Sure, government is responsible.
on
The SUV Is Dethroned
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Here's a list of government problems, mostly anti-trust issues and corporate welfare:
Allowing anti-comptitive practices that consolidated automobile making into three companies.
Allowing GM to kill streetcars and other electric vehicles.
Protecting their favorite companies from imports like the VW Bug, and later Japanese economy cars.
Allowing GM to kill modest safety improvements at Ford
Bailing out bankrupt companies in the late 70s and 80s.
Regulation that makes sense:
Safety standards as measured by crash tests
Emissions controls as measured by calibrated machinery at break tag stations
Fuel economy standards.
The contnued availability of cheap cars from Japan show that the technology to do all of the above has been around for more than 30 years and it's not terribly expansive. Instead of promoting such things, government has been busy supporting companies that rip us all off. That's a crime.
Your car is too fat. Uncle Sam needs to trim it.
on
The SUV Is Dethroned
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Over the last ten years cars have gotten so big, normal people can't ride their bikes on the same roads. A $5/gallon diet seems to be curing the problem.
The SUV is the end result of American car maker plans from the late 1960s. In order to keep their growth they had to sell larger, ever more expensive cars. The gas crisis of the mid 70s and air polution studies only partly derailed those plans. Regulation helped a lot. 20 years of cheap gas followed by corrupt government and import restrictions gave us the SUV craze. Further corruption gave us really expensive gas, which is going to solve the problem.
Further regulation is needed to avoid the inevitable resurgence of these monsters. We all deserve better road safety and air quality.
Spectrum should not be owned. As long as the spectrum is owned by a small number of companies that don't really compete, we will all have to use the crap they allow us to use to connect to their network.
A half measure would be for regulators to devise reasonable standards for connecting to networks so that any device made could be used. This would give people the ability to guard their privacy but it would not save the economy from tremendous parasitic communications costs.
We should not be willing to let Music companies decide who gets to use the internet but that's what Virgin is doing. Only a complete moron would trust the music industry at this point, but they would be wrong even if they were telling the truth.
When you combine these "cut off" programs with the ACTA end of the internet, what you have is more distopian than 1984. ACTA will turn the internet into something that resembles cable TV/spy machine. It will read people's mail and track them as they visit the few officially sanctioned and "free" internet sites. The power to exclude people from even that will complement ACTA's broad powers by allowing those in power to ruin those who deviate. Who's going to dare run VirginSucks.org when they might lose their ability to pay their bills, get a job, and everything else that requires the web? This kind of power is too dangerous to grant anyone.
You don't need legs to join a protest, but that does not give you the right to cut mine off.
The internet, if you had not noticed, has made it possible for people all around the world to cooperate. It is vital to modern political movements and business. The ability to share and publish has gone a long way to repair the damage government created broadcast networks did to democracy and civil discourse.
Prostate cancer is the target of the research, so your comment is closer to reality than you might like.
In this case, free software was the right tool. HPC with GNU/Linux is both flexible and mature. MD Anderson and everyone has better ways to spend their money than on software licenses for 5,000+ computers required to do this kind of work. Every kind of task will go this way eventually and most are already there. Whenever you start a task, you should look to see if some free program does not already do what you want.
It's amazing how operators tollerated crappy DOS based SCDA systems in some plants. These things should be hunted down with spears and removed. No one should be able to reset a 4GW themral reactor at a $1 million/day through a someone's spamed out W2K desktop or a telephone modem. Un-Fucking-Believable.
Germany is a place that knows what wiretaps and domestic spying is all about. Everyone's grandfather can tell them what the Nazis did to friend and foe alike. Public display of Nazi symbols is still against the law because it outrages so many. People who lived through the East German Police state have more recent and personal reasons to fear this kind of monitoring. Domestic spying is about eliminating political opposition and the only way to save yourself from that is to run away. Eventually, even those who manage to keep out of sight by doing nothing are destroyed by the schemes of those in power. States that do this are out of control.
If you understand these things and how computers work, you have no choice but to use and advocate free software. Non free software has the ability to end freedom of press and every other right. We are well down that path, with newspapers raided, citizens spyed on, an unpopular war of aggression, torture and other evil things. You can have your privacy with free software and should demand it.
M$'s revenue was down 24% last quarter over the last year. The knock out punch is putting something out that convinces the market NOT to buy M$ Office. The prospect of platform independence, lower cost and higher reliability can convince wavering corporate IT managers that an upgrade to M$XML and ten more years of file format lock in is a bad idea.
Don't feel bad for the Soft, it's something they have done again and again to other companies, even when the other company's tech was better. The SCO, Get the Facts, and patent attacks are all evidence of the same kind of behavior. They deserve to fail.
You would think that the AP or Yahoo would point out the distinction instead of just running a corporate press release. Who said there was some kind of animosity between Microsoft and Yahoo? Oh yeah, M$ did but both the AP and Yahoo are compliant supplicants who will run an advertisement and call it news.
Yeah, it's too bad McAfee Inc acts like there's nothing in the world but Windows. If they were honest, they would have a list of browsers and OS really endangered but they would like to say this is a "computer" problem instead of a Windows problem. The words, "Microsoft" and "Windows" did not occur in the article.
Netflix provides big publisher movies. They have an exclusive contract to back up a good business model and that's why they have thrived.
They can not possibly hope to compete in the porn market. The porn market is free due to it's mainstream exclusion. It is as close to Adam Smith's capitalist fuck fest that you can hope to find. There are many providers and vendors. If you want porn, you can buy any kind you want right now. Vendors and makers are not likely to sign any kind of exclusive deals with Netflix because they can do better on their own and both will be undercut by independent dealers.
Given the close relationship between Jimmy Swaggart and other moral majority types and porn, you have to wonder about the motivations of the current administration's fight against porn. Are they fighting porn out because they despise human degradation, hate sex or want to help out TW and other big publishers? The constant errsion of rights and approval of torture rules out any humanitarian opposition. The use of words like "penis" on air rules out puritanical motivation, other than callous political means to the end. What we are left with is a favor to MPAA.
The submitter quotes the most frightening parts of the article and our current "trade partner" China is well positioned to spy. We trust them to make equipment and non free software like Cisco routere has proved itself impossible to check.
Still, most of the hacks are common and anyone could do it. Time and time again we read about autopropagating botnets for Windows and how they cover large parts of the internet. When that system is used on corporate and government desktops, anyone can exploit it.
The article mentions large scale government, military and industry intrusions. They also mention criminal gangs and others besides China as those responsible.
This is an odd issue that gives neo-conservatives fits. They like trading with China, so they don't like hearing old school anti-Communist and human rights complaints. They place the interests of large American companies above those of American people, so they don't like hearing bad things about Microsoft. This leads to a large scale head in sand act.
University scheduling with Word and VBA? That's nothing. I used Timex Sinclair BASIC to pull records from a database and used the results to navigate and control a nuclear submarine! The costs easily ran into the billions of dollars.
End joke. Please, end joke.
You can use assembly language to teach all the things the fine physics teacher needs but it's not practical. It will take a long time to teach, be a nightmare to grade, be system dependent and it teaches students nothing about the tools that people actually use for physics. Those libraries are written in fortran, C and have thousands of man years worth of testing in them. You should teach what you use because that's what you know and that's what you think is useful.
Slashdot Mirror
Here's a list of government problems, mostly anti-trust issues and corporate welfare:
Regulation that makes sense:
The contnued availability of cheap cars from Japan show that the technology to do all of the above has been around for more than 30 years and it's not terribly expansive. Instead of promoting such things, government has been busy supporting companies that rip us all off. That's a crime.
Over the last ten years cars have gotten so big, normal people can't ride their bikes on the same roads. A $5/gallon diet seems to be curing the problem.
The SUV is the end result of American car maker plans from the late 1960s. In order to keep their growth they had to sell larger, ever more expensive cars. The gas crisis of the mid 70s and air polution studies only partly derailed those plans. Regulation helped a lot. 20 years of cheap gas followed by corrupt government and import restrictions gave us the SUV craze. Further corruption gave us really expensive gas, which is going to solve the problem.
Further regulation is needed to avoid the inevitable resurgence of these monsters. We all deserve better road safety and air quality.
Spectrum should not be owned. As long as the spectrum is owned by a small number of companies that don't really compete, we will all have to use the crap they allow us to use to connect to their network.
A half measure would be for regulators to devise reasonable standards for connecting to networks so that any device made could be used. This would give people the ability to guard their privacy but it would not save the economy from tremendous parasitic communications costs.
We should not be willing to let Music companies decide who gets to use the internet but that's what Virgin is doing. Only a complete moron would trust the music industry at this point, but they would be wrong even if they were telling the truth.
When you combine these "cut off" programs with the ACTA end of the internet, what you have is more distopian than 1984. ACTA will turn the internet into something that resembles cable TV/spy machine. It will read people's mail and track them as they visit the few officially sanctioned and "free" internet sites. The power to exclude people from even that will complement ACTA's broad powers by allowing those in power to ruin those who deviate. Who's going to dare run VirginSucks.org when they might lose their ability to pay their bills, get a job, and everything else that requires the web? This kind of power is too dangerous to grant anyone.
You don't need legs to join a protest, but that does not give you the right to cut mine off.
The internet, if you had not noticed, has made it possible for people all around the world to cooperate. It is vital to modern political movements and business. The ability to share and publish has gone a long way to repair the damage government created broadcast networks did to democracy and civil discourse.
Prostate cancer is the target of the research, so your comment is closer to reality than you might like.
In this case, free software was the right tool. HPC with GNU/Linux is both flexible and mature. MD Anderson and everyone has better ways to spend their money than on software licenses for 5,000+ computers required to do this kind of work. Every kind of task will go this way eventually and most are already there. Whenever you start a task, you should look to see if some free program does not already do what you want.
There are several measures of feedwater flow and reactor water level that a chemical monitoring program should never have been able to override.
It's amazing how operators tollerated crappy DOS based SCDA systems in some plants. These things should be hunted down with spears and removed. No one should be able to reset a 4GW themral reactor at a $1 million/day through a someone's spamed out W2K desktop or a telephone modem. Un-Fucking-Believable.
Germany is a place that knows what wiretaps and domestic spying is all about. Everyone's grandfather can tell them what the Nazis did to friend and foe alike. Public display of Nazi symbols is still against the law because it outrages so many. People who lived through the East German Police state have more recent and personal reasons to fear this kind of monitoring. Domestic spying is about eliminating political opposition and the only way to save yourself from that is to run away. Eventually, even those who manage to keep out of sight by doing nothing are destroyed by the schemes of those in power. States that do this are out of control.
If you understand these things and how computers work, you have no choice but to use and advocate free software. Non free software has the ability to end freedom of press and every other right. We are well down that path, with newspapers raided, citizens spyed on, an unpopular war of aggression, torture and other evil things. You can have your privacy with free software and should demand it.
M$'s revenue was down 24% last quarter over the last year. The knock out punch is putting something out that convinces the market NOT to buy M$ Office. The prospect of platform independence, lower cost and higher reliability can convince wavering corporate IT managers that an upgrade to M$XML and ten more years of file format lock in is a bad idea.
Don't feel bad for the Soft, it's something they have done again and again to other companies, even when the other company's tech was better. The SCO, Get the Facts, and patent attacks are all evidence of the same kind of behavior. They deserve to fail.
You will have to buy Vista Business or Ultimate to get that, but neither of those is selling as well as EEEPC with Xandros.
You would think that the AP or Yahoo would point out the distinction instead of just running a corporate press release. Who said there was some kind of animosity between Microsoft and Yahoo? Oh yeah, M$ did but both the AP and Yahoo are compliant supplicants who will run an advertisement and call it news.
Yeah, it's too bad McAfee Inc acts like there's nothing in the world but Windows. If they were honest, they would have a list of browsers and OS really endangered but they would like to say this is a "computer" problem instead of a Windows problem. The words, "Microsoft" and "Windows" did not occur in the article.
for corruption.
Netflix provides big publisher movies. They have an exclusive contract to back up a good business model and that's why they have thrived.
They can not possibly hope to compete in the porn market. The porn market is free due to it's mainstream exclusion. It is as close to Adam Smith's capitalist fuck fest that you can hope to find. There are many providers and vendors. If you want porn, you can buy any kind you want right now. Vendors and makers are not likely to sign any kind of exclusive deals with Netflix because they can do better on their own and both will be undercut by independent dealers.
Given the close relationship between Jimmy Swaggart and other moral majority types and porn, you have to wonder about the motivations of the current administration's fight against porn. Are they fighting porn out because they despise human degradation, hate sex or want to help out TW and other big publishers? The constant errsion of rights and approval of torture rules out any humanitarian opposition. The use of words like "penis" on air rules out puritanical motivation, other than callous political means to the end. What we are left with is a favor to MPAA.
Those tags were produced by Adobe distiller or similar. Word does not yet have direct to pdf printing. Shocking how archaic is is, isn't it?
Oh yeah, I'm not Twitter and I'm not going to shut up, especially for such an ignoramus as you.
The submitter quotes the most frightening parts of the article and our current "trade partner" China is well positioned to spy. We trust them to make equipment and non free software like Cisco routere has proved itself impossible to check.
Still, most of the hacks are common and anyone could do it. Time and time again we read about autopropagating botnets for Windows and how they cover large parts of the internet. When that system is used on corporate and government desktops, anyone can exploit it.
I'm not Twitter and I'll post how I'll do as I please.
The article mentions large scale government, military and industry intrusions. They also mention criminal gangs and others besides China as those responsible.
This is an odd issue that gives neo-conservatives fits. They like trading with China, so they don't like hearing old school anti-Communist and human rights complaints. They place the interests of large American companies above those of American people, so they don't like hearing bad things about Microsoft. This leads to a large scale head in sand act.
"A computer virus" is as close as this article came to the reason power companies are so wide open to any aggressor.
No one at Google is dumb enough to use M$ Word. How dare M$ frame Google like that? Geeze, they might as well have made it a docx from Vista.
Some of these specs, like the 1280x800 resolution screen look beyond the M$ limits for such devices. Good for Dell, they know what the market really looks like.
University scheduling with Word and VBA? That's nothing. I used Timex Sinclair BASIC to pull records from a database and used the results to navigate and control a nuclear submarine! The costs easily ran into the billions of dollars.
End joke. Please, end joke.
You can use assembly language to teach all the things the fine physics teacher needs but it's not practical. It will take a long time to teach, be a nightmare to grade, be system dependent and it teaches students nothing about the tools that people actually use for physics. Those libraries are written in fortran, C and have thousands of man years worth of testing in them. You should teach what you use because that's what you know and that's what you think is useful.
We could make tens of dollars a day. .... Sweet!