Theoretically, with the advent of molecular nanotech, every man, woman and child on the planet would have infinite personal wealth, and infinite physical power.
That's laughable. Nanotech has the potential to cure a vast number of medical/developmental conditions, but it isn't going to make people infinitely wealthy, and while it could significantly improve life expectancy and physical power, it's not going to make them "infinite" by a long shot.
For one thing, nanotech isn't going to create itself, it's still going to be in the form of products you have to buy. For another, no matter how capable it may be, it's still going to require lots of energy to do the things you want. And that's all in the BEST CASE.
How is that relevant when we are already decimating every other living part of the biosphere
The affluence of a nation appears directly tied their environmental concerns... In the extreme case, when you can't get enough to eat, you don't give a damn about melting polar ice caps. Furthermore, it is these technological advances that are going to make it possible to be more environmentally friendly, wasting less land, emitting less pollution and less greenhouse gases.
and most of the populations of most of the completely corporate owned nation/states still believe some invisible man is going to come out of the sky and smite all the sinners?
Since when is religion a scourge? It is Christian beliefs upon which the US was founded, by mostly religious men. I'd bet a great many of the people you (and most everyone else) looks up to, were devout Christians. How about Isaac Newton for one? Galileo? Washington?
the increasingly aggressive stance of China globally (who manufacture EVERYTHING we currently rely on, btw)
China has been developing a less and less aggressive stance, as they have become dependent on the world to sustain their economy, and there's no reason to believe that will change any time soon.
Also, the idea that we are completely dependent China (rather than the other way around) it's completely wrong. The US is still the #1 manufacturer in the world, producing about 2X as much as Japan, who is #2 on the list. China is only at a very distant #4, behind Germany. Sure, the products you buy at Walmart are a few cents cheaper because of China, but that's about it.
WHERE THE FUCK IS THE REAL NEWS? I CAN'T EVEN GET IT ON SLASHDOT ANYMORE!!
This is as real as news gets. The decline of research is the most serious long-term problem facing the US, and the world. It affects damn near every thing you're ranting and raving about, from every environmental concern to trade deficits with Japan and China.
Advanced research and development in the US is also directly responsible for us being able to wage war on extremists in the middle east and elsewhere without an all-out draft, and killing hundreds of thousands of US soldiers in the process.
Where do you think satellites, stealth aircraft, electronic surveillance, unmanned drones, and the like came from? How about efficient engines, solar panels, wind turbines, etc.? Was it all spontaneously assembled from the collective egos and self satisfaction of hundreds of tree-hugging atheists?
His point #6 is pure crap. He claims labor laws need to be non-existent for start-ups to form, yet a great many started up in the 70s and before, when the labor laws he reviles were as strong as they have ever been. Apple is here, HP is here, etc., etc.
And point #10 is irrelevant to the discussion. The problem with K-12 schools in the US has NOTHING to do with specialization. The problem is that grade inflation has made people who don't understand bare-minimum first-order algebra equations still straight-A students, even though they're woefully unprepared for entering the university system and will need 6-months or more of remedial courses. There are still the few exceptional K-12 schools that resist the trend, and there will always be a small percentage of students that will learn on their own, but by and large, K-12 is turning out, and could be shortened by perhaps 4-6 years turning out kids equally well educated.
Will we really save money? Or simply lose a lot of cool ("indy") channels that don't get enough sponsorship to survive on their own?
If anything, ala carte will make indy cable channels possible (for the first time)... If a niche audience finds a channel good, they will be willing to pay a higher monthly fee to support it, where advertisers won't, and demand is low enough that cable operators wouldn't otherwise care about that niche enough to raise everyone's monthly bill by a few dollars.
If niche channels are watched by a tiny portion of subscribers, and can't convince those people to pay more for them, why should they survive? If the channel doesn't work out, start selling DVDs...
Do consumers REALLY need another 5,000 Coke commericals nationwide today, too? Are they afraid that we'll all of a sudden forget they exist? Afraid that people who like Coke would switch to Pepsi thanks to those ads so we'd better innundate them with our ads to keep that from happening?
Interesting choice of hypothetical scenarios, because that's EXACTLY what, in-fact, happened.
Go read about "New Coke." It was Pepsi's overwhelming success in advertising their product that led to Coke's downfall.
Brand advertising isn't about telling you that a product (you might want/need) exists... It's about making you want to have their product more than their competitors. When was the last time you saw a commercial for Coke or Pepsi that mentioned price or "benefits" of one over the other?
Analogue SD PAL (625i) is almost *indistinguishable* from 720i/p HD
That's pure crap. You'd have to be legally blind not to be able to distinguish a tripling of resolution. Or do you use your computer at 800x600 and aren't able to distinguish any improvement at 3X higher resolutions?
And more to the point... There are plenty of people in NTSC land that say the same thing... PAL's improvement over NTSC is small, and HD's improvement over both is tremendous.
Here, we moved to colour later, and so got PAL, which generally has a better picture quality than NTSC, making HD less of an obvious requirement.
That's laughable. I can't imagine how you possibly fooled someone into modding up such baseless crap. The resolution difference is 20%, and PAL pays for it with a 20% lower frame-rate as well.
No one can rationally claim that a 600% increase in resolution is necessary, while a 500% increase (plus higher framerate) is undesirable.
While HD is better than PAL SD, the low quality of PAL is much less irritating than the quality of NTSC when you don't have the side-by-side comparison.
I think you're swallowing a little too much of the propaganda.
1) It's much lower than 80%. 2) "Urban" for the US is still far, far less dense than urban for Europe and Asia. The US is 24th is high-speed internet access... I'm willing to bet there are at least 23 industrialized nations with higher population density... 3) Where it is urban, it tends to be an island... There are large cities, but they are drastically separated, unlike many other countries.
In Korea, broadband is a link over 20Mbps both ways.
By your definition, you should be able to get the same type of connection in downtown New York city, but it is not the case...
You can, in fact, get extremely high-speed connections in downtown New York. And that's without extensive government subsidization you see in South Korea.
In any city (there are several already) with Verizon FTTH/FIOS 30/5Mbps is available for low cost. The benefits of synchronous bandwidth are highly debatable.
Eastern Airlines was put out of business because its unions refused to change their contracts.
I have a hard time blaming the union... More recently, we've seen several cases where companies claimed they were on the verge of going out of business, and used that to get a union contract with significantly reduced wages. Of course, it comes out shortly afterwards that the companies in question were doing fine, and outright lied in contract negotiations. If a unions rep has reason to suspect it is being lied to, brinkmanship is the only option. Sometimes it will work, sometimes it wont.
-Block the lay-off/firing of dead weight employees [...] able to perform their job like 90% of the other workers in the shop.
Maybe that's a typo, but I fail to see how an employee that can do their job like other workers, is dead weight, and should be fired...
-I've seen them hold meetings encouraging (borderline ordering) union workers to vote for X candidate in local and national elections
Companies do exactly the same things. At least Unions provide a counter-balance.
union official demand that X% of office workers work on Saturdays as well
That one doesn't even make sense. You've provided no possible reasoning for why the union is doing, or would want to do this. It sounds like something that has some rational reason behind it, but you're not providing it.
-I've seen union officials keep the company from switching to a more suitable insurance plan [...] simply because the old plan better suited them despite the fact that the new plan was better suited for a vast majority of the other workers in the shop.
That sounds perfectly reasonable. If a company wants to remove worker's benefits in some way, they should compensate in another, or better yet, find another plan which doesn't cut-back on their benefits.
You've got it backwards. Thugs use illegitimate unions as a way to get money... It's the same way thugs use drug dealing, gambling, robbery, money laundering, or anything else. An illegitimate Union forced upon companies with threats is just another scam. Legitimate unions, however, don't need or want to do anything of the sort.
And the fact that managers do it doesn't excuse the fact that unions do it, or the other way around. It's all bad.
Unions provide a counter-balance to corporate power. I'm all for reform, but saying they should be outlawed because they're not perfect, is extremely biased and short-sighted.
The only thing unions currently accomplish is to set the salaries too high, and make it impossible to fire anybody, even when they do a bad job.
I'd say the same thing, but in exactly the opposite way as you are spinning it...
Unions currently prevent corporations from using their immense power to drive down worker's wages, and prevent unjustified/arbitrary firings of those doing their job (see Circuit City) and force slightly more reliance on non-arbitrary metrics, like seniority, to prevent the boss' relatives getting high paying positions.
High prices, almost as high as you had under the monopolized system.
Ummm... that's internally inconsistent. Since when does "high prices" == "less than before"?
By "high prices" you apparently mean "lower prices", but that detracts from your point, so you want to obscure it.
In my opinion, having reliable service is worth forgoing the buzzword-of-the-week./blockquote Buzzwords like "DSL" and "Cell"? If not for deregulation, I imagine "high speed internet access" would be 128K ISDN.
Then, it has become a game of Russian roulette on which of your subsequent visits the friendly Western Union teller turns out to be an FBI agent.
There are 15 Western Union "Agent Locations" within 10 miles of my current location.
Let's say I have 2 accomplices... That makes $18,000 per branch, and $270,000 total, picked up consecutively in just a couple hours. And it's easy enough to drive a few miles to the next city and at least double that amount easily in the same day, before the FBI even knows anything is awry.
And that's assuming the simplest possible method. It's easy enough to pay a few hobos to pick-up your money for you, and give them a small cut.
1. Photo ID 2. Address of Sender 3. Full name of Sender 4. Exact amount of transfer I was looking to receive 5. Phone number of Sender 6. My phone number 7. My full name 8. My address
You didn't have to provide any of that. You only need the Wester Union transfer code (given to you by the sender), and they won't ask you another damn thing.
It's only if you DON'T have that important information that they'll still allow you to get the money only upon verifying your ID.
Well they simply did an incredibly crappy job of it. No fault of Linux to be sure, and highly secure options like kerberos have been around... longer than Linux has.
You mean till someone clears the bios, boots in from a live cd and changes the permissions?
If you allow that to happen, all bets are off, no matter the OS. However, there is no way a non-root user can clear the BIOS with a program. Password the BIOS and lock the PC's case shut. That will be plenty secure against school kids. With Window's historic lack of security, all bets are off.
If you're going to restrict things that much then why not go for a full out network client?
Restrict? Everything should work just fine, kids can run whatever programs they like. etc.
I never dismissed network clients. They may be a good option... or not... depending on the relative speed of the available PCs and the school's network.
You are, however, guaranteed to have a rough time of it if you want to watch videos on your thin clients. (Automatically) scaling video down to 320x240 will make it just small enough to stream (one person playing a video at a time), on a mostly traffic-free 100Mbps network.
Additionally, it will be extremely tricky to set things up so you can insert a CD locally and run the (educational) program on the central server. That is, if the school wants users to be able to do so (I would).
They didn't give us any freedom, bad stuff still happened...
Ah yes, linux, the reason half the school student (and teacher) passwords were known (passwd file, people cracked much of it). I mean great security, took only two weeks for some freshman to get the file.
If you think that's somehow worse than Windows, you're sadly mistaken.
With anything NT based, you just have to boot-up with a disk and copy the SAM file, to crack at your leisure. And NT's cryptographic hashing is far faster than that used by most Linux system.
With Windows 9x, it's far, far worse. With something like the Netware login installed (unless you toggle a single setting hidden deep in the hundreds of other trivial options it provides) after you log-in to the network, the Windows log-in dialog pops-up. Not knowing any better, just about everyone again types in their password, as asked, which does precisely one thing... it writes the password to disk as username.pwl. PWL files are trivially easily cracked. With my school having nothing but Windows machines, that's how I got all the network passwords... Some used their dog's name, some reversed their last-name, their phone number, etc., etc.
The solution to the problem in both the Windows and Unix case, are to depend on network authentication instead of local passwords. Windows, of course, makes this harder than necessary.
Then there are all the security flaws in most OSs, not a problem if you're up to date but trying to keep all those systems up to date (with no budget of course) can't be fun.
Remove the SUID/SGID bit on practically everything. Problem solved. As long as there isn't an exploit in login, X11, or the kernel, you don't have to worry about local privilege escalation.
It's a school they don't want suers to install apps,
True, but it's actually because they're control freaks. Giving users a small amount of freedom can only be a good thing.
they'd have kids failing out for skipping classes to play games in the library while making it impossible for library systems to be used for actual work
The kids should be getting punished for skipping classes in the first place. Thrown out of the library for hogging the computers for unrelated work in the second place.
The ability to install programs isn't responsible in the slightest. Browser-based Java and Flash games are quite common, and will still work. And if not for games, kids would be ditching class and occupying the computers just to surf the web and other trivialities. Locking down the computers is attacking one of the minor symptoms, rather than the disease. You could use the same justifications to say students shouldn't have internet access, or computers at all...
Then there is all the fan wanna-be hackers that'd be putting trojans on the systems.
Not an issue for any operating systems with any decent security.
User creativity in schools by students generally means figuring out how to break the school network, repeatably.
Students are bored to death. If you give them nothing else to do, yes, that's where their frustration is going to be vented.
Personally, I'd spend just a little time getting around restrictions, and looking around. A couple of my teachers put me to work fixing computer problems... Most of them, though, had a tendency to go ape-shit ballistic, because I held the terrifying capacity to change the screen saver.
They usually have a fair lot of clued students at their hands who would gladly offer support in exchange for additional credit or at least other services the school can provide
We're talking about Primary and Secondary schools here, not a University. The students in question can't offer tech support to anyone. I can't believe any of them will possibly have any grasp of Unix systems (or Windows for that matter). That's about the age when kids are getting interested in technology, but really still just fumbling around in the dark, clicking on things they don't understand.
the UK, in order to have the legal right to watch any television, including non-BBC television, you are obliged to subscribe to the BBC. It is compulsory, its a criminal offense not to.
And in order to have the legal right to drive on the roads, you are obliged to pay taxes for road maintenance... even the roads you NEVER drive on.
That's the way all taxes go. They go to some things you like, as well as some things you may not like. Being in a democracy, however, you do have the right to lobby for your money to go elsewhere, but that of course depends on a significant number of people agreeing with you, which I doubt many do.
Slashdot Mirror
That's laughable. Nanotech has the potential to cure a vast number of medical/developmental conditions, but it isn't going to make people infinitely wealthy, and while it could significantly improve life expectancy and physical power, it's not going to make them "infinite" by a long shot.
For one thing, nanotech isn't going to create itself, it's still going to be in the form of products you have to buy. For another, no matter how capable it may be, it's still going to require lots of energy to do the things you want. And that's all in the BEST CASE.
The affluence of a nation appears directly tied their environmental concerns... In the extreme case, when you can't get enough to eat, you don't give a damn about melting polar ice caps. Furthermore, it is these technological advances that are going to make it possible to be more environmentally friendly, wasting less land, emitting less pollution and less greenhouse gases.
Since when is religion a scourge? It is Christian beliefs upon which the US was founded, by mostly religious men. I'd bet a great many of the people you (and most everyone else) looks up to, were devout Christians. How about Isaac Newton for one? Galileo? Washington?
China has been developing a less and less aggressive stance, as they have become dependent on the world to sustain their economy, and there's no reason to believe that will change any time soon.
Also, the idea that we are completely dependent China (rather than the other way around) it's completely wrong. The US is still the #1 manufacturer in the world, producing about 2X as much as Japan, who is #2 on the list. China is only at a very distant #4, behind Germany. Sure, the products you buy at Walmart are a few cents cheaper because of China, but that's about it.
This is as real as news gets. The decline of research is the most serious long-term problem facing the US, and the world. It affects damn near every thing you're ranting and raving about, from every environmental concern to trade deficits with Japan and China.
Advanced research and development in the US is also directly responsible for us being able to wage war on extremists in the middle east and elsewhere without an all-out draft, and killing hundreds of thousands of US soldiers in the process.
Where do you think satellites, stealth aircraft, electronic surveillance, unmanned drones, and the like came from? How about efficient engines, solar panels, wind turbines, etc.? Was it all spontaneously assembled from the collective egos and self satisfaction of hundreds of tree-hugging atheists?
His point #6 is pure crap. He claims labor laws need to be non-existent for start-ups to form, yet a great many started up in the 70s and before, when the labor laws he reviles were as strong as they have ever been. Apple is here, HP is here, etc., etc.
And point #10 is irrelevant to the discussion. The problem with K-12 schools in the US has NOTHING to do with specialization. The problem is that grade inflation has made people who don't understand bare-minimum first-order algebra equations still straight-A students, even though they're woefully unprepared for entering the university system and will need 6-months or more of remedial courses. There are still the few exceptional K-12 schools that resist the trend, and there will always be a small percentage of students that will learn on their own, but by and large, K-12 is turning out, and could be shortened by perhaps 4-6 years turning out kids equally well educated.
That only covers China vs the US. How about all of Europe?
If anything, ala carte will make indy cable channels possible (for the first time)... If a niche audience finds a channel good, they will be willing to pay a higher monthly fee to support it, where advertisers won't, and demand is low enough that cable operators wouldn't otherwise care about that niche enough to raise everyone's monthly bill by a few dollars.
If niche channels are watched by a tiny portion of subscribers, and can't convince those people to pay more for them, why should they survive? If the channel doesn't work out, start selling DVDs...
Interesting choice of hypothetical scenarios, because that's EXACTLY what, in-fact, happened.
Go read about "New Coke." It was Pepsi's overwhelming success in advertising their product that led to Coke's downfall.
Brand advertising isn't about telling you that a product (you might want/need) exists... It's about making you want to have their product more than their competitors. When was the last time you saw a commercial for Coke or Pepsi that mentioned price or "benefits" of one over the other?
That's pure crap. You'd have to be legally blind not to be able to distinguish a tripling of resolution. Or do you use your computer at 800x600 and aren't able to distinguish any improvement at 3X higher resolutions?
And more to the point... There are plenty of people in NTSC land that say the same thing... PAL's improvement over NTSC is small, and HD's improvement over both is tremendous.
That's laughable. I can't imagine how you possibly fooled someone into modding up such baseless crap. The resolution difference is 20%, and PAL pays for it with a 20% lower frame-rate as well.
No one can rationally claim that a 600% increase in resolution is necessary, while a 500% increase (plus higher framerate) is undesirable.
I think you're swallowing a little too much of the propaganda.
1) It's much lower than 80%.
2) "Urban" for the US is still far, far less dense than urban for Europe and Asia. The US is 24th is high-speed internet access... I'm willing to bet there are at least 23 industrialized nations with higher population density...
3) Where it is urban, it tends to be an island... There are large cities, but they are drastically separated, unlike many other countries.
You can, in fact, get extremely high-speed connections in downtown New York. And that's without extensive government subsidization you see in South Korea.
In any city (there are several already) with Verizon FTTH/FIOS 30/5Mbps is available for low cost. The benefits of synchronous bandwidth are highly debatable.
I have a hard time blaming the union... More recently, we've seen several cases where companies claimed they were on the verge of going out of business, and used that to get a union contract with significantly reduced wages. Of course, it comes out shortly afterwards that the companies in question were doing fine, and outright lied in contract negotiations. If a unions rep has reason to suspect it is being lied to, brinkmanship is the only option. Sometimes it will work, sometimes it wont.
Maybe that's a typo, but I fail to see how an employee that can do their job like other workers, is dead weight, and should be fired...
Companies do exactly the same things. At least Unions provide a counter-balance.
That one doesn't even make sense. You've provided no possible reasoning for why the union is doing, or would want to do this. It sounds like something that has some rational reason behind it, but you're not providing it.
That sounds perfectly reasonable. If a company wants to remove worker's benefits in some way, they should compensate in another, or better yet, find another plan which doesn't cut-back on their benefits.
You've got it backwards. Thugs use illegitimate unions as a way to get money... It's the same way thugs use drug dealing, gambling, robbery, money laundering, or anything else. An illegitimate Union forced upon companies with threats is just another scam. Legitimate unions, however, don't need or want to do anything of the sort.
Unions provide a counter-balance to corporate power. I'm all for reform, but saying they should be outlawed because they're not perfect, is extremely biased and short-sighted.
I'd say the same thing, but in exactly the opposite way as you are spinning it...
Unions currently prevent corporations from using their immense power to drive down worker's wages, and prevent unjustified/arbitrary firings of those doing their job (see Circuit City) and force slightly more reliance on non-arbitrary metrics, like seniority, to prevent the boss' relatives getting high paying positions.
Ummm... that's internally inconsistent. Since when does "high prices" == "less than before"?
By "high prices" you apparently mean "lower prices", but that detracts from your point, so you want to obscure it.
Are you going to finish your polonium?
Oddly enough, most of the articles from the future are also from the past...
There are 15 Western Union "Agent Locations" within 10 miles of my current location.
Let's say I have 2 accomplices... That makes $18,000 per branch, and $270,000 total, picked up consecutively in just a couple hours. And it's easy enough to drive a few miles to the next city and at least double that amount easily in the same day, before the FBI even knows anything is awry.
And that's assuming the simplest possible method. It's easy enough to pay a few hobos to pick-up your money for you, and give them a small cut.
You didn't have to provide any of that. You only need the Wester Union transfer code (given to you by the sender), and they won't ask you another damn thing.
It's only if you DON'T have that important information that they'll still allow you to get the money only upon verifying your ID.
Well they simply did an incredibly crappy job of it. No fault of Linux to be sure, and highly secure options like kerberos have been around... longer than Linux has.
If you allow that to happen, all bets are off, no matter the OS. However, there is no way a non-root user can clear the BIOS with a program. Password the BIOS and lock the PC's case shut. That will be plenty secure against school kids. With Window's historic lack of security, all bets are off.
Restrict? Everything should work just fine, kids can run whatever programs they like. etc.
I never dismissed network clients. They may be a good option... or not... depending on the relative speed of the available PCs and the school's network.
You are, however, guaranteed to have a rough time of it if you want to watch videos on your thin clients. (Automatically) scaling video down to 320x240 will make it just small enough to stream (one person playing a video at a time), on a mostly traffic-free 100Mbps network.
Additionally, it will be extremely tricky to set things up so you can insert a CD locally and run the (educational) program on the central server. That is, if the school wants users to be able to do so (I would).
They didn't give us any freedom, bad stuff still happened...
If you think that's somehow worse than Windows, you're sadly mistaken.
With anything NT based, you just have to boot-up with a disk and copy the SAM file, to crack at your leisure. And NT's cryptographic hashing is far faster than that used by most Linux system.
With Windows 9x, it's far, far worse. With something like the Netware login installed (unless you toggle a single setting hidden deep in the hundreds of other trivial options it provides) after you log-in to the network, the Windows log-in dialog pops-up. Not knowing any better, just about everyone again types in their password, as asked, which does precisely one thing... it writes the password to disk as username.pwl. PWL files are trivially easily cracked. With my school having nothing but Windows machines, that's how I got all the network passwords... Some used their dog's name, some reversed their last-name, their phone number, etc., etc.
The solution to the problem in both the Windows and Unix case, are to depend on network authentication instead of local passwords. Windows, of course, makes this harder than necessary.
Remove the SUID/SGID bit on practically everything. Problem solved. As long as there isn't an exploit in login, X11, or the kernel, you don't have to worry about local privilege escalation.
True, but it's actually because they're control freaks. Giving users a small amount of freedom can only be a good thing.
The kids should be getting punished for skipping classes in the first place. Thrown out of the library for hogging the computers for unrelated work in the second place.
The ability to install programs isn't responsible in the slightest. Browser-based Java and Flash games are quite common, and will still work. And if not for games, kids would be ditching class and occupying the computers just to surf the web and other trivialities. Locking down the computers is attacking one of the minor symptoms, rather than the disease. You could use the same justifications to say students shouldn't have internet access, or computers at all...
Not an issue for any operating systems with any decent security.
Students are bored to death. If you give them nothing else to do, yes, that's where their frustration is going to be vented.
Personally, I'd spend just a little time getting around restrictions, and looking around. A couple of my teachers put me to work fixing computer problems... Most of them, though, had a tendency to go ape-shit ballistic, because I held the terrifying capacity to change the screen saver.
Hmm... That sounds like the kind of problem that solves itself...
We're talking about Primary and Secondary schools here, not a University. The students in question can't offer tech support to anyone. I can't believe any of them will possibly have any grasp of Unix systems (or Windows for that matter). That's about the age when kids are getting interested in technology, but really still just fumbling around in the dark, clicking on things they don't understand.
And in order to have the legal right to drive on the roads, you are obliged to pay taxes for road maintenance... even the roads you NEVER drive on.
That's the way all taxes go. They go to some things you like, as well as some things you may not like. Being in a democracy, however, you do have the right to lobby for your money to go elsewhere, but that of course depends on a significant number of people agreeing with you, which I doubt many do.
I never understood why someone would pay /. for the privilege of doing their work for them...