If terrorism can be 'for profit' then what exactly distinguishes it from run of the mill crime? And following this line of reasoning: how then can you justify the difference between anti terror government organisations and their specific tactics, and the police themselves?
Personally, I agree with you, I believe there is no point in reclassifying specific crimes as 'terrorism' when 'crime' is sufficient. That is unless of course you want to admit your police force was inadequate for doing what you wanted... without ever admitting they are not doing their job (as an aside, it bothers me here that the government seems to classify 'terror' as a crime committed specifically against a government, thus implying that they are deserving of some sort of different status to regular people). Or to put it in vastly more cynical terms: To invent a new class of criminal which warrants vastly expanded powers within the law enforcement structures of your nation... Machiavelli would have been proud.
Yes, this is a smart thing to do, but I'm not really sold on batteries as an energy storage means for machines yet. Electronics is different, but mechanical energy can be gained through a more efficient storage medium. I note that the big dog robot runs on an ICE, a smart choice in my opinion, and why? Versatility. Its so damn easy to fill up a tank of fuel.
To this day the most efficient way to store energy is to pump water up a hill and leave it there until you need it. Note this implies it is more efficient to store and release energy through a pump and turbine than it is to use a battery. I am still of the mind that this statement is true for oils and combustion engines. Oil makes more economic sense to me, it is far easier to transport to places off the grid and we have machines to extract power from it.
A company near me in Australia was working on a hybrid system that uses a series of compressed gas cylinders instead of batteries. To my mind this is an infinitely more elegant solution than the typical dual engine electric hybrid. The system was designed for use on trucks. And of course theres the rub: what electric motor is going to efficiently run a crane, or a dragline boom, or a pile driver, or a freight train? On sites with no power...
Synthetic oil will be used for these things. I don't know why people have a problem with synthetic oil, it is carbon neutral and it is dead easy to make. We have millions of machines in perfect working order that run on oil derived fuels. So explain again why we need new technology?
And where does the energy come from to power that 90% efficient electric motor? Your local power plant will run at 70% efficiency if it is very modern, probably more like 50% if it is not so new and it most likely burns coal. If it does not then its efficiency will be even lower. There is a further loss involved in transporting the coal to the plant and digging it up in the first place. There is the other issue as to what we do with variable power, I believe much is lost to heat anyway at off peak times. There are losses down the tubes, then there are losses as you charge. Ever felt a power pack and battery when charging? Heat is energy, if something is hot you have lost energy.
The picture is not quite so rosy and simple as many like to think. If it made economic sense to be using electric vehicles right now we would be, but it does not so we do not. I doubt if it ever will - we are tooled up to use oil so we are more likely to synthesise it than completely restructure our entire industrial machine.
The thing people don't get is thermodynamic efficiency is always very low. There is a simple law and it is related to the temperature of your heat source and sink (reversible carnot cycle):
n = 1 - TL/TH
Where TL is the sink temperature (ambient in the case of air cooling) and TH the source temperature. So, what this means is that for a perfect, lossless heat engine, 100% efficiency can only be achieved with an absolute zero heat sink, or an infinite temperatured heat source.
Using this equation and some approximate figures from a quick google, the Carnot efficiency of a typical ICE is in the order of some 42%. You cannot exceed that level of efficiency without violating some laws of physics. Given that modern ICEs run at some 30%+ efficiency, which gives you a figure more like 70% efficiency in terms of what is possible. The truth is that ICEs are in fact very efficient within the realm of what they can achieve. But hey don't let physics get in the way of environmental dogma.
Thermodynamics is a bitch isn't it?
The really inefficient part of driving a car is the dead weight you carry around with you, factoring in how much energy moves the driver I think you are down to 1% efficiency. If you do the calculations on electric vehicles the numbers a similarly dismal. Truth is we aren't admitting to ourselves what the real problem is: our expectations of what "personal transport" is.
The bicycle is still the most energy efficient personal transportation machine devised by man. Use it, if you care.
I too believed Firefox would still be necessary for web development due to firebug. Then I found out the chrome already has a kickass interactive alternative to firebug built in.
Chrome is fast to render, fast to crunch through javascript, has what firefox 3 should have had in the awesome bar, and it has unbeatable screen real estate. Apart from one or two bugs here and there it is the best browser I've used. Of course I'm typing this on an eee pc running xubuntu and firefox 3, even slashdots js brings firefox to its knees with limited resources... I'm getting sick of the firefox slowness.
That is a zero sum analysis of economics, which is incorrect from the outset. To your mind you are thinking scientifically: "The world is finite thus has finite resources". But the system does not behave in that manner, through observation it is known that this is not a scientific analysis. Output of resources and labour are variable in magnitude, and so the system behaves as such.
It is entirely possible, and has been clearly demonstrated in the last century that everyone can grow richer together, in principle. It may not be working in all corners of the world, and certainly looks like it is not happening in the USA, but it is entirely possible for everybody to gain something from economic output. Hell if your hypothesis were even half correct your lower classes would look more like poor african villages, but instead you have (likely) a roof over your head, food in your belly, television, a computer (clearly). Then theres the really important things: you have a sanitary environment, gifted to you by your peers through taxation systems, you have sanitary distribution networks for your food and water, and in principle access to the best medical facilities in the world. It looks to me that you are quite rich already, even if you are dirt poor.
This is not to say there are not problems with the current system, but over the centuries the current economic system you live under has grown you richer, and everyone around you.
Vista isn't sluggish, that is why you have missed the point. If you throw the hardware at it, Vista runs like a champ. Vista is only sluggish if you have less than 2gig of ram, and less than a reasonably new dual core cpu, neither of which is a very costly upgrade.
Face it, Vista and osx, and ubuntu for that matter (to a lesser extent) all have a very intensive overhead... If your expectation is that you shouldn't need an upgrade to run them. They have high overhead because they do lots of things, its debatable whether they need to or not but millions of users out there say they like it this way. If you want modular go with linux, I'm sure you already do.
Where do they get this idea from anyway? If somebody is renting it out, then Epic made money off the sale of the game. If somebody buys it second hand, again they made money off the sale of the game.
I see your point but I don't see theirs, they did make their money, they made exactly what they wanted when they set the asking price!
Sorry, I should have replied more directly to you. I agree with the canals idea, seems like a very good one. Of course for me as an Australian in a country of near permanent drought, its not so much an option on the table.
And you're a niche market that Microsoft and Apple do not care about. Why is it not acceptable? I have a ton of resources and I like my OS to be shiny, thats right I like it! So do millions of other users.
What is unreasonable here is geeks running Linux on 8 year old PCs claiming the whole world of software engineering should cater to them only.
No I think you miss the point, and so are lots of others.
Let me correct this for you: when the public is in the tank for a candidate, the press would be stupid not to follow, since it is ratings numbers for advertising which they actually live off. The public, as evidenced by your recent poll, was certainly 'in the tank' with Obama.
I watched this also recently in Australia. The best man to watch for this phenomenon is our man Rupert Murdoch. He has an uncanny ability to sniff the winds and go with the public mood. Observe he came out in tentative support for Obama when things looked to be going his way (and criticised him brutally when he won), he did the same for Kevin Rudd in Australia (left wing party), Tony Blair in Britain (left wing) and Bush jnr in the US (crackpot). These are business decisions, fair and balanced reporting has nothing to do with it.
I wish people would get off their high horses for a minute and accept that the media gives them what they want. Sure, I am absolutely 100% in favour of fair and balanced reporting, I am a pragmatic individual who above all else simply wants to see the best decisions being made regardless of affiliations. I seek out the most balanced reporting I can find, but do I know what that is? The press I seek is baised to my worldview even if I find it balanced. Everyone, given the freedom to do so, will seek out a press that is biased in favour of their own world view. Is this the fault of the press? Fox news sucks, but they get ratings, ask yourself, is that really because of Fox news? Or is there something a little deeper going on here.
Electricity is not trivial nor efficient to store, so far the best we can do is pump a bunch of water up on top of a hill. That is literally the most efficient way to store energy in terms of electricity. Compressed steam and air are also non trivial to store and less space efficient than oil.
You cant charge batteries at the rate oils can be pumped, you cant store enough energy in a tank of air to rival a sloshing tank of oils at attmospheric pressure. Oils for better or worse are the most versatile form of energy transportation we have. Why is the notion of carbbon neutral fuels so off putting to everyone?
You have concisely outlined here why oil is such a fantastic energy source. The stored potential energy in a tank of fuel is enormous, the ease by which it is transported is unprecedented in all our technology.
Fancy alternatives all fail at these incredibly important factors which add up to why we use oil. Personally I believe the best solution to our dirty energy problems is to make carbon neutral oil and use that. Its energy intensive to do but oil is so damn useful, and to hell with the current fads.
The thing I found when I went looking for a linux eee pc is that nobody stocked them. So I bought a windows version and immediately (like as soon as I got home) installed Xubuntu. Install the custom eee pc ubuntu kernel and a 3rd party app to get the osd and function keys working, everything works perectly, including compiz. It is the most perfect linux install I have ever owned. But after getting off track there my point is that few vendors even stock linux eeepc's where I live, so I think that accounts for a lot.
There are some other stupid things Asus has done: linux versions of the later models do not come with bluetooth and Xandros is an absolute piece of shit. Basically I am with you there, XP on a netbook makes no sense to me whatsoever. All the reasons I still use windows: games, photoshop, CAD, office, are irrelevant on a netbook.
Actually the XP versions are cheaper... Plus, as I already said in another post for the difference in price you can get an even bigger drive by upgrading with a flash card.
I just ordered an XP 901 and plan to put Xubuntu on it almost straight away. I did this because I read this article and wanted to get an 8" before they are gone. I have a 12" tablet pc, a second 10" laptop with hdd does not satisfy what I want out of a netbook. Really it completely defeats the purpose, its not a mobile device anymore its just another laptop. I have a small laptop.
For the record I am getting the XP version because it is cheaper. The linux version does have a bigger drive but for the price difference I can buy a 16 gig ssd and double my drive space anyway, I'll end up with more.
The free market is a fantasy, it is a hypothetical benchmark to which you strive. The free market consists of these broad assumptions (among others) which you should realise are not even rempotely realistic:
- Zero barriers to entry. In the free market model there exists nothing to stop you from simply opening up shop.
- Perfect competition. In a free market all business operates under the assumption of sufficient competition to have pricing structure based entirely on supply and demand
- Perfectly rational consumer behaviour. In the free market, consumers are assumed to be capable of rationalising each and every purchasing choice they make according to some idealised demand model. What that model even is is not universally agreed upon in the first place.
- Perfectly well informed consumers. In the free market, all consumers are assumed to have sufficient information at their disposal to satisfy the previous condition (perfectly rational purchasing decisions).
- Neglecting the existence of externalities. It is assumed that such a thing does not exist, or has no cost.
And others.
Now, can you, in any good sense of reason, tell me that any one of these assumptions is valid in the real world?
The free market is a good idealisation, much like in thermodynamics we make use of ideal gas laws and continuum assumptions. These assumptions make for excellent models but are not realistic, thus can only be used for benchmarking. Better models need to account for discrepancies, enter market regulation. Now if this stuff is news to you, you are not an economic rationalist you are a right wing idealogue.
Oh for christ's sake, where does the notion of land ownership come from? Sovereignty. It is not your land it belongs to that entity which is willing to protect it by force: Your government. The only way such a notion exists as 'land ownership' is because your government enforces such an idea, much like the idea of fiat currency when you think about it. There is no inherent ownership of anything other than that which is enforced by some powerful entity: Your government. It could be you in principle but something tells me you aren't going to be so willing or able to physically defend your property without the help of a more powerful entity. Sure I bet you think you'd be sitting there on your porch with shotgun in hand should all else fail but in reality you would lose in this scenario to the bigger dog.
So its socialism to the left, socialism to the right, if you think about it. Get over yourself mate, the idea of ownership as you understand it is gifted to you by a more powerful entity which actually enforces it. I suggest that the logical conclusion of this line of reasoning is that you own what that powerful entity tells you you own, and good luck to you if you believe otherwise.
What is it with you Americans and the stigmatism of wealth redistribution? ALL taxation is wealth redistribution by definition. Do you pay for each and every road you drive on *proportionately* to the amount you drive on it? No you do not, and the same goes for any public service you use. You do not pay your fair share. Why? Because of tax indexation. Hell, remove indexation and you still do not pay your share, because you do not earn as much as others therefore you do not pay as much as others.
All economists worth their salt favour wealth redistribution. Why? Because there is no such thing as a free market, it is an idealised situation that you aim to simulate through regulation. If you disagree with this then you fail to grasp the science behind economic theory (science is the model they strive for anyway). You can't just remove regulation and expect a free market to ensue, it doesn't work like that, libertarians and Austrain school economists be damned(*). The free market is an ideal, much like continuum assumptions in mechanics, and any other assumption in scientific modeling. They are ideal scenarios that you use as a benchmark.
Back to Obama, his tax plan is actually similar to the position held by none other than Milton Friedman. Yes, Milton Friedman. Friedman advocated a negative income tax instead of welfare systems to achieve wealth redistribution (yes the great free market monetarist believed in wealth redistribution, why? because he was not an idiot, he was a nobel prize winning economist no less). While Obamas plan is not exactly a negative income tax it is damn close, and follows the same principles. Welfare tends to have negative connotations in the minds of both the public and the government, and tremendous bureaucratic overhead. Why have two separate bureaucracies which are doing the same thing: Redistributing wealth?
What do they teach you in school that wealth redistribution is evil red communism or something? Consider this: Unemployment is a necessary function of economic activity, without it you have no room to manoeuvre and inflation spirals out of control. In a true free market there are no barriers to entry, so in theory anyone should be able to earn a buck somehow if they can be bothered working. But in a real market there are massive barriers to entry, you can't just earn a living. With the commons all but gone you can't go hunting and gathering, so without work (as roughly 5% of the population will be) what do you do? You steal shit, beat people up and take their money. Sound good? Sound like a positive well functioning society? It doesn't work, it is stupid and no government in their right mind would consider such a scenario. No citizen who has properly thought it through would reject wealth redistribution, it is a necessary condition in response to the way the real market operates.
Just get over it, think for a minute beyond your cushy little life and realise that somewhere out there at any given time people are going to be unemployed or unemployable. Do you want these people to be fighting tooth and nail for survival? I haven't even begun to discuss the virtues of public infrastructure either... but if you are a thinking individual then you will get your head around it. Drop the damn rhetoric and ideology and think pragmatically.
(*) The Austrian school favours empiricism and qualitative argument over rigorous mathematical modeling and mechanical logic. I assert that it is therefore in a tenuous position to make sound arguments at best, even with recent economic collapse in mind.
"Seems like it would be a lot simpler and more productive to simply buy a large area of land outside of a city and create a huge residential area with a central area for research. "
You see, here in Brisbane we have one of those, its called: The University of Queensland. Possibly the biggest area of land devoted to a university campus in the country, rated in the top 3 universities in the country, in the top 40 in the world.
I happen to be a student at UQ, it really is a fantastic university, it actually does groundbreaking research (shock horror) and the community is massive and draws talent from around the globe. But this is what I don't understand: How is this small town idea different to a university? UQ, like most large campuses (50k students, 5k staff) is a mini city already. It has shops, banks, a few bars, cafes etc, hundreds of on campus students and half the professors live in the surrounding suburbs. Most importantly UQ has $2.5 billion in assets in the form of research facilities built up over the past hundred years. How the hell is the campus anything different than what they are trying to create?
One major thing... west of Brisbane fucking sucks, it really fucking sucks, and UQ is one of the most attractive campuses in the country. Queensland I think is like Florida, but mostly desert (and lots of rain forest too - none 'west of Brisbane') Brisbane is sort of ok but the rest of the state is just a bunch of rednecks! It is dry, deforested, and sparsely populated. Queensland has a population of 4 million and is 2.5 times the size of Texas, half the population lives in Brisbane.
This is a stupid field of dreams idea and anyone with half a brain cell would not move to some shit hole west of Brisbane because UQ asked them to. Sounds like they are sinking some serious coin into a completely pointless exercise that many have already pointed out has been done before. I have nothing but respect and admiration for my university, they made the worlds first thrust generating scramjet, lots of good medical research comes out of UQ too, but this idea is stupid.
Slashdot Mirror
If terrorism can be 'for profit' then what exactly distinguishes it from run of the mill crime? And following this line of reasoning: how then can you justify the difference between anti terror government organisations and their specific tactics, and the police themselves?
Personally, I agree with you, I believe there is no point in reclassifying specific crimes as 'terrorism' when 'crime' is sufficient. That is unless of course you want to admit your police force was inadequate for doing what you wanted... without ever admitting they are not doing their job (as an aside, it bothers me here that the government seems to classify 'terror' as a crime committed specifically against a government, thus implying that they are deserving of some sort of different status to regular people). Or to put it in vastly more cynical terms: To invent a new class of criminal which warrants vastly expanded powers within the law enforcement structures of your nation... Machiavelli would have been proud.
Yes, this is a smart thing to do, but I'm not really sold on batteries as an energy storage means for machines yet. Electronics is different, but mechanical energy can be gained through a more efficient storage medium. I note that the big dog robot runs on an ICE, a smart choice in my opinion, and why? Versatility. Its so damn easy to fill up a tank of fuel.
To this day the most efficient way to store energy is to pump water up a hill and leave it there until you need it. Note this implies it is more efficient to store and release energy through a pump and turbine than it is to use a battery. I am still of the mind that this statement is true for oils and combustion engines. Oil makes more economic sense to me, it is far easier to transport to places off the grid and we have machines to extract power from it.
A company near me in Australia was working on a hybrid system that uses a series of compressed gas cylinders instead of batteries. To my mind this is an infinitely more elegant solution than the typical dual engine electric hybrid. The system was designed for use on trucks. And of course theres the rub: what electric motor is going to efficiently run a crane, or a dragline boom, or a pile driver, or a freight train? On sites with no power...
Synthetic oil will be used for these things. I don't know why people have a problem with synthetic oil, it is carbon neutral and it is dead easy to make. We have millions of machines in perfect working order that run on oil derived fuels. So explain again why we need new technology?
And where does the energy come from to power that 90% efficient electric motor? Your local power plant will run at 70% efficiency if it is very modern, probably more like 50% if it is not so new and it most likely burns coal. If it does not then its efficiency will be even lower. There is a further loss involved in transporting the coal to the plant and digging it up in the first place. There is the other issue as to what we do with variable power, I believe much is lost to heat anyway at off peak times. There are losses down the tubes, then there are losses as you charge. Ever felt a power pack and battery when charging? Heat is energy, if something is hot you have lost energy.
The picture is not quite so rosy and simple as many like to think. If it made economic sense to be using electric vehicles right now we would be, but it does not so we do not. I doubt if it ever will - we are tooled up to use oil so we are more likely to synthesise it than completely restructure our entire industrial machine.
The thing people don't get is thermodynamic efficiency is always very low. There is a simple law and it is related to the temperature of your heat source and sink (reversible carnot cycle):
n = 1 - TL/TH
Where TL is the sink temperature (ambient in the case of air cooling) and TH the source temperature. So, what this means is that for a perfect, lossless heat engine, 100% efficiency can only be achieved with an absolute zero heat sink, or an infinite temperatured heat source.
Using this equation and some approximate figures from a quick google, the Carnot efficiency of a typical ICE is in the order of some 42%. You cannot exceed that level of efficiency without violating some laws of physics. Given that modern ICEs run at some 30%+ efficiency, which gives you a figure more like 70% efficiency in terms of what is possible. The truth is that ICEs are in fact very efficient within the realm of what they can achieve. But hey don't let physics get in the way of environmental dogma.
Thermodynamics is a bitch isn't it?
The really inefficient part of driving a car is the dead weight you carry around with you, factoring in how much energy moves the driver I think you are down to 1% efficiency. If you do the calculations on electric vehicles the numbers a similarly dismal. Truth is we aren't admitting to ourselves what the real problem is: our expectations of what "personal transport" is.
The bicycle is still the most energy efficient personal transportation machine devised by man. Use it, if you care.
I too believed Firefox would still be necessary for web development due to firebug. Then I found out the chrome already has a kickass interactive alternative to firebug built in.
Chrome is fast to render, fast to crunch through javascript, has what firefox 3 should have had in the awesome bar, and it has unbeatable screen real estate. Apart from one or two bugs here and there it is the best browser I've used. Of course I'm typing this on an eee pc running xubuntu and firefox 3, even slashdots js brings firefox to its knees with limited resources... I'm getting sick of the firefox slowness.
That is a zero sum analysis of economics, which is incorrect from the outset. To your mind you are thinking scientifically: "The world is finite thus has finite resources". But the system does not behave in that manner, through observation it is known that this is not a scientific analysis. Output of resources and labour are variable in magnitude, and so the system behaves as such.
It is entirely possible, and has been clearly demonstrated in the last century that everyone can grow richer together, in principle. It may not be working in all corners of the world, and certainly looks like it is not happening in the USA, but it is entirely possible for everybody to gain something from economic output. Hell if your hypothesis were even half correct your lower classes would look more like poor african villages, but instead you have (likely) a roof over your head, food in your belly, television, a computer (clearly). Then theres the really important things: you have a sanitary environment, gifted to you by your peers through taxation systems, you have sanitary distribution networks for your food and water, and in principle access to the best medical facilities in the world. It looks to me that you are quite rich already, even if you are dirt poor.
This is not to say there are not problems with the current system, but over the centuries the current economic system you live under has grown you richer, and everyone around you.
Vista isn't sluggish, that is why you have missed the point. If you throw the hardware at it, Vista runs like a champ. Vista is only sluggish if you have less than 2gig of ram, and less than a reasonably new dual core cpu, neither of which is a very costly upgrade.
Face it, Vista and osx, and ubuntu for that matter (to a lesser extent) all have a very intensive overhead... If your expectation is that you shouldn't need an upgrade to run them. They have high overhead because they do lots of things, its debatable whether they need to or not but millions of users out there say they like it this way. If you want modular go with linux, I'm sure you already do.
Where do they get this idea from anyway? If somebody is renting it out, then Epic made money off the sale of the game. If somebody buys it second hand, again they made money off the sale of the game.
I see your point but I don't see theirs, they did make their money, they made exactly what they wanted when they set the asking price!
Sorry, I should have replied more directly to you. I agree with the canals idea, seems like a very good one. Of course for me as an Australian in a country of near permanent drought, its not so much an option on the table.
And if you run Vista that is just: Windows key, type calc, enter.
The new start menu is brilliant, you can't deny that.
And you're a niche market that Microsoft and Apple do not care about. Why is it not acceptable? I have a ton of resources and I like my OS to be shiny, thats right I like it! So do millions of other users.
What is unreasonable here is geeks running Linux on 8 year old PCs claiming the whole world of software engineering should cater to them only.
No I think you miss the point, and so are lots of others.
Let me correct this for you: when the public is in the tank for a candidate, the press would be stupid not to follow, since it is ratings numbers for advertising which they actually live off. The public, as evidenced by your recent poll, was certainly 'in the tank' with Obama.
I watched this also recently in Australia. The best man to watch for this phenomenon is our man Rupert Murdoch. He has an uncanny ability to sniff the winds and go with the public mood. Observe he came out in tentative support for Obama when things looked to be going his way (and criticised him brutally when he won), he did the same for Kevin Rudd in Australia (left wing party), Tony Blair in Britain (left wing) and Bush jnr in the US (crackpot). These are business decisions, fair and balanced reporting has nothing to do with it.
I wish people would get off their high horses for a minute and accept that the media gives them what they want. Sure, I am absolutely 100% in favour of fair and balanced reporting, I am a pragmatic individual who above all else simply wants to see the best decisions being made regardless of affiliations. I seek out the most balanced reporting I can find, but do I know what that is? The press I seek is baised to my worldview even if I find it balanced. Everyone, given the freedom to do so, will seek out a press that is biased in favour of their own world view. Is this the fault of the press? Fox news sucks, but they get ratings, ask yourself, is that really because of Fox news? Or is there something a little deeper going on here.
Electricity is not trivial nor efficient to store, so far the best we can do is pump a bunch of water up on top of a hill. That is literally the most efficient way to store energy in terms of electricity. Compressed steam and air are also non trivial to store and less space efficient than oil.
You cant charge batteries at the rate oils can be pumped, you cant store enough energy in a tank of air to rival a sloshing tank of oils at attmospheric pressure. Oils for better or worse are the most versatile form of energy transportation we have. Why is the notion of carbbon neutral fuels so off putting to everyone?
You have concisely outlined here why oil is such a fantastic energy source. The stored potential energy in a tank of fuel is enormous, the ease by which it is transported is unprecedented in all our technology.
Fancy alternatives all fail at these incredibly important factors which add up to why we use oil. Personally I believe the best solution to our dirty energy problems is to make carbon neutral oil and use that. Its energy intensive to do but oil is so damn useful, and to hell with the current fads.
The thing I found when I went looking for a linux eee pc is that nobody stocked them. So I bought a windows version and immediately (like as soon as I got home) installed Xubuntu. Install the custom eee pc ubuntu kernel and a 3rd party app to get the osd and function keys working, everything works perectly, including compiz. It is the most perfect linux install I have ever owned. But after getting off track there my point is that few vendors even stock linux eeepc's where I live, so I think that accounts for a lot.
There are some other stupid things Asus has done: linux versions of the later models do not come with bluetooth and Xandros is an absolute piece of shit. Basically I am with you there, XP on a netbook makes no sense to me whatsoever. All the reasons I still use windows: games, photoshop, CAD, office, are irrelevant on a netbook.
Actually the XP versions are cheaper... Plus, as I already said in another post for the difference in price you can get an even bigger drive by upgrading with a flash card.
I just ordered an XP 901 and plan to put Xubuntu on it almost straight away. I did this because I read this article and wanted to get an 8" before they are gone. I have a 12" tablet pc, a second 10" laptop with hdd does not satisfy what I want out of a netbook. Really it completely defeats the purpose, its not a mobile device anymore its just another laptop. I have a small laptop.
For the record I am getting the XP version because it is cheaper. The linux version does have a bigger drive but for the price difference I can buy a 16 gig ssd and double my drive space anyway, I'll end up with more.
WHOOSH!
It was a joke mate, a joke. Irony, sarcasm, all mixed up into one stupid little comment that was supposed to extract a giggle.
I swear the sense of humor in people everywhere is sinking fast... Do we really have to flag every sarcastic comment for people?
Judging by your sig you probably don't take much of anything with a sense of humor now do you son?
The free market is a fantasy, it is a hypothetical benchmark to which you strive. The free market consists of these broad assumptions (among others) which you should realise are not even rempotely realistic:
- Zero barriers to entry. In the free market model there exists nothing to stop you from simply opening up shop.
- Perfect competition. In a free market all business operates under the assumption of sufficient competition to have pricing structure based entirely on supply and demand
- Perfectly rational consumer behaviour. In the free market, consumers are assumed to be capable of rationalising each and every purchasing choice they make according to some idealised demand model. What that model even is is not universally agreed upon in the first place.
- Perfectly well informed consumers. In the free market, all consumers are assumed to have sufficient information at their disposal to satisfy the previous condition (perfectly rational purchasing decisions).
- Neglecting the existence of externalities. It is assumed that such a thing does not exist, or has no cost.
And others.
Now, can you, in any good sense of reason, tell me that any one of these assumptions is valid in the real world?
The free market is a good idealisation, much like in thermodynamics we make use of ideal gas laws and continuum assumptions. These assumptions make for excellent models but are not realistic, thus can only be used for benchmarking. Better models need to account for discrepancies, enter market regulation. Now if this stuff is news to you, you are not an economic rationalist you are a right wing idealogue.
+5 to you sir (mods?)
Oh for christ's sake, where does the notion of land ownership come from? Sovereignty. It is not your land it belongs to that entity which is willing to protect it by force: Your government. The only way such a notion exists as 'land ownership' is because your government enforces such an idea, much like the idea of fiat currency when you think about it. There is no inherent ownership of anything other than that which is enforced by some powerful entity: Your government. It could be you in principle but something tells me you aren't going to be so willing or able to physically defend your property without the help of a more powerful entity. Sure I bet you think you'd be sitting there on your porch with shotgun in hand should all else fail but in reality you would lose in this scenario to the bigger dog.
So its socialism to the left, socialism to the right, if you think about it. Get over yourself mate, the idea of ownership as you understand it is gifted to you by a more powerful entity which actually enforces it. I suggest that the logical conclusion of this line of reasoning is that you own what that powerful entity tells you you own, and good luck to you if you believe otherwise.
Goddamn libertarian ;)
What is it with you Americans and the stigmatism of wealth redistribution? ALL taxation is wealth redistribution by definition. Do you pay for each and every road you drive on *proportionately* to the amount you drive on it? No you do not, and the same goes for any public service you use. You do not pay your fair share. Why? Because of tax indexation. Hell, remove indexation and you still do not pay your share, because you do not earn as much as others therefore you do not pay as much as others.
All economists worth their salt favour wealth redistribution. Why? Because there is no such thing as a free market, it is an idealised situation that you aim to simulate through regulation. If you disagree with this then you fail to grasp the science behind economic theory (science is the model they strive for anyway). You can't just remove regulation and expect a free market to ensue, it doesn't work like that, libertarians and Austrain school economists be damned(*). The free market is an ideal, much like continuum assumptions in mechanics, and any other assumption in scientific modeling. They are ideal scenarios that you use as a benchmark.
Back to Obama, his tax plan is actually similar to the position held by none other than Milton Friedman. Yes, Milton Friedman. Friedman advocated a negative income tax instead of welfare systems to achieve wealth redistribution (yes the great free market monetarist believed in wealth redistribution, why? because he was not an idiot, he was a nobel prize winning economist no less). While Obamas plan is not exactly a negative income tax it is damn close, and follows the same principles. Welfare tends to have negative connotations in the minds of both the public and the government, and tremendous bureaucratic overhead. Why have two separate bureaucracies which are doing the same thing: Redistributing wealth?
What do they teach you in school that wealth redistribution is evil red communism or something? Consider this: Unemployment is a necessary function of economic activity, without it you have no room to manoeuvre and inflation spirals out of control. In a true free market there are no barriers to entry, so in theory anyone should be able to earn a buck somehow if they can be bothered working. But in a real market there are massive barriers to entry, you can't just earn a living. With the commons all but gone you can't go hunting and gathering, so without work (as roughly 5% of the population will be) what do you do? You steal shit, beat people up and take their money. Sound good? Sound like a positive well functioning society? It doesn't work, it is stupid and no government in their right mind would consider such a scenario. No citizen who has properly thought it through would reject wealth redistribution, it is a necessary condition in response to the way the real market operates.
Just get over it, think for a minute beyond your cushy little life and realise that somewhere out there at any given time people are going to be unemployed or unemployable. Do you want these people to be fighting tooth and nail for survival? I haven't even begun to discuss the virtues of public infrastructure either... but if you are a thinking individual then you will get your head around it. Drop the damn rhetoric and ideology and think pragmatically.
(*) The Austrian school favours empiricism and qualitative argument over rigorous mathematical modeling and mechanical logic. I assert that it is therefore in a tenuous position to make sound arguments at best, even with recent economic collapse in mind.
Seriously dude regular smart phones are bricks enough when held up to the ear, can you imagine trying to hold a 9" laptop up to your ear and talk?
I hope this turns out like Far Cry 2, that would be epic.
I can just see linux pulling bullets out of its flesh with pliers while mowing down the foreign MS mercenaries.
What?
Pfft! you lie, nobody has wireless working in ubuntu!
"Seems like it would be a lot simpler and more productive to simply buy a large area of land outside of a city and create a huge residential area with a central area for research. "
You see, here in Brisbane we have one of those, its called: The University of Queensland. Possibly the biggest area of land devoted to a university campus in the country, rated in the top 3 universities in the country, in the top 40 in the world.
I happen to be a student at UQ, it really is a fantastic university, it actually does groundbreaking research (shock horror) and the community is massive and draws talent from around the globe. But this is what I don't understand: How is this small town idea different to a university? UQ, like most large campuses (50k students, 5k staff) is a mini city already. It has shops, banks, a few bars, cafes etc, hundreds of on campus students and half the professors live in the surrounding suburbs. Most importantly UQ has $2.5 billion in assets in the form of research facilities built up over the past hundred years. How the hell is the campus anything different than what they are trying to create?
One major thing... west of Brisbane fucking sucks, it really fucking sucks, and UQ is one of the most attractive campuses in the country. Queensland I think is like Florida, but mostly desert (and lots of rain forest too - none 'west of Brisbane') Brisbane is sort of ok but the rest of the state is just a bunch of rednecks! It is dry, deforested, and sparsely populated. Queensland has a population of 4 million and is 2.5 times the size of Texas, half the population lives in Brisbane.
This is a stupid field of dreams idea and anyone with half a brain cell would not move to some shit hole west of Brisbane because UQ asked them to. Sounds like they are sinking some serious coin into a completely pointless exercise that many have already pointed out has been done before. I have nothing but respect and admiration for my university, they made the worlds first thrust generating scramjet, lots of good medical research comes out of UQ too, but this idea is stupid.