Add: one ounce of capitalism, one ounce of socialism, a pinch of communism
Umm, the Communist half of Korea is one of the poorest and most repressive places on Earth. The article is about South Korea, which is effectively a different country. Think east and west Germany before the Berlin Wall came down.
SMP isn't a good thing in itself, as the article seemed to imply: it's what you use when there isn't a single processor available that's fast enough. One processor at full speed is almost always better than two at half the speed.
It depends. If you are bogged down in a context thrash, dual slower processors will recover more easily than a single fast one. Generally, if you have many processes in the run queue, multiple CPUs perform better than a single one.
Re:This has nothing to do with making money...
on
Expose on Insider Loans
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· Score: 1, Flamebait
You'll notice names like Enron, Dynegy, Tyco, WorldCom, and Adelphia.
I don't doubt for a second that the Linux companies would be granting loans and stock options left and right, if they had any money. Wasn't ESR openly gloating about the value of his options? "Hello Pot, meet Mr Kettle".
You should have used MS Outlook, it is the most ethical email system since it has the "Recall" feature. The CEO could have recalled the email without presenting anyone with any ethical dilemas
It's interesting you should mention this, because the designers of NT (and VMS) actually did consider that there are cases in which the administrator of a system should not have access to certain files on the system. For example, should the sysadmin have the ability to view or even edit the payroll file? Or HR records? Unix does nothing to prevent it - root has access to all files. On NT, however, any user can have an ACL that denies the sysadmin rights to access a file or folder, and can log attempts by anyone including the sysadmin to do so. Another difference is that on NT you have to "take ownership" of a file, but on Unix you can "change ownership" of a file. That means that if you change the ACL on a file you had no read access to to give yourself access to it, you cannot change it back to what it was.
There is a special privilege on NT called "Backup Operator" - it allows you to copy any file to tape, or back again, but does not let you read the file. The developers of Unix, in an academic environment, did not consider how the system would be used outside of that setting, and many of the architectural choices they made are ill-suited to the corporate world.
I don't know where you get the ridiculous idea that the corporate CEO and the "tree hugger" want the same thing. Because you don't back it up, I don't know where to start critiquing it; its fallacy is self-evident to anyone who has the slightest knowledge of the movement.
Altho' they don't realize it, the "tree huggers" campaigning for "fair trade" are in fact campaigning for the removal of trade barriers and subsidies, which is the definition of globalization and free trade. Yet these same people will turn around and say that free trade is bad. But fair trade and free trade are the same thing, since you can't have "unfair" trade in a free market; buyers and sellers will simply disintermediate you.
The constitution gives you the right to own guns. It does not give you the right to own them anonymously.
The only reason that the Constitution does not include things like privacy and anonymity is that these things simply were not problems back then. Want to have a private conversation? Walk out into the middle of a field, and just talk. Want to be anonymous? Move to the next state over and just start using a different name. Enshrining privacy and anonymity simply would not have occured to the Founding Fathers, because they could not imagine a situation in which the government would ever be in a position to deny them to its citizens.
The closest thing to what you want is the 4th Amendment.
Not really. A PIN only works if you have the hardware token that goes with it, it's easy to see if your hardware token is missing and you can have it invalidated without needing access to it, and it's very difficult too automate cracking PINs - you can't attach a machine to an ATM and even if you could, the ATM will enforce delays so that guessing a PIN will take a long time.
A password, on the other hand, doesn't need a hardware token (not many people use SecurID), you might not know if its been stolen until it's too late, often it cannot be invalidated without you (or someone else) accessing the same system that it formerly protected, and many systems (unlike/bin/login) don't enforce a delay between guesses.
I used to be one of those people who thought those anti-globalization protesters were just treehugging tenderhearts looking for something to do. Mostly because I'm for free trade on principle. But then I realized how our farm subsidies caused starvation in poorer countries by destroying local food production industries.
Ironically, by campaigning against agricultural subsidies and for "fair prices" for the developing world, the anti-globalization movement is agitating in favor of more globalization! That would homogenize prices across the market.
Actually, the whole movement is like that. They are anti-profit, but pro-tax. Anti-monopoly, but pro-government. Anti-capitalist, but pro-freedom.
Really, the corporate CEO and the tree-hugger want the same things, neither of which are in the interests of the government, which does its best to set them against each other.
As I understand it the farm subsidies are even worse in the EU, esp France, and this is causing problems with Eastern European countries who wouldn't get the subsidies if they joined the EU. This is from the economist which isn't an unbiased source; is it true?
Yup, google for "Common Agricultural Policy". You can get the raw figures from the EU website itself, then do the analysis yourself (compare, say, the CAP to the value of the agricultural sector in one of the aspiring members). I won't post a link, I want you to look for yourself so you know that I'm not biased the other way.
Have you considered outsourcing backups? Granted, I have absolutely no experience in utilizing such services, but it might have a better ring to it than "new hire" to your boss.
Ah, I remember the good old days when the easiest way to do a backup was to uuencode a compress'd tar, split it into a thousand parts and post all of them to Usenet!:-)
Just a thought: Would your boss would be more willing to hire someone *part-time* to handle the backups?
Probably not. You would want to share responsibility for backups between the entire team on rotation, so that anyone can do a restore at 3AM without assistance if necessary. Don't forget that the point of the exercise is disaster recovery, no-one sane does backups just for the sheer hell of it.
You could hire a part-timer to come in and change tapes, sure, but not to do anything that requires thinking.
On the contrary, if you can get by with spending 10% less on equipment (the other way of looking at this) than that can make the difference between being a solvent, viable company and everyone being out of work.
You're at a university, so you are under no commercial pressure to deliver. I mean, once you're past undergrad assignment deadlines, research gets written when it gets written, right? You can't rush science, maaaan, pass the bong. But in the real world, there are real consequences, and 10% could make a real difference to computation-intensive jobs.
The US Revolution was really a terrorist effort. Disproportional warfare was fought by the Americans, the British, and other power powers of the time had strict rules of engagement. Certain things were "allowed" and "unallowed" during warfare. The Americans, outmatched by the British Forces employed distinctly divergent tactics (raids, ambushes etc) that were -- at the time -- considered barbaric, disgraceful and un-honourable.... Terrorism.
As far as I am aware, the American revolutionaries tended to attack military and government targets. Contrast them with modern-day terrorists such as the IRA who focus their attacks primarily on the civilian population. That's the real difference between freedom fighters and terrorists, not their tactics, not their strategy, but their choice of target.
Note that the Taliban/al-Queda were freedom fighters while they only attacked Soviet military forces, but exactly the same people using exactly the same techniques became terrorists when they turned their attention to noncombatants.
That is just plain wrong and is an indication of the ignorance of the problem. Zambia, Zimbabwe, Botswana, South Africa and Malawi together probably has that amount on their own! And on top of that people are starving right now, so AIDS-deaths are only really starting to impact right now.
The people of Africa don't need AIDS drugs. What they need is to start using contraception! The AID epidemic will never be solved until the widespread belief there that using a condom makes you less of a man is eradicated. All the medicine in the world is literally treating the symptoms rather than the cure in Africa.
Of course, what they also need to stop their constant civil wars, and establish democratic governments with universal suffrage. Most African countries like Zimbabwe could easily feed their own people and even be very wealthy from mineral resources, but they can't stop centuries-old tribal conflicts long enough to do it.
Until Africa sorts itself out, the West should not donate another penny - it'll only get siphoned off into a dictator's Swiss account or get spent on arms.
continue to protect a criminal organisation (MSFT) which pays half it's politicians. No, now the US is preaching the word of IP, patents and general stifling of inovation to 3rd World countries.
It's telling that the Slashbots are so upset by RIAA and MS. These things are utterly trivial. The real problems are in steel tarriffs and agricultural subsidies, that a nation that touts free trade (and the EU is just as bad here) resorts to protectionism and barely-disguised mercantilism at the first sign of trouble. Trouble's when you need your principles the most, not the least.
The developing world doesn't give a stuff what word processor you prefer or how you think it's unfair that you should have to pay, what, $15 for a CD, so you steal it instead. Look at the big picture, people.
Does anyone know of a console-land type of setup, a "getty"-ish app, perhaps, that would let me log in, start a task (say a big compile), detach, and then reattach later to 'check up on it'?
That is exactly what screen does. CTRL-A d to "detach" from screen, then log off. When you log back in, do "screen -r" to reattatch, and everything will still be running.
On an X windows system, you can do the same thing with VNC or even Xvfb.
The lives of workers aren't threatened by paying taxes, unless the country's economy is in deep shit. Taking $100,000 from a CEOs $1,000,000 salary to clothe and feed other hungry citizens is less slavery than forcing those other citizens to die
As I said before, not giving something to someone is not the same as taking away something that they already own. If someone chooses not to work, no-one is forcing them to starve - they have made the choice themselves. You might as well say someone who throws themselves off a cliff is "forced" to die. Force is nothing to do with it, it is simply the consequence of choosing a particular course of action.
, a McDonalds burger-flipper pays almost zero tax, he supports himself only (as it should be), and an IT worker earning $60,000 supports himself plus a few people on welfare (as it should be).
The tax system is unfair because the people who contribute the most receive the least, and the people who contribute the least receive the most. In a truly fair system, most tax would be paid by the poor, since they are the biggest users of the government's services.
why should people who pay for private healthcare, education, pensions etc, have to pay for everyone elses? After all, they're saving the government money by providing for themselves!
So no welfare results in 3 types of slavery, and a welfare state results in only 1 type of partial slavery, well actually I'd rather call it compulsory community donation.
You keep using the word "slavery" but I don't think you know what it means. Slavery means forcing someone to produce economic value and confiscating it from them, without allowing them any control over its use. Slaves worked in fields or mines or building pyramids. People who do not work produce nothing, therefore, the term slavery is irrelevant.
The only way to stop someone (even a criminal heroin addict needing food, clothing and shelter is by killing them or cryogenically freezing them (killing them).
So long as they're prevented from harming innocent citizens, there's no need to interact with them at all. Let the live the lives they choose - well away from decent folk, and with their own money.
Freedom means freedom to work wherever you like, freedom to eat whatever you like, freedom to buyy whatever you like, freedom to not work if you like.
These freedoms don't exist, because they all require obligations. Consider: if you are free to eat whatever you like, without working, then someone must be obligated to work and provide the food. If you are free to buy whatever you like without working, then someone must be obligated to work and provide it for you.
The way our society makes this fair - for the most part, I agree that there are distortions - is that what you can buy is directly proportional to how much you contribute to society by working.
If we were forced to work then what reasone would employers have to make workplaces nice?
But you aren't forced to work in a particular place or in a particular role (which really would be slavery). So long as you do work, you can pick and choose where and what, subject to limitations (i.e. our society insists only graduates of medical schools can be doctors, so doctors are "forced" to qualify, is that a bad thing?). Competition for the best workers means that companies provide well above the bare minimum to their employees.
It's unfair for the old woman who switched on her kettle, putting the grid power usage 1kW over capacity, requiring an entire nuclear reactor to be brought on line just for her damn kettle to get a standard bill. Does she get a $300,000 bill for her electricity? Nope, everybody absorbs the cost.
Everybody does not "absorb" the cost. The cost of the electricity is divided by all the customers in proportion to how much they use.
It takes weeks to bring a reactor from cold to a working state, so your example is nonsensical - the excess power would simply be met from reserves. That's why your TV doesn't go out during the interval when everyone in the country switches their kettles on.
Ordinary citizens should pay, their companies should pay for it.
Ordinary citizens have already paid for it through their taxes. That's the point. The people who pay get nothing, and the people who don't pay get everything, exactly the opposite of how it should be.
Picasso, Beethoven and Mozart would have been mentally unable to do Data Entry/Secretarial jobs.
Well, so what? I can't compose symphonies either. Neither can 99.9% of the population, or more, but as I say, unemployment is at 3-4%.
Immigrants generally don't have savings. My Dad came to England with £3 in his pocket - that was all. He lived on welfare initially, but then within a short time he got a very good job due to his work ethic.
Fair enough. Perhaps the solution is to grant loans to asylum seekers rather than writing them a blank cheque. That's not a problem at all for people like your father who work hard and pay more into the system than they take out.
Look at the automotive industry - now cars are made by robots, and these companies have virtually no employees. shareholders also can be anywhere in the world. A company that becomes automated isn't tied to one country, this means that the factory can easily relocate to China where everything is cheaper.
That's bad for auto workers - but it's very good for anyone who wants to buy a car, because cars are cheaper. So long as the auto workers can find other jobs (and they can, otherwise unemployment in this country would be much higher than it is) then everyone is better off. There are the same number of jobs as before, but more people can afford cars!
Banks are also being automated, think about it, you can easily do your job in India, why do you have to be in the UK?
Actually, the reason is that bankers like to be close to other bankers (videoconferencing is no subsititute for being there except for the most trivial of conversations) so they tend to cluster in banking hotspots like London, Frankfurt, NYC, etc. When banks do move, it's only to go to another hotspot. That isn't going to change any time soon.
But your job's going to be moved there, want to go?
Simple analysis shows that isn't true. What could be simpler than a burger flipping job at McDonalds? Surely simple jobs will move first? No, because a burger flipper in Bangalore can't flip burgers for a customer in London!
Any job that does not require interacting directly with people can be moved offshore - but any job that does is perfectly safe here.
What I want is a filesystem that supports 1)Long File Names 2)Large Files (over 4GB) 3)Journaling and 4) can be used between Linux, Mac OS X and whatever else. Unfortuantely there are currently no filesystems that mett all of these criteria.
Ok, so being I'm not the highest on there terminology totem pole, can somebody expain to me why journaling matters to me, and why its worth 10-15% of my system resources?
Like everything else, it's about money. If you are getting paid to do a massive compute job - for example, rendering a movie, or simulating a skyscraper in an earthquake - then the otherwise minimal risk of filesystem corruption becomes significant. What do you do if you lose the output and don't have time to compute that part again before the deadline? A lot of the intermediate data produced by serious computation is simply too big to dump to tape regularly. This is why SGI had journalling in XFS - because time is money, and journalling saves you a lot of time if something goes wrong.
Linus Torvalds wrote Linux when he was a student; in Finland students are supported by the taxpayer.
What, all these people giving away their work FOR FREE are an abomination?
It's still not free to produce; that's why all but a handful of free software writers have day jobs. Even Linus, Larry Wall and Eric S Raymond don't support themselves on free software itself, but on working for a chip designer, writing books and lecturing respectively.
The Internet would not be possible without free software
What, you think software grows on trees? You think that free software writers don't need money?
I am enjoying this conversation; a pity that Slashdot eventually locks old discussions. It's great that you get notified these days when someone posts a followup; I remember/. before it even had accounts!
Once a Welfare state starts excluding certain people from welfare that's called a slave race in which case the American civil war was not won at all, the slave race just changed to a different group of people
Not giving something to someone is completely different from taking away something that they already have. In fact, the welfare state itself is a form slavery - it compels a class of workers to give the economic value they produce to a class of people who do not work.
If you go to Kirby(Liverpool) and force a young heroin-addicted girl to work in an office, then that'll decrease the work output of the office as she thieves, kicks, punches and stabs all the other employees with her syringe. The country's GDP would decrease if these people were given salaries to decrease a company's output by greater than the miniscule amount of tax that would give such a person shelter. She can then thieve off other unemployed people, leaving GDP unaffected.
There are certain people who are simply unemployable, it's true. But the fact is that we don't owe them a living. Very few people are born unable to pull their weight in society (i.e. to produce at least as much as they consume). In the vast majority of cases it is a choice freely (if unwisely) entered into. The individual in your example is a parasite, nothing more. I don't advocate "disposing" of such people, but I don't believe that honest, law-abiding citizens have any responsibility to people who deliberately choose not to be honest or law-abiding themselves. It would be very different if she were a good citizen facing circumstances beyond her control.
Temporary slaves, "Be a Nigger for 25 years and then you'll be freed!".
Not at all; they are free to earn money and spend it like anyone else. But it is unfair to those who have contributed to the system by paying taxes if people who have contributed nothing enjoy all the benefits of the system, leaving nothing left for those who have contributed.
Example: ordinary British citizens have to pay for flu vaccinations, but illegal immigrants get it for free.
There must be some freeloaders, these "freeloaders" are just people who've fallen out of fashion e.g. Windows 3.1 administrators. The Capitalist system makes productive people into freeloaders involuntarily
This is a classic economic fallacy, called the "lump of labour" by economists. It is based on the assumption that people have fixed skill sets, which isn't true in practice. What happens is that people re-train and re-skill themselves and find other work. Let me give you an example: unemployment in Britain is currently around 3-4%, amongst the lowest in Europe. 2-3% unemployment is perfectly natural and is caused by people changing jobs or taking career breaks. What happened to all the miners laid off in the 80s? Why, they found other jobs - there aren't a million miners still sitting idle.
In tech, few people become obsolete, because we learn new technologies all the time - if anyone chooses not to keep their skills up to date, they have no-one to blame but themselves if they can't find work.
What you gonna do with these out of fashion people who have worked too long in your country to go back, but not long enough to earn welfare rights - shoot them? Same "starve and die immigrant asshole" argument as above.
No, do what most ordinary citizens do: live on savings until you find another job. I was laid off last year, and that's exactly what I did.
BTW, I think that native-born citizens should have to earn welfare rights too, by contributing into the system by working and paying taxes.
If all jobs are automated then there will be no salaries, and the massive corporations that would benefit from such automation will have the resources to move their money to an offshore tax haven, robbing your economy of investment and salaries
Again, it doesn't work like that in practice. Money sitting in an offshore haven is useless; like electricity, money is only useful when it moves from place to place. People talk about "massive corporations" as if they are some sort of alien presence, but in reality corporations are employees and shareholders. (Do you have an ISA or a pension? You're a shareholder too). Money made by a corporation pretty soon gets spent in a country.
Example: banking has not moved offshore, London is still THE financial centre of the world. There are 700-ish American banks with a presence in London, compared with 400-ish in NYC. (NYC does have more volume in certain instruments, but London is a one-stop shop). This is an example of service economy that is not paid for by salaries, and even in these down times, it's thriving.
While we all hate AOL they still do offer the most access numbers out of any other ISP if you do a lot of traveling.
Actually, I don't hate AOL anymore. Most of the reason they were despised by the congoscenti was their members' idiotic presence on Usenet, but now Usenet has become all but unusable anyway, thanks to idiots from dozens of ISPs. All the worthwhile discussion forums are on private mailing lists and moderated web boards (like this one). I simply don't encounter AOL or its users, so they're really irrelevant to me. But I would be sorry to see AOL go out of business, they're a real bellwether of the industry, and if they're gone it won't be a good sign for the markets.
It won't happen while ADSL is a matter of microfilters and routers and hubs, but once it becomes ubiquitous, then AOL becomes a utility like phone or electricity. Wake up, switch on the TV, there's the breakfast news and lots of friendly links to AOL content, products and services.
With few exceptions, I've usually found that accomodations to ADA laws (or just accessibility in general) often benefit everyone, not just those targeted.
Well, yes and no. All that stuff isn't free, and will all have to be factored into the price. If you aren't in a business that the "disabled" patronize, what's in it for everyone else?
You wanted it you got it....! blender is OpenSource now. We are very sorry that the site is down now but we had to move the server because our previous ISP unplugged us last thursday! Stay tuned we will be up soon.
It would be helpful for Slashdot or OSDN or whoever to offer to mirror stuff that they're planning to link to.
Slashdot Mirror
Add: one ounce of capitalism, one ounce of socialism, a pinch of communism
Umm, the Communist half of Korea is one of the poorest and most repressive places on Earth. The article is about South Korea, which is effectively a different country. Think east and west Germany before the Berlin Wall came down.
SMP isn't a good thing in itself, as the article seemed to imply: it's what you use when there isn't a single processor available that's fast enough. One processor at full speed is almost always better than two at half the speed.
It depends. If you are bogged down in a context thrash, dual slower processors will recover more easily than a single fast one. Generally, if you have many processes in the run queue, multiple CPUs perform better than a single one.
You'll notice names like Enron, Dynegy, Tyco, WorldCom, and Adelphia.
I don't doubt for a second that the Linux companies would be granting loans and stock options left and right, if they had any money. Wasn't ESR openly gloating about the value of his options? "Hello Pot, meet Mr Kettle".
You should have used MS Outlook, it is the most ethical email system since it has the "Recall" feature. The CEO could have recalled the email without presenting anyone with any ethical dilemas
It's interesting you should mention this, because the designers of NT (and VMS) actually did consider that there are cases in which the administrator of a system should not have access to certain files on the system. For example, should the sysadmin have the ability to view or even edit the payroll file? Or HR records? Unix does nothing to prevent it - root has access to all files. On NT, however, any user can have an ACL that denies the sysadmin rights to access a file or folder, and can log attempts by anyone including the sysadmin to do so. Another difference is that on NT you have to "take ownership" of a file, but on Unix you can "change ownership" of a file. That means that if you change the ACL on a file you had no read access to to give yourself access to it, you cannot change it back to what it was.
There is a special privilege on NT called "Backup Operator" - it allows you to copy any file to tape, or back again, but does not let you read the file. The developers of Unix, in an academic environment, did not consider how the system would be used outside of that setting, and many of the architectural choices they made are ill-suited to the corporate world.
I don't know where you get the ridiculous idea that the corporate CEO and the "tree hugger" want
the same thing. Because you don't back it up, I don't know where to start critiquing it; its fallacy is self-evident to anyone who has the slightest knowledge of the movement.
Altho' they don't realize it, the "tree huggers" campaigning for "fair trade" are in fact campaigning for the removal of trade barriers and subsidies, which is the definition of globalization and free trade. Yet these same people will turn around and say that free trade is bad. But fair trade and free trade are the same thing, since you can't have "unfair" trade in a free market; buyers and sellers will simply disintermediate you.
The constitution gives you the right to own guns. It does not give you the right to own them anonymously.
The only reason that the Constitution does not include things like privacy and anonymity is that these things simply were not problems back then. Want to have a private conversation? Walk out into the middle of a field, and just talk. Want to be anonymous? Move to the next state over and just start using a different name. Enshrining privacy and anonymity simply would not have occured to the Founding Fathers, because they could not imagine a situation in which the government would ever be in a position to deny them to its citizens.
The closest thing to what you want is the 4th Amendment.
Do we see the problem here yet?
/bin/login) don't enforce a delay between guesses.
Not really. A PIN only works if you have the hardware token that goes with it, it's easy to see if your hardware token is missing and you can have it invalidated without needing access to it, and it's very difficult too automate cracking PINs - you can't attach a machine to an ATM and even if you could, the ATM will enforce delays so that guessing a PIN will take a long time.
A password, on the other hand, doesn't need a hardware token (not many people use SecurID), you might not know if its been stolen until it's too late, often it cannot be invalidated without you (or someone else) accessing the same system that it formerly protected, and many systems (unlike
What was your point again?
I used to be one of those people who thought those anti-globalization protesters were just treehugging tenderhearts looking for something to do. Mostly because I'm for free trade on principle. But then I realized how our farm subsidies caused starvation in poorer countries by destroying local food production industries.
Ironically, by campaigning against agricultural subsidies and for "fair prices" for the developing world, the anti-globalization movement is agitating in favor of more globalization! That would homogenize prices across the market.
Actually, the whole movement is like that. They are anti-profit, but pro-tax. Anti-monopoly, but pro-government. Anti-capitalist, but pro-freedom.
Really, the corporate CEO and the tree-hugger want the same things, neither of which are in the interests of the government, which does its best to set them against each other.
As I understand it the farm subsidies are even worse in the EU, esp France, and this is causing problems with Eastern European countries who wouldn't get the subsidies if they joined the EU. This is from the economist which isn't an unbiased source; is it true?
Yup, google for "Common Agricultural Policy". You can get the raw figures from the EU website itself, then do the analysis yourself (compare, say, the CAP to the value of the agricultural sector in one of the aspiring members). I won't post a link, I want you to look for yourself so you know that I'm not biased the other way.
Have you considered outsourcing backups? Granted, I have absolutely no experience in utilizing such services, but it might have a better ring to it than "new hire" to your boss.
:-)
Ah, I remember the good old days when the easiest way to do a backup was to uuencode a compress'd tar, split it into a thousand parts and post all of them to Usenet!
Just a thought: Would your boss would be more willing to hire someone *part-time* to handle the backups?
Probably not. You would want to share responsibility for backups between the entire team on rotation, so that anyone can do a restore at 3AM without assistance if necessary. Don't forget that the point of the exercise is disaster recovery, no-one sane does backups just for the sheer hell of it.
You could hire a part-timer to come in and change tapes, sure, but not to do anything that requires thinking.
"smack[ing] the Mac on the back and attack"...
He probably said Mack, which means pimp.
10% never matters.
On the contrary, if you can get by with spending 10% less on equipment (the other way of looking at this) than that can make the difference between being a solvent, viable company and everyone being out of work.
You're at a university, so you are under no commercial pressure to deliver. I mean, once you're past undergrad assignment deadlines, research gets written when it gets written, right? You can't rush science, maaaan, pass the bong. But in the real world, there are real consequences, and 10% could make a real difference to computation-intensive jobs.
The US Revolution was really a terrorist effort. Disproportional warfare was fought by the Americans, the British, and other power powers of the time had strict rules of engagement. Certain things were "allowed" and "unallowed" during warfare. The Americans, outmatched by the British Forces employed distinctly divergent tactics (raids, ambushes etc) that were -- at the time -- considered barbaric, disgraceful and un-honourable.... Terrorism.
As far as I am aware, the American revolutionaries tended to attack military and government targets. Contrast them with modern-day terrorists such as the IRA who focus their attacks primarily on the civilian population. That's the real difference between freedom fighters and terrorists, not their tactics, not their strategy, but their choice of target.
Note that the Taliban/al-Queda were freedom fighters while they only attacked Soviet military forces, but exactly the same people using exactly the same techniques became terrorists when they turned their attention to noncombatants.
That is just plain wrong and is an indication of the ignorance of the problem. Zambia, Zimbabwe, Botswana, South Africa and Malawi together probably has that amount on their own! And on top of that people are starving right now, so AIDS-deaths are only really starting to impact right now.
The people of Africa don't need AIDS drugs. What they need is to start using contraception! The AID epidemic will never be solved until the widespread belief there that using a condom makes you less of a man is eradicated. All the medicine in the world is literally treating the symptoms rather than the cure in Africa.
Of course, what they also need to stop their constant civil wars, and establish democratic governments with universal suffrage. Most African countries like Zimbabwe could easily feed their own people and even be very wealthy from mineral resources, but they can't stop centuries-old tribal conflicts long enough to do it.
Until Africa sorts itself out, the West should not donate another penny - it'll only get siphoned off into a dictator's Swiss account or get spent on arms.
continue to protect a criminal organisation (MSFT) which pays half it's politicians. No, now the US is preaching the word of IP, patents and general stifling of inovation to 3rd World countries.
It's telling that the Slashbots are so upset by RIAA and MS. These things are utterly trivial. The real problems are in steel tarriffs and agricultural subsidies, that a nation that touts free trade (and the EU is just as bad here) resorts to protectionism and barely-disguised mercantilism at the first sign of trouble. Trouble's when you need your principles the most, not the least.
The developing world doesn't give a stuff what word processor you prefer or how you think it's unfair that you should have to pay, what, $15 for a CD, so you steal it instead. Look at the big picture, people.
Does anyone know of a console-land type of setup, a "getty"-ish app, perhaps, that would let me log in, start a task (say a big compile), detach, and then reattach later to 'check up on it'?
That is exactly what screen does. CTRL-A d to "detach" from screen, then log off. When you log back in, do "screen -r" to reattatch, and everything will still be running.
On an X windows system, you can do the same thing with VNC or even Xvfb.
The lives of workers aren't threatened by paying taxes, unless the country's economy is in deep shit. Taking $100,000 from a CEOs $1,000,000 salary to clothe and feed other hungry citizens is less slavery than forcing those other citizens to die
As I said before, not giving something to someone is not the same as taking away something that they already own. If someone chooses not to work, no-one is forcing them to starve - they have made the choice themselves. You might as well say someone who throws themselves off a cliff is "forced" to die. Force is nothing to do with it, it is simply the consequence of choosing a particular course of action.
, a McDonalds burger-flipper pays almost zero tax, he supports himself only (as it should be), and an IT worker earning $60,000 supports himself plus a few people on welfare (as it should be).
The tax system is unfair because the people who contribute the most receive the least, and the people who contribute the least receive the most. In a truly fair system, most tax would be paid by the poor, since they are the biggest users of the government's services.
why should people who pay for private healthcare, education, pensions etc, have to pay for everyone elses? After all, they're saving the government money by providing for themselves!
So no welfare results in 3 types of slavery, and a welfare state results in only 1 type of partial slavery, well actually I'd rather call it compulsory community donation.
You keep using the word "slavery" but I don't think you know what it means. Slavery means forcing someone to produce economic value and confiscating it from them, without allowing them any control over its use. Slaves worked in fields or mines or building pyramids. People who do not work produce nothing, therefore, the term slavery is irrelevant.
The only way to stop someone (even a criminal heroin addict needing food, clothing and shelter is by killing them or cryogenically freezing them (killing them).
So long as they're prevented from harming innocent citizens, there's no need to interact with them at all. Let the live the lives they choose - well away from decent folk, and with their own money.
Freedom means freedom to work wherever you like, freedom to eat whatever you like, freedom to buyy whatever you like, freedom to not work if you like.
These freedoms don't exist, because they all require obligations. Consider: if you are free to eat whatever you like, without working, then someone must be obligated to work and provide the food. If you are free to buy whatever you like without working, then someone must be obligated to work and provide it for you.
The way our society makes this fair - for the most part, I agree that there are distortions - is that what you can buy is directly proportional to how much you contribute to society by working.
If we were forced to work then what reasone would employers have to make workplaces nice?
But you aren't forced to work in a particular place or in a particular role (which really would be slavery). So long as you do work, you can pick and choose where and what, subject to limitations (i.e. our society insists only graduates of medical schools can be doctors, so doctors are "forced" to qualify, is that a bad thing?). Competition for the best workers means that companies provide well above the bare minimum to their employees.
It's unfair for the old woman who switched on her kettle, putting the grid power usage 1kW over capacity, requiring an entire nuclear reactor to be brought on line just for her damn kettle to get a standard bill. Does she get a $300,000 bill for her electricity? Nope, everybody absorbs the cost.
Everybody does not "absorb" the cost. The cost of the electricity is divided by all the customers in proportion to how much they use.
It takes weeks to bring a reactor from cold to a working state, so your example is nonsensical - the excess power would simply be met from reserves. That's why your TV doesn't go out during the interval when everyone in the country switches their kettles on.
Ordinary citizens should pay, their companies should pay for it.
Ordinary citizens have already paid for it through their taxes. That's the point. The people who pay get nothing, and the people who don't pay get everything, exactly the opposite of how it should be.
Picasso, Beethoven and Mozart would have been mentally unable to do Data Entry/Secretarial jobs.
Well, so what? I can't compose symphonies either. Neither can 99.9% of the population, or more, but as I say, unemployment is at 3-4%.
Immigrants generally don't have savings. My Dad came to England with £3 in his pocket - that was all. He lived on welfare initially, but then within a short time he got a very good job due to his work ethic.
Fair enough. Perhaps the solution is to grant loans to asylum seekers rather than writing them a blank cheque. That's not a problem at all for people like your father who work hard and pay more into the system than they take out.
Look at the automotive industry - now cars are made by robots, and these companies have virtually no employees. shareholders also can be anywhere in the world. A company that becomes automated isn't tied to one country, this means that the factory can easily relocate to China where everything is cheaper.
That's bad for auto workers - but it's very good for anyone who wants to buy a car, because cars are cheaper. So long as the auto workers can find other jobs (and they can, otherwise unemployment in this country would be much higher than it is) then everyone is better off. There are the same number of jobs as before, but more people can afford cars!
Banks are also being automated, think about it, you can easily do your job in India, why do you have to be in the UK?
Actually, the reason is that bankers like to be close to other bankers (videoconferencing is no subsititute for being there except for the most trivial of conversations) so they tend to cluster in banking hotspots like London, Frankfurt, NYC, etc. When banks do move, it's only to go to another hotspot. That isn't going to change any time soon.
But your job's going to be moved there, want to go?
Simple analysis shows that isn't true. What could be simpler than a burger flipping job at McDonalds? Surely simple jobs will move first? No, because a burger flipper in Bangalore can't flip burgers for a customer in London!
Any job that does not require interacting directly with people can be moved offshore - but any job that does is perfectly safe here.
What I want is a filesystem that supports 1)Long File Names 2)Large Files (over 4GB) 3)Journaling and 4) can be used between Linux, Mac OS X and whatever else. Unfortuantely there are currently no filesystems that mett all of these criteria.
What you want is one of these.
Ok, so being I'm not the highest on there terminology totem pole, can somebody expain to me why journaling matters to me, and why its worth 10-15% of my system resources?
Like everything else, it's about money. If you are getting paid to do a massive compute job - for example, rendering a movie, or simulating a skyscraper in an earthquake - then the otherwise minimal risk of filesystem corruption becomes significant. What do you do if you lose the output and don't have time to compute that part again before the deadline? A lot of the intermediate data produced by serious computation is simply too big to dump to tape regularly. This is why SGI had journalling in XFS - because time is money, and journalling saves you a lot of time if something goes wrong.
And Linux is a free lunch.
Linus Torvalds wrote Linux when he was a student; in Finland students are supported by the taxpayer.
What, all these people giving away their work FOR FREE are an abomination?
It's still not free to produce; that's why all but a handful of free software writers have day jobs. Even Linus, Larry Wall and Eric S Raymond don't support themselves on free software itself, but on working for a chip designer, writing books and lecturing respectively.
The Internet would not be possible without free software
What, you think software grows on trees? You think that free software writers don't need money?
OK
/. before it even had accounts!
I am enjoying this conversation; a pity that Slashdot eventually locks old discussions. It's great that you get notified these days when someone posts a followup; I remember
Once a Welfare state starts excluding certain people from welfare that's called a slave race in which case the American civil war was not won at all, the slave race just changed to a different group of people
Not giving something to someone is completely different from taking away something that they already have. In fact, the welfare state itself is a form slavery - it compels a class of workers to give the economic value they produce to a class of people who do not work.
If you go to Kirby(Liverpool) and force a young heroin-addicted girl to work in an office, then that'll decrease the work output of the office as she thieves, kicks, punches and stabs all the other employees with her syringe. The country's GDP would decrease if these people were given salaries to decrease a company's output by greater than the miniscule amount of tax that would give such a person shelter. She can then thieve off other unemployed people, leaving GDP unaffected.
There are certain people who are simply unemployable, it's true. But the fact is that we don't owe them a living. Very few people are born unable to pull their weight in society (i.e. to produce at least as much as they consume). In the vast majority of cases it is a choice freely (if unwisely) entered into. The individual in your example is a parasite, nothing more. I don't advocate "disposing" of such people, but I don't believe that honest, law-abiding citizens have any responsibility to people who deliberately choose not to be honest or law-abiding themselves. It would be very different if she were a good citizen facing circumstances beyond her control.
Temporary slaves, "Be a Nigger for 25 years and then you'll be freed!".
Not at all; they are free to earn money and spend it like anyone else. But it is unfair to those who have contributed to the system by paying taxes if people who have contributed nothing enjoy all the benefits of the system, leaving nothing left for those who have contributed.
Example: ordinary British citizens have to pay for flu vaccinations, but illegal immigrants get it for free.
There must be some freeloaders, these "freeloaders" are just people who've fallen out of fashion e.g. Windows 3.1 administrators. The Capitalist system makes productive people into freeloaders involuntarily
This is a classic economic fallacy, called the "lump of labour" by economists. It is based on the assumption that people have fixed skill sets, which isn't true in practice. What happens is that people re-train and re-skill themselves and find other work. Let me give you an example: unemployment in Britain is currently around 3-4%, amongst the lowest in Europe. 2-3% unemployment is perfectly natural and is caused by people changing jobs or taking career breaks. What happened to all the miners laid off in the 80s? Why, they found other jobs - there aren't a million miners still sitting idle.
In tech, few people become obsolete, because we learn new technologies all the time - if anyone chooses not to keep their skills up to date, they have no-one to blame but themselves if they can't find work.
What you gonna do with these out of fashion people who have worked too long in your country to go back, but not long enough to earn welfare rights - shoot them? Same "starve and die immigrant asshole" argument as above.
No, do what most ordinary citizens do: live on savings until you find another job. I was laid off last year, and that's exactly what I did.
BTW, I think that native-born citizens should have to earn welfare rights too, by contributing into the system by working and paying taxes.
If all jobs are automated then there will be no salaries, and the massive corporations that would benefit from such automation will have the resources to move their money to an offshore tax haven, robbing your economy of investment and salaries
Again, it doesn't work like that in practice. Money sitting in an offshore haven is useless; like electricity, money is only useful when it moves from place to place. People talk about "massive corporations" as if they are some sort of alien presence, but in reality corporations are employees and shareholders. (Do you have an ISA or a pension? You're a shareholder too). Money made by a corporation pretty soon gets spent in a country.
Example: banking has not moved offshore, London is still THE financial centre of the world. There are 700-ish American banks with a presence in London, compared with 400-ish in NYC. (NYC does have more volume in certain instruments, but London is a one-stop shop). This is an example of service economy that is not paid for by salaries, and even in these down times, it's thriving.
While we all hate AOL they still do offer the most access numbers out of any other ISP if you do a lot of traveling.
Actually, I don't hate AOL anymore. Most of the reason they were despised by the congoscenti was their members' idiotic presence on Usenet, but now Usenet has become all but unusable anyway, thanks to idiots from dozens of ISPs. All the worthwhile discussion forums are on private mailing lists and moderated web boards (like this one). I simply don't encounter AOL or its users, so they're really irrelevant to me. But I would be sorry to see AOL go out of business, they're a real bellwether of the industry, and if they're gone it won't be a good sign for the markets.
Hah! Somehow I doubt that's going to happen.
It won't happen while ADSL is a matter of microfilters and routers and hubs, but once it becomes ubiquitous, then AOL becomes a utility like phone or electricity. Wake up, switch on the TV, there's the breakfast news and lots of friendly links to AOL content, products and services.
With few exceptions, I've usually found that accomodations to ADA laws (or just accessibility in general) often benefit everyone, not just those targeted.
Well, yes and no. All that stuff isn't free, and will all have to be factored into the price. If you aren't in a business that the "disabled" patronize, what's in it for everyone else?
You wanted it you got it....! blender is OpenSource now. We are very sorry that the site is down now but we had to move the server because our previous ISP unplugged us last thursday! Stay tuned we will be up soon.
It would be helpful for Slashdot or OSDN or whoever to offer to mirror stuff that they're planning to link to.