I am not a lawyer. But clearly, this is equivalent to allowing people to sign blank cheques in exchange for potentially nothing, without them explicitly agreeing to. How such clauses would be conscionable mystifies me. If the laws in the US allow that, and people are not outraged enough that some member of congress will find enough colleagues to put a stop to that (because a super-popular law is worth a lot of votes -- and this compensates potential losses in contributions), you guys deserve it.
Although frankly, No one deserves the North American telecom companies. Seriously. No one. I gave up on having a mobile phone at all, because I refuse to give them a single cent.
Right. This is what I meant. I have some bizarre conception in my head that education ends with you getting a PhD, and Bachelors being some sort of drop-outs.
There is exactly one Ponzi scheme which works: immigration. This is the real source of the US's riches. Generations upon generations of immigrants building their lives and enriching the country. Why do you think your country is rich? Natural ressources are good, but you are not Saudi Arabia, and that's a good thing too. The institutions are good but not great, although they are extremely stable. The infrastructure is pretty crummy. The primary educational system has pretty dismal outcomes. But new generations of immigrants bring in their skills and motivation.
Higher education is good, and the spillover in new industries drive the new economy, but you know the joke: "what is a Russian professor teaching Indians and Chinese students -- A US University classroom". Immigration is the key there. Again, it is a Ponzi scheme, new generations generating the wealth to sustain the older ones.
But this is a good and virtuous one! Embrace it: it makes the US vibrant compared to Old Europe, and I say that as a European rather found of my continent!.
In France the "Socialists" want these students to stay, and the right wants to throw them out. Now if they leave after recieving free education, it is the fault of the left? Dafuk?
And the highly motivated foreign students bring in enthusiasm and diversity, and frequently stay to enrich France. Win-Win.
T-Bills have a negative real yield. You can't really justify the investment strategies of those big corporations. It's not that there are not better investment to be made, starting spin-offs, investing in blue-sky research. It's that managers at those corporations understand investment seemingly only in terms of financial instruments.
Inflation does not depend on the amount of money in the system. It depends on the amount of money people get to spend. Whether you have large sums in a foreign bank, or a US bank, doing nothing means this money can cause no inflation. In fact, the FED trebled the money supply in those last years, and the US is still in quasi-deflation...
You know, tax codes need not be written full of loopholes... You need a big helping of corruption -- sorry, lobbying -- to get the mess that the US tax code is.
Though in this case, this is not even a loophole: why would you tax differently US corporations buying US T-Bills and foreign corporations buying US T-Bills ?
The companies doing these shenanigans are not even really avoiding taxes: they are simply delaying them. If the money was to flow back to the US operation, it would be taxed. The problem is that the idiot managers think that avoiding taxes at the cost of investing less is somehow a good idea. Because some moron has decreed that having large amounts of cash is somehow a good idea for a corporation -- it's not, it is a horrble waste of resources.
And of course, it is also bad for society. But this is not really a taxation issue, it is a "people can't count and will cut their noses to spite their faces" issue. And frankly, I don't know how to solve that except by giving significantly more leverage on the board and board salaries to the shareholders.
Re:Can't decide if it's embarrassing or impressive
on
Decade Old KDE Bug Fixed
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· Score: 4, Interesting
I tend to consider my cross-domain cookies getting lost a feature. I never noticed the bug -- and I have been using KDE since before it was introduced.
There are legitimate uses for cookies, for sure, but the vast majority of them seem to serve no other purpose than tracking me. Which is occasionally fine in the case of wikipedia or slashdot keeping me logged in, but in the vast majority of cases _not_ OK.
No. As non-sociopathic humans, we tend to see things in moral terms. However, I do not wish for my government to think about tax in moral terms: I want them to think about taxes in terms of maximising the global welfare of the people they administer. Arguably, this is a moral objective, but it should be attempted through pure optimisation.
This means that if I get 1€ in taxes by taxing the beejeezus out of a company, and 1.1€ by taxing nominally much less, I should pick the second option, because although it will seem unfair, it is also more effective. And this is indeed what countries tend to do.
However, this causes a problem: some countries can specialise in doing that (offering low taxes) and because they are unbeatably better at it than anyone (the Cayman Islands is a tropical paradise with minuscule needs in terms of infrastructure and social spending, and no significant military -- no large country can beat them at low taxes without going insta-bankrupt) they get all the taxes and we all, collectively, have a problem.
A global treaty where no country is allowed to tax _less_ than, say 15% of its GDP and the money it gets beyond the 200% of its needs gets put into some international redistribution fund would do wonders. You could still have very low taxes country if you want to (because taxing 15% of GDP is mighty low), but no "paradise", because then there is a legitimate balance as a company between picking a country with excellent infrastructure and a country with low taxes.
No, it may also mean developing nuclear power more, or imposing efficiency standards on wares. Le's talk about standards.
As a European, one of the stricking thing about America is the absolutely dismal standards in housing construction, household applicances, cars, etc. Sure, things are a bit cheaper, but the TCO of all those things is really bad compared to euro stuff. It seems people only look at the sticker price, and don't think about the costs down the road.
So in fact, in the US there is quite a margin to do something significant, now, and have everyone be richer in the medium term from lower energy bills, less replacing stuff, and who knows? less fat as a side effect from enjoying cooking with appliances that don't suck.
I want it on my monitor. Who watches TV anymore anyway?
OK, not a very good point, but basically, I can absolutely use more pixels. youtube videos will still be crappy, but when I write, code or draw, I'll see much more:). I don't think that the fact that those pixels require such large files is very relevant compared to the fact that economies of scale will yield much larger and better screens.
I am still bitter about the whole fullHD scam -- for a scam it was: moitor resolutions went down. and in the 21st century, reversing the direction of progress takes quite a bit of effort.
Who cares, this is not the important point!
on
The Trouble With 4K TV
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· Score: 5, Insightful
The important point is that at last, there'll be computer screens with non-stupid resolutions again! They took my 1920x1200 away, and though I would prefer 3840x2400, I can live with 3840x2160.
Dude(tte), you need to find friends/collegues with a bit more conversation. You'll whither away otherwise.
I don't actually think the place of maths is ambiguous: even if logic exists as some fundamental fact (I happen to believe that, and this is a reason why I believe in no gods) , it is not a fact which depends on physical reality. It merely requires the capability to perform calculations.
Which the universe happens to do, but also computers, minds, and any non-linear physical process. If there is a non-linear process, maths are.
And science, on the other hand, is the description of physical reality. Through theories which predict measurable outcomes from measurable inputs. If you can't measure it (however indirectly) it is not science.
compsci is not science at all. It is a branch of mathematics. There is the question of processor design, if you count it in, which is basically engineering.
Mathematics are not a science, because they do not rely on underlying reality: the universe may have had completely different physics (never mind the fine-tuning arguments) but mathematics would still be the same.
No. in fact, you cannot simultaneously worry about the spread of GMOs and think that terminator is a bad idea. The thing about the farmers keeping seeds for the next year is folklore: in developed nations, no one does that: far too inefficient -- it still happens in subsistance farming, but subsistance farming is a horrible way of living that you should no wish upon anyone.
Monsanto may be a horrible company -- and by all accounts, they are -- but terminator is nothing evil. It is just a perfectly valid way of not spreading genes around.
There is exactly 1 budget to be balanced, and that is the energy budget of the planet. All the rest is just accounting tricks.
And even the energy budget can be changed, depending on the willingness to invest in space infrastructure.
Also, yes, liberals, in the American sense, are more clever than everybody else. Because everyone who believes that somehow there is a value greater than individual human happyness obtained at the expense of the happyness of no other human (with no future discounting) is a dick, but is also an idiot because he is discounting his own happyness or that of his children friends or relatives. Discounting the happyness of unknown strangers present or future is also not nice, but also idiotic, because you are betting against other humans potentially helping you in return -- against all observable odds.
There is the case where you have no children, friend or relative, but then maximising the happyness of psychopaths seems a terrible idea.
In short "conservative" is just short hand for "I either did not think very deeply about it, or I am thinking wrong (aka I am incapable of seeing the point of view of a random stranger)".
The only time in the history of Humanity where the medium of exchange had its own value was when some guy exchanged an arrowhead for a piece of lether string.
Money is nothing magical. You do some work, I do some, those things never intersect but are both necessary in society.Thus some mode of accounting is necessary that you and I exchange, within the confines of society, the product of our labour.
We call this accounting method momey, and it is just a convention that little counters serve as markers of how desirable our work is to others at large. There is no reason -- in fact it would be terrible -- that the counters themselves have value. If you think fiat money is a scam, you are an idiot who missed the train some 4000 years ago.
Note that the questions asked, though rhetorical, were in fact loaded: my usage of the idiom was unusual, but correct.
But then idioms change, and unlike "I could care less" by which people mean the opposite of what they say, begging the question in the sense that an assertion is leading to a point is to me a perfectly ok case of semantic shift.
I am not American, and even then, I know that the budget needs to originate in the House, which has been of a Republican majority for a large part of said period. And like in every single other democracy, it is the leading party/coalition's job to formulate the budget. Now to be fair, knowing that the budget will be filibustered/voted down in the senate is not highly motivating.
But then the very act of making a budget grounded in reality would be deemed treasonous by a large part of the GOP... You know, where you balance needs, wants long term and short term. Those things. And using arithmetic too.
On the other hand, this does beg the question: why are people voting for a party for which the very act of governing seems too fucking hard? Also, why is said party presenting itself when it obviously wants to do fuck all?
On others, that is. The fiscal cliff thing is just idiotic: basically, it came about because congress would not agree to pay for the budget it had voted for and set itself an ultimatum so terrifying that it would have to get its collective act together.
It turns out that the amount of pain the Congress is ready to inflict on random individuals who were just unlucky is very, very large. And this thread is full of crazies thinking it is oh-so-brave to cut funding for weather (they leave far from the hurrican paths), to stop giving money to the unemployed (they themselves have a cushy job they think is entirely due to their hard work), to not give people health care (because cancer/car accidents are the product of bad lifestyle -- always. Also, they themselves have good insurance).
So maybe the US deserves to go over the cliff and have a good 3 point of GDP recession. After all, the economy is doing so well... Or maybe the American electorate needs to pull the plug on the Republicans and the Libertards. Then the Democracts can be split into a centre right and a centre left party.
I don't think there ever was a market in Linux retail. The money was always in services -- training, deployments, custom developments, support. Having your own solution may help, but it may also make you less attractive, as your client miss out on one of the great benefits of open source: no vendor lock-in.
But yes, the market for devices, in the retail sense is likely much larger.
Your are missing something: in the flat, near-perfect-competitive-field of opensource software, the best tech wins. In general, through anticompetitive practices or simply high cost of entry coupled with important network effects, the best tech does not win.
In general, believing in perfect markets is crazy, but within opensource, you're not too far off the mark:)
It is not so much the number of servers as the network interface. It can be installed on any number of servers mirroring one another, the server might be running in a VM, which is probably closer to what you think of when thinking cloud.
But from the point of view of the user, the important things are freedom of usage, and control over their data.
Slashdot Mirror
Dude, better anything than Rogers basically requires you to exist and not try.
I am not a lawyer. But clearly, this is equivalent to allowing people to sign blank cheques in exchange for potentially nothing, without them explicitly agreeing to. How such clauses would be conscionable mystifies me. If the laws in the US allow that, and people are not outraged enough that some member of congress will find enough colleagues to put a stop to that (because a super-popular law is worth a lot of votes -- and this compensates potential losses in contributions), you guys deserve it.
Although frankly, No one deserves the North American telecom companies. Seriously. No one. I gave up on having a mobile phone at all, because I refuse to give them a single cent.
Right. This is what I meant. I have some bizarre conception in my head that education ends with you getting a PhD, and Bachelors being some sort of drop-outs.
That'll be at some point in the future, I guess ;)
There is exactly one Ponzi scheme which works: immigration. This is the real source of the US's riches. Generations upon generations of immigrants building their lives and enriching the country. Why do you think your country is rich? Natural ressources are good, but you are not Saudi Arabia, and that's a good thing too. The institutions are good but not great, although they are extremely stable. The infrastructure is pretty crummy. The primary educational system has pretty dismal outcomes. But new generations of immigrants bring in their skills and motivation.
Higher education is good, and the spillover in new industries drive the new economy, but you know the joke: "what is a Russian professor teaching Indians and Chinese students -- A US University classroom". Immigration is the key there. Again, it is a Ponzi scheme, new generations generating the wealth to sustain the older ones.
But this is a good and virtuous one! Embrace it: it makes the US vibrant compared to Old Europe, and I say that as a European rather found of my continent!.
Insightful? Who the hell moderated that?
In France the "Socialists" want these students to stay, and the right wants to throw them out. Now if they leave after recieving free education, it is the fault of the left? Dafuk?
And the highly motivated foreign students bring in enthusiasm and diversity, and frequently stay to enrich France. Win-Win.
T-Bills have a negative real yield. You can't really justify the investment strategies of those big corporations. It's not that there are not better investment to be made, starting spin-offs, investing in blue-sky research. It's that managers at those corporations understand investment seemingly only in terms of financial instruments.
Inflation does not depend on the amount of money in the system. It depends on the amount of money people get to spend. Whether you have large sums in a foreign bank, or a US bank, doing nothing means this money can cause no inflation. In fact, the FED trebled the money supply in those last years, and the US is still in quasi-deflation...
You know, tax codes need not be written full of loopholes... You need a big helping of corruption -- sorry, lobbying -- to get the mess that the US tax code is.
Though in this case, this is not even a loophole: why would you tax differently US corporations buying US T-Bills and foreign corporations buying US T-Bills ?
The companies doing these shenanigans are not even really avoiding taxes: they are simply delaying them. If the money was to flow back to the US operation, it would be taxed. The problem is that the idiot managers think that avoiding taxes at the cost of investing less is somehow a good idea. Because some moron has decreed that having large amounts of cash is somehow a good idea for a corporation -- it's not, it is a horrble waste of resources.
And of course, it is also bad for society. But this is not really a taxation issue, it is a "people can't count and will cut their noses to spite their faces" issue. And frankly, I don't know how to solve that except by giving significantly more leverage on the board and board salaries to the shareholders.
I tend to consider my cross-domain cookies getting lost a feature. I never noticed the bug -- and I have been using KDE since before it was introduced.
There are legitimate uses for cookies, for sure, but the vast majority of them seem to serve no other purpose than tracking me. Which is occasionally fine in the case of wikipedia or slashdot keeping me logged in, but in the vast majority of cases _not_ OK.
No. As non-sociopathic humans, we tend to see things in moral terms. However, I do not wish for my government to think about tax in moral terms: I want them to think about taxes in terms of maximising the global welfare of the people they administer. Arguably, this is a moral objective, but it should be attempted through pure optimisation.
This means that if I get 1€ in taxes by taxing the beejeezus out of a company, and 1.1€ by taxing nominally much less, I should pick the second option, because although it will seem unfair, it is also more effective. And this is indeed what countries tend to do.
However, this causes a problem: some countries can specialise in doing that (offering low taxes) and because they are unbeatably better at it than anyone (the Cayman Islands is a tropical paradise with minuscule needs in terms of infrastructure and social spending, and no significant military -- no large country can beat them at low taxes without going insta-bankrupt) they get all the taxes and we all, collectively, have a problem.
A global treaty where no country is allowed to tax _less_ than, say 15% of its GDP and the money it gets beyond the 200% of its needs gets put into some international redistribution fund would do wonders. You could still have very low taxes country if you want to (because taxing 15% of GDP is mighty low), but no "paradise", because then there is a legitimate balance as a company between picking a country with excellent infrastructure and a country with low taxes.
No, it may also mean developing nuclear power more, or imposing efficiency standards on wares. Le's talk about standards.
As a European, one of the stricking thing about America is the absolutely dismal standards in housing construction, household applicances, cars, etc. Sure, things are a bit cheaper, but the TCO of all those things is really bad compared to euro stuff. It seems people only look at the sticker price, and don't think about the costs down the road.
So in fact, in the US there is quite a margin to do something significant, now, and have everyone be richer in the medium term from lower energy bills, less replacing stuff, and who knows? less fat as a side effect from enjoying cooking with appliances that don't suck.
I want it on my monitor. Who watches TV anymore anyway?
OK, not a very good point, but basically, I can absolutely use more pixels. youtube videos will still be crappy, but when I write, code or draw, I'll see much more :). I don't think that the fact that those pixels require such large files is very relevant compared to the fact that economies of scale will yield much larger and better screens.
I am still bitter about the whole fullHD scam -- for a scam it was: moitor resolutions went down. and in the 21st century, reversing the direction of progress takes quite a bit of effort.
The important point is that at last, there'll be computer screens with non-stupid resolutions again! They took my 1920x1200 away, and though I would prefer 3840x2400, I can live with 3840x2160.
At least resolutions are going up again.
Dude(tte), you need to find friends/collegues with a bit more conversation. You'll whither away otherwise.
I don't actually think the place of maths is ambiguous: even if logic exists as some fundamental fact (I happen to believe that, and this is a reason why I believe in no gods) , it is not a fact which depends on physical reality. It merely requires the capability to perform calculations.
Which the universe happens to do, but also computers, minds, and any non-linear physical process. If there is a non-linear process, maths are.
And science, on the other hand, is the description of physical reality. Through theories which predict measurable outcomes from measurable inputs. If you can't measure it (however indirectly) it is not science.
compsci is not science at all. It is a branch of mathematics. There is the question of processor design, if you count it in, which is basically engineering.
Mathematics are not a science, because they do not rely on underlying reality: the universe may have had completely different physics (never mind the fine-tuning arguments) but mathematics would still be the same.
No. in fact, you cannot simultaneously worry about the spread of GMOs and think that terminator is a bad idea. The thing about the farmers keeping seeds for the next year is folklore: in developed nations, no one does that: far too inefficient -- it still happens in subsistance farming, but subsistance farming is a horrible way of living that you should no wish upon anyone.
Monsanto may be a horrible company -- and by all accounts, they are -- but terminator is nothing evil. It is just a perfectly valid way of not spreading genes around.
There is exactly 1 budget to be balanced, and that is the energy budget of the planet. All the rest is just accounting tricks.
And even the energy budget can be changed, depending on the willingness to invest in space infrastructure.
Also, yes, liberals, in the American sense, are more clever than everybody else. Because everyone who believes that somehow there is a value greater than individual human happyness obtained at the expense of the happyness of no other human (with no future discounting) is a dick, but is also an idiot because he is discounting his own happyness or that of his children friends or relatives. Discounting the happyness of unknown strangers present or future is also not nice, but also idiotic, because you are betting against other humans potentially helping you in return -- against all observable odds.
There is the case where you have no children, friend or relative, but then maximising the happyness of psychopaths seems a terrible idea.
In short "conservative" is just short hand for "I either did not think very deeply about it, or I am thinking wrong (aka I am incapable of seeing the point of view of a random stranger)".
The only time in the history of Humanity where the medium of exchange had its own value was when some guy exchanged an arrowhead for a piece of lether string.
Money is nothing magical. You do some work, I do some, those things never intersect but are both necessary in society.Thus some mode of accounting is necessary that you and I exchange, within the confines of society, the product of our labour.
We call this accounting method momey, and it is just a convention that little counters serve as markers of how desirable our work is to others at large. There is no reason -- in fact it would be terrible -- that the counters themselves have value. If you think fiat money is a scam, you are an idiot who missed the train some 4000 years ago.
Note that the questions asked, though rhetorical, were in fact loaded: my usage of the idiom was unusual, but correct.
But then idioms change, and unlike "I could care less" by which people mean the opposite of what they say, begging the question in the sense that an assertion is leading to a point is to me a perfectly ok case of semantic shift.
Nice straw-man you build there.
I am not American, and even then, I know that the budget needs to originate in the House, which has been of a Republican majority for a large part of said period. And like in every single other democracy, it is the leading party/coalition's job to formulate the budget. Now to be fair, knowing that the budget will be filibustered/voted down in the senate is not highly motivating.
But then the very act of making a budget grounded in reality would be deemed treasonous by a large part of the GOP... You know, where you balance needs, wants long term and short term. Those things. And using arithmetic too.
On the other hand, this does beg the question: why are people voting for a party for which the very act of governing seems too fucking hard? Also, why is said party presenting itself when it obviously wants to do fuck all?
On others, that is. The fiscal cliff thing is just idiotic: basically, it came about because congress would not agree to pay for the budget it had voted for and set itself an ultimatum so terrifying that it would have to get its collective act together.
It turns out that the amount of pain the Congress is ready to inflict on random individuals who were just unlucky is very, very large. And this thread is full of crazies thinking it is oh-so-brave to cut funding for weather (they leave far from the hurrican paths), to stop giving money to the unemployed (they themselves have a cushy job they think is entirely due to their hard work), to not give people health care (because cancer/car accidents are the product of bad lifestyle -- always. Also, they themselves have good insurance).
So maybe the US deserves to go over the cliff and have a good 3 point of GDP recession. After all, the economy is doing so well... Or maybe the American electorate needs to pull the plug on the Republicans and the Libertards. Then the Democracts can be split into a centre right and a centre left party.
I'm pretty certain that would be the European Centre for whatever. Them being based in England and all that :)
I don't think there ever was a market in Linux retail. The money was always in services -- training, deployments, custom developments, support. Having your own solution may help, but it may also make you less attractive, as your client miss out on one of the great benefits of open source: no vendor lock-in.
But yes, the market for devices, in the retail sense is likely much larger.
Your are missing something: in the flat, near-perfect-competitive-field of opensource software, the best tech wins. In general, through anticompetitive practices or simply high cost of entry coupled with important network effects, the best tech does not win.
In general, believing in perfect markets is crazy, but within opensource, you're not too far off the mark :)
It is not so much the number of servers as the network interface. It can be installed on any number of servers mirroring one another, the server might be running in a VM, which is probably closer to what you think of when thinking cloud.
But from the point of view of the user, the important things are freedom of usage, and control over their data.