Well put. If the original poster had taken the time to think things through like you have, I would not have been so flippant. Your understanding of the tragedy of the commons indicates the nuanced view of someone who has thought deeply about the subject. I prefer the anarcho-syndicalist approach to the anarcho-capitalist one, but in an ideal world we would both have our pick of which system to adhere to, a free market of governance, if you will.
What we both agree on, I believe, is that any system where authority is divorced from responsibility is doomed to fail. That, and coercion is bad. Basics of anarchism, really, no matter what flavor you adhere to.
You don't really understand how the free market works. Here's a hint: it's not a free market if someone is using their monopoly power in unfair ways. In order for us to maintain our free market system, we need to keep that from happening.
MS did more than out compete the competition. We have rules governing fair competition. For instance, would you say it was out competing the competition to poison their executives? No? Why not? Oh, we have laws against that? Well, we have laws against unfair use of monopoly power for the same damn reason.
The US would never invalidate all EU patents and bring on the mother of all trade wars in order to protect one US company. There would have to be more at stake. The US doesn't control the oil spigots. We also do not control the oceans! You have a very warped view of the world and the US's importance in it. Stop belivieving the propaganda and try looking with your own eyes.
But if thinking that the US is the bestest most powerfullest country in the whole world and could take on the rest of the world with one hand tied behind it's back compensates you in any way for your other shortcomings, you just go on believing that.
That's the best you can do? Chrissake, man, that is nothing more than an early example of owning-class FUD. That situation never took place, because people can collectively look after their interests and punish freeloaders. Try the tragedy of private ownership: when ownership is unlimited, there is no incentive to maintain resources rather than exploiting them, because you can simply take your cash and move on to a new exploitation when the old one dries up.
Ah, good old dada21. Whenever I'm looking for a good argument, as opposed to getting hit on the head lessons, which is what most conversation here amounts to, you are one of the ones I turn to.:)
Remember, there are natural monopolies as well as state sponsored ones, and in a capitalist system, all markets will eventually become monopolistic as money and power concentrate and corporations raise the barriers of entry. It's unavoidable.
Now, I'm with you at least part way on working the land giving you a right to it. But you can't really work it by yourself unless you fence it off first. Gone are the days of unclaimed land waiting to be taken. 20,000 years gone, at least. The thing is, even before the land was improved by your work, it was being used as part of an ecosystem required for the lifestyle of indigenous peoples who probably had only a vague concept of ownership. So you take the land and start working it, but they still want to keep hunting and gathering there. What right do you have to keep them off? And where in the world would you ever have found land that wasn't already claimed and used in this way?
What moral right do one group of people have to exclude another group from using land? Did that other group sign a contract saying they wouldn't use it? What happens to the people who don't own any land when all the land is owned?
Unergulated capitalism failed. Lassez faire failed. We have regulations for a reason, because as bad as they are, the alternative has been proven worse.
As for your argument regarding ownership caps, how in the world could you be 100,000 times as productive as someone else without a social system backing you up? Well then, it isn't really you that is productive, it is the system. If you want absolute rights to the fruits of your labor, you better make damn sure you aren't counting the fruits of someone else's labor as your own. That is the thing most anarcho capitalists forget. No man is an island. The good or bad that we do is the result of society and it's impact on us as individuals. Responsiblity is shared. Profit should be too.
And what of inheritance? Why should one person be allowed to start out with advantages that others don't have, when that person contributed nothing of value? What you do to earn your dollar impacts all of us, and that gives all of us a moral right to say what you do to earn your dollar, as well as how many dollars you deserve to earn. What you seem to want is a world where you are free to do what you want without worrying about the impact that has on others, unless those others have the money and power to fight what you do economically or in court.
We have a state, laws, and government so that we can have some say in what others do when it impacts us. If you don't like it, might I suggest living by yourself on an island where what you do really doesn't impact others? As a bonus, you will get to keep all the fruits of your labor. Not many people would realistically make that trade-off because they know that what they get from living in a cooperative society far outweighs the burdens. Again I will say, anarcho-capitalists and libertarians want the benefits of cooperative society without any of the burdens and they think the free market is the magic fairy dust that will get them to that never-never land.
You yourself propose a cap on ownership, no more land than what one can improve with one's own hands. You just don't want to cap money. Well, without a cap on money ownership, how long do you think the cap on land ownership would last? Do a thought experiment and try to tell me how unlimited ownership of wealth would not lead to concentration of power, which would lead to concentration of ownership of real property, which would lead to a world where a small oligarchy owned 90% of everything and we all become their virtual slaves because we own nothing and have no way of supporting ourselves except by doing what they tell us. How exactly do you propose to keep that from happening?
First, what a convicted monopolist is allowed to do and what regular companies are allowed to do are different. If MS was any old company it would be fine for them to bundle. However, MS has used bundling to leverage monopoly in one market to dominate other markets, which is illegal, and why they were stopped.
As for the EU declaring war on MS, MS would never be stupid enough to pull out in the first place. They would lose billions, investors would panic, exec's stock would plunge, every country but the US would wake up and smell the tyranny. They would never again risk using a proprietary OS from a foreign corporation.
As for the rest of your comment, you have no idea how realpolitik is played. Here's a hint: the US is not that powerful. We can't afford to take on fricken Iran or North Korea right now, you think we would step to the EU?!? Get a clue.
Sorry, but modern day anarchists recognize that "The State" is old hat. Corporations are the new state. Oh, you can claim they are creations of the state, and they were, but face it, they are where the power is these days. Corporations control the state, not the other way around. Do away with the state without checking the power of the corporations and you have done nothing.
But that's exactly what Marx predicted that capitalism would lead to. Too bad that Bakunin's prediction of what Marxism would lead to was equally as prescient. But just because you are anarcho-capitalist doesn't mean you have to discount the power of corporations and focus on the state. Power is power, whatever the name.
Our present problems aren't the fault of a central state, they are a direct failing of the capitalist system, which itself is a natural outgrowth of unfair and unjust property laws. Property is theft, plain and simple: You fence off land and claim it as your own, you are stealing. It was once everybody's land, now it's just yours. How'd that happen?
Here's an idea, rather than curbing a democratically controlled system (the state) in favor of one where money and power naturally concentrate in fewer and fewer hands, how about we do away with real property? Own your own home, clothes, tools, etc. but not land. Control land and natural resources democratically. Or at least put a solid cap on ownership. No one person needs assets worth more than 100 times what the poorest own, nor do they deserve it, nor will it motivate them more than they already are by their inner passions.
I'm sure you are different, but most anarcho capitalists and libertarians I have known just want unlimited property rights with no responsiblities. They have kind of a "I've got mine, the rest of you can fuck off" attitude.
Well, I'm sorry if you were in fact a good parent and got screwed over by the system. There certainly are problems but the system does more to protect children than harm them. For every case like yours there are fifty where the child was in real danger, and like I said, taking children from their families is not all we do.
Christ, you have no idea what we actually do here. And you have no frickin idea what some of these kids have gone through, so zip it. Foster care for orphans, detention centers for kids who commit crimes, aid for families in crisis, there's a lot more to CYFD than just taking abused kids away from messed up parents.
The last point you make sounds suspiciously like the excuse an abuser would make. Sorry if you were a bad parent and someone took your kids away. Doesn't negate the good work we do.
I don't know, I just started and myposition is still kinda up in the air until September. It is a fun place to work, though, even counting the wacky politics you find in any state agency, even one that's well run.
Ha! These came with three hot swappable PSUs, and easy to replace disks with locking tabs. But you are right about the system disk, there is only room for one 2.5" hard drive, but the controllers we used do allow you to set up more than one RAID array, so you could easily use two of the 16 in a RAID 1 mirror if you wanted to. These were scientific computing clusters, so not mission critical, and our clients didn't mind the possibility of the system disk going caput. So you take the cluster down for an hour to replace it, no data is lost and the thing keeps going from where it left off when you reboot.
The RAID volumes are pretty damn huge, we routinely built 4 and 8 terrabyte head nodes, and network throughput?!? We used Infiniband for interprocess communication and GigE for control, so, um, no. We had very, very high throughput and lower latency than you've ever seen.
Did I mention the three hot swappable, rock solid PSUs? Oh, and it took me, bare metal with no motherboard to complete system with ROCKS installed and ready to go, about three hours to set one up, and the guys in Los Alamos National Labs could maintain these things in their sleep. Every piece of hardware was triple checked and completely Linux compatible, and we offered on-site replacement within 24 hours.
Honestly, Sun can go hang. I can build a box that's just as good with one hand tied behind my back, for half the price.
The chassis I worked with had three large and three small fans in the middle, right behind the drives, as well as three fans at the back and two in the PSU. You can blowdry your hair standing behind one. The 3U, 16 disk chassis I used had four rows of four disks mounted horizontally, and they were very easy to hot swap. The SATA backplane comes with signal lights that are compatible with the 3ware cards, having power, access, and error lights which made it really fun to watch: when there was a lot of disk access, it looked like the WOPR from Wargames.
Someday, a slashdot troll will apply for a government job and they will ask him about those lovely images he continually posts, and is he really into that sort of thing? And what is his connection with the known terrorist organization, GNAA?
And without knowing why, the rest of us will get a warm fuzzy feeling in our bellies and we will laugh in a Nelson voice, Ha-ha! and then wonder why we did it.
You can also buy commodity 3U server chassis that hold 16 drives. We built a number of these as ROCKS cluster head nodes for Los Alamos National Labs. Two 3ware SATA raid cards running 8 drive RAID 5 arrays, bonded together in software as a RAID 0 array. Decent performance relatively inexpensively. Which is after all what the I in RAID is supposed to stand for. If you do this, get the SATA backplane that uses 4 Infiniband cables instead of 16 SATA cables and the cards that support that. I've done it both ways, and trust me, your knuckles will thank you for the four-fold reduction in cables. As an interesting aside, the chassis we used has a space up top for a 2.5" laptop hard drive to use as the system disk. It's is the only way to fit a system disk in that chassis.
I work for the Child, Youth and Family Development department. We use Windows on the desktop, Novell as our file server and SuSE Linux for everything else. Currently we are transitioning away from HPUX to an IBM BladeCenter environment running VMWare and SuSE. We have one major application and several minor ones. The major app, a client tracking system, was developed in house and runs Sybase as a back end. Eventually we plan on porting it to use Postgres and releasing it as open source so that anyone in need of a client tracking system can use it.
This is the real beauty of open source in government, not leveraging the work of others by running open source systems, but leveraging the large development force that most governments have to share in house apps wit less of the usual inter-agency squabbling. An agency that might be wary of using a non open source application developed by a rival agency will be less wary of using an open source app that just happens to be developed by said rival. Instead of reinventing the wheel, in house development staff can cooperate with other staff in other agencies.
That the DoD would recommend open source is exciting, because it really is a good fit for government agencies. Believe it or not, our little state government IT department is better run and more on the ball than most IT departments that I have worked for in big corporations. Moving to Linux hosted on blades running VMWare has freed up a lot of resources to plan for the future that used to be used in just putting out fires.
Well shit, neither would I! That's not the point. Skipping content you don't want to watch, like commercials, should be okay. How do you skip content you don't know is coming? How do you skip the sex and violence or whatever you don't like without actually seeing what you don't want to see? Look, I think people who do this are fricken fruitcakes who deserve to be taunted unmercifully for their prudish ways. But not stopped.
However, the point is, as has been pointed out to me, they are in fact making unauthorized copies, not just sitting there, remote in hand, to skip the naughty bits for you. So that's wrong, and bad, Perhaps we need a new word for it, like "badrong." What they need to sell are universal remotes programmed to hit the fast forward button at certain times during playback. I would assume you would have no problem with a system like that, that doesn't make unauthorized copies? Because otherwise, logic dictates that you be against using DVRs at all. Doesn't the poor artist have the right to make you watch his show with commercials? It's how it's meant to be viewed, after all...
Okay, how about this: if you want absolute moral rights to your work, you must be raised in a box and never have contact with outside culture. Then and only then will your works be yours. If by work, we mean "drooling and shitting yourself." Everything else is stolen. Ain't nothin' new under the sun. Everything artistic is a rip off of something else. That's why the US has the copyright system we do, to ensure that there are enough works in the public domain that artists can go on creating without infringing.
Let's take a little tumble down the slippery slope you have set up. Absolute "natural" rights (or the incredibly shortsighted tack our congress is taking by indefinite extension of copyright) leads to the state where every possible idea is owned, and no one can ever create without paying well-nigh incalculable royalties to bazillions of artists and their decadent heirs. Making art is like making a baby. You make it, you point it in the right direction, and you let go.
Now you and I probably wouldn't call television executives "artists." Yet they are creating artistic works, programs interspersed with commercials. According to them, those programs are meant to be viewed with commercials. You can see it in the pace and timing of the shows. Are we then destroying the artistic integrity of those shows by using DVRs and skipping the commercials? Skipping commercials is unauthorized editing. How is skipping commercials different than skipping violence or sex?
Let's even do away with commercial skipping as we are dealing with three different sets of "artists" e.g. the ones who made the show, the ones who made the commercial, and the ones who "artfully" combined the two into half hour and hour long segments. Let's just look at the pause button. I like it. Sometimes I have to go to the bathroom, sometimes I like to talk with my wife about the show (well, more often listen to what she says about the show...) But the artist never intended the show to be paused. Perhaps pausing the show ruins the dramatic tension they were trying to build. Should artists have the right to prohibit my use of the pause button? If not, why should they be able to prohibit the use of the fast forward button, which aside from the unauthorized copying is what we are really talking about.
I could go on one of my long winded "there are no such things as natural rights" rants, but I will spare you. Let's pull an Internet favorite and put it in terms of that damn "first they came for the blah blah" speach. First they came for the people who wanted to skip violence and sex, and I did not speak out because I damn well like violence and sex. Then they came for the people who wanted to skip commercials and I was pretty well hoist by my own petard, now wasn't I?
In short, I cannot reconcile thwe belief that commercial skipping is okay with the belief that editing out violence or sex for personal viewing is not okay. Either they are both okay or neither is.
Oh Jeebus no, I wouldn't be happy. I'm not happy about the KKK spouting their bullshit, either, but I support their right to do it. The way I see it, your first point is the salient one. This is about what's fair, not what would make you or me happy. They are making an unauthorized copy. That's something you can point to and say, "That's unfair based on our current laws."
Now, suppose that one had a player with a programmable scene skip feature, and one sold discs that could program the player to skip certain scenes of certain movies. This would be doing the same thing without making an unauthorized copy. It would still be making artists as just as unhappy, but I would argue that it was fair and probably legal. This is a dispute over principles. What is more basic, an artist's right to control their works, or a purchaser's right to do what they want with purchased materials.
In European society, artists are seen as having a natural moral right to control their works, in the US we are explicitely more pragmatic and define copyright and suchlike as being government granted monopolies with the express purpose of promoting the arts and sciences. So this is one of those rather rare cases where moral relativism is actually applicable without being in some way apalling. Really, it is up to each society to decide which right is more basic in this case, because unlike, say, the right to life, this is relatively unimportant.
Personally, I take the side of property rights in this case, which anyone reading my comment history would find amusingly ironic, as I usually put property rights pretty far down the list of basic rights, much to the horror of libertarians everywhere. Actually, as I think of it, I am being consistent. I'm judging the right to alter and use physical property above the more arbitrary property right artists have over their "intellectual property."
But to reiterate, you have a valid point in that, under our (I'm assuming you are from a country honoring the Berne Convention) copyright laws, they are making an unauthorized copy. The rest of your argument is just emotionalism. I'm unhappy about a lot of things that I support just because the alternatives are worse. Would you take away the right of the KKK to free speach just because what they said made you unhappy?
Totally off topic, but I have wondered whether the Casimir effect could be used in a type of nanotech battery. Take a large number of very thin plates connected to nano scale gears and motors. The battery is charged by running the motors to seperate the plates. The casimir effect pushes the plates together, turning the motors as generators, providing electric current. Anyone know if this would (in theory, given the right materials and advances in materials science, but not basic physics) work?
No, no, no. You can't actually edit his post, just like Cleanfix can't edit the original. What Cleanfix can do is what you actually did. You provided an edited copy, that everyone can clearly see is not the original, without altering the original. Some people may prefer your version, but they will never be confused as to who wrote what.
It comes down to fair use. It saddens me that anyone would be such a prissy little prude as to want such a thing, but I support the rights of prissy little prudes to be prissy little prudes, just as I support the rights of other 'artists' to take a copy of the Bible and alter it by smearing it with shit. You buy it, you can do whatever the fuck you want with it.
I may be a socialist, but I'm no communist and I'd hope that in this country private property still means exactly that. In the end, this means commercial skipping is just as illegal.
Slashdot Mirror
Well put. If the original poster had taken the time to think things through like you have, I would not have been so flippant. Your understanding of the tragedy of the commons indicates the nuanced view of someone who has thought deeply about the subject. I prefer the anarcho-syndicalist approach to the anarcho-capitalist one, but in an ideal world we would both have our pick of which system to adhere to, a free market of governance, if you will.
What we both agree on, I believe, is that any system where authority is divorced from responsibility is doomed to fail. That, and coercion is bad. Basics of anarchism, really, no matter what flavor you adhere to.
No he meant Filota, the delicious Greek pastry. Yes, the universe is built out of pastry and is in fact donut shaped.
Yes, I often feel that way when I'm drunk, too.
You don't really understand how the free market works. Here's a hint: it's not a free market if someone is using their monopoly power in unfair ways. In order for us to maintain our free market system, we need to keep that from happening.
MS did more than out compete the competition. We have rules governing fair competition. For instance, would you say it was out competing the competition to poison their executives? No? Why not? Oh, we have laws against that? Well, we have laws against unfair use of monopoly power for the same damn reason.
The US would never invalidate all EU patents and bring on the mother of all trade wars in order to protect one US company. There would have to be more at stake. The US doesn't control the oil spigots. We also do not control the oceans! You have a very warped view of the world and the US's importance in it. Stop belivieving the propaganda and try looking with your own eyes.
But if thinking that the US is the bestest most powerfullest country in the whole world and could take on the rest of the world with one hand tied behind it's back compensates you in any way for your other shortcomings, you just go on believing that.
That's the best you can do? Chrissake, man, that is nothing more than an early example of owning-class FUD. That situation never took place, because people can collectively look after their interests and punish freeloaders. Try the tragedy of private ownership: when ownership is unlimited, there is no incentive to maintain resources rather than exploiting them, because you can simply take your cash and move on to a new exploitation when the old one dries up.
Four words: Think before you write.
Ah, good old dada21. Whenever I'm looking for a good argument, as opposed to getting hit on the head lessons, which is what most conversation here amounts to, you are one of the ones I turn to. :)
Remember, there are natural monopolies as well as state sponsored ones, and in a capitalist system, all markets will eventually become monopolistic as money and power concentrate and corporations raise the barriers of entry. It's unavoidable.
Now, I'm with you at least part way on working the land giving you a right to it. But you can't really work it by yourself unless you fence it off first. Gone are the days of unclaimed land waiting to be taken. 20,000 years gone, at least. The thing is, even before the land was improved by your work, it was being used as part of an ecosystem required for the lifestyle of indigenous peoples who probably had only a vague concept of ownership. So you take the land and start working it, but they still want to keep hunting and gathering there. What right do you have to keep them off? And where in the world would you ever have found land that wasn't already claimed and used in this way?
What moral right do one group of people have to exclude another group from using land? Did that other group sign a contract saying they wouldn't use it? What happens to the people who don't own any land when all the land is owned?
Unergulated capitalism failed. Lassez faire failed. We have regulations for a reason, because as bad as they are, the alternative has been proven worse.
As for your argument regarding ownership caps, how in the world could you be 100,000 times as productive as someone else without a social system backing you up? Well then, it isn't really you that is productive, it is the system. If you want absolute rights to the fruits of your labor, you better make damn sure you aren't counting the fruits of someone else's labor as your own. That is the thing most anarcho capitalists forget. No man is an island. The good or bad that we do is the result of society and it's impact on us as individuals. Responsiblity is shared. Profit should be too.
And what of inheritance? Why should one person be allowed to start out with advantages that others don't have, when that person contributed nothing of value? What you do to earn your dollar impacts all of us, and that gives all of us a moral right to say what you do to earn your dollar, as well as how many dollars you deserve to earn. What you seem to want is a world where you are free to do what you want without worrying about the impact that has on others, unless those others have the money and power to fight what you do economically or in court.
We have a state, laws, and government so that we can have some say in what others do when it impacts us. If you don't like it, might I suggest living by yourself on an island where what you do really doesn't impact others? As a bonus, you will get to keep all the fruits of your labor. Not many people would realistically make that trade-off because they know that what they get from living in a cooperative society far outweighs the burdens. Again I will say, anarcho-capitalists and libertarians want the benefits of cooperative society without any of the burdens and they think the free market is the magic fairy dust that will get them to that never-never land.
You yourself propose a cap on ownership, no more land than what one can improve with one's own hands. You just don't want to cap money. Well, without a cap on money ownership, how long do you think the cap on land ownership would last? Do a thought experiment and try to tell me how unlimited ownership of wealth would not lead to concentration of power, which would lead to concentration of ownership of real property, which would lead to a world where a small oligarchy owned 90% of everything and we all become their virtual slaves because we own nothing and have no way of supporting ourselves except by doing what they tell us. How exactly do you propose to keep that from happening?
First, what a convicted monopolist is allowed to do and what regular companies are allowed to do are different. If MS was any old company it would be fine for them to bundle. However, MS has used bundling to leverage monopoly in one market to dominate other markets, which is illegal, and why they were stopped.
As for the EU declaring war on MS, MS would never be stupid enough to pull out in the first place. They would lose billions, investors would panic, exec's stock would plunge, every country but the US would wake up and smell the tyranny. They would never again risk using a proprietary OS from a foreign corporation.
As for the rest of your comment, you have no idea how realpolitik is played. Here's a hint: the US is not that powerful. We can't afford to take on fricken Iran or North Korea right now, you think we would step to the EU?!? Get a clue.
Sorry, but modern day anarchists recognize that "The State" is old hat. Corporations are the new state. Oh, you can claim they are creations of the state, and they were, but face it, they are where the power is these days. Corporations control the state, not the other way around. Do away with the state without checking the power of the corporations and you have done nothing.
But that's exactly what Marx predicted that capitalism would lead to. Too bad that Bakunin's prediction of what Marxism would lead to was equally as prescient. But just because you are anarcho-capitalist doesn't mean you have to discount the power of corporations and focus on the state. Power is power, whatever the name.
Our present problems aren't the fault of a central state, they are a direct failing of the capitalist system, which itself is a natural outgrowth of unfair and unjust property laws. Property is theft, plain and simple: You fence off land and claim it as your own, you are stealing. It was once everybody's land, now it's just yours. How'd that happen?
Here's an idea, rather than curbing a democratically controlled system (the state) in favor of one where money and power naturally concentrate in fewer and fewer hands, how about we do away with real property? Own your own home, clothes, tools, etc. but not land. Control land and natural resources democratically. Or at least put a solid cap on ownership. No one person needs assets worth more than 100 times what the poorest own, nor do they deserve it, nor will it motivate them more than they already are by their inner passions.
I'm sure you are different, but most anarcho capitalists and libertarians I have known just want unlimited property rights with no responsiblities. They have kind of a "I've got mine, the rest of you can fuck off" attitude.
Well, I'm sorry if you were in fact a good parent and got screwed over by the system. There certainly are problems but the system does more to protect children than harm them. For every case like yours there are fifty where the child was in real danger, and like I said, taking children from their families is not all we do.
I have too much of the cellular enzyme, hornihumpine onmydates A. I need stimulation from nude things.
Christ, you have no idea what we actually do here. And you have no frickin idea what some of these kids have gone through, so zip it. Foster care for orphans, detention centers for kids who commit crimes, aid for families in crisis, there's a lot more to CYFD than just taking abused kids away from messed up parents.
The last point you make sounds suspiciously like the excuse an abuser would make. Sorry if you were a bad parent and someone took your kids away. Doesn't negate the good work we do.
I don't know, I just started and myposition is still kinda up in the air until September. It is a fun place to work, though, even counting the wacky politics you find in any state agency, even one that's well run.
Ha! These came with three hot swappable PSUs, and easy to replace disks with locking tabs. But you are right about the system disk, there is only room for one 2.5" hard drive, but the controllers we used do allow you to set up more than one RAID array, so you could easily use two of the 16 in a RAID 1 mirror if you wanted to. These were scientific computing clusters, so not mission critical, and our clients didn't mind the possibility of the system disk going caput. So you take the cluster down for an hour to replace it, no data is lost and the thing keeps going from where it left off when you reboot.
The RAID volumes are pretty damn huge, we routinely built 4 and 8 terrabyte head nodes, and network throughput?!? We used Infiniband for interprocess communication and GigE for control, so, um, no. We had very, very high throughput and lower latency than you've ever seen.
Did I mention the three hot swappable, rock solid PSUs? Oh, and it took me, bare metal with no motherboard to complete system with ROCKS installed and ready to go, about three hours to set one up, and the guys in Los Alamos National Labs could maintain these things in their sleep. Every piece of hardware was triple checked and completely Linux compatible, and we offered on-site replacement within 24 hours.
Honestly, Sun can go hang. I can build a box that's just as good with one hand tied behind my back, for half the price.
The chassis I worked with had three large and three small fans in the middle, right behind the drives, as well as three fans at the back and two in the PSU. You can blowdry your hair standing behind one. The 3U, 16 disk chassis I used had four rows of four disks mounted horizontally, and they were very easy to hot swap. The SATA backplane comes with signal lights that are compatible with the 3ware cards, having power, access, and error lights which made it really fun to watch: when there was a lot of disk access, it looked like the WOPR from Wargames.
Which he then blew on buying a JATO and strapping it on the roof of his chevy...
Actually, if you put enough fireworks in your pocket before you take acid, you can fly. Landing in one piece is the real trick...
Someday, a slashdot troll will apply for a government job and they will ask him about those lovely images he continually posts, and is he really into that sort of thing? And what is his connection with the known terrorist organization, GNAA?
And without knowing why, the rest of us will get a warm fuzzy feeling in our bellies and we will laugh in a Nelson voice, Ha-ha! and then wonder why we did it.
You can also buy commodity 3U server chassis that hold 16 drives. We built a number of these as ROCKS cluster head nodes for Los Alamos National Labs. Two 3ware SATA raid cards running 8 drive RAID 5 arrays, bonded together in software as a RAID 0 array. Decent performance relatively inexpensively. Which is after all what the I in RAID is supposed to stand for. If you do this, get the SATA backplane that uses 4 Infiniband cables instead of 16 SATA cables and the cards that support that. I've done it both ways, and trust me, your knuckles will thank you for the four-fold reduction in cables. As an interesting aside, the chassis we used has a space up top for a 2.5" laptop hard drive to use as the system disk. It's is the only way to fit a system disk in that chassis.
I work for the Child, Youth and Family Development department. We use Windows on the desktop, Novell as our file server and SuSE Linux for everything else. Currently we are transitioning away from HPUX to an IBM BladeCenter environment running VMWare and SuSE. We have one major application and several minor ones. The major app, a client tracking system, was developed in house and runs Sybase as a back end. Eventually we plan on porting it to use Postgres and releasing it as open source so that anyone in need of a client tracking system can use it.
This is the real beauty of open source in government, not leveraging the work of others by running open source systems, but leveraging the large development force that most governments have to share in house apps wit less of the usual inter-agency squabbling. An agency that might be wary of using a non open source application developed by a rival agency will be less wary of using an open source app that just happens to be developed by said rival. Instead of reinventing the wheel, in house development staff can cooperate with other staff in other agencies.
That the DoD would recommend open source is exciting, because it really is a good fit for government agencies. Believe it or not, our little state government IT department is better run and more on the ball than most IT departments that I have worked for in big corporations. Moving to Linux hosted on blades running VMWare has freed up a lot of resources to plan for the future that used to be used in just putting out fires.
Well shit, neither would I! That's not the point. Skipping content you don't want to watch, like commercials, should be okay. How do you skip content you don't know is coming? How do you skip the sex and violence or whatever you don't like without actually seeing what you don't want to see? Look, I think people who do this are fricken fruitcakes who deserve to be taunted unmercifully for their prudish ways. But not stopped.
However, the point is, as has been pointed out to me, they are in fact making unauthorized copies, not just sitting there, remote in hand, to skip the naughty bits for you. So that's wrong, and bad, Perhaps we need a new word for it, like "badrong." What they need to sell are universal remotes programmed to hit the fast forward button at certain times during playback. I would assume you would have no problem with a system like that, that doesn't make unauthorized copies? Because otherwise, logic dictates that you be against using DVRs at all. Doesn't the poor artist have the right to make you watch his show with commercials? It's how it's meant to be viewed, after all...
Take off and nuke them from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
Okay, how about this: if you want absolute moral rights to your work, you must be raised in a box and never have contact with outside culture. Then and only then will your works be yours. If by work, we mean "drooling and shitting yourself." Everything else is stolen. Ain't nothin' new under the sun. Everything artistic is a rip off of something else. That's why the US has the copyright system we do, to ensure that there are enough works in the public domain that artists can go on creating without infringing.
Let's take a little tumble down the slippery slope you have set up. Absolute "natural" rights (or the incredibly shortsighted tack our congress is taking by indefinite extension of copyright) leads to the state where every possible idea is owned, and no one can ever create without paying well-nigh incalculable royalties to bazillions of artists and their decadent heirs. Making art is like making a baby. You make it, you point it in the right direction, and you let go.
Now you and I probably wouldn't call television executives "artists." Yet they are creating artistic works, programs interspersed with commercials. According to them, those programs are meant to be viewed with commercials. You can see it in the pace and timing of the shows. Are we then destroying the artistic integrity of those shows by using DVRs and skipping the commercials? Skipping commercials is unauthorized editing. How is skipping commercials different than skipping violence or sex?
Let's even do away with commercial skipping as we are dealing with three different sets of "artists" e.g. the ones who made the show, the ones who made the commercial, and the ones who "artfully" combined the two into half hour and hour long segments. Let's just look at the pause button. I like it. Sometimes I have to go to the bathroom, sometimes I like to talk with my wife about the show (well, more often listen to what she says about the show...) But the artist never intended the show to be paused. Perhaps pausing the show ruins the dramatic tension they were trying to build. Should artists have the right to prohibit my use of the pause button? If not, why should they be able to prohibit the use of the fast forward button, which aside from the unauthorized copying is what we are really talking about.
I could go on one of my long winded "there are no such things as natural rights" rants, but I will spare you. Let's pull an Internet favorite and put it in terms of that damn "first they came for the blah blah" speach. First they came for the people who wanted to skip violence and sex, and I did not speak out because I damn well like violence and sex. Then they came for the people who wanted to skip commercials and I was pretty well hoist by my own petard, now wasn't I?
In short, I cannot reconcile thwe belief that commercial skipping is okay with the belief that editing out violence or sex for personal viewing is not okay. Either they are both okay or neither is.
Oh Jeebus no, I wouldn't be happy. I'm not happy about the KKK spouting their bullshit, either, but I support their right to do it. The way I see it, your first point is the salient one. This is about what's fair, not what would make you or me happy. They are making an unauthorized copy. That's something you can point to and say, "That's unfair based on our current laws."
Now, suppose that one had a player with a programmable scene skip feature, and one sold discs that could program the player to skip certain scenes of certain movies. This would be doing the same thing without making an unauthorized copy. It would still be making artists as just as unhappy, but I would argue that it was fair and probably legal. This is a dispute over principles. What is more basic, an artist's right to control their works, or a purchaser's right to do what they want with purchased materials.
In European society, artists are seen as having a natural moral right to control their works, in the US we are explicitely more pragmatic and define copyright and suchlike as being government granted monopolies with the express purpose of promoting the arts and sciences. So this is one of those rather rare cases where moral relativism is actually applicable without being in some way apalling. Really, it is up to each society to decide which right is more basic in this case, because unlike, say, the right to life, this is relatively unimportant.
Personally, I take the side of property rights in this case, which anyone reading my comment history would find amusingly ironic, as I usually put property rights pretty far down the list of basic rights, much to the horror of libertarians everywhere. Actually, as I think of it, I am being consistent. I'm judging the right to alter and use physical property above the more arbitrary property right artists have over their "intellectual property."
But to reiterate, you have a valid point in that, under our (I'm assuming you are from a country honoring the Berne Convention) copyright laws, they are making an unauthorized copy. The rest of your argument is just emotionalism. I'm unhappy about a lot of things that I support just because the alternatives are worse. Would you take away the right of the KKK to free speach just because what they said made you unhappy?
Totally off topic, but I have wondered whether the Casimir effect could be used in a type of nanotech battery. Take a large number of very thin plates connected to nano scale gears and motors. The battery is charged by running the motors to seperate the plates. The casimir effect pushes the plates together, turning the motors as generators, providing electric current. Anyone know if this would (in theory, given the right materials and advances in materials science, but not basic physics) work?
No, no, no. You can't actually edit his post, just like Cleanfix can't edit the original. What Cleanfix can do is what you actually did. You provided an edited copy, that everyone can clearly see is not the original, without altering the original. Some people may prefer your version, but they will never be confused as to who wrote what.
It comes down to fair use. It saddens me that anyone would be such a prissy little prude as to want such a thing, but I support the rights of prissy little prudes to be prissy little prudes, just as I support the rights of other 'artists' to take a copy of the Bible and alter it by smearing it with shit. You buy it, you can do whatever the fuck you want with it.
I may be a socialist, but I'm no communist and I'd hope that in this country private property still means exactly that. In the end, this means commercial skipping is just as illegal.