"The central idea of all statists is that the State knows enough about everything to be able to make smart, rational decisions about everything, including proactively dealing with problems, whatevet that means."
It's interesting to notice that, in the more extreme of the type of incident you mention, not one of the states (US, Soviet Union or Japan) was able to "proactively deal with problems." Heck, Japan and the USSR weren't able to deal with the problems, post facto!
The kind of people breaking immigration laws are people who work in hourly jobs/etc. The engineers who're here are not going to stick around with no job - they can go back home and earn more money with their 'US experience'.
Speaking as one who returned home a few years ago, I'd say you're exactly right. Most of my compatriots who stayed are now having to deal with huge mortgages on sinking home prices and an uncertain prospect in the job market.
Where do you get the idea that farmers in the third world are being put out of business by farming businesses in the U.S. and Europe?
If anything, farmers in North America and Europe are being given vast lifelines (in the form of subsidies and trade barriers) to avoid competition from more efficient producers in the developing world.
Boo wooh.. I wish I could reply, but I'm busy having a heart attack...
Now seriously, I'm not fat, my cholesterol levels are OK, and I don't have a history of heart disease in my family. Why should I deprive myself of the exquisite gustatory pleasure of a good steak or the superior cooking properties of animal fat?
Remember son, not all people are cut from the same mold, no matter what the health nazis say.
If you're into Caribbean (well, Puerto Rican, anyways) rice and beans are best when prepared with lard too. Poor vegetarians, don't know what they're missing...
Re:Ready, Fire, Aim! I protest!
on
Eco-Terrorism
·
· Score: 2
Yeah, human sacrifice. Mmm. Which history books did you read?
Better ones than you did, apparently. To recap: in both the Roman and the Greek cultures infanticide (of unwanted or crippled offspring) was commonplace; bloody sacrifice (of animals) was the norm in their religious cults, and sometimes it could include a virgin or two. Amongst the surrounding barbarians in Northern Europe the situation was, of course, much worse, unless you consider having a pint of beer on your slain enemy's skull a refined and civilized habit.
And in exchange for the "Ok-ing" of a specific, unpopular version of Christianity
Excuse me, but what in heavens are you talking about? Remember, no schisms and no established heresies at that time...
, we got... The Dark Ages!
Of course, the Middle Ages, a historical period many ignoramuses like to vent their ignorance about, but few go to the trouble of actually getting educated about...
Filled with book burning,
Oops, sorry, that'd be Hitler's III Reich and/or a mixture of Indiana Jones and a...
infanticide,
Nope, that'd be Classical Greece...
war
Nope, that'd be the whole human history...
, and bloody sports.
Well, OK, I'll give you that one, but on a gore scale of 1 to 10, I think jousting is much closer to ice hockey on the bottom than to gladiator fights at the top.
--
Re:Ready, Fire, Aim! I protest!
on
Eco-Terrorism
·
· Score: 2
Thanks, Constantine. Love ya. Mean it.
You bet ya. If it weren't for his wise move of OK'ing the religion that was already the most popular in the Empire we'd still be looking at things like infanticide, human sacrifice, cannibalism and bloody sports as normal. Would you rather have it that way? --
What you said would be all fine and dandy, except for the fact that Tenochtitlan (a.k.a. Mexico City) had a larger population than most European towns at the time. --
Whch reminds of asking: when the writers christened the villain were they inspired by Unisys work (which didn't exist as such at the time) or was it the reverse? --
Just as keeping a central database of all configuration data (the Windows registry) is stupid, keeping a central database of all files (locate) is stupid, and keeping a central database of all packages (RPM) is stupid.
Quick, hurry to the head of the HR department and tell them that maintaining a central database of all employees is stupid! Don't forget to tell the same to your account manager at the bank! --
Don't blame Debian if you're too stupid read the docs and learn how to use update-modules. And please, don't make up bogus strawmen, because apt-get in no way splits the kernel source and of couse does not prevent you from downloading said source yourself and mangling it as you see fit.
Stick to Slackware, because you certainly lack the required number of brain cells to grow out of it. --
To me it looks like they just want protect themselves from another future round of "cease and desist" letters. Don't go looking for conspiratory theories where none can be found. The sky is not falling. --
Compare that to a company that takes their employees seriously such as, let's say, Andersen Consulting (no really, bear with me for a moment) where practically everybody is a vice-president, does no real important job, and is paid peanuts. Now don't even get me started about how seriously they take their customers!
Really. Like BlueDraco says, job titles are meaningless, and the more pompous they sound the more certain you can be that the job stinks. --
I hereby propose the enactment of afc's Law, a reformulation of the venerable Godwin's Law: that every person that brings up or nonchalantly mentions the subject of the controversial Kansas Board of Education decision in the comments to any Slashdot news piece that may cater to a religious audience, thereby producing a torrent of flame wars between fundamentalist readers, evolution advocates and plain bona fide trolls, be declared a loser, and the thread to be abandoned, never to be addressed again. --
A) try to use more bold characters in your posts. It more effectively emphasizes your point
I for one, think that the full spectrum of tags in the HTML specification was meant to be used, and, as you pointed out, it makes for a nice emphasizing effect.
B)Most of the good sysads i've known are some of the most skillfull coders i've seen. We also have some developers who have become sysads because they like the work better. The reason
developers/project managers/dba's/whoever fucking else are paid better than sysads is because they're overpaid. sysads are undepaid because there are so many entry-level personell coming into the market who think that, because they used pine in college, they know all there is to know about the unix OS. and fuck MCSE's, they're overvalued.
I've never known any sysadmin that was worth his salt as a programmer, and I've known many who couldn't write any C to program their way out of a wet paper bag. Mind you, I did not say that all sysadmins are dofuses, only a sizeable portion of the guild. The problem that spoils most sysadmins to the programming job is the tendency to believe that any half-baked, scratched on the palm of your hand, little program will do the job, just like them ol' Shell scripts used to do. That simply doesn't fly with real, complex systems. As for developers being overpayed, you almost nailed it on the head my friend: that's market economy for you. A shortage of skilled, talented programmers will increase the average salaries for the existing talented labour pool.
C)Roll our own fucking software? What's the purpose in trying to reinvent the wheel. If a piece of software is out there that effectively does the task you need it to do, what eactly is the purpose of re-writing it? You're trying to give me enough rope to hang myself with here...but WTF do you think the purpose of all those nifty configure switches is for? how about hacking the source that you downloaded rather than completely coding it from scratch. Oh, i guess develotubbies wouldn't think to do that because they're so 1337.
Actually, I do that with some of the packages that I have installed, Emacs being the most prominent example. I simply don't have the time or patience to do that for every little program that I use maybe once a week. That's why prepackaged binaries are useful. And that's why package managers are good.
D)Windows NT can do almost anything that Linux can do, if only worse
thank you very much. i haven't had a good laugh in quite some time. If you honestly believe this, i suppose all hope is lost and this whole thread is meaningless because you just don't get it.
Ok, I'll try to put in somewhat clearer terms: I've used Linux regularly since early '94, having been introduced to it back in mid '93 (a pre 1.0 version!). I defended Linux many a time against MS flunkies on/., sometimes in even more heated terms than I'm using to debate youu now.
Given that, though, I don't think there is any service that you can get from a Linux server that you can't use an NT server for. Perhaps it will be slower, perhaps it will be less reliable, but it will certainly be feasible. I challenge you to prove me wrong. What is it that I don't get? Let me guess, you're sixteen, right?
D)[...]the purpose of an OS, my friend, is facilitation, not isolation.
Just go back to your copy of Tannebaum and take his word for it, not mine. --
sorry, but i'm reading this post and i have to jump in here.
Well, well, look who's been browsing my User Info page. Talk about stalking!
afc: you are one of the most abrasive posters i have read on/. With others, it is easy to write off their
posts as trolls, or flames. You, however take a more subtle approach towards the agitation of your
neighbors. Perhaps you don't realize it, as you're not throwing explatives around in plain view. What
you're doing is throwing slugs (look it up, i think there might also be a book on the matter).
Translation of the above: you don't agree with me, but you can't argue your point of view rationally, so you write me off as a troll. Ob slugs: do you mean like metal projectiles from a gun's barrel?
fluxrad, my friend, calling me a troll only because I disagree with you won't automatically make me one. You have to understand that there's a very fine line that separates genuine, honest argument from clever trolls in an online forum. That is because there's no way to tell the irony in someone's written remarks. IMHO, the only thing that can tell those two apart is the fact that trolls don't actually believe the point they're defending.
Believe me, that's not the case with me. The only difference between you and me is that I argue using my brain, and you argue using your heart.
--
It's amazing how we say exactly the same thing and yet you see me as a zealotous young freak.
Funny how I never saw you write that you actually agree with us.
As I said, as long as it is optional, I don't care. It's that entire mentality that options must be removed to "keep it simple" that I fight against, and yes, it does piss me off.
Like I said, nowhere in the thread I saw people claming that. Instead, what I saw was people pointing out that indeed the boot screen was optional, and every one of those who said they liked it said they wanted it that way. That's why I called your whining a strawman.
At 27 years of age, I have learned a long time ago that fighting in real life is not allowed. You are
supposed to bend over and take whatever shit is thrown your way. But, on something that actually
matters, I rarely do. Which probably explains my relatively low station in life. I don't kiss enough ass to
make it out of the "you must be a little fuck-head" stage in other people's eyes.
There's a big difference in the concept of "kissing ass" (which I do not condone nor engage in) and calling people names ("fucking idiot" in block letters) in an uncalled for way. I never engage in the latter online, and when I do it in real life I mean it. Somehow I have the impression that people that blow their top easily at the keyboard, would be much more controlled when face to face with an angry countenance and a louder voice.
That's alright. I should have known that the concept of expressing concerns is just completely not allowed on slashdot. After all, this is the zealots playground.
Nobody is stopping you from speaking your mind, son, but don't ask to sit quiet listening to your preaching when we know you are wrong. In other words: you talk shit, you get shit talked to ya. --
Slashdot Mirror
And watch as a group of heretic TV producers disconnects from the medium because it's being used for advertisement instead of the arts...
"The central idea of all statists is that the State knows enough about everything to be able to make smart, rational decisions about everything, including proactively dealing with problems, whatevet that means."
It's interesting to notice that, in the more extreme of the type of incident you mention, not one of the states (US, Soviet Union or Japan) was able to "proactively deal with problems." Heck, Japan and the USSR weren't able to deal with the problems, post facto!
Ah, the sweet crackling of a burning straw man...
[...] they provided early Delphi's for free on my teenage years when noone else did.
Boy, do I feel old reading this, and recalling Turbo Pascal 3.0 way after I was a teenager...
The kind of people breaking immigration laws are people who work in hourly jobs/etc. The engineers who're here are not going to stick around with no job - they can go back home and earn more money with their 'US experience'.
Speaking as one who returned home a few years ago, I'd say you're exactly right. Most of my compatriots who stayed are now having to deal with huge mortgages on sinking home prices and an uncertain prospect in the job market.
Where do you get the idea that farmers in the third world are being put out of business by farming businesses in the U.S. and Europe? If anything, farmers in North America and Europe are being given vast lifelines (in the form of subsidies and trade barriers) to avoid competition from more efficient producers in the developing world.
Now seriously, I'm not fat, my cholesterol levels are OK, and I don't have a history of heart disease in my family. Why should I deprive myself of the exquisite gustatory pleasure of a good steak or the superior cooking properties of animal fat?
Remember son, not all people are cut from the same mold, no matter what the health nazis say.
If you're into Caribbean (well, Puerto Rican, anyways) rice and beans are best when prepared with lard too. Poor vegetarians, don't know what they're missing...
Better ones than you did, apparently. To recap: in both the Roman and the Greek cultures infanticide (of unwanted or crippled offspring) was commonplace; bloody sacrifice (of animals) was the norm in their religious cults, and sometimes it could include a virgin or two. Amongst the surrounding barbarians in Northern Europe the situation was, of course, much worse, unless you consider having a pint of beer on your slain enemy's skull a refined and civilized habit.
And in exchange for the "Ok-ing" of a specific, unpopular version of Christianity
Excuse me, but what in heavens are you talking about? Remember, no schisms and no established heresies at that time...
, we got... The Dark Ages!
Of course, the Middle Ages, a historical period many ignoramuses like to vent their ignorance about, but few go to the trouble of actually getting educated about...
Filled with book burning,
Oops, sorry, that'd be Hitler's III Reich and/or a mixture of Indiana Jones and a ...
infanticide,
Nope, that'd be Classical Greece...
war
Nope, that'd be the whole human history...
, and bloody sports.
Well, OK, I'll give you that one, but on a gore scale of 1 to 10, I think jousting is much closer to ice hockey on the bottom than to gladiator fights at the top.
--
Thanks, Constantine. Love ya. Mean it. You bet ya. If it weren't for his wise move of OK'ing the religion that was already the most popular in the Empire we'd still be looking at things like infanticide, human sacrifice, cannibalism and bloody sports as normal. Would you rather have it that way?
--
What you said would be all fine and dandy, except for the fact that Tenochtitlan (a.k.a. Mexico City) had a larger population than most European towns at the time.
--
A female deer? Sorry, couldn't resist :-P
--
Whch reminds of asking: when the writers christened the villain were they inspired by Unisys work (which didn't exist as such at the time) or was it the reverse?
--
Are you the real deal, or just someone posing as Don Hopkins? Not that I expect truth in the answer, anyways...
--
What you described above is the exact same as RedHat's Rawhide thingie, thus we may imply that RedHat's development model is open too, right?
--
Excuse me if I'm missing something, but exaclty why do you need to reboot?
--
Quick, hurry to the head of the HR department and tell them that maintaining a central database of all employees is stupid! Don't forget to tell the same to your account manager at the bank!
--
Stick to Slackware, because you certainly lack the required number of brain cells to grow out of it.
--
To me it looks like they just want protect themselves from another future round of "cease and desist" letters. Don't go looking for conspiratory theories where none can be found. The sky is not falling.
--
Really. Like BlueDraco says, job titles are meaningless, and the more pompous they sound the more certain you can be that the job stinks.
--
I mean, even if you haven't read the FAQ, it's pretty obvious that this is yet another pun on their favourite simian theme (cf bonobo etc).
And lastly, please Taco, take some lessons in Spanish, because that line was really embarassing.
--
I hereby propose the enactment of afc's Law, a reformulation of the venerable Godwin's Law: that every person that brings up or nonchalantly mentions the subject of the controversial Kansas Board of Education decision in the comments to any Slashdot news piece that may cater to a religious audience, thereby producing a torrent of flame wars between fundamentalist readers, evolution advocates and plain bona fide trolls, be declared a loser, and the thread to be abandoned, never to be addressed again.
--
Run on coffee and donuts? That's the ultimate version of Robocop!
--
A) try to use more bold characters in your posts. It more effectively emphasizes your point
I for one, think that the full spectrum of tags in the HTML specification was meant to be used, and, as you pointed out, it makes for a nice emphasizing effect.
B)Most of the good sysads i've known are some of the most skillfull coders i've seen. We also have some developers who have become sysads because they like the work better. The reason developers/project managers/dba's/whoever fucking else are paid better than sysads is because they're overpaid. sysads are undepaid because there are so many entry-level personell coming into the market who think that, because they used pine in college, they know all there is to know about the unix OS. and fuck MCSE's, they're overvalued.
I've never known any sysadmin that was worth his salt as a programmer, and I've known many who couldn't write any C to program their way out of a wet paper bag. Mind you, I did not say that all sysadmins are dofuses, only a sizeable portion of the guild. The problem that spoils most sysadmins to the programming job is the tendency to believe that any half-baked, scratched on the palm of your hand, little program will do the job, just like them ol' Shell scripts used to do. That simply doesn't fly with real, complex systems. As for developers being overpayed, you almost nailed it on the head my friend: that's market economy for you. A shortage of skilled, talented programmers will increase the average salaries for the existing talented labour pool.
C)Roll our own fucking software? What's the purpose in trying to reinvent the wheel. If a piece of software is out there that effectively does the task you need it to do, what eactly is the purpose of re-writing it? You're trying to give me enough rope to hang myself with here...but WTF do you think the purpose of all those nifty configure switches is for? how about hacking the source that you downloaded rather than completely coding it from scratch. Oh, i guess develotubbies wouldn't think to do that because they're so 1337.
Actually, I do that with some of the packages that I have installed, Emacs being the most prominent example. I simply don't have the time or patience to do that for every little program that I use maybe once a week. That's why prepackaged binaries are useful. And that's why package managers are good.
D)Windows NT can do almost anything that Linux can do, if only worse
thank you very much. i haven't had a good laugh in quite some time. If you honestly believe this, i suppose all hope is lost and this whole thread is meaningless because you just don't get it.
Ok, I'll try to put in somewhat clearer terms: I've used Linux regularly since early '94, having been introduced to it back in mid '93 (a pre 1.0 version!). I defended Linux many a time against MS flunkies on /., sometimes in even more heated terms than I'm using to debate youu now.
Given that, though, I don't think there is any service that you can get from a Linux server that you can't use an NT server for. Perhaps it will be slower, perhaps it will be less reliable, but it will certainly be feasible. I challenge you to prove me wrong. What is it that I don't get? Let me guess, you're sixteen, right?
D)[...]the purpose of an OS, my friend, is facilitation, not isolation.
Just go back to your copy of Tannebaum and take his word for it, not mine.
--
Well, well, look who's been browsing my User Info page. Talk about stalking!
afc: you are one of the most abrasive posters i have read on /. With others, it is easy to write off their
posts as trolls, or flames. You, however take a more subtle approach towards the agitation of your
neighbors. Perhaps you don't realize it, as you're not throwing explatives around in plain view. What
you're doing is throwing slugs (look it up, i think there might also be a book on the matter).
Translation of the above: you don't agree with me, but you can't argue your point of view rationally, so you write me off as a troll. Ob slugs: do you mean like metal projectiles from a gun's barrel?
fluxrad, my friend, calling me a troll only because I disagree with you won't automatically make me one. You have to understand that there's a very fine line that separates genuine, honest argument from clever trolls in an online forum. That is because there's no way to tell the irony in someone's written remarks. IMHO, the only thing that can tell those two apart is the fact that trolls don't actually believe the point they're defending.
Believe me, that's not the case with me. The only difference between you and me is that I argue using my brain, and you argue using your heart.
--
Funny how I never saw you write that you actually agree with us.
As I said, as long as it is optional, I don't care. It's that entire mentality that options must be removed to "keep it simple" that I fight against, and yes, it does piss me off.
Like I said, nowhere in the thread I saw people claming that. Instead, what I saw was people pointing out that indeed the boot screen was optional, and every one of those who said they liked it said they wanted it that way. That's why I called your whining a strawman.
At 27 years of age, I have learned a long time ago that fighting in real life is not allowed. You are supposed to bend over and take whatever shit is thrown your way. But, on something that actually matters, I rarely do. Which probably explains my relatively low station in life. I don't kiss enough ass to make it out of the "you must be a little fuck-head" stage in other people's eyes.
There's a big difference in the concept of "kissing ass" (which I do not condone nor engage in) and calling people names ("fucking idiot" in block letters) in an uncalled for way. I never engage in the latter online, and when I do it in real life I mean it. Somehow I have the impression that people that blow their top easily at the keyboard, would be much more controlled when face to face with an angry countenance and a louder voice.
That's alright. I should have known that the concept of expressing concerns is just completely not allowed on slashdot. After all, this is the zealots playground.
Nobody is stopping you from speaking your mind, son, but don't ask to sit quiet listening to your preaching when we know you are wrong. In other words: you talk shit, you get shit talked to ya.
--