and postpartum women and children up to age five.
Everybody with half a brain knows that some level of socialist programs are good for society; the two main parties just disagree on what level is appropriate. That Democrats support more socialist programs doesn't make them socialists -- just look at how Dems are in bed with Hollywood and the RIAA/MPAA. Now I'm no political scientist, but I can't think of any kind of socialist that would ever side with them, and yet the Justice Department is now ruled by RIAA lackeys thanks to Joe Biden.
Actually, there's this:
http://www.magicaljellybean.com/keyfinder/
Which I have successfully used from Wine before. Of course I only saved the Windows XP OEM key (the sticker was illegible) and not the Photoshop one. I figured she can reinstall that if she actually has it. I also installed Ubuntu right beside Windows for good measure, and she actually uses Ubuntu to this day. Of course she has switched most of her computing activities to her Android phone, so it wasn't such a stretch.
The thing of value was the knowledge we would have gained from the satellite. The post above you was dead on correct.
This should be pretty obvious. I mean, does anybody honestly think the components in the satellite are worth half a billion dollars? The vast majority of that money went to paying the people that developed it over the past several years.
They could also just ditch Orbital and go with SpaceX for all of COTS.
To be fair, you'd have to be quite brave to put an expensive satellite on top of a Falcon with so few launches so far.
It's also important to note that Taurus is the rocket with two failures in a row (three of the last four failed, even). Taurus II, a new medium-lift rocket that Orbital has developed with a liquid fuel first stage, is going to be used for COTS. If they were smart they'd rename Taurus II right about now and move away from that name. Their other products are far more successful.
I was thinking roughly the same thing. "Satellite orbited to study the environment fucks up (in a very small way) same environment, and cannot do the study it was launched to perform. Twice."
Third time's the charm?
Funny you should mention that: NASA is already paying Orbital to build and launch OCO-2 in February 2013.
On a Taurus XL rocket.
I'm so sorry, Mr. Stuxnet
But we just don't know how to fix you right now
But they're feeling so insanely super
Even the fact that they can't run can't bring us down
He spent very little time talking about being a christian. When he did in his books, he left the image that it was a calculated political decision to declare himself a christian and even the church he attended which a lot of people don't think is christian outside of name, was calculated.
Mod parent up. Obama only invokes the label when it makes sense to do so, when people want to hear it. He's only gone to church half a dozen times since he's been in office, always at opportune times. I wouldn't be surprised if this pattern is common in elected officials and, from the recent trends in religious affiliation, the United States in general. People just call themselves Christians because it's still somewhat taboo to be anything else.
P.S.=> Which, in the end, speaks MORE FOR ME, than against me... because, when ALL YOU HAVE IS EFFETE MOD DOWNS, that have NO TECHNICAL JUSTIFICATION BEHIND THEM? You're shown as "helpless henrys"... and you ALL know it! apk
I know, I know, don't feed the trolls.
I'll play along for a moment and keep pretending like the number of vulnerabilities are a valid measure of a system's security. Let's take a closer look at your secunia links: the number for the Linux kernel includes all vulnerabilities from 2003-2011. Windows 7 was released in October 2009. The most severe unpatched vulnerability in the Linux kernel is rated "Less critical," or 2/5. The most severe unpatched Windows vulnerability is rated "Highly critical," or 4/5. The actual numbers are pretty even: both had 47 in 2010, Win7 has had 6 and Linux has had 4 so far this year. And hey, I don't even need to cite this info, you've already done it for me.
Now let's find some more of these facts that you love so much. There were at least 1,017,208 malware programs *created* in the first half of 2010...99.4% of them for Windows. Now consider that, by far, the primary entry point of malware is social engineering, not actual system vulnerabilities. I know this is Slashdot and all, but once you have less tech-savvy family and friends on your computers and networks, it doesn't matter how careful or knowledgeable you are.
In the sixteenth century, the Venetians innovated ways to make colored glass. They protected their IP by turning the glass blowing factory into a fortress. Revealing the secrets to folks outside the factory was punishable by death.
The Chinese had a monopoly on silk making, and used similar methods to ensure that no silk worms left the country. Italian monks eventually managed to smuggle some out hidden in hollowed out walking sticks. Hey, ancient Industrial Espionage!
So ancient cultures did understand the value of protecting their innovations. They just used different methods to protect them.
Keeping trade secrets is pretty widely accepted among the End Software Patents crowd.
All taxes are regressive. The lie of the left is taxes can be progressive at all. Everyone pays all the taxes. Hiding taxes among the 'rich' doesn't help people realize this, as the taxes just get hidden, and passed down to the little guy in the form of higher prices, lower wages and so on.
And this is the lie of the rich: conflating "rich" with "businesses." We know what happens when taxes on the rich (not businesses, just the rich) go down: they save more. In President Bush's first term, the highest tax bracket went from 39.6% to 35%. The percentage of income the rich put into savings in the same time from went from 2.2% to 7.6%.
You want my solution to taxes, spending, and so on? It is simple. Vote on things you don't want society to promote, make it legal and tax those things. Legalize drugs, tax them. Legalize Prostitution, tax it. Legalize whatever you think is a "victimless crime" and tax the activity. You'll end up with far more revenue, far less crime (by definition) and the problems of society become controlled.
You can see this with Cigarettes. Legal, taxed to death, and we don't have nearly the problem with second hand smoke as we used to.
Now sin taxes, I fully agree with. I have no problem helping out the poor with more progressive mandatory taxes, but if they want to waste their extra money on entirely unnecessary stuff like cigarettes and booze, that's their problem. But yeah, it's not hard to imagine how huge of a positive impact legalizing and taxing marijuana would have, even considering that there would be a large number of people that grow it on their own. Alcohol and cigarette lobbies and various conservative groups have been powerful enough to thwart these efforts in most states, but I think we're inching toward it.
So, you would suggest that rich people should pay sales tax in relation to their income? So if the poor person buys a pair of shoes and pays $3 sales tax on them, the same pair of shoes should rack up $300 for the rich person?
Hey, way to take it to the logical extreme there! Let's look at this from another angle. Under our current system, the economy has grown by about 20% in the last ten years. And yet, the wages of the lower and middle classes have been virtually unchanged. Guess where all of that wealth is going? Tell me, how is that fair for the middle class, to whom this country owes most of its productivity gains? And you want to make it *worse* by lowering taxes on the rich and raising them for everybody else? That's what these so-called Fair Tax proposals do.
I'll tell you what, when taxes on the rich are increased to a point where the country's increase in wealth is distributed properly to the people responsible, you go right ahead and quit trying to be productive. I'll gladly step in and take the raise.
With the PogoPlug, all you're doing really on the device is stopping a shell script that's running, and installing a new bootloader. Everything else gets installed on whatever storage device you attach to it, so I think it's probably fairly difficult to properly brick it (although there are more obscure NAND installs that do have the potential to really screw it up).
I actually think Debian is a more obvious choice for these devices than an Arch-based distro as it has more packages than any other distro and has good support for ARM. In my case I really wanted a number of packages that were in Debian, such as byobu and procmail, and I use Ubuntu on the desktop and have always liked Debian-based distros, so it seemed the obvious choice.
Funny story: I actually came across your blog yesterday as I browsed for info about setting up a mail server on the PogoPlug. I'm not sure I'll do it (getting a web server and website up and running is first), but just considering some options. I'm actually an Arch user normally, but I tend to agree that Debian might be better since I don't care about having bleeding edge stuff on there. Thanks for the info!
Minecraft confirms it, Java is not dead.
Isn't the fact that you can "unbrick" it mean it's not really bricked?
Also I think this requires JTAG, which comes with Sheevaplug but is sold separately from Guruplug, and AFAIK is not available on the PogoPlug, et al. So, not quite so useful for me (I just picked up a PogoPlug on the cheap with the intent of running Plugbox Linux.
Pretty much any time someone makes a reference to tea bagging in relation to the tea party movement, that's a good indication of someone who's following the misinformation of the MSM.
Or, you know, we're just juvenile and we find enjoyment in referring to you as teabaggers. The other hilarious part is that you guys think you still have any real influence even though you've simply become a wing of the Republican party, who only "cares" about the deficit when it'll win them votes. Case in point: their "compromise" for keeping tax breaks for the rich (which increases the deficit, I might add) was to increase the deficit even further. Luckily for them, of course, the Dems keep on heaping on the spending, so watch Republicans pretend to care again next November.
I'm still waiting for somebody to catch on to the fact that the summary called Fox News part of the mainstream media. That alone would throw half the Fox News-watching population into a rage.
3.6 --> 4.0 --> 5.0 --> 6.0 --> 7.0 = 3.6 --> 4.0 --> 4.1 --> 4.2 --> 4.3
It's "big version number envy". Nothing more. The Mozilla folks have given in to the idea that "3.6 is less than 8.0 and is less than 12, therefore FireFox 3.6 is less than MSIE 8.0 and Chrome 12". Is this a sign that marketing people are now running Mozilla? Will the budget go to engineers or Superbowl ads?
Perhaps they've gotten enough complaints or questions from their users that they decided this change was better. Perhaps there are a bunch of people on Firefox 3.0.x and 3.5.x that aren't upgrading to 3.6.x because the number isn't that much bigger. I'm sure there was similar grumbling when Slackware decided to jump from version 4 to version 7, but I suspect nobody really cares now.
On a related note, though it bugged me at first, Ubuntu's simple YY.MM version numbering is growing in popularity and now I quite like it. When everybody knows how old a release is, there's no confusion about which is the latest version and the developers have extra incentive for a new stable release if their competitors have a newer one.
And if the President isn't going to (or shouldn't) kill the Internet, why bring it up at all (as some Senators did)?
Because some people think he should have the power to protect critical computer systems across the country from compromise. But hey, let's just pretend for a moment that people aren't once again talking out of their asses for political purposes when they talk about the Internet kill switch. The Communications Act of 1934 *already gives* the President the power to close or take control over "any facility or station for wire communication" when the U.S. is at war. Go ahead, read 47 U.S.C. 606, I'll wait.
If anything, the so-called kill-switch bill will limit the President's power to only having the ability to cut off computer systems at government and critical infrastructure locations.