Oh dear, you seeem to have mistaken me for a democrat. I know this might be a stretch, but try to consider that their are alternative viewpoints to republican *and* democrat. In fact, from my perspective there's barely a fart to separate them.
I'm saying that any political system, even one which is supposed to be based upon merit and democracy, tends to degrade into one based upon tyranny and priviledge. The Kennedy's were another great example of this phenomena. Remember than traditional dynasties are often short lived. The Tudors only lasted 2 generations, the Stuarts 3. One powerful clique surpasses another. Gore also came from the political nobility, how else could such a zombie almost become president.
You can't seriously tell me you believe that a choice between Gore and Bush is any kind of democracy. The political process was hijacked long ago.
> Our country has been through times much worse than this in the past, and we've always come out stronger in the end.
Hmm, depends what you mean by strength. America is rapidly becoming the new Roman Empire. The media talks about "ensuring American dominance in XXX" without a hint that there might be something wrong with dominating other nations. People don't like being dominated. Of course, Americans see this as "helping to maintain stability" but I expect Roman citizens thought along similar lines.
I dunno, maybe you're right about America emerging stronger. Actions produce reactions. I'm curious as to what you mean by stronger though and I don't know how you would back the assertion up. If it's more than a platitude, what do you mean ?
Since the constitution was written by terrorists, why are you so surprised that it's getting eroded as part of the war on terror ?
For those who want to argue that they weren't terrorists: get a grip - they would certainly fall under Ashcroft's definition if they tried similar things today, and would have been branded terrorists by the (British) government at the time had the word been in vogue then.
The constitution was written by people who understood that over time power gradually shifts away from the shareholders (people) into the hands of the management (politicians). They understood that monarchy and tyranny didn't arise overnight. Do you think people just one day decided to be ruled over by kings. You start off with a leader, chosen on merit who leads with consent of his people and you end up with heriditary tyrants. It's funny how far along this road you can get without anybody noticing. Do you really think that King Bush II got there on merit ? He inherited the position from his father with the help of his brother, Prince Jed. The fact that he lost Florida is interpreted with Orwellian brilliance as "results vindicate bush".
The writers of the consitituion understood this, and did their best to minimize the tendancy, but they knew that eventually another revolution would be necessary. What they didn't forsee was that technology would evolve that would make future revolutions virtually impossible. The technology for keeping a population under surveillance was unimaginable at the time.
The other thing they couldn't forsee was the level of propoganda and willful ignorance that is achievable with a TV nation.
It would cause too much friction to revoke the consititution. Instead they will just reinterpret the phrases until the document means something else entirely.
make mine a double decaff lowfat nutrasweet
on
Heart of the Net
·
· Score: 2
Yeah, I know exactly what you mean. I keep reading Katz out of morbid curiosity. It's funny: he types words, the words form sentances, the sentances form paragraphs, they parse like normal English, but they mean nothing, sometimes less than nothing. It could form the basis for a new understanding of information theory - negative information *is* possible. I swear to God, he has a lower signal to noise ratio than cosmic radio waves.
Re:Chinese Rooms and Software Guys
on
Arguing A.I.
·
· Score: 2
> symbolic manipulations still do not result in a real understanding of Chinese
Now who's a dualist ? What is the definition of a "real understanding". The only definition that avoids dualism is if the behaviour of a system that "understands" is indistingishable from one that doesn't then that system understands.
Read Dennet's "Consciousness Explained" on this. (BTW, I am not saying I agree with his conclusions, or his title, but his deconstruction of this argument is very clear).
> I think you underestimate the importance of choice. If you like your no-advert TV service so much, then you can pay market price for it.
Ah - *choice*, the favorite word of capitalist idealism. Actually, I *do* buy the argument that one can never do anybody harm by increasing the number of choices available to them (unless they are stupid, but that's their problem). This is why I favor legalisation of all drugs. But, it is not so crystal when one person's choice adversely effects others.
One valid argument against legalised heroin is that sometimes people's choices harm others. For instance, if I end up having to foot the medical bills of heroin users, then it *is* my business what other people do in the privacy of their own homes. So, along with legal drugs I would also support education to warn people of dangers.
It would seem a bit off to me if far more effort went into trying to persuade people to take heroin than was being spent telling them it might not be such a good idea. I don't believe in stopping people from doing stupid things, but I do have a problem with relentless propoganda telling them that stupid things are a good idea.
The existence of adverts on your precious Sky effects me adversely even if I don't watch it. For instance, the advertising for PizzaHut leads to increased obesity, the additional burden on the NHS increases my taxes. I would be willing to pay money to educate people about dangers of eating high-sugar high-fat diets because education is cheaper than cure. By the same token, I would be prepared to pay extra not just to avoid adverts myself, but to avoid your exposure to adverts.
In general advertising leads to increased consumerism: more roads, driving, shops, stress and pollution. In fact, it leads to what is hilariously called "progress". The direction it leads people in has only got the faintest association with this idea of "choice". The only "choices" proposed in adverts are ones which will make the advertiser richer.
The desires of humanity are being manipulated and shaped by those with a short term money making agenda. If you want a purely capitalist solution, you need to somehow calculate the true costs of advertising. So, by all means: persuade people to buy that new BMW, that is perfectly fair - just make sure that the full cost of the extra pollution, congestion, noise, road accidents, etc is paid by the advertiser.
I think you underestimate the importance of a lack of adverts. The BBC show no adverts. The average American watches 44000 pieces of carefully crafted pieces of corporate propoganda every year, each 30 seconds long. These encourage them to eat more fast food, drive more, consume more, go into debt, and vote for the politicians who are most friendly to corporate interests (the candidate with the most corporate sponsorship can afford the most adverts).
If you watch US television for long, you will start to understand the obesity levels. Sandwitched between 10 minutes worth inane rubbish featuring potentially beautiful but dangerously starved people, you be subjected to 5 minutes of carefully crafted inviting you to go further into debt, then pig out on sugered drinks and ultra high fat junk.
Paying a paltry £100 a year to make a dent in the level of brainwashing we are subjected to is peanuts. The cost is justified by the decreased load on the NHS alone.
Of course, a better solution is to avoid TV altogether. If you must watch TV, at least buy a mirror to put up above the screen. That way you can look up from time to time and compare the excitement on the screen with the futile existence of the vegtable on the couch.
Why would anyone want to go outside, meet people or do things ? Instead, you can watch others have fake adventures or get your opinions and desires programmed in rather than going to all the trouble of figuring them out for yourself. You can achieve a state of lower consciousness - it helps pass the time while you wait for death.
For those too weak to avoid TV altogether (like me), advert free TV is the low-fat/filter-tipped option.
I agree that g++ is a bit slow, but your figures are way off. In many cases cl is slower. If you use precompiled headers cl can be faster, but not 10x. I think gcc3.1 should have necessary performance improvements especially for heavy template useage (which is main cause of slow compile times in c++). Besides, g++ 2.95+ is a much *better* compiler than even latest VC++. Try doing some complex template stuff (eg Blitz) in VC++ - it's plain broken.
> Then you say that we create more money faster than we can create more stuff
No - I say we need if no extra money was created, one would expect prices to go down over time. If more is created prices go up. Inflation is a modern phenomena caused by the fact that banks create too much money. Banks *want* to lend people money since this is very profitable for them, they really *make* money from it.
The "lending creates money" aspect is covered in economic texts but in a misleading fashion. The implications and alternatives are barely covered at all. They talk about stuff like the money pyramid without noticing the simplest things, such as the fact that the pyramid is actually inverted - there is no natural cap.
We have a system where privately owned institutions enrich themselves by inventing money and this makes everybody else poorer. You would have the same effect on the economy as a lending institution if you set up a printing press and printed a million dollars, and then burnt them a year later.
> Usury is how money gets created
It is the way money is created now. This has a lot of nasty side effects. The least controversial of which is the Boom/Bust cycle. It is absolutely impossible to have a stable economy with debt based money, since the only way current debts can be paid is for larger sums to be lent. This creates the conveyor belt. We are not allowed the option of a stable economy.
When we used gold the money supply was relatively stable, inflation was largely absent, but the economy grew slowly because one needs money to lubricate the economy. The people adding to the money supply were gold miners. These days we have banks instead of gold miners, but since they only create debt-based money, the effect is different. Also, the benefit of inventing money is squandered on a parasitical private banking sector that accumulates enormous wealth yet provides nothing of value except a service to decide who is a worthy recipient of credit. I'm not saying we should return to gold system, just that current system is also bad.
C.H. Douglas proposed a different mechanism - social credit. This would exist alongside current lending institutions and would be used to gradually increase level of debt-free money.
So, no - the arguments have got nothing to do with biblical stuff.
The idea that everybody should work is a fairly modern one. It's become tangled up with our lives and economy in various ways that made sense at the time but are now a hindrance.
Increasing automation should make us all better off, but doesn't. The problems boil down to the concept "if I can't get a job, I won't have any money". To properly fix this we need to overhaul the way money works. The real problem is that we have a debt based economy which *forces* us to perpetually invest efficiency gains rather than enjoying them.
You're probably thinking: what the fuck am I talking about. Sorry - it's not easy to convey how this works or what's wrong with it in a few sentences and it's extremely difficult to find decent information about this online. You won't find it in most economic texts, but these are so full of holes it's a wonder that economics as a discipline has more respect than astrology.
The problem boils down to the fact that almost all money today is created in the form of debt. Extra stuff gets created constantly. As more stuff is created, either more money needs to be created or prices need to fall otherwise nobody could afford to buy it an afford to buy it. Currently money is created faster than stuff which is why we have positive inflation rates. However this money is all created in the form of debt. Governments don't make money [cash is only about 4% of money in system] - private banks *invent* money by lending out more than they borrow. When you write a check, you are effectively using a currency printed by your bank. Since interest must be paid on loans money is only loaned to those who will invest it, ie almost all the created money is targeted for investment. The monetary system keeps society on a technological conveyor belt.
So, we live in a system where the humans are being automated out of the system, but none of these advancements *can* go towards making life more pleasant or free. In fact, people must work more and more. It doesn't have to be like this, and there is a simple solution, but it'll never happen while humanity is asleep. People spend their entire adult lives trying to aquire something that they don't understand to even the slightest degree. It's funny how people can be so obsessed with money, but if you ask them where it comes from all you get is a blank stare or some irrelevent crap about the mint.
Understanding this stuff is not difficult but it does require thinking clearly about things that we normally don't think about at all, and there are lots of aspects to it - pollution, poverty, ever decreasing quality of consumer goods. An intelligent and informative book that explains this stuff and related ideas quite thoroughly is "Confronting Tyranny - The case for monetary reform" by Mike Rowbotham, but this is hard to get hold of.
The trouble is that people always leave things out of the schedule. For instance maybe 30% of those reading this post are supposed to be writing software right now, but nobody in the schedule does it say "time spent pissing about on/.: 2 weeks".
Stupid topic, it depends what you're doing, duh: nth ecommerce site - predictable,
anything interesting (which by my definition means something that hasn't been done before) - unpredictable
The first rule of software schedules is things always take least twice as long as you think, even when you allow for the first rule.
Or to put it another way, the first 90% takes 90% of the time, and the remaining 10% takes the other 90%.
So, it's actually stupid to try to produce a valid schedule. If you estimate 2 weeks it will take about 4. You might think it smarter to change the estimate to 4 weeks, but then it will take 8, so you may as well estimate 2 weeks and be done with it.
Also, SuSE certainly does sell SuSE. They can't prevent other people from copying/selling/whatever the GPL'ed parts of the distribution, but there is no restriction in GPL about selling GPLed software, in fact it is explicitly permitted.
Do you really ? How do you know, how many countries have you lived in, how many different environments within your own country have you lived in ?
The freedom granted to a rich preppy born into a good Mayflower descended family with strong political ties is rather different to those available to a ghetto kid effectively imprisoned to his own neighbourhood.
Freedom is a loose term, in some ways America is free, in others it isn't.
You might want to try freeing your mind a bit. Go live in thailand for a year, as long as you don't 'diss the royal family you will find yourself astounded at what you can do freely.
I don't know which country is most free, but neither do you. Where did you learn that USA had most freedom ? was it in America perhaps ?
Religion is only a small component of world view. The basic environment plays a significant part. Every country on earth teaches a selective view of history. Japanese children have only the vaguest notion of Japan's role in WWII but know a lot about Hiroshima. Most Americans are only taught details for periods of American history which reflect will upon America, and it's the same everywhere.
> Today we have Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein and dozens...
Exactly. Your example illustrates differences in world view. There are many people in the world would put Dubya above those two in a top ten list of dangerous morons who will gladly use violence to further their aims. For the average person on the planet, the chance of being harmed by a stupid decision from Bush is far greater than the threat posed by CNN's villain de jour.
Check out blitz thoroughly before you jump to that conclusion. It is an extraordinary library that provides extreme efficiency while allowing you to write very high level mathematical looking code with performance right up with F90. If you need to squeeze the last 5% out of a very stable routine, stick with Fortran, if you're going to be changing things even somewhat frequently, blitz may well be a better bet.
However, it is emphatically *not* based upon OOP principles. It is object-based generic programming and has virtually nothing to do with what most people think of as OOP programming (inheritance etc).
Re:Coming from a store owner...
on
The Euro
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· Score: 2
> Should we adopt the Euro? Probably. Should we be part of a 'European Super-state'? Perhaps not.
There lies the rub. Single currency will lead to tax harmonisation, which will lead to Euro super state.
I wouldn't mind EU government if it was founded on something similar to US constitution but current EU parliament is thoroughly undemocratic,
not that British parliament is much better.
As for economics education, it's bollocks. You can do a 4 year degree, and it won't answer the simple question "where does money come from" (mostly it's invented by privately owned banks when people take out loans - an insane system)
Re:Congrats to the Brits
on
The Euro
·
· Score: 3, Funny
This is rated in PPP$. Purchasing power parity is hard to measure.
eg, a train ticket for a 100 mile journey in India is a lot cheaper than in the UK, but it is a very different experience. In India, the train may be crowded and unreliable while in England, oh, wait, nevermind....
Symantec are perfectly entitled to do whatever they want. If they want to sell crippled security software, it's their funeral ? Sophos has a more sensible attitude http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/55/23057.html , and better AV software anyway.
If US software companies want to sell crippleware in the interests of "patriotism" that's their business. There are plenty of companies willing to fill the gap.
However, based on your spelling and nic, I think you're actually a yank. It's nice that you think our brains would start working without a daily fix of porn but I think it would take more than that. Maybe if we weren't allowed to watch TV at all...
Wow, just a tiny bit of cynicism might be in order.
> The Afghan people didnt care, they had no hope, they have hope now...
The Taliban orginally swept aside the warlords/NA who were tearing country apart. The taliban weren't exactly friendly either but were generally considered better than their predecessors. Now after US bombs, they have been displaced. If you had heard an ordinary Russian talking about how the soviet invasion had "restored hope in Afghanistan", you may reasonably have inferred that he had only heard one side of the story. Try to keep your amazment in check when the Afghan people do not feel much more gratitude to the US than they felt towards Russia.
Re:I need this like I need colonic irrigation
on
Galeon 1.0 Released
·
· Score: 2
I agree with your sentiments about wasteful web pages/software/bla bla. I used to use SGIs exclusively - nice machines for their time but come on... let the poor thing rest, put it out to stud, buy something from this century.
And you might want to reconsider the colonic irrigation too. How do you know that colonic irrigation isn't just what you need.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh dear, you seeem to have mistaken me for a democrat. I know this might be a stretch, but try to consider that their are alternative viewpoints to republican *and* democrat. In fact, from my perspective there's barely a fart to separate them.
I'm saying that any political system, even one which is supposed to be based upon merit and democracy, tends to degrade into one based upon tyranny and priviledge. The Kennedy's were another great example of this phenomena. Remember than traditional dynasties are often short lived. The Tudors only lasted 2 generations, the Stuarts 3. One powerful clique surpasses another. Gore also came from the political nobility, how else could such a zombie almost become president.
You can't seriously tell me you believe that a choice between Gore and Bush is any kind of democracy. The political process was hijacked long ago.
> Our country has been through times much worse than this in the past, and we've always come out stronger in the end.
Hmm, depends what you mean by strength. America is rapidly becoming the new Roman Empire. The media talks about "ensuring American dominance in XXX" without a hint that there might be something wrong with dominating other nations. People don't like being dominated. Of course, Americans see this as "helping to maintain stability" but I expect Roman citizens thought along similar lines.
I dunno, maybe you're right about America emerging stronger. Actions produce reactions. I'm curious as to what you mean by stronger though and I don't know how you would back the assertion up. If it's more than a platitude, what do you mean ?
Since the constitution was written by terrorists, why are you so surprised that it's getting eroded as part of the war on terror ?
For those who want to argue that they weren't terrorists: get a grip - they would certainly fall under Ashcroft's definition if they tried similar things today, and would have been branded terrorists by the (British) government at the time had the word been in vogue then.
The constitution was written by people who understood that over time power gradually shifts away from the shareholders (people) into the hands of the management (politicians). They understood that monarchy and tyranny didn't arise overnight. Do you think people just one day decided to be ruled over by kings. You start off with a leader, chosen on merit who leads with consent of his people and you end up with heriditary tyrants. It's funny how far along this road you can get without anybody noticing. Do you really think that King Bush II got there on merit ? He inherited the position from his father with the help of his brother, Prince Jed. The fact that he lost Florida is interpreted with Orwellian brilliance as "results vindicate bush".
The writers of the consitituion understood this, and did their best to minimize the tendancy, but they knew that eventually another revolution would be necessary. What they didn't forsee was that technology would evolve that would make future revolutions virtually impossible. The technology for keeping a population under surveillance was unimaginable at the time.
The other thing they couldn't forsee was the level of propoganda and willful ignorance that is achievable with a TV nation.
It would cause too much friction to revoke the consititution. Instead they will just reinterpret the phrases until the document means something else entirely.
what a fuckwit
Yeah, I know exactly what you mean. I keep reading Katz out of morbid curiosity. It's funny: he types words, the words form sentances, the sentances form paragraphs, they parse like normal English, but they mean nothing, sometimes less than nothing. It could form the basis for a new understanding of information theory - negative information *is* possible. I swear to God, he has a lower signal to noise ratio than cosmic radio waves.
> symbolic manipulations still do not result in a real understanding of Chinese
Now who's a dualist ? What is the definition of a "real understanding". The only definition that avoids dualism is if the behaviour of a system that "understands" is indistingishable from one that doesn't then that system understands.
Read Dennet's "Consciousness Explained" on this. (BTW, I am not saying I agree with his conclusions, or his title, but his deconstruction of this argument is very clear).
> I think you underestimate the importance of choice. If you like your no-advert TV service so much, then you can pay market price for it.
Ah - *choice*, the favorite word of capitalist idealism. Actually, I *do* buy the argument that one can never do anybody harm by increasing the number of choices available to them (unless they are stupid, but that's their problem). This is why I favor legalisation of all drugs. But, it is not so crystal when one person's choice adversely effects others.
One valid argument against legalised heroin is that sometimes people's choices harm others. For instance, if I end up having to foot the medical bills of heroin users, then it *is* my business what other people do in the privacy of their own homes. So, along with legal drugs I would also support education to warn people of dangers.
It would seem a bit off to me if far more effort went into trying to persuade people to take heroin than was being spent telling them it might not be such a good idea. I don't believe in stopping people from doing stupid things, but I do have a problem with relentless propoganda telling them that stupid things are a good idea.
The existence of adverts on your precious Sky effects me adversely even if I don't watch it. For instance, the advertising for PizzaHut leads to increased obesity, the additional burden on the NHS increases my taxes. I would be willing to pay money to educate people about dangers of eating high-sugar high-fat diets because education is cheaper than cure. By the same token, I would be prepared to pay extra not just to avoid adverts myself, but to avoid your exposure to adverts.
In general advertising leads to increased consumerism: more roads, driving, shops, stress and pollution. In fact, it leads to what is hilariously called "progress". The direction it leads people in has only got the faintest association with this idea of "choice". The only "choices" proposed in adverts are ones which will make the advertiser richer.
The desires of humanity are being manipulated and shaped by those with a short term money making agenda. If you want a purely capitalist solution, you need to somehow calculate the true costs of advertising. So, by all means: persuade people to buy that new BMW, that is perfectly fair - just make sure that the full cost of the extra pollution, congestion, noise, road accidents, etc is paid by the advertiser.
then I could learn perl, biology, and Italian all at the same time.
I think you underestimate the importance of a lack of adverts. The BBC show no adverts. The average American watches 44000 pieces of carefully crafted pieces of corporate propoganda every year, each 30 seconds long. These encourage them to eat more fast food, drive more, consume more, go into debt, and vote for the politicians who are most friendly to corporate interests (the candidate with the most corporate sponsorship can afford the most adverts).
If you watch US television for long, you will start to understand the obesity levels. Sandwitched between 10 minutes worth inane rubbish featuring potentially beautiful but dangerously starved people, you be subjected to 5 minutes of carefully crafted inviting you to go further into debt, then pig out on sugered drinks and ultra high fat junk.
Paying a paltry £100 a year to make a dent in the level of brainwashing we are subjected to is peanuts. The cost is justified by the decreased load on the NHS alone.
Of course, a better solution is to avoid TV altogether. If you must watch TV, at least buy a mirror to put up above the screen. That way you can look up from time to time and compare the excitement on the screen with the futile existence of the vegtable on the couch.
Why would anyone want to go outside, meet people or do things ? Instead, you can watch others have fake adventures or get your opinions and desires programmed in rather than going to all the trouble of figuring them out for yourself. You can achieve a state of lower consciousness - it helps pass the time while you wait for death.
For those too weak to avoid TV altogether (like me), advert free TV is the low-fat/filter-tipped option.
Huh ?
I agree that g++ is a bit slow, but your figures are way off. In many cases cl is slower. If you use precompiled headers cl can be faster, but not 10x. I think gcc3.1 should have necessary performance improvements especially for heavy template useage (which is main cause of slow compile times in c++). Besides, g++ 2.95+ is a much *better* compiler than even latest VC++. Try doing some complex template stuff (eg Blitz) in VC++ - it's plain broken.
That Katz should write an article on the end of cyber BS. His writing has a worse S/N than cosmic radio raves.
> Then you say that we create more money faster than we can create more stuff
No - I say we need if no extra money was created, one would expect prices to go down over time. If more is created prices go up. Inflation is a modern phenomena caused by the fact that banks create too much money. Banks *want* to lend people money since this is very profitable for them, they really *make* money from it.
The "lending creates money" aspect is covered in economic texts but in a misleading fashion. The implications and alternatives are barely covered at all. They talk about stuff like the money pyramid without noticing the simplest things, such as the fact that the pyramid is actually inverted - there is no natural cap.
We have a system where privately owned institutions enrich themselves by inventing money and this makes everybody else poorer. You would have the same effect on the economy as a lending institution if you set up a printing press and printed a million dollars, and then burnt them a year later.
> Usury is how money gets created
It is the way money is created now. This has a lot of nasty side effects. The least controversial of which is the Boom/Bust cycle. It is absolutely impossible to have a stable economy with debt based money, since the only way current debts can be paid is for larger sums to be lent. This creates the conveyor belt. We are not allowed the option of a stable economy.
When we used gold the money supply was relatively stable, inflation was largely absent, but the economy grew slowly because one needs money to lubricate the economy. The people adding to the money supply were gold miners. These days we have banks instead of gold miners, but since they only create debt-based money, the effect is different. Also, the benefit of inventing money is squandered on a parasitical private banking sector that accumulates enormous wealth yet provides nothing of value except a service to decide who is a worthy recipient of credit. I'm not saying we should return to gold system, just that current system is also bad.
C.H. Douglas proposed a different mechanism - social credit. This would exist alongside current lending institutions and would be used to gradually increase level of debt-free money.
So, no - the arguments have got nothing to do with biblical stuff.
The idea that everybody should work is a fairly modern one. It's become tangled up with our lives and economy in various ways that made sense at the time but are now a hindrance.
Increasing automation should make us all better off, but doesn't. The problems boil down to the concept "if I can't get a job, I won't have any money". To properly fix this we need to overhaul the way money works. The real problem is that we have a debt based economy which *forces* us to perpetually invest efficiency gains rather than enjoying them.
You're probably thinking: what the fuck am I talking about. Sorry - it's not easy to convey how this works or what's wrong with it in a few sentences and it's extremely difficult to find decent information about this online. You won't find it in most economic texts, but these are so full of holes it's a wonder that economics as a discipline has more respect than astrology.
The problem boils down to the fact that almost all money today is created in the form of debt. Extra stuff gets created constantly. As more stuff is created, either more money needs to be created or prices need to fall otherwise nobody could afford to buy it an afford to buy it. Currently money is created faster than stuff which is why we have positive inflation rates. However this money is all created in the form of debt. Governments don't make money [cash is only about 4% of money in system] - private banks *invent* money by lending out more than they borrow. When you write a check, you are effectively using a currency printed by your bank. Since interest must be paid on loans money is only loaned to those who will invest it, ie almost all the created money is targeted for investment. The monetary system keeps society on a technological conveyor belt.
So, we live in a system where the humans are being automated out of the system, but none of these advancements *can* go towards making life more pleasant or free. In fact, people must work more and more. It doesn't have to be like this, and there is a simple solution, but it'll never happen while humanity is asleep. People spend their entire adult lives trying to aquire something that they don't understand to even the slightest degree. It's funny how people can be so obsessed with money, but if you ask them where it comes from all you get is a blank stare or some irrelevent crap about the mint.
Understanding this stuff is not difficult but it does require thinking clearly about things that we normally don't think about at all, and there are lots of aspects to it - pollution, poverty, ever decreasing quality of consumer goods. An intelligent and informative book that explains this stuff and related ideas quite thoroughly is "Confronting Tyranny - The case for monetary reform" by Mike Rowbotham, but this is hard to get hold of.
> Sure, you may not be the next Britney Spheres, but why would you want to?
So I could grope my own tits
The trouble is that people always leave things out of the schedule. For instance maybe 30% of those reading this post are supposed to be writing software right now, but nobody in the schedule does it say "time spent pissing about on /.: 2 weeks".
Stupid topic, it depends what you're doing, duh: nth ecommerce site - predictable,
anything interesting (which by my definition means something that hasn't been done before) - unpredictable
The first rule of software schedules is things always take least twice as long as you think, even when you allow for the first rule.
Or to put it another way, the first 90% takes 90% of the time, and the remaining 10% takes the other 90%.
So, it's actually stupid to try to produce a valid schedule. If you estimate 2 weeks it will take about 4. You might think it smarter to change the estimate to 4 weeks, but then it will take 8, so you may as well estimate 2 weeks and be done with it.
If you only want to run linux it's trivial:
build an X terminal with a slow fanless CPU and no disk (boot from floppy) and a fanless power supply.
Put your real PC somewhere else. Make it as bad ass and noisy as you like.
Also, SuSE certainly does sell SuSE. They can't prevent other people from copying/selling/whatever the GPL'ed parts of the distribution, but there is no restriction in GPL about selling GPLed software, in fact it is explicitly permitted.
> we have the MOST free national laws
Do you really ? How do you know, how many countries have you lived in, how many different environments within your own country have you lived in ?
The freedom granted to a rich preppy born into a good Mayflower descended family with strong political ties is rather different to those available to a ghetto kid effectively imprisoned to his own neighbourhood.
Freedom is a loose term, in some ways America is free, in others it isn't.
You might want to try freeing your mind a bit. Go live in thailand for a year, as long as you don't 'diss the royal family you will find yourself astounded at what you can do freely.
I don't know which country is most free, but neither do you. Where did you learn that USA had most freedom ? was it in America perhaps ?
Agreed.
...
Religion is only a small component of world view. The basic environment plays a significant part. Every country on earth teaches a selective view of history. Japanese children have only the vaguest notion of Japan's role in WWII but know a lot about Hiroshima. Most Americans are only taught details for periods of American history which reflect will upon America, and it's the same everywhere.
> Today we have Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein and dozens
Exactly. Your example illustrates differences in world view. There are many people in the world would put Dubya above those two in a top ten list of dangerous morons who will gladly use violence to further their aims. For the average person on the planet, the chance of being harmed by a stupid decision from Bush is far greater than the threat posed by CNN's villain de jour.
Check out blitz thoroughly before you jump to that conclusion. It is an extraordinary library that provides extreme efficiency while allowing you to write very high level mathematical looking code with performance right up with F90. If you need to squeeze the last 5% out of a very stable routine, stick with Fortran, if you're going to be changing things even somewhat frequently, blitz may well be a better bet.
However, it is emphatically *not* based upon OOP principles. It is object-based generic programming and has virtually nothing to do with what most people think of as OOP programming (inheritance etc).
> Should we adopt the Euro? Probably. Should we be part of a 'European Super-state'? Perhaps not.
There lies the rub. Single currency will lead to tax harmonisation, which will lead to Euro super state.
I wouldn't mind EU government if it was founded on something similar to US constitution but current EU parliament is thoroughly undemocratic,
not that British parliament is much better.
As for economics education, it's bollocks. You can do a 4 year degree, and it won't answer the simple question "where does money come from" (mostly it's invented by privately owned banks when people take out loans - an insane system)
This is rated in PPP$. Purchasing power parity is hard to measure.
eg, a train ticket for a 100 mile journey in India is a lot cheaper than in the UK, but it is a very different experience. In India, the train may be crowded and unreliable while in England, oh, wait, nevermind....
Symantec are perfectly entitled to do whatever they want. If they want to sell crippled security software, it's their funeral ? Sophos has a more sensible attitude http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/55/23057.html , and better AV software anyway.
If US software companies want to sell crippleware in the interests of "patriotism" that's their business. There are plenty of companies willing to fill the gap.
Lol, you might be on to something there.
However, based on your spelling and nic, I think you're actually a yank. It's nice that you think our brains would start working without a daily fix of porn but I think it would take more than that. Maybe if we weren't allowed to watch TV at all...
Wow, just a tiny bit of cynicism might be in order.
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> The Afghan people didnt care, they had no hope, they have hope now
The Taliban orginally swept aside the warlords/NA who were tearing country apart. The taliban weren't exactly friendly either but were generally considered better than their predecessors. Now after US bombs, they have been displaced. If you had heard an ordinary Russian talking about how the soviet invasion had "restored hope in Afghanistan", you may reasonably have inferred that he had only heard one side of the story. Try to keep your amazment in check when the Afghan people do not feel much more gratitude to the US than they felt towards Russia.
I agree with your sentiments about wasteful web pages/software/bla bla. I used to use SGIs exclusively - nice machines for their time but come on... let the poor thing rest, put it out to stud, buy something from this century.
And you might want to reconsider the colonic irrigation too. How do you know that colonic irrigation isn't just what you need.