Wow, you sound really emotionally invested in this issue. Take a few deep breaths. Repeat after me, "The size of my dick has nothing to do with the success or failure of Microsoft." There, feel better?
Anytime a big company uses Linux in a large installation, that is news. Embedded Linux is something most geeks here don't get to play with that much, so this is news. The fact that a company that is fighting tooth and nail against open source uses open source, that is also news.
Your ridiculous strawman, slippery slope, and ad hominem arguments only highlight the growing panic amongst luser admins who have staked their careers on a steaming pile of crap.
You know, I suspected that might be the case, and you just had issue with the use of the word "partner" because hiding what you are makes it seem like that's not okay. But I see so much homophobia here, I thought that you were just closeted and self hating. BTW I only posted as AC originally because this whole thread is off topic, not because I have any fear of my name being associated with anything pro-gay. Anyways, my karma hasn't dipped below "excellent" since they imposed the cap, so I can afford to be modded off-topic.
Oh, and I'm not actually a fag. I tried. I really gave it a fair shot, and I still wouldn't turn down fooling around with a guy who I liked and respected if he really wanted me (as long as my wife was okay with it, which she probably would be as we have an open marriage and she currently owes me one.) But having tried it I know for sure that guys just don't do it for me like girls do. I have to like and respect a guy, and he has to really want me, to do it with him. I'll do just about any girl who's still breathing.
Hmmm, I just wait until games hit the "$30 for the game and two expansion packs" level (1-2 years) or the $10 bargain bin level (3-4 years). Or if they are console games, I buy them used. So I don't get to play newer games, they are still new to me when I play them. Plus I can get by on with a cheaper computer. I played MUDs in college and Asheron's Call when it came out, and got fairly well hooked, but the problem for me has always been that I find it hard to suspend disbelief and really get into the story with a bunch of characters named "DildoBuggers4693" running around shouting "D00d! U totly pwnd that n00b!"
They would have to provide access to the home for any competitor on their wires at a rate no higher than they charge to their own internet business.
Wasn't this the way it was for a while here in the US? I tried to look this up in google, but failed to find anything relevant. Yet I am sure this was the law a few years back, and I remember a big stink in the tech community when it was changed. Anyone have some references on this?
I'm curious, what do you suppose motivates people who think global warming is a problem? You make it sound as if people who believe in global warming have some kind of an agenda. What is their agenda and what motivates them to persue it? What is your agenda? You say you aren't invested in oil or anything, so what do you get from denying that global warming is a man made problem?
Is it that you like to think of yourself as a good and decent person, but you profit off of the status quo (not oil per se, but the system that depends on it), so you must deny that there is a problem in order to go on profiting and still believing you are good and decent?
We have many ways outside of the historical record to measure temperature. Tree rings and ice cores spring to mind. What lgw was saying is true, if you look at the data you will see that prior to about 10,000BC the climate fluctuated dramatically. After that, it stabilised. We don't know why or how, but from our point of view it was sheer dumb luck. When a person wins the lottery, even though we know that physics caused those particular balls to be selected, it was still luck.
Albedo is a term indicating how reflective something is. Reflection is not absorbtion. Completely the opposite, actually. So as the ice melts, just the opposite of what you predict will happen. Ice reflects a great deal of heat. Without the ice, more heat will be absorbed.
This sgtory has been spun in such a way as to ignore the central issue. She was protecting her library patrons rights and helping the police. What kind of case would they have if they didn't follow procedure? The creep might have gotten off scott-free. The police and the library might have been sued. So she added a few extra hours to the investigation. She should get a fucking medal, for doing her job, and also for doing the police's job.
The conspiracy nut in me wants to think this is all calculated to make people forget that police actually need a subpeona.
I've noticed that I get the opportunity to mod more when I post less. I think there is a built in bias towards letting lurkers moderate, so that people who post consistently will continue to post.
Thanks. What's the point of posting a story like this now, when everyone who reads slashdot has left work already? Nothing relieves the boredom of work like a good flamefest. Now I have to wait until tomorrow. (read from home? and waste MY precious time?)
I love the smell of burning karma in the morning... It smells like slashdot!
Why? Because it's hard to fit a normal sized system disk in a 3U server with 16 drive bays. There's a tiny sliver of space above the drives that can hold a laptop CD ROM, Floppy, and 2.5" Hard drive. I've built several of these as head nodes for clusters using dual 3ware SATA RAID controllers and quad AMD boards. The new Escalade cards use Infiniband wiring from the RAID cards to the SATA backplane, so there's only four cables instead of sixteen, which is much nicer than trying to fit 16 SATA cables, two IDE cables, a floppy cable and 8 power cables past the six fans that sit in the middle of the box.
Yes, yes I can picture a Beowulf cluster of those, though I actually use ROCKS.
You just proved you have no rebuttal to my logical counters. A strawman isn't just an argument you don't happen to like, the phrase has a specific meaning. It means to misrepresent an opponent's position, defeat that position, and claim you have defeated the opponents real position. The thing is, I am not misrepresenting the position of the Libertarian Party. Oh, there may be Libertarians with different positions, but they aren't the official Libertarian Party, are they? Don't believe me? Go read the party platform at lp.org. Everything I say is right there. I am not really trying to logically counter their insane propositions, just point out how insane they are.
I mean, I will debate those points if you want, but really, you don't think monopolies are possible without government intervention? You think we'd all be better off with toll roads and a dozen competing electric companies, no environmental regulations, and no food or workplace safety laws?
If you want to live in that world, why don't you and your Libertarian friends all move to some small county someplace in Montana? I'm sure you could control local politics and get your slate elected and agenda enacted. I mean, there are a lot of you, right? It's not like you are some tiny little fringe group that can never get it's act together. Oh, wait, it's been tried, and yes, you ARE some tiny little fringe group that can't get it's act together. I mean, come on. Every other ideology under the sun has managed to get itself enacted and tried out someplace in the real world. Either Libertarians are completely ineffecive goofballs who can't even manage what the freakin' Quakers managed, i.e. get a plot of land and set up your own rules, OR Libertarians know their policies are full of shit and don't want to see them enacted because so long as they are purely imaginary, we can all imagine them actually working.
I'm pretty sure that if politicians enact laws allowing backbone providers to decide what data passes over their backbone and how fast, it will take at least ten minutes to load any page critical of said politicians.
Oh, me too, to be honest. I just like to give Libertarians a hard time, one, because they tend to spout off party rhetoric without understanding the implications; two, because they tend to not agree with, or not even know their party platform and it's fun to make them admit they aren't "really" Libertarians; and three, because I consider myself a socialist leaning anarchist, and nothing pisses us off more than someone who agrees with us about nine out of ten things and then goes off on some wild capitalist owning-class tangent.
Pshaw. Just because they don't know about the issue doesn't mean they wouldn't care if they did know. I have explained this issue to non technical people, and everyone I have talked to about it (okay, less than a dozen non-nerds) is against it once they understand it. People don't like being screwed out of things they have become accustomed to. Just because your date used rohypnol and you didn't realize you were being screwed doesn't mean it wasn't rape.
An AC post, replying to what could easily be considered flamebait at best (I should know, I wrote it that way;-), that is rational and insightful? Wha?!? Where's the real AC, what have you done with him?
You hit the nail on the head about Libertarians. They are idealogues, and a bit crazy, but they have some good ideas. And I hadn't even thought about migration difficulties in voting systems, you are right, Condorcet may be more fair, but it is really complicated. You basically have to take every possible pairing of candidates and say who you would prefer given those two choices. Approval voting is not as fair in some ways, but much simpler to implement.
I think the Libertarian party would get less votes in a system such as you describe, as people would be scared that the Libertarians might actually win.
If you read the party platform, Libertarians come across as scary nutcases. They deny the existence of natural monopolies and state that all monopolies come from government regulation, overlooking hundreds of years of economic theory. In a Libertarian country, the schools, police, fire, roads, water, power, and sewer systems would all be privatized. All regulations would be abolished. Tainted meat? Sue! Airplane crashes due to poor maintenance? Don't fly with them, the free market will sort it! Environmental disasters? Sue, after the damage has been done of course.
There are two answers to any problem in Libertarian La-La Land: Vote with your wallet, or sue. Of course, if you don't have any money to begin with, you're pretty much screwed, but that's Social Darwinism for you. Obviously, the fact that you are poor proves you are inferior, Q.E.D.
Now that I'm done bashing Libertarians (they make such an easy target, almost as much fun to taunt as hippies) let me just say I like Condorcet voting better than approval voting.
"Poses a circular argument" is really that hard to say? Right, I know begging the question isn't quite the same as a circular argument, because you don't use A to prove B and then B to prove A, you just use A to prove A, but that's really splitting hairs for most people. The reason the original meaning of "Begging the question" is going away is because it is unclear and not useful for most people, who wouldn't recognize a logical fallacy if it jumped up and bit them in the syllogism. You have a valid point, from a linguistic snob's point of view. Unfortunately for liguistic snobs, there are no Holy Guardians of the One True Language. Language is as it is used, and people change words and make up new ones all the time. Complain all you like, but it's unlikely to have much of an effect.
I like his version better, 'any hole is fair game, no bars on these holes!' That's dirty. I like it. Anyway, the point is moo. You know, like the opinion of a cow. It's "moo."
In other news, noted playwright William Shakespeare was at the beach when he bent over and heard a ripping sound. Convinced he had torn his swim trunks, he asked a companion to look behind and report. "No holes, Bard" was the reply.
What article did you read? because the one I read provided credible evidence the government was involved. Here's one of many relevant quotes providing credible evidence:
Congressional investigators estimated the U.S. government spent $30 million last year buying personal data from private brokers. But that number likely understates the breadth of transactions, since brokers said they rarely charge law enforcement agencies any price.
I guess you don't consider congressional investigators to be credible? Here is a nice quote from one data brokering company:
PDJ said it always provided help to police for free. "Agencies from all across the country took advantage of it," said PDJ's lawyer, Larry Slade of Los Angeles.
So that $30 million really is just the tip of the iceberg, most of this stuff was provided for free.
Here are some more specific examples from the article that the granparent post somehow missed:
"We are requesting any and all information you have regarding the above cell phone account and the account holder... including account activity and the account holder's address," Ana Bueno, a police investigator in Redwood City, Calif., wrote in October to PDJ Investigations of Granbury, Texas.
An agent in Denver for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Anna Wells, sent a similar request on March 31 on Homeland Security stationery: "I am looking for all available subscriber information for the following phone number," Wells wrote to a corporate alias used by PDJ.
The issues that people have with this are: 1.) These unregulated, unsupervised companies are agregating our personal information and reselling it in the first place. 2.) The companies in question use illegal tactics to obtain this information and 3.) Government agencies do not need to obtain a warrant to use these services.
So, you are all for unsupervised third parties spying on you by any means, legal or not, and not only profiting from what they find, but giving it to the government without the need for a warrant or even an official investigation? If you really enjoy getting screwed that much, I'm sure you can find some profitable work in the escort business.
I was trying to show that corporations could be called on to handle arbitration instead of government. Not that I would really want that for myself, but that's not the point. I was creating a hypothetical situation in which a government did not do the one thing you said governments should do, but did do other things, at the behest of the governed. The point is that government should do the will of the people, whatever that may be.
Perhaps we give the government certain resources in order to prevent the necessity of an arbitration situation that we know will go badly. For instance, trying to arbitrate with someone who has nothing to lose is usually pointless, so perhaps we pool our resources and make sure that everyone has something to lose. Perhaps we have learned from experience that the free market is not the most efficient solution for certain classes of problems, and so we want our government to handle those situations, for instance, the case of natural monopolies such as water, power, sewers and roads.
Ideally, no one would be forced to live under a government they did not support. They would sign a contract with their chosen governing authority which spelled out the rights and responsibilities of each, and they would be free to leave and contract with a different government if they so choose. Until then, you are right and governments do choose how you will be governed.
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Wow, you sound really emotionally invested in this issue. Take a few deep breaths. Repeat after me, "The size of my dick has nothing to do with the success or failure of Microsoft." There, feel better?
Anytime a big company uses Linux in a large installation, that is news. Embedded Linux is something most geeks here don't get to play with that much, so this is news. The fact that a company that is fighting tooth and nail against open source uses open source, that is also news.
Your ridiculous strawman, slippery slope, and ad hominem arguments only highlight the growing panic amongst luser admins who have staked their careers on a steaming pile of crap.
You know, I suspected that might be the case, and you just had issue with the use of the word "partner" because hiding what you are makes it seem like that's not okay. But I see so much homophobia here, I thought that you were just closeted and self hating. BTW I only posted as AC originally because this whole thread is off topic, not because I have any fear of my name being associated with anything pro-gay. Anyways, my karma hasn't dipped below "excellent" since they imposed the cap, so I can afford to be modded off-topic.
Oh, and I'm not actually a fag. I tried. I really gave it a fair shot, and I still wouldn't turn down fooling around with a guy who I liked and respected if he really wanted me (as long as my wife was okay with it, which she probably would be as we have an open marriage and she currently owes me one.) But having tried it I know for sure that guys just don't do it for me like girls do. I have to like and respect a guy, and he has to really want me, to do it with him. I'll do just about any girl who's still breathing.
That's probably TMI, I know...
Hmmm, I just wait until games hit the "$30 for the game and two expansion packs" level (1-2 years) or the $10 bargain bin level (3-4 years). Or if they are console games, I buy them used. So I don't get to play newer games, they are still new to me when I play them. Plus I can get by on with a cheaper computer. I played MUDs in college and Asheron's Call when it came out, and got fairly well hooked, but the problem for me has always been that I find it hard to suspend disbelief and really get into the story with a bunch of characters named "DildoBuggers4693" running around shouting "D00d! U totly pwnd that n00b!"
They would have to provide access to the home for any competitor on their wires at a rate no higher than they charge to their own internet business.
Wasn't this the way it was for a while here in the US? I tried to look this up in google, but failed to find anything relevant. Yet I am sure this was the law a few years back, and I remember a big stink in the tech community when it was changed. Anyone have some references on this?
Learnt: (UK) past tense of to learn.
Not everyone lives in the US or speaks US English.
Then again, you could always just check the damn source to see how it works...
No thanks. Reading slashcode has been shown to be only slightly less insanity producing than chatting with Cthulhu.
I'm curious, what do you suppose motivates people who think global warming is a problem? You make it sound as if people who believe in global warming have some kind of an agenda. What is their agenda and what motivates them to persue it? What is your agenda? You say you aren't invested in oil or anything, so what do you get from denying that global warming is a man made problem?
Is it that you like to think of yourself as a good and decent person, but you profit off of the status quo (not oil per se, but the system that depends on it), so you must deny that there is a problem in order to go on profiting and still believing you are good and decent?
We have many ways outside of the historical record to measure temperature. Tree rings and ice cores spring to mind. What lgw was saying is true, if you look at the data you will see that prior to about 10,000BC the climate fluctuated dramatically. After that, it stabilised. We don't know why or how, but from our point of view it was sheer dumb luck. When a person wins the lottery, even though we know that physics caused those particular balls to be selected, it was still luck.
Albedo is a term indicating how reflective something is. Reflection is not absorbtion. Completely the opposite, actually. So as the ice melts, just the opposite of what you predict will happen. Ice reflects a great deal of heat. Without the ice, more heat will be absorbed.
This sgtory has been spun in such a way as to ignore the central issue. She was protecting her library patrons rights and helping the police. What kind of case would they have if they didn't follow procedure? The creep might have gotten off scott-free. The police and the library might have been sued. So she added a few extra hours to the investigation. She should get a fucking medal, for doing her job, and also for doing the police's job.
The conspiracy nut in me wants to think this is all calculated to make people forget that police actually need a subpeona.
I've noticed that I get the opportunity to mod more when I post less. I think there is a built in bias towards letting lurkers moderate, so that people who post consistently will continue to post.
Thanks. What's the point of posting a story like this now, when everyone who reads slashdot has left work already? Nothing relieves the boredom of work like a good flamefest. Now I have to wait until tomorrow. (read from home? and waste MY precious time?)
I love the smell of burning karma in the morning... It smells like slashdot!
"Gentlemen! To complement my recent invention of the Five Assed Monkey, I present to you... The Man With Nine Dicks!"
--Dr. Alphonse Mephisto
Why? Because it's hard to fit a normal sized system disk in a 3U server with 16 drive bays. There's a tiny sliver of space above the drives that can hold a laptop CD ROM, Floppy, and 2.5" Hard drive. I've built several of these as head nodes for clusters using dual 3ware SATA RAID controllers and quad AMD boards. The new Escalade cards use Infiniband wiring from the RAID cards to the SATA backplane, so there's only four cables instead of sixteen, which is much nicer than trying to fit 16 SATA cables, two IDE cables, a floppy cable and 8 power cables past the six fans that sit in the middle of the box.
Yes, yes I can picture a Beowulf cluster of those, though I actually use ROCKS.
You just proved you have no rebuttal to my logical counters. A strawman isn't just an argument you don't happen to like, the phrase has a specific meaning. It means to misrepresent an opponent's position, defeat that position, and claim you have defeated the opponents real position. The thing is, I am not misrepresenting the position of the Libertarian Party. Oh, there may be Libertarians with different positions, but they aren't the official Libertarian Party, are they? Don't believe me? Go read the party platform at lp.org. Everything I say is right there. I am not really trying to logically counter their insane propositions, just point out how insane they are.
I mean, I will debate those points if you want, but really, you don't think monopolies are possible without government intervention? You think we'd all be better off with toll roads and a dozen competing electric companies, no environmental regulations, and no food or workplace safety laws?
If you want to live in that world, why don't you and your Libertarian friends all move to some small county someplace in Montana? I'm sure you could control local politics and get your slate elected and agenda enacted. I mean, there are a lot of you, right? It's not like you are some tiny little fringe group that can never get it's act together. Oh, wait, it's been tried, and yes, you ARE some tiny little fringe group that can't get it's act together. I mean, come on. Every other ideology under the sun has managed to get itself enacted and tried out someplace in the real world. Either Libertarians are completely ineffecive goofballs who can't even manage what the freakin' Quakers managed, i.e. get a plot of land and set up your own rules, OR Libertarians know their policies are full of shit and don't want to see them enacted because so long as they are purely imaginary, we can all imagine them actually working.
I'm pretty sure that if politicians enact laws allowing backbone providers to decide what data passes over their backbone and how fast, it will take at least ten minutes to load any page critical of said politicians.
Oh, me too, to be honest. I just like to give Libertarians a hard time, one, because they tend to spout off party rhetoric without understanding the implications; two, because they tend to not agree with, or not even know their party platform and it's fun to make them admit they aren't "really" Libertarians; and three, because I consider myself a socialist leaning anarchist, and nothing pisses us off more than someone who agrees with us about nine out of ten things and then goes off on some wild capitalist owning-class tangent.
Pshaw. Just because they don't know about the issue doesn't mean they wouldn't care if they did know. I have explained this issue to non technical people, and everyone I have talked to about it (okay, less than a dozen non-nerds) is against it once they understand it. People don't like being screwed out of things they have become accustomed to. Just because your date used rohypnol and you didn't realize you were being screwed doesn't mean it wasn't rape.
An AC post, replying to what could easily be considered flamebait at best (I should know, I wrote it that way ;-), that is rational and insightful? Wha?!? Where's the real AC, what have you done with him?
You hit the nail on the head about Libertarians. They are idealogues, and a bit crazy, but they have some good ideas. And I hadn't even thought about migration difficulties in voting systems, you are right, Condorcet may be more fair, but it is really complicated. You basically have to take every possible pairing of candidates and say who you would prefer given those two choices. Approval voting is not as fair in some ways, but much simpler to implement.
I think the Libertarian party would get less votes in a system such as you describe, as people would be scared that the Libertarians might actually win.
If you read the party platform, Libertarians come across as scary nutcases. They deny the existence of natural monopolies and state that all monopolies come from government regulation, overlooking hundreds of years of economic theory. In a Libertarian country, the schools, police, fire, roads, water, power, and sewer systems would all be privatized. All regulations would be abolished. Tainted meat? Sue! Airplane crashes due to poor maintenance? Don't fly with them, the free market will sort it! Environmental disasters? Sue, after the damage has been done of course.
There are two answers to any problem in Libertarian La-La Land: Vote with your wallet, or sue. Of course, if you don't have any money to begin with, you're pretty much screwed, but that's Social Darwinism for you. Obviously, the fact that you are poor proves you are inferior, Q.E.D.
Now that I'm done bashing Libertarians (they make such an easy target, almost as much fun to taunt as hippies) let me just say I like Condorcet voting better than approval voting.
"Poses a circular argument" is really that hard to say? Right, I know begging the question isn't quite the same as a circular argument, because you don't use A to prove B and then B to prove A, you just use A to prove A, but that's really splitting hairs for most people. The reason the original meaning of "Begging the question" is going away is because it is unclear and not useful for most people, who wouldn't recognize a logical fallacy if it jumped up and bit them in the syllogism. You have a valid point, from a linguistic snob's point of view. Unfortunately for liguistic snobs, there are no Holy Guardians of the One True Language. Language is as it is used, and people change words and make up new ones all the time. Complain all you like, but it's unlikely to have much of an effect.
I like his version better, 'any hole is fair game, no bars on these holes!' That's dirty. I like it. Anyway, the point is moo. You know, like the opinion of a cow. It's "moo."
In other news, noted playwright William Shakespeare was at the beach when he bent over and heard a ripping sound. Convinced he had torn his swim trunks, he asked a companion to look behind and report. "No holes, Bard" was the reply.
I guess you don't consider congressional investigators to be credible? Here is a nice quote from one data brokering company:
So that $30 million really is just the tip of the iceberg, most of this stuff was provided for free.
Here are some more specific examples from the article that the granparent post somehow missed:
The issues that people have with this are: 1.) These unregulated, unsupervised companies are agregating our personal information and reselling it in the first place. 2.) The companies in question use illegal tactics to obtain this information and 3.) Government agencies do not need to obtain a warrant to use these services.
So, you are all for unsupervised third parties spying on you by any means, legal or not, and not only profiting from what they find, but giving it to the government without the need for a warrant or even an official investigation? If you really enjoy getting screwed that much, I'm sure you can find some profitable work in the escort business.
I was trying to show that corporations could be called on to handle arbitration instead of government. Not that I would really want that for myself, but that's not the point. I was creating a hypothetical situation in which a government did not do the one thing you said governments should do, but did do other things, at the behest of the governed. The point is that government should do the will of the people, whatever that may be.
Perhaps we give the government certain resources in order to prevent the necessity of an arbitration situation that we know will go badly. For instance, trying to arbitrate with someone who has nothing to lose is usually pointless, so perhaps we pool our resources and make sure that everyone has something to lose. Perhaps we have learned from experience that the free market is not the most efficient solution for certain classes of problems, and so we want our government to handle those situations, for instance, the case of natural monopolies such as water, power, sewers and roads.
Ideally, no one would be forced to live under a government they did not support. They would sign a contract with their chosen governing authority which spelled out the rights and responsibilities of each, and they would be free to leave and contract with a different government if they so choose. Until then, you are right and governments do choose how you will be governed.
What is this "base ball" you speak of? Couldn't you phrase that in terms of a car analogy?